I know we are all going a little crazy right now. I Marlene King dropped a big information bomb on Pretty Little Liars and yet, it only seemed to throw everything we know into even greater question instead of giving us any sense of understanding. It's no wonder that any Charles clue Pretty Little Liars will give us spurs a thousand theories, including the Charlemagne clue that King tweeted after the #BigAReveal (below). Unfortunately, fans who've connected Charlemagne, the magician from Ravenswood, to Andrew Campbell might be missing a few pieces of the puzzle.
Sure, King said that Charlemagne was a clue because it's the root name of Charles, but I think it stops there. When you look at the mime makeup, you can probably suss out some similarities to Andrew actor Brandon Jones' face, but that doesn't seal the deal that Andrew was the one making Aria disappear back in Ravenswood. First of all, there was a completely different actor playing the magical mime: Brian Dare. He is also blonde, seemingly charming, with a knack for smirking (from what I can see on IMDb) but he is decidedly not Andrew Campbell. Of course, there's the caveat that casting could have thrown an Andrew doppelganger into the role since his face would be covered in makeup anyway, but there's also the red flag of the mime's height:
Aria is a really, really tiny person. Andrew is a giant, muscular hunky dude. Even if they switched up and got a random actor to fill in for Brandon Jones just this once, don't you think they would have gotten someone with a similar stature or at least a similar height? When have you known this show to do anything that was just "close enough"? (Hell, when they replaced Jason's first portrayer, they didn't get someone close enough, they gave the dude a major upgrade. King and Co. go all out, OK?)
So while this overlapping face thing from prettypllcrazy is really cool, I just don't think we're looking in the right places for clues with this one:
And while this detective work on rosewood-clues is solid and Dare is the right age to hang with the NAT club, it's also not quite enough:
But in case you think I'm just being a bully and shooting down theories out there, consider this other clue King tweeted about Charles' mask-less identity:
That mime is wearing a mask of paint, so while she could be playing with semantics here and the paint doesn't count, I'm guessing she's not trying to tell us the dude with the obscured face is the Charles that we've met before. And while she said "may" in her tweet, an interview on The Hollywood Reporter was a little more resolute about who Charles is to the PLL audience: Executive producer Oliver Goldstick told THR "No, no. That I can guarantee you. You've definitely met this person."
Sure, we technically met that mime, but he was part of the whole Ravenswood thing and we couldn't even tell what his face looked like without Googling the actor. While we could say that the mime is Charles and that we should have been paying more attention to him, I think this ultimately comes down to faith in King and Co. Do we really think that they would deliver the identity of this person torturing our girls and allow it to be some less-than-tertiary character? Pretty Little Liars does jerk us around to the point where I was pretty sure that creepy dollhouse with cement in front of the windows was a metaphor for our relationship with the show, but the writers wouldn't do us that dirty.
Charles will be unveiled as someone who matters to us. That person could very well be Andrew, but I'd bet you 15 hundred Ali-Mona wigs that it's not going to be this rando. Even if the actor himself clearly wants us to think it's possible:
Nah, bro. We can do better.
Images: screengrab/ABC Family; Tumblr (credits with images)
