Joe Keene Jr. first appears to viewers of HBO’s Watchmen as a clean-cut Oklahoma senator dispatched to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to help restore order after the reemergence of the Seventh Kavalry, a mask-clad white supremacist group with a history of violence and terror.
The first sign of trouble with Senator Keene, though, is that he’s played by James Wolk, an actor with a long history of onscreen duplicity. He emerged on the short-lived 2010 Fox drama Lone Star as a man balancing two different lives. On Mad Men, his affable Bob Benson fabricated his identity to climb the professional ladder. On Billions, his character Craig Heidecker was widely seen as analogous to the tech billionaire Elon Musk.
It’s not lost on Wolk that he keeps getting cast in roles that bring out menace beneath his polished exterior.
“In society we all wear masks,” he said in a recent phone call. “I don’t think we all wear quite as big of a mask as Joe Keene does. But I think it’s really cool and an interesting investigation to peel that mask away from someone. When I do get to play a character like that, I get artistically charged up to dive into that psyche, as dark as it may be.”
In the alternate-timeline 2019 of Watchmen, Keene is on a covert crusade to undo what he sees as the overreach of “Redfordations,” a program out of the Robert Redford presidential administration that provided tax credits to victims of systemic racial oppression. Assuming the form of the ominpotent Dr. Manhattan, he believes, is his ticket to restoring order.
Keene’s charm offensive fully crumbles during the Dec. 15 finale, when he explains his self-aggrandizing motivations to an assembled crowd of white supremacists and most of the show’s main characters, including a weakened Dr. Manhattan. The twist: He’s stripping off his trim blue suit while talking, down to a black Speedo, nodding to the sleek underwear Dr. Manhattan sported in the graphic novel that inspired the show.
“I think when I saw the Speedo in my trailer, there was a moment of, ‘This is going to be a very revealing scene.’ But in the moment, I didn’t even think twice about it,” Wolk says. “I felt very empowered by it, which is preposterous. Luckily something took over and I wasn’t thinking of myself as myself.”
Wolk says he can’t remember whether the original script called for him to be totally nude or partially covered—but, he says, “I was really grateful when I showed up in my trailer and costumes was like, ‘We have this black Speedo.’”
Delivering a right-wing tirade (“First he took our guns, and then he made us say sorry”) while daintily removing his clothes for multiple takes might seem daunting, but Wolk says having something to do while talking actually made the performance flow more seamlessly. “Undressing and disrobing in all of my glory is what Keene would feel too. It grounded me in the character,” Wolk said.
There was one sticking point, though: “Taking off cowboy boots was hard as shit,” he admits.
He came to the show via his agents, who told him last year that Damon Lindelof, the cocreator of Lost and The Leftovers, was working on an HBO adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Having watched Lost as it aired when he was a high school student in the Detroit suburbs, Wolk was thrilled to meet with Lindelof, who he calls “quite a force of nature.”