‘Veep’: Gary Cole on How Kent Could Help the Trump Administration — Watch
Kent Davison is a mysterious man. First introduced as President Hughes’ senior strategist, Kent came off as a human calculator, spitting out data for every opinion, situation, and potential decision his peers punched in. He later provided the same service for President Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and, little by little, we got to know the man behind the numbers as a man guided purely by them.
“The character was described to me by the creator, Armando Ianucci, as a highly, highly intelligent person with no people skills,” Cole said in a recent interview with IndieWire.
In the world of politics, those are valuable assets for someone Cole describes as having no personal ambition to run for office. He’s there to help others achieve success, no matter who’s asking.
“He left his moral compass on the dresser,” Cole said. “I think Kent can work with any person because he’s so robotic. It wouldn’t matter the nature, tone, or ideology of the person. His job would be to measure it and to feed it back in data as to whether it would work or not.”
That includes President Trump, who Cole believes his character could have helped avoid at least one sticky situation. Watch the video below for more.
Over the past few seasons of “Veep,” we’ve been given surprising insight into Kent’s off-hours self. Kent had a romantic relationship with Sue (Sufe Bradshaw), the president’s personal secretary, and revealed his hobby as a romance novelist. We also learned he’s a motorcycle enthusiast who spends his time off riding up and down the coast with a “predominantly Spanish-speaking” biker gang, “Los Anjos Do Inferno,” which translates to “The Angels From Hell.”
But the details of Kent’s personal history aren’t as important as how they’re revealed, Cole argues.
“To me it’s almost irrelevant what it is and what the details are, as much as it’s him and we find out this information about him,” Cole said. “It says a lot about his character because it makes you go, ‘Who is this person?’ And that’s what you want.”
READ MORE: ‘Veep’: Julia Louis-Dreyfus & Cast Tease Season 6: ‘Keep Your Eyes on Obama,’ Not Trump
“I’ll give you an example, based on what Armando said about his relationship with Sue: ‘I want to take this relationship between these two people and build it and build it and build it until it turns into absolutely nothing.’ And that’s what it did. We don’t know what they were doing or the nature of their relationship. We don’t know exactly what happened, we never find out, and we never will. And I think that speaks to the purpose of the character.”
Watch the video below to hear where Kent is headed in the new season, and don’t miss the Season 6 premiere of “Veep” on Sunday, April 16 at 10:30 p.m.
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