Camellia Peebles
There is a question I could not stop asking while watching Matt Smith work his way through three of the most magnetic, most dangerous men on television, and it is this: is the charm in him, or is it in us? Most of us met him as the Eleventh Doctor—the raggedy man, all warmth and elbows and childish delight, the least threatening face in the universe. Everything he has done since has been, in one way or another, a betrayal of that face. And I cannot tell anymore whether the through-line I keep seeing across his roles is a thing he is doing or a thing I am importing, because The Doctor remains the baseline against which I first learned to read his charm. That does not stop me from seeing Bunny, Philip, or Daemon as themselves. But it does make the distance between that warmth and what Smith does with the same magnetism now impossible to ignore. That tension is, I have come to think, the entire engine of his post-Who career.
Smith has said he has no single technique—”one’s an alien, one’s a prince, one’s a serial killer,” a different key for every lock. He builds from the outside in: the shoes, the rhythm of the costume, the texture and tone of how a man carries himself, then research piled high and dialed back down to essence. This is a craftsman’s account, not a mystic’s, and it matters, because the thing people call his charm is not a mist that follows him around. It is a tool he deploys, and the interesting roles are the ones where he points it somewhere ugly.
Watch three of them together and a pattern surfaces that is sharper than “he plays charming villains.” What Smith keeps finding—or keeps being handed, which is its own question—is men whose surface is a compensation for a wound about not being enough of a man. The charm, the coldness, the appetite: all of it is caulking over the same crack. But the compensations are not interchangeable, and this is where you can watch him work rather than watch the character. Bunny performs desirability. Philip performs control. Daemon performs dominance. Three men frightened of the same thing, and three entirely different bodies built to hide it.
Start with Philip in The Crown, the coldest character I have seen Smith play, and the one where the compensation is control. This is not charm withheld so much as charm turned to frost. Watch him in “Paterfamilias,” fighting Elizabeth over Charles’s schooling—insisting she honor their agreement that the children’s education is his to direct, because it is the one province of the marriage where a consort outranks a queen. Smith plays it with almost no movement. The stillness is the performance: a man who has learned that raising his voice cedes ground, so he lowers it instead, goes wry and clipped and unbendable, and lets the coldness do the coercion. Look at what he does when he is contradicted—the jaw sets, the eyes go flat and appraising, and he makes the other person feel they have transgressed simply by disagreeing, so that Elizabeth is maneuvered toward the posture of someone who owes him deference. And then, crucially, once he has won the room by force of chill, Smith lets the mask sag into something morose and self-pitying the instant no one is meant to be looking. The bitterness of the man who says “we all know by now I go second” lives in that sag. The control is total and it costs him everything, and Smith shows you the price in the seconds after the victory. It is the same architecture as the cane-flinch in Bunny, run in reverse: there, the wound erupts; here, it leaks out only after the performance of strength is complete.
Then Bunny Munro, which is charm weaponized, and failing. In the adaptation of Nick Cave’s novel, Smith plays a traveling cosmetics salesman and self-professed lothario—a sex addict whose compulsion is not, as the show is careful to show, the same thing as being good at it. Cave has said the Bunny of the page is repulsive, a man people recoil from, and that casting Smith changes him: “Matt’s Bunny Munro is hot. He’s actually attractive.” I would put it more precisely. Smith does not make Bunny attractive so much as he makes the charm operational—and then lets you watch it curdle. There is a scene where he propositions three women to sell them cosmetics, offering “extra services,” and they laugh him off and walk away, and the seduction engine runs its whole program and fails in real time. That is the thing I would have bet he could not do: play a magnetic man being witnessed as repulsive, holding both at once. The compensation is nakedly a compensation, and the show is honest that it is coping and it is self-harm. His best moment is not sexual at all. When Bunny meets his father, and the old man raises his cane, Smith flinches—a full-body, involuntary flinch, the reflex of someone who has actually been hit—and the entire origin of the man arrives in a gesture. The bad father made the bad father. He plays the mind of the addict, not the appetite, which is what keeps the character from being the shallow thing it could so easily have been.
And then Daemon Targaryen, which is charm as dominance and supremacy—and where Smith’s most interesting Daemon tool is not the swagger but the silence. Where Bunny talks and sells and seduces without pause, Daemon barely grants people the courtesy of his eyes. He watches, he sizes up, he lets a question hang while his gaze travels the room, and only then does he answer, if he answers at all. It reads as strategy incarnate—a man forever calculating the angles—but Smith uses the same stillness to stage Daemon’s undoing, because Daemon’s real hunger is not power. He already has power. What he wants is recognition, from Viserys, from Rhaenyra, from the throne he stands beside and cannot have, and humiliation is the thing that cracks the composure open.
Watch the two versions of the same fight, seasons apart, and you can see the whole range in one man. In the first-season throne room, when Viserys strips him of his place as heir—”I’m your heir,” Daemon says, and is told, not anymore—Smith does not react on the line. He lets it land and be understood, a beat of slow comprehension, and then steps forward into a seething, silent, barely-leashed threat, the dominance holding by its fingernails. Years later the series restages that fight, nearly word for word, and Smith plays it inside out: no seething now, only a man on the brink of tears, interrupting, approaching, trying with his hands to physically stop the past from happening again. Same dialogue, opposite body. The swagger that can walk into a room like he owns the continent and the adolescent injury that collapses him inward the instant the person whose validation he needs turns away—Smith puts both in the same character and lets you feel the second living underneath the first. And in the third season, confronting an army with three dragons ranged behind him, Smith can make the threat before Daemon even speaks; the stare does the work. He loves the silent threat, this Daemon, because silence is the last thing a man can control when he cannot control being wanted.
Choosing is the right word for all of this, and it is worth dwelling on, because Smith did not drift into Bunny. He executive produced it, alongside Cave. He sought the role out, shepherded it, built the vehicle to drive himself into that particular darkness. The raggedy man did not get cast against type by an industry with other ideas; he went looking. And the pattern holds across the work he takes on: the audio-drama noir where Quinn’s founder praised his “incredible ability to make you root for even his most complicated characters,” the transgressive leads, the men who cross lines. Even in his most reprehensible recent roles, the pull stays switched on. That is not an accident of casting. It is a lane he has built.
Which returns me to where I started, and to the honest admission the piece requires. Is he taking hotter, more charged roles lately—or have I simply reached the point, as a viewer, where I see the actor and not the character, and read magnetism onto everything he does? Both, I think, and the second does not disqualify the first. The roles are objectively more charged; his recent filmography trades openly on it. And I am not a neutral instrument, and I know it, and saying so is not a confession but a data point—because if a viewer determined to watch him clinically still finds the clinical distance collapsing, then the charm is operational, and I am Exhibit A. He makes you root for men you should not. He did it to me across three of them, in three different registers, with three different bodies—control, appetite, dominance—and the through-line was never simply that they were charming. It was that each of them was afraid, in his own key, of not being man enough, and Smith made the fear magnetic. The instrument he built for warmth turned out to work just as well aimed at menace, and the unsettling part—the part the Doctor set up years ago without any of us knowing—is that we bring the warmth with us, every time, and hand it to the monster ourselves.
