ForeverDuke
Charles Aitken ’01, actor: The Knick, Sleepy Hollow, Madam Secretary 46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
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plays. He also started his own theater company and directed a production that included Paul Aronson ’00, now a pediatric-emergency medicine specialist at Yale. “While Dan certainly wanted the end product to be a success—it was, because of his leadership and directing—he also prioritized making the experience special for each of us,” Aronson says. “It is the same principle he carries in the social environment. Whenever we were together at Duke, Dan made each of us feel like the most important person.” Arcadia, the mind-bending and time-traveling work by Tom Stoppard, provided Mallory’s favorite acting role. Jeffery West, a former theater instructor who directed Arcadia, recalls him as a student who loved wrestling with ideas, and for whom a play that presented complex theme after complex theme, from landscape gardening to Romantic poetry to computer algorithms, seemed “perfect.” In a year-in-review assessment, The Chronicle declared that as a student actor, Mallory was in a class by himself: “As the brilliant mathematician Valentine, Mallory’s performance was nothing short of astonishing. Why? Because he played an extremely difficult role with wit, ferocity, and passion. Because he could deliver a dazzling monologue, fire off clever one-liners, and cry all in the same scene. Because he looks like a cross between [onetime James Bond actor] Pierce Brosnan and Hugh Grant, only taller.” Mallory majored in English, and he recalls a class taught by Tom Ferraro, who delighted in obliterating the distinctions between high and low literature. “To be able to enroll in a class in which an esteemed professor places The Godfather on the syllabus—indeed, it enjoyed a privileged place on the syllabus—was a pretty formative experience for me.” Under English professor Buford Jones, both Mallory and Eva Sayre ’01 worked on senior theses; Mallory’s project was a long work of fiction. The two would push each other via Instant Messenger through late nights of writing, “fueled on my side by techno music and on his side by a steady diet of gummy worms,” says Sayre, now a Berlin-based executive with an “adtech” company. “As his unofficial editor, I spilled plenty of red ink for unimportant grammar edits, but I could never write anything other than ‘!’ for content. Even then, he had an extraordinary ability to create an immersive scene with a tinge of melancholy, to sketch deep captivating characters, and to sprinCourtesy @AJFinnbooks/@misterglister
house that would take on the book—though, initially, with no clue about the real identity of the writer. (He’s given up the editorial position and is now pretty much writing and speaking about writing.) His personal story can’t be separated from books and more books. One of his earliest memories is reading the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. (Above his writing desk, which was once his parents’ dining-room table, is a print of Holmes by Sidney Paget, taken from The Strand Magazine.) “I started reading at a very young age, although I didn’t start speaking until a worryingly late age,” he says. He spent summers in East Hampton at a twelve-bedroom Victorian house—he calls it a “borderline” candidate for condemnation—that went back generations in his mother’s family. It was filled with books by mystery writers. A key feature of his current Chelsea quarters is the built-in bookshelves. Now those shelves house an “eclectic” assortment of genres and authors: Maritime histories. Books about dogs. A Charles Dickens assortment. Sherlock Holmes. Works by Andrea Camilleri, a Sicilian detective writer. “And lots of books about poisoning.” A SELFIE MOMENT: Before his college years, the family Checking out the moved to Charlotte, and it was there promotional poster that movies entered Mallory’s creative in the London Tube consciousness. He lived down the block from a theater that, on weekends, would present film-noir retrospectives, classic-movie nights, and Hitchcock marathons. He would plant himself in the front row. Eventually he would come to admire older movies for their stylistic and sophisticated look and tone. He also discerned a narrative power that allowed them to establish characters and build suspense. “It was a way for me to feel sort of cultured, I guess.” At Duke, he found culture as a film reviewer for The Chronicle. He showed the depth of a thinker, even as he spun out sentences far removed from the propulsive language of his novel. His take on Shadow of the Vampire, for example, was that deploying “diabolical wit,” the script “equates the monstrous narcissism of the vampire—who saps the life of others to sustain his own existence beyond the boundaries of reason and necessity, and whose rotting exterior fails to incriminate him in mirrors—with the storied arrogance of movie divas.” Theater was the other important involvement; he acted in six
Liz Simons ’01, comedian, writer, actor: Broad City
Paul Downs ’04, actor: Broad City, Time Traveling Bong, Rough Night