Dandy Is Not A Villain In The Eyes Of Finn Wittrock
American Horror Story: Freak Show is left with its final three episodes and it has quite obviously been one of the most controversial seasons of the show yet. Most of the characters of the show are boxed with complications and we often end up putting them in the grey area. We are often unsure about how exactly to conceive a character. Take Twisty, the clown, for instance. He was a child kidnapping, murdering monster for quite sometime but then we were taken back to his days of innocence and then we cannot help but feel sorry for him. He was once the nicest, the most harmless kind of man who only wished to spread joy in his days. But then the spiteful backstabbers and his perilous innocence led him to this path of eternal doom. We have seen the dark pasts of most of the freak show performers but like Edward Mordrake, we have been able to see the light in them too. However, one person we would npt have expected any good from would be Dandy. I mean, the man murdered his own mother in cold blood. But the one person who argues about the evilness of Dandy is none other than Finn Wittrock, who plays the role.
Wittrock stated in an interview with Vulture, “Dandy revered the clown, he puts him on a pedestal, he wants to be him, and then he basically becomes him. I mean, he becomes his own version of him. He’s still Dandy. I think he inhabits the clown’s spirit and that liberates him to do all the nefarious things that he does.” Well, that definitely is one way to put it but Wittrock doesn’t stop here, he further states, “I can never think of him as a villain. I can never think of him as evil.”
Almost all the actors on American Horror Story admires the show’s plot and has their own view on this unique piece by Ryan Murpy and Finn Wittrock is no exception. The actor stated in an interview with Indiewire, “There’s monsters in all of us, but there’s also vulnerability. I think there’s a lot. Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that’s a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it and he squeezes it.
I think Freak Show has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves, the objectification of people and the lengths we’ll go for our own amusement. It’s sort of a warped version of our pop culture.” To play the character flawlessly as he does, it is important to fully comprehend the Dandy’s characteristics and Wittrock explains how he does that by stating, “I just have to keep getting under his skin. But he realizes that his purpose in life is to kill. It doesn’t get more dangerous than that. Because I actually found that the killing is not out of hatred. He kind of likes the people that he kills. He wanted to be a performer, and somehow that’s transformed into murder, so he thinks of it as a performance, like he’s fulfilling his destiny.”