Spoilers ahead for all of The Fall of the House of Usher, including the finale.
Give Mark Hamill the chance to act like a little freak, and he’ll dive into it like so much green thala-siren milk. In The Fall of the House of Usher, with that gravelly voice, those expressive eyebrows, and the aggrieved aura that no one else alive has seen such nightmarish shit, Hamill is chugging away.
Since personifying the goodness of the Force as Luke Skywalker, Hamill has dotted his career with villains and weirdos. He’s voiced serial-killing doll Chucky and various animated baddies like the Joker, Skeletor, the Hobgoblin, and Studio Ghibli antagonist Muska, and appeared in all kinds of genre stuff, from vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows to Crusades-era historical drama Knightfall. Hamill continues those trends with his role as Arthur Pym, the lawyer and enforcer to Sackler-inspired family the Ushers in Mike Flanagan’s Edgar Allan Poe/Succession mashup. Nicknamed “the Pym Reaper” by the Usher children, he’s Roderick and Madeline’s most trusted employee, the only person to know (nearly) all of the twins’ secrets. He is constantly hovering in corners and doorways, waiting to be called into service, and that unfailingly acquiescent yet devious posture is Usher’s greatest force of narrative stability.
When Pym, tasked with finding the informant amid the Ushers, says “I’m on everybody” in “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” Hamill delivers the line with a croaking confidence that makes clear no one has ever evaded his grasp; his deadpan “We have all your passwords” to the Usher children when they worry about being surveilled is a satisfying reminder that their money buys them nearly everything, but not privacy from this man. He exudes a level of worldliness that no one else in the Ushers’ orbit can really match, which is fitting given that the character (pulled from Poe’s only novel, 1838’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) was, at 25 years old, part of an expedition that circumnavigated the planet. “While you and I were dicking around with our petty little dramas,” Roderick says to old rival Auggie, Pym was “bending the planet over and taking his piece.” Usher doesn’t explain how Pym came to work for Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, but that backstory feels irrelevant; Hamill so effectively surrounds himself with a glowering aura of ruthlessness that it feels like he’s simply always been involved with this terrible family. His outfits evoke Max von Sydow’s leftovers from The Exorcist crossed with the Nazis from the Indiana Jones movies — all dark overcoats, jaunty hats, high collars, and little glasses — and his face is often frozen in a beleaguered scowl. He’s not the kind of man of whom you ask questions, or with whom you attempt a personal conversation.
Usher ramps up when the kids start dying in wild ways, Roderick and Madeline scheme against each other, and cosmic force Verna shape-shifts into various entities to get her revenge against this painkiller-peddling family. As it does, Hamill’s Pym becomes a source of humor — an important counterbalance to the grisly gore of the series’ central murders — exactly because of the character’s previously established malice. Hamill’s commitment to Pym’s steadfast wickedness and his black hole of a personality is so unblinking that it almost becomes campy; his indifferent reaction to Dupin’s opening statement against the Usher family when they’re in court together and his look of admiration when surveying pictures of Verna with the likes of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are useful contrasts, conveying how uninterested this man is in morality.
But unlike the Ushers, he’s not in this for legacy. Hamill nails Pym as a man content with his power in the present — with the ability to push cops around, roll his eyes at the Usher children, and casually accept assassination assignments — and he breezily moves between foreboding and arch. His whole deal is being exaggerated enough to make us uncomfortable and self-aware enough to turn our discomfort into amusement. Again, remember the swaggering smirk Luke gives Rey in The Last Jedi after he slurps that green milk; Hamill knows we don’t like what his character is doing, and he invites our laughter as a way of easing that tension. Pym taking an aggrandized pull of an asthma inhaler after a particularly physically demanding murder in Usher feels similar: a prop used to remind us of the character’s biological needs, and therefore his humanity, only seconds after doing something inhumane.
As a source of dark comedy in Usher, Hamill is a welcome addition to Flanagan’s ensemble, and it’s a rare delight to see him act on camera given how much of his career lately has been voice work. But Hamill also delivers the series’s most quietly heartbreaking scene in finale “The Raven,” when Verna — the woman he thought he killed for the Ushers — comes back to life, reveals herself as Death, and asks him about himself. During this chat, Hamill strips away every braggadocious part of Pym, revealing him as a lonely man plagued by memories of the past; without having to immediately answer to the Ushers and their employer-employee hierarchy, he can pause, gather his words, look Verna in her eyes. As Pym and Verna sit across from each other, talking in suggestively vague terms about the horrors Pym partook in or saw during his transglobe expedition (abandoning people to their deaths, raping indigenous women) and what will happen to Pym after the Usher bloodline is over, Flanagan keeps Hamill and his newly cowed expression center-aligned in the frame.
When Hamill says of humanity, “We’re a virus, I think,” that’s Pym at his most honest; when he tells Verna that he’s turning down a cosmic deal with her to instead “play out my hand,” that’s Pym at his most brave; when he offers Verna a little shrug at the end of “If it’s all the same to you,” that’s Pym at his most principled. In 10 or so minutes, Hamill builds Pym an entire internal world of guilt, self-condemnation, and rigidity that accentuates how impressively artificial the character’s outward menace is. Pym isn’t redeemed, but he is transformed, a man to be loathed turned into a man to be pitied. And the look of melancholic ecstasy on Pym’s face as Verna touches his cheek in a gesture of recognition and understanding is as memorable as any of the series’s more grotesque elements, acid-rain orgy included.
“I like to think he killed someone. I like to think he’s eaten human flesh,” Roderick says of Pym, and before that finale scene, Hamill’s performance is so dastardly that those imaginings don’t feel impossible. Afterward, though, Hamill uncovers in Pym such depths that those actions would be regrets, not boasts; they would be memories buried, not revisited. In harnessing both the dark side and the light of the man who survived a sit-down with Death, Hamill gives The Fall of the House of Usher equilibrium.
