Suits continues to bring Gabriel Macht closer to the top

Suits star Gabriel Macht is one of the best actors on television, as the show utilizes all of his impressive talent. Find out how in this week’s Deeper Cut.

It’s fitting that Suits returns the day after Gabriel Macht’s birthday, because he’s so integral to the USA series. Not only is he the show’s leading man, but the show is also the culmination of many of his talents — as uncovered in the latest Deeper Cut.

Macht has now become synonymous with Harvey Specter, the hotshot lawyer he plays on Suits, which resumes its eighth season tonight. It’s been eight and a half years since Macht signed on for the role; that’s the better part of a decade playing a character who has more complications and layers than most entire TV ensembles.

But while he makes it look easy, it’s been anything but. Before Suits premiered in 2011, Macht hadn’t been a series regular in 11 years. He hadn’t appeared on TV at all since 2005.

He was a film actor, and over the last eight seasons viewers have gotten to watch him become a television actor, and evolve into one of the best in the business. He has truly put the work in, and mastered a completely different side of his craft. And he’s brought his own experience and talent to making Suits what it is today.

First, some necessary backstory: film acting and television acting are not the same thing. Every medium requires a different set of skills. Film roles have set beginnings and endings, because the movies themselves are finite (unless you’re part of a franchise where there are sequels, and those sequels actually get made).

Television roles are much more fluid, because with rare exceptions no one knows if a TV show will last one season or 10 seasons. And when each of those seasons consists of somewhere between 12 to 24 episodes, depending on the marching orders, that’s much more screen time and far more story. Most movies run from 120 to 150 minutes now; a TV show surpasses that in three and a half episodes.

TV actors have to roll with the punches. Their characters evolve every week, and the journeys they go on change if the writers come up with a different idea. But they’re also given an incredible gift: they get to develop and explore a character far more deeply than any other kind of actor. They can play the same role for a long time, and not everyone is ready or willing to take on that challenge.

Macht deserves credit for stepping into Harvey Specter’s expensive suits when it was truly uncertain territory for him. He wasn’t an actor who hadn’t done TV in a while; he had hardly gotten to try in the first place. And his previous series, the sci-fi drama The Others, was much more of an ensemble show than Suits — which has an excellent ensemble, but Harvey is clearly the breakout character.

He was taking a big risk, but he did it with years of film expertise at his back. Macht has never had a role quite like Harvey, but there are small aspects of his previous work to be found in Suits if you look closely enough.

He’s got a tremendous amount of screen presence, as if every scene in which he appears has a purpose; that’s not far off from The Spirit, where Macht played the titular superhero with such a relentless conviction that he was the best thing about an otherwise muddled movie. There’s the certain degree of arrogance; remember the CIA hotshot he portrayed in The Recruit?

But there’s charm, too, which audiences got to see when he was Mandy Moore’s love interest in Because I Said So. There’s a reflective side, which Macht somehow managed to squeeze into the unnecessary S.W.A.T. sequel to build an actual character in a movie that didn’t call for one. And, perhaps most importantly, the ability to be an absolute mess, as he did so well in the underrated  Middle Men back in 2009.

He’s incredibly versatile, but as he’s played all these different roles, he’s excelled in these different areas that now have some effect on how we look at Harvey.

Every actor draws upon their past experience to a certain extent, but with Macht you can see how the film roles he’s done in the past have come to bear on the TV character he’s known and loved for in the present. So many of them are relevant, with each one bringing something that this character wouldn’t be the same without.

Which brings us to Suits, and to Harvey Specter. To truthfully analyze the full extent of the character, you’d need more words than this column would allow. Aaron Korsh created a great character, and he and his writers have continued to give Macht the material he deserves to keep pushing the role further each season. Let’s not discount the words on the page.

But let us also be fair and admit that Harvey could have, would have been a caricature if not for the casting of Macht. TV fans have seen so many hotshot lawyers that they can start to check the boxes: they’re all quick-witted, stylish, excellent at their jobs but somehow still terrible in their personal lives. There’s a template that exists in television, especially in this sub-genre, and on the surface that also describes Harvey Specter.

Yet Korsh, in creating Harvey, did a very smart thing. He introduced Harvey as this exact stereotype — the first episode of Suits involves him breezily handling a crisis before flirting with a waitress — before then hammering away at the man under the facade. It becomes apparent that there’s a Harvey persona and the actual Harvey, and what hooks the audience isn’t how cool he is (though he’s still the coolest character on TV), but that we want to know what actually makes him tick.

And Macht is the absolute perfect actor to pull that off. There’s no doubt he can play Harvey the closer perfectly; he’s gotten to portray that charming, confident, sometimes overconfident guy a lot in his career, as mentioned above. When he delivers those one-liners that are supposed to be evidence of how witty Harvey is, or why people take so much notice of him, we believe him. He’s naturally just an interesting person who holds your attention.

But the real heavy lifting is in digging into Harvey’s complicated history, his various emotional and moral and social issues, and the fact that this is a man who’s still very much incomplete. He has it all, but that doesn’t mean he’s figured himself out yet. Actually, the longer the show goes on, he’s seemingly less and less certain of who he really is — the divide between aspects of him is growing, which in turn only makes it more understandable why he’s so private.

As Suits has gone on, watching Harvey’s character arc has been entertaining in its own right, no matter what’s happening in the show at large. Where most characters are built up or branch out, Harvey has essentially been deconstructed.

That’s difficult material to play, because a writer can make a character so complex on the page, but if the actor can’t make it reality then it doesn’t exist — and that’s no small feat since we’re talking about internal struggles and emotions and things that are often intangible. But Macht has tackled it head-on for years now, and in turn he’s gotten even better as an actor, because audiences have gotten to see him take Harvey to places his other roles have never had the chance to go.

There’s Harvey’s thorny relationships with his entire family, particularly his mother and wayward brother, Marcus, both of whom he’s had to do very difficult things for. Macht has shown how that history affects how Harvey interacts in the present — not just with them but with others. Or his platonic friendship (or is it?) with assistant turned colleague Donna Paulsen, which has created a unique bond unlike any other seen on TV.

This leads to an organic through-line that Suits is able to carry with Harvey, making it easy for the audience to trace his evolution, and that’s because Macht is layering his performance, whether it’s the way he carries himself in a flashback as compared to the present, or just the way Harvey acts differently with one character over another. He’s clearly put in the effort to make sure all of these details are realized.

And as Suits season 8 starts up again, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate Gabriel Macht. He challenged himself by taking this show, and in so doing made himself better. But at the same time, that challenge and the extra effort he put in has made the show better. Audiences wouldn’t get that from a TV veteran, or an actor who hadn’t played a wide variety of roles to give him so many different strengths.

As viewers follow Harvey’s journey, we’re also following his. Who knows where it will go next? We have no idea, but we know that we want to follow.

Suits airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on USA. Find the next Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.