Jeremy Allen White Plays ‘Shameless’s Most Tragic Character

Getting the class divide right on television is tough. Upper classes don’t want to see it unless it as amusement, and lower classes aren’t usually going to feel like a show depicting their current situation is entertaining. In a lot of ways, Shameless brought a good balancing act to this dichotomy. One way that they did this was through the character, Phillip aka “Lip” Gallagher (Jeremy Allen White). Through him the show depicts what happens when people have the motive and means to succeed, but not the opportunity.

On another show about the chasm between classes, Little Fires Everywhere, Mia (Kerri Washington), a struggling single mother, says to Elena (Reese Witherspoon), an affluent mother of a pregnant teenager, “You didn’t make good choices, you had good choices.” As hard as it can be to hear, those living in the cycle of poverty lack a lot of the resources that the privileged take for granted. Access to health care, education, and even food makes a big difference to every aspect of one’s life from health, to earning potential, and even decision-making. Most of these “good choices” that Mia referred to were not extended to Lip.

Lip is the eldest son of six children with largely absent parents. He is both street-smart and book-smart and is the hope of the family. Due to his intelligence, he is given opportunities that some of the other siblings do not get. Yet, he seems uncomfortable with the constraints of his own abilities and crippled by his familiar ways of life. He begins a long road of self-destruction coupled with poverty-related dead ends.

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Lip Struggles When He Becomes a Father

Being the son of a deadbeat dad, Lip has no desire to become one. While admirable, this drive takes him down some paths far from academia. While still in high school, he is told he is the father of Karen’s (Rebecca Atkinson) baby. He is happy about the prospect of fatherhood, and since she has decided to put the baby up for adoption, it won’t interfere with his educational plans. But the baby isn’t his. The situation causes him a lot of grief.

During college, his eldest sister, Fiona (Emmy Rossum), becomes incarcerated and Lip has to step in to be the primary caregiver to the younger siblings. This is challenging, to say the least, and he is especially resentful since it was put upon him and not a direct consequence of an action he made. After he drops out of college, he gets Tami (Kate Milner) pregnant. She almost decides to terminate the pregnancy or give the baby up for adoption, but ultimately decides to keep the baby. For a brief time, Lip is even a single father and seems to relish it.

Then, he and Tami have another unplanned pregnancy that couldn’t have come at a worse time. They are again left pondering an abortion or adoption. Being a father is a culmination of Lip’s life experiences thus far. He is used to giving up his own comforts and freedoms for others and is able to go on autopilot to put his life on hold to bring in money. But it doesn’t make his life easier and, at times, seems desperately unfair to a young man trying to better himself.

Lip Used His Smarts For Get Rich Quick Schemes

When the show begins, Lip is near-genius-level smart. As one of the oldest Gallagher siblings, he is wearing many hats. He is an ersatz father, an older brother, an income provider, a star student, and a tutor. He also starts trying out a shortcut to make money while furthering his schooling: he starts taking the SATs for his classmates. This was not a prudent decision, but his family needed money. He continues this scheme until it becomes dangerous. He also helps steal cars. He and Kevin (Steve Howey) sell marijuana out of an ice cream truck in a park. He hustles his “girlfriend’s” parents for money to break up with her. He also sabotages his one steady job and income, the motorcycle garage, Born Free, by helping run an insurance fraud grift. The mafia gets involved, and he and Brad (Scott Michael Campbell) almost get in serious trouble, and then they have to sell the place.

Sometimes we get a glimpse into Lip’s headspace and get the feeling that he knows it is better to wait for steady employment, but waiting doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t feel as normal to him as constantly being on the move for money. Often schemes will lead to schemes, and he has to see one through before there are serious consequences for his family.

Lip Was Plagued by the Sins of His Father

Shameless draws a definitive line between poverty and addiction. Frank (William H. Macy) is an alcoholic. Lip’s mother, Monica (Chloe Webb), is a drug addict and alcoholic. As a result, they were neglectful of their children and the children witness too much in too few years and are forced to grow up at an alarming rate. Then, not only are the Gallaghers impoverished, but they are also dealing with the trauma that addiction causes. This is definitely true with Lip. He shows all the classic signs of a child of an addict: low self-esteem, impulsivity, noticeable difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and lastly, his own addiction to alcohol.

His addiction to alcohol along with his poor choices — namely starting an affair with a married professor and discarding a letter of recommendation from another professor out of jealousy — leads Lip to be kicked out of his university. Without an education, he proves to be as aimless as his siblings; floating in and out of relationships, jobs, and get-rich-quick schemes. His desperate need to provide for his struggling family outweighs his desire for upward mobility. It is easy to declare from the outside looking in that he would have been in a better position to provide for his family had he stayed in college. But even with his scholarships, college was expensive and took him away from the family that he needed to guide and protect.

Lip could not have been delivered by just any actor. If he had been played by the wrong actor, the character could have ironically gotten lost in the shuffle of all the seasons. White’s cerebral and more restrained take on Lip lends a deeper and more nuanced performance to a character that, at first glance, many may see as an example of failure. Through all Lip’s faults and mistakes, White is able to maintain the audience’s empathy while simultaneously invoking frustration at the tragedy of the character. Unlike Macy, whose character is a tramp clown of sorts, Lip is the tragic hero of the tale. Even though he often causes his own downfall, just as often, he is a victim of his own unfortunate circumstances.