Love Quote by Jeremy Brett

Brett’s gripe isn’t really about Sherlock Holmes; it’s about what happens when a pop-culture icon gets flattened into a tagline. “A man without a heart - all brain” is Doyle’s provocative sales pitch for modernity: the detective as pure instrument, a cold machine that outthinks the messy world. It’s also a trap for any actor. Theatre and screen thrive on readable feeling; even a still face has to suggest a weather system underneath. If Holmes is genuinely “without a heart,” you don’t have a character, you have a demonstration.

The intent here is craft-level honesty: Brett is naming the performance problem Doyle hands you. “Difficult to play, or even indicate” points to the paradox of showing absence. How do you communicate interiority when the text claims there isn’t any? The subtext is that the “heartless Holmes” is never actually true onstage. You have to smuggle humanity in through the side door: impatience as a kind of pain, precision as compulsion, arrogance as armor, detachment as a practiced survival tactic. Brett’s Holmes famously vibrates with that tension, suggesting that what looks like coldness is often control.

Context matters: Brett was taking on a role already fossilized by earlier portrayals and fan expectations. His comment reads like a refusal to cosplay a genius automaton. He’s arguing that the thrill of Holmes isn’t the absence of emotion; it’s the sustained effort to keep emotion from leaking into view.