Let’s get this out of the way right here and right now: Colin Stratton is Julian Kaye’s biological son, right? Right? I mean, the timing works out, given his age and how long Julian spent in prison. Obviously he and Colin’s mom Michelle were hot and heavy during the right timeframe, or at least so it seems, since we never actually see them have a falling-out in any of the show’s copious flashbacks.
And — this is the important bit from American Gigolo Episode 3 — Colin and young Julian/Johnny are played by the same actor!
They are, aren’t they? I’m not going crazy, am I? Maybe it’s been made obvious between the point at which I’m writing this review and the point at which it’s getting published, but I spent the better part of an hour frantically googling to make sure I gave the young actor playing Colin proper credit, only to come up with zero mention of the character or who played him. I combed both the closing and opening credits of each episode so far — no dice.
Then I finally allowed the obvious solution to click into place in my mind: “Boy, the guys playing Colin and young Julian sure look alike, don’t they?” And I realized the only thing tricking me into believing they were different people — and it’s a pretty good trick, honestly — is their wildly different hairstyles, with Colin’s in particular obscuring his face while young Julian’s curls define the character. Now I understand how Clark Kent can fool people by tucking away his spit-curl and putting on glasses.
Anyway, mystery solved. Eat your heart out, Detective Sunday!
Well, with that out of the way, we can get into the meat of the episode. Peppered with flashbacks that show us Julian/Johnny’s blissful days with his high-school girlfriend Lisa (who we learn killed herself) and his grown-up girlfriend Michelle, the episode’s primary concern is the disastrous hunt for Colin and his adult “girlfriend” Elizabeth (Laura Liguori), a teacher who’s been raping him. A goon in the employ of Michelle’s tech-billionaire husband Richard named Panish (Alex Fernandez) has tracked the pair down to their motel room — not hard to do, given the fact that Elizabeth used her credit card to rent the room like a dang rube who’s never seen a crime show before — but when he bursts in, Colin has run out for snacks. (Kind of an oversight not to be watching the door for the occupants’ comings and goings, no?)
Anyway, a fight ensues, and Panish accidentally kills Elizabeth. He flees; Colin returns, sees her body, and flees himself; Michelle, who’s gotten the location from Elizabeth’s husband (Shaun J. Brown), arrives the next morning, finds the body, and, you guessed it, flees, though not before doing a half-assed clean-up job, much to Panish and Richard’s chagrin.
Unfortunately for everyone, that half-assed clean-up job was extremely half-assed: Perhaps because she was afraid to get too close to the corpse, Michelle completely missed a small photobooth strip containing pics of her and Julian smooching that Colin had been fixating on prior to the murder.
When the evidence gets back to the LAPD, the marvelously sardonic Detective Sunday notices right away, and confronts Julian about it, having already grilled him about his whereabouts when his old madam Olga and her assistant Guy were shot to death a few days earlier. “You’re like the Where’s Waldo of fuckin’ crime scenes,” she tells him in the episode’s best laugh line.
All of this more or less sails over Julian’s head; he’s too busy trying to get reacclimated to life on the outside. He goes to work, he chats and smokes a jay with his landlord Lizzy, he — at least initially — rejects his old friend Lorenzo’s invitation to a night out on the town with himself and Olga’s successor Isabelle (who gets rip-roaring drunk at Olga’s threadbare graveside service and pours booze all over the coffin), with all the gaudy purple suits and cocaine that entails. For his part, Julian is too fixated on Lisa (he visits their old school and recalls taking her to a rave at Olga’s place) and Michelle (he remembers a time when she had the two of them dressed up like tourists from Kansas and hit the boardwalk) to be in much of a partying mood.
But ultimately, his melancholy over Michelle is what drives him to snort some blow, put on that purple suit, and drive off into the night for a rendezvous with his old life. As I’m fond of saying in reviews like these, what could go wrong?
So far, American Gigolo the TV show isn’t the world’s most compelling mystery. I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to put together the “Colin is Julian’s son, played by the same actor who plays Julian as a teenager” thing, but put it together I did. And while I’m not a betting man, dollars to donuts, it’s Lorenzo who’s responsible for the murders of Olga, Guy, and the woman whose death who got Julian put in prison in the first place; my hunch is you don’t cast Wayne Brady against type to this extent unless you really plan to cast him against type, know what I mean? The joke — Wayne Brady, Multiple Murderer — is too hard to resist.
But for those of us who major in Jon Bernthal Studies, Gigolo remains a captivating portrait of a guy forced into a life he didn’t want at a too-young age, who found he excelled at it and came to embrace everything about it, only to have it all taken away from and be forced to reinvent himself, first as a convict, now as a free man. By the looks of things, he’ll be tricking again soon enough, yet another reinvention. Bernthal’s natural magnetism is the thing that connects all the dots: He’s equally convincing as a carefree playboy, a tatted-up jailbird, a down-on-his-luck sad sack, a doe-eyed heartsick lover, and a recidivist hustler. Physically, his gift is that he can embody all these things at once: It’s so easy to picture him as a fuck machine, a friendly just-folks kinda guy, or a thug, or sometimes all three at once. That’s the beauty of his work, and that’s the beauty of American Gigolo.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
