I say! I don’t believe we’ve met. Richard Tremayne. Horne’s department store. Designer fashions.
Okay, I’ll admit it—when I first saw him on Quantum Leap, I thought, “Wait, is that Dick?” I do still tend to have the head canon that the character he plays in the episode is actually Dick, which doesn’t actually make chronological sense but who cares? (The episode takes place in 1975, at a time when Ian Buchanan was seventeen.) The episode is extremely silly and extremely fun and is one of a handful that makes less sense the more you think about it even before you factor in the less-than-rational premise of the series in the first place.
Still, the characters do have certain things in common, and it isn’t just that delightfully snobby tone. I haven’t seen any of his soap opera work, though I’ve read summaries and boy do we have things to say, but I have to assume there’s a certain amount of the same thing in those characters as well. Both Richard Tremayne and Victor Drake are covering up things they very much do not want anyone to know. Well—that’s not necessarily text, in Richard Tremayne’s part, but after all he’s explicitly from Twin Peaks, isn’t he? His official character biography says he went to Eton, but how? Why? There’s a lot going on there that doesn’t make sense, and I suspect lies are involved.
As it happens, Buchanan himself has considerably more world experience than Dick—whom Mark Frost believes is currently working as a real estate agent in Bellingham, Washington, if you’re curious. Both for good and ill, honestly. Buchanan is one of six children of a pair of alcoholics from Hamilton, Scotland. His parents died when he was still a teenager; two years after he was orphaned, he began working as a bellhop in a hotel. He seems to have risen through the ranks there. At any rate, he was on vacation in Spain when he was Discovered and became a model. He was even Giorgio Armani’s personal fitting model, essentially a living dressmaker’s dummy for Armani’s menswear designs as they were being made.
All of this came before the soap opera work, which involves some of the more bonkers plots I’ve read. In 1973, Erica Kane of All My Children had an abortion just after the Roe v. Wade decision. OR DID SHE? In fact, Buchanan’s character was obsessed with her and transplanted the embryo from Kane into his own wife. It took a while, I guess, because the child of said plotline wasn’t born until 1980 according to the soap. Wikipedia, in a claim marked “[citation needed],” then informs us that his character was killed by being buried alive. All this is obviously quite a lot, and that’s even before they switched actors on the kid, who’d grown to adulthood unaware of his biological impossibility.
As Dick or as Victor, he was beautifully cast. Buchanan says that he routinely has times when he just wants to lie around eating bonbons, and all in all, who can blame him? He’s done a lot with his life; it seems unlikely to me that anyone was really taking care of him when he was fourteen. His only older sibling was likely a child as well. He’s lived a long, productive life, and he’s still working, and if he wants to take a break from it, lie around with his partner, and eat bonbons, good for him.
