Helen Mirren: The Hollywood Interview

Dame Helen Mirren.


HELEN MIRREN: SCREEN QUEEN
By
Alex Simon


Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in the April 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.

Helen Mirren has carved out a unique niche for herself as the thinking man’s pin-up girl. A dynamic actress of incredible range and intelligence, Mirren was born Ilynea Lydia Mironoff July 26, 1945 in London to a Russian-born father and English mother. After cutting her teeth as a child in Britain’s National Youth Theater, Helen went on to train at the legendary Royal Shakespeare Company, before landing her first film role in 1967’s Herostratus, followed in quick succession by Sir Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968) and Michael Powell’s Age of Consent (1969). Memorable turns followed in diverse fare such as Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973), followed by a great deal of TV and stage work, but Mirren really came into her own around the time she appeared in Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious epic Caligula in 1980: as Bob Hoskins’ upper-crust gangster’s moll in the British mob classic The Long Good Friday, and a memorably sensual Morgana Le Fay in John Boorman’s masterful King Arthur adaptation Excalibur (1981).

Helen Mirren gradually became a household name on both sides of the pond, as her appearances on-screen became more prolific: she was heart-breaking as the policeman’s widow who unwittingly has an affair with the young IRA recruit in Cal (1984), appeared in Peter Hyams’ underrated 2001 sequel 2010 as a Russian cosmonaut, was fine again drawing on her Russian ancestry as Mikhail Baryshnikov’s former lover in White Nights (1985, where she also met her husband, director Taylor Hackford), gave a mutli-dimensional turn as Harrison Ford’s saintly wife in Peter Weir’s excellent The Mosquito Coast (1986), and an no-holds-barred, uninhibited performance in Peter Greenaway’s scathing, scatological The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989).

1991 brought about the birth of the character Mirren has become most identified with: police inspector Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series, of which there have been six installments, with a seventh, and final episode to air later this year. Among her many accolades, Helen has been nominated for two Academy Awards (The Madness of King George in 1995, and for Robert Altman’s masterful ensemble drama Gosford Park in 2002), and won three BAFTA awards for her work in Prime Suspect. She has twice won the Best Actress prize at Cannes ( Cal and The Madness of King George) and has also captured two Emmys (Prime Suspect 4, 1995, and The Passion of Ayn Rand, 1999).

Helen Mirren graces the big and small screen in two very different films: HBO’s Elizabeth I is a gritty, literate look at the life of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I, AKA “The Virgin Queen,” one of history’s first liberated female leaders, who ruled England during the particularly bloody period of 1558-1603, also referred to as the Elizabethan Period or The Golden Age, when English influence and power was marked worldwide. Co-starring with the great Jeremy Irons, Hugh Dancy and Toby Jones, Elizabeth I is a pinnacle in Helen Mirren’s already-illustrious career. It premieres on HBO April 22. Also set for release is Lee Daniels’ Shadowboxer, which Helen co-stars with Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a deadly assassin. It is set for limited release in May.

Helen Mirren sat down recently over lunch at photographer Jeff Dunas’ studio to discuss her latest work, and her remarkable career.

VENICE: You have two very different movies coming out: Elizabeth and Shadowboxer.
Helen Mirren: I also did a film about the other Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth II, which will be coming out later in the year. It’s a Stephen Frears film.

I saw that the director of Elizabeth I, Tom Hooper, directed the last episode of Prime Suspect. You must’ve worked well together.
Yes, we enjoy working together very much. I suggested him for this project because he’s this wonderful combination of young and hungry, but also quite experienced. He’s done a lot of big TV stuff, which in a way is more demanding than doing a movie, because the turnover is so much faster. To do something like Elizabeth, you’ve got to have someone who has the strength to hold on and sort of get through it.

The thing I liked about it was it reminded me of the stuff people like Tony Richardson and Franco Zefferelli did in the 60s: there’s a classical element to it, but also a “kitchen sink” element, that brought grit and realism to the table.
We had the best Steadycam operator in the world working for us, which was amazing. Almost the whole thing was shot on SteadyCam, which is technically difficult but it gave the film an immediacy which it needed. So often you feel as if you’re outside watching this pageant take place which is gorgeous, but it doesn’t put you into it. We wanted to drag the audience into it.

Mirren as Queen Elizabeth I in HBO's mini-series Elizabeth.

Yeah, it had a real griminess to it. Nobody looked like a shirt model. You could believe that they bathed once or twice a month and their teeth were bad.
(laughs) That’s probably thanks to being shot in Lithuania. We shot it all there.

What were your impressions of the country?
It’s extraordinary. Very beautiful and rather magical. At the same time, it was a little frightening, which many of those northern European countries are. A lot of dark things have happened there over the centuries and you can’t get away from that fact. The extras all had these very real, almost medeival looking faces. Lithuania is probably very close to what the English countryside looked in those days: heavily wooded and undeveloped. It’s very forested in Lithuania, very undeveloped. So they used a certain amount of digital effects, to put bits of London in there, but they also built these amazing sets out of wood that were very authentic.

What were you impressions of Elizabeth herself?
She was fascinating, an amazing character. The only sadness about playing someone like that is you only have access to them through doing a huge amount of research, the type of which will allow you to only get so close to who they were. The accounts of her that were written at the time were, of course, very tempered because the writers were frightened that if they displeased her, they’d get their heads chopped off! (laughs) So the only truthful accounts you have of her are from foreign ambassadors who didn’t have the necessity to be polite. All of them were absolutely fascinated by her. She was incredibly powerful, often foolish, but whether deliberately or just by instinct, an absolutely superb politician. Obviously she was very bright: spoke several languages fluently, but obviously a fool in love, as well. That’s what was great about her. She wasn’t just this cold fish. She was incredibly emotional and passionate. And since she was the queen, her emotions were allowed to rage. She’s so unlike Queen Elizabeth II, whose emotions are completely controlled and pulled in. There are so many similarities between Elizabeth the I and II, but also they are polar opposites in just as many areas.

One reason Elizabeth I was so hugely emotional was the fact that she never consummated any of her relationships. Why do you think that was?
It was incredibly dangerous for her, physically. Pregnancy was a very dangerous thing for a woman in those days. So many women died in childbirth, it was very, very common. Politically it was very dangerous, as well. To get pregnant by someone, and it was impossible to hide since she was constantly surrounded by people all the time. They lived a very public life in those days. People slept in their rooms with them. So they couldn’t get away with anything. Plus there were so many people whose interests would have been served had she been disgraced. She came to the throne as a bastard. Henry VIII never took away her status as a bastard after declaring her to such, even though he put her second in line to the throne after her sister. So her claim to the throne was always very precarious. So that was another fear of getting married.

Henry VIII was a Protestant also, right?
Yes. Henry created the Church of England after he wanted to get divorced, and threw out Roman Catholicism.

You know who I kept thinking of while I was watching you: Hillary Clinton. As the English weren’t ready for Elizabeth I, I don’t think the United States is ready for Hillary yet.
(laughs) She’s an extraordinary woman, and I agree with you. But it’s coming. It’s very interesting that people are even talking about it, because ten years ago, they wouldn’t have even talked about it. At least now, the thought is out there in the ether.

I don’t know. I think ten years ago we would have been ready for a woman or a minority, but since the current administration took office, I think this country has de-volved three or four decades. I think we’ve gone back to the 1950s.
And in a far more dangerous way than in the 1950s, because the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world now that the threat from the east is gone, and also because you have corporate globalization, development that’s gone so far beyond anything that existed in the 50s. There’s such unbelievable economic power out there. It’s almost a return to Feudalism, in a way. The peasants are sort of kept quiet with celebrity gossip magazines and Big Brother.

And in this case Big Brother is in the form of the leaders of our government who invoke the name of Jesus Christ to shut the peasants up.
Right, fundamentalist religion.

Which is what they did back in the day, as well. If you look at the history of both the Protestant and Catholic churches, when their officials ran the world, their doctrines were designed to keep the masses opiated.
Yes, absolutely.

Do you think Elizabeth would have been more comfortable as a modern woman, in this century?
No, she would have hated it! I think if you took Elizabeth out of her environment and plopped her into this one, it wouldn’t have worked, because she was a dictator, really. She was a Saddam Hussein, or she had the power of one. She could put anyone into prison, torture them, have them executed.

Although in terms of the manners and mores of the time, she didn’t strike me as being a demagogue.
No, that’s true. She wasn’t out of control, relatively speaking. And whenever she could, she tended towards leniency, and towards forgiveness.

The entire film, parts I and II, deals with her relationships with these two men, played by Jeremy Irons and Hugh Dancy. Had you worked with Jeremy previously?
No, never. I’ve known him for many years, but never had the great pleasure to work with him, and he was so wonderful to work with. He was born to play that role.

The older he gets, the more he reminds me of Laurence Olivier. He has the same kind of carriage.
That’s interesting. He’s a superb film actor, isn’t he? He’s also a brilliant stage actor and great comedian, which many people don’t realize.

How about Hugh Dancy?
How lucky can a woman get? (laughs) Hugh and I started at the beginning of the piece doing all our scenes together. Every scene we did I had to kiss him or he, poor kid, had to kiss me. And all the girls on the set are just looking at me with envy, saying “I can’t believe how lucky you are!”

Tell us about Shadow Boxer. Have you seen it yet?
No, I haven’t. I tend to sort of avoid seeing films that I’m in. Lee Daniels, who directed it, is such a great guy. He calls it “Homo-Euro-Ghetto.” (laughs) Which I think is sort of a great mixture of things. And that’s probably exactly what it is. It was great fun to do it. You don’t often get to be in pieces like that, so I was very glad to do it. Most girls don’t get to run around with guns and be assassins.

I read that your father wound up in the UK under very unusual circumstances.
My father was born in Russia. He came to England when he was two years old. His family was upper military class. They were a form of aristocracy, I suppose.

Wasn’t your grandfather in London brokering an arms deal with the British government when the revolution in Russia took place?
Yes, he was, and he was stuck there. He was very loyal to the czarist system, and just happened to have brought his family with him on this trip because it was taking such a long time, which was very lucky. He left his sisters and his mother behind, however. I just recently had their letters to him translated, which I’ve been carrying around for years, and that was an incredible experience for me, to lift the curtain on their lives. In fact, I think we’re going to do a piece on the radio, in England, based on the letters.

What did your grandfather and father wind up doing in England?
They both ultimately became taxi drivers.

So they had to become working class. What was that like for them?
I have no idea, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like, especially for my grandfather. It taught me one thing though, and that’s nothing is permanent. And no matter how established you think you are, nothing is permanent. And you have people who say “Oh well my family goes back 500 years…”

Whose doesn’t?
(laughs) Yes, exactly! Whose doesn’t? And on that level it seems the most aristocratic people in America are the black people, because we know all their families go back two or three hundred years.

Where do you think your artistic side came from?
I suspect it came much more from my English mother than my Russian father. My father was very intelligent and an intellectual, and was a classical musician before he became a taxi driver. My mother was working class London, from the East End. She had pretensions not to be working class, and she was very dramatic, my mother, so I suspect that’s where much of my acting bug came from. Although, two of the greatest actors that Russia ever had, had my family name, which is Mironoff. There was a man who died five or six years ago who was like the Olivier of Russia whose last name was Mironoff, so I think there must be a relation somewhere in there.

You started acting very young. When did you know you were an actor?
Well you don’t really know, do you? You kind of wish, or hope for, or dream. You never quite know. Certainly my parents were not of the “you must follow you dream” kind of attitude. They were much more “Don’t be stupid. You’ve got to be secure,” which I love in retrospect, because I think all that “you must follow your dream” nonsense, especially in those TV shows like American Idol, is so dangerous, because it’s a cruel world. So you must do both: you must follow your dream and be practical and realistic. But yes, fairly young, I loved the process of imaginatively going into another world. And I did do the pragmatic thing and go to teachers’ college for three years in London, which was really a complete waste of time. Also, I didn’t have any money to go to drama school. Plus, I just didn’t know how you became an actor then, so my options were limited.

You got your start at the Royal Shakespeare Company. What was RSC like?
It was a wonderful experience because it’s ensemble theater, for lack of a better word. You’re working with a huge group of actors, all of whom do very divergent roles and things in different plays. You’re all rehearsing together. You’re all getting drunk together. It was very communal, and very educative on that level, in terms of how to work with people, and how to be a gypsy. And the grander your level as an actor, the more of a gypsy you become.

24 year-old Helen Mirren in Michael Powell's Age of Consent (1969).

Your first film, Age of Consent, was directed by the great Michael Powell.
That was an amazing experience, very surreal! (laughs) I’d hardly been on an airplane before doing that film, and here I was in the first class compartment of a Qantas airliner on this long plane ride to Australia. Then we filmed on this tiny island, called Dunk Island near the Great Barrier Reef. And I was running around, hardly wearing anything and working with the great James Mason, who was very kind. So it was a completely wonderful, very strange, very surreal experience. It all seems a bit like a dream now. Michael was very kind to me, although he could be a bit of a martinet to others. I was very inexperienced, so he was very patient, as was James, who sort of guided me around.

Another great film you did a few years later was O Lucky Man! with Malcolm McDowell and Lindsay Anderson.
Yes, that is a wonderful film, and very much locked in its era in terms of the music and everything, but in terms of what it was saying about the world, it was very advanced, very ahead of its time. Lindsay had an extraordinary personality…maybe I just attract these weird directors. They seem to be the only ones who like me.

Why do you say “weird”?
Well you know, Peter Greenaway, and Lindsay, they’re very, very distinctive personalities. Visionaries, really. But Lindsay was very private, and yet intensely loyal to his actors. Very serious, and yet always you felt he was laughing at himself and everything else. He always seemed to be having this very dark internal laugh at the whole thing. He really put his inner being into his movies, I think. He really loved humanity, in a very Platonic way. He didn’t strike me as being very sexual, and he would seem to have this sort of Platonic love for the men he worked with, but also for a number of women. He adored Celia Johnson, for example.

What happened with Caligula? You had this script by Gore Vidal, and this dream cast, and it ended up being an epic porn movie. I know that Malcolm McDowell is ashamed of it, to this day.
Yes, I guess it did end up being that. Malcolm shouldn’t be ashamed of it. He’s wonderful in it! I’m certainly not ashamed of Caligula. In fact, I’ve always been very proud of it. Within its form, there’s a really great movie about Rome in there. The fact is, Gore took his name off it, but we made Gore’s movie. We really did stick to the script, and he wrote a really full-on, “out there” movie. It’s funny, when we all met together for the first time and Bob Guccione gave us lunch, and he stood up and said “This is going to be the greatest film because we’ve got the best actors, and the best director, and the best writer…and kept going on and on. And the director, Tinto Brass, was sitting next to me as Bob was talking and whispered “The best people, to make the worst movie!” (laughs) Tinto and I became great friends and we still are. He’s very devil-may-care, and there’s a wonderful excessiveness about him that appeals to me. Caligula may have been excessive, but it was never boring. I saw some of it recently again. Plus, it’s two different movies: there’s the version we shot, then there’s a great deal of hardcore sex footage that Guccione put in later. It didn’t need it, because what we had was quite enough! (laughs)

Trailer for the British gangster classic The Long Good Friday (1980), starring Mirren and Bob Hoskins. You did one of the great gangster films around this time, as well: The Long Good Friday. It was one of those scripts that just leapt off the page at you, where you went “God! This is just fantastic!” The one thing that was a problem, was my character Victoria, who was a terrible character, as written. I became a real thorn in the side of our director, John Mackenzie, in trying to flesh her out. But Bob Hoskins was incredibly supportive, which was great. So I was constantly trying to pull the character into the story. I’m glad that I made such a fuss about it, because I think it enriched the film. You’ve got to have something you can hold your head up about later on in life. But I was a bit of a pain for John, I think. Right after Long Good Friday, you played Morgana Le Fay in John Boorman’s great King Arthur film, Excalibur, in an adaptation that I think is worthy of Shakespeare. Yes, that was tricky on the page, actually. That one didn’t leap off the page. It was quite difficult to follow and I think it was very much to John Boorman’s credit that he crafted this very magical world out of what could have been a real mess! (laughs) Some of those scenes when we read them during rehearsal sounded absolutely embarrassing! We were all like “My God, how can we say these lines?” (laughs) But with all the other elements, it all started falling into place, especially the lighting and the beauty of the film. Mirren as the evil Morgana in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981). I heard that Boorman cast you and Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, because the two of you didn’t get along, and it generated a very specific kind of tension on-screen. We had done a production of MacBeth prior to that, and our relationship was horrendous. Nicol is a very brilliant, but very dark, troubled man. He has so much talent in so many different directions, but he just…he couldn’t bear me, and was very nasty to me. I don’t think I was nasty to him at all, but he just hated me. When I went to see John about the film, he said “I’m thinking about Nicol for Merlin,” I said I didn’t think I could do it then, because we had this horrible relationship. John convinced me that he would help to make it work, and of course, being greedy and wanting the role, I said ‘Fuck it. I’ll just put up with it.’ In fact, Nicol and I wound up becoming very good friends on it! (laughs) We were finally free of that play, and I’m sure the play had a lot to do with it. So I finished up loving him. Let’s talk about Prime Suspect and DCI Jane Tennison.Jane is a great character. I’m doing just one more, which we start shooting this year. That was a gift of a role, that just landed in my lap. Of course at the time, you don’t know that. I thought it was a lovely script, but you never start our realizing how much it’s going to affect your life at the time. But I had the great luxury with Prime Suspect of only doing one about every eighteen months, so I was never trapped into doing a TV series full time, and could always go off and do other things, movie and theater, in between. In addition to being a great character study, the series has also been a real metaphor for how English society is changing.Yes, and as it’s progressed, I’ve been able to be more involved in the actual storylines, with the writers, and so forth. I always loved it best when the stories were contemporary as possible, and relevant to the world we all live in, rather than a sort of generic murder mystery. It seems that from the beginning, you’ve always been very uninhibited and have never had a problem doing nudity on film.Oh, that’s not true. I’ve always had a problem doing nudity. I hated it! I hated the fact that I hated it, however. It’s never a comfortable thing. It was quite nice in Australia, because one was out with nature, and Michael Powell was very sweet. But I’ve never enjoyed it, ever. It’s always mortifying. But I always felt it was something I should get over, as well. I might seem uninhibited, but believe me I’m not! (laughs) I’ve just never thought it was necessary, ever. My taste in movies tends toward the European, and I think when sex and nudity is dealt with in an adult or poetic way, it’s wonderful. It’s great. It’s a great extra tool in all those dramatic tools we have. But I didn’t want to be uptight, and I also always told myself ‘It’s okay, because you work in the theater, so you’re not going to get stuck with it.’ But of course, I have gotten stuck with it, in a way! (laughs) You have to tell us about working with Brother Bob Altman in Gosford Park.Oh, God! Genius! Most directors basically do it the same way. They’re great, and many are great visionaries. But they basically set the scene up the same way and shoot the same way. Robert Altman is completely different. You never know if you’re on the screen or not, which is great, so you’ve all got to be “on it” all the time. There’s no such thing as “having your moment” with Altman. You look at your role, see that you have this big speech, show up on the set, and realize that the whole scene is about this dog running around the people in the scene, all of whom are having their big speech! (laughs) He’s the only guy who will start with what’s happening in the background, and then the main actors find their place within that. That’s why his screen is always so full of detail, because those details haven’t been put in at the last minute by the 1st A.D. He will very carefully set up, rehearse, and have all those elements in place before he shoots. But in a way, the background actors are more important than you are. Then he’ll have two cameras: one on tracks over here, then another on tracks opposite, constantly moving around the scene. I’ve never seen another director who does that. It’s great. He’s one of the great visionary American directors, without a doubt. Mirren in her Oscar-winning turn as Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears' The Queen (2006). Any final thoughts?Well, it’s been very interesting, you taking me through my whole career like this, and it’s gotten me thinking: I was very conscious during Elizabeth that this will probably be the best role I will ever have in my life. I was thinking ‘It absolutely doesn’t get any better than this, Helen. You might as well just go for it, and give it your all,’ and I think I did. Women’s roles don’t come along that often, anyway, so to play one like this, I never forget how lucky I am. Helen Mirren in Don Levy's Herostratus (1967), one of her first films.

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Stephen Frears: The Hollywood Interview

Director Stephen Frears.



STEPHEN FREARS LIFTS THE VEIL ON THE QUEEN
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.

Stephen Frears is one of Britain’s leading filmmakers, specializing in the “kitchen sink” brand of filmmaking pioneered by his predecessors (and mentors) Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) and Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man!). Born June 20, 1941 in the central English city of Leicester, Stephen Frears read law at Cambridge University, and made his directing debut in 1968, with The Burning. After years honing his craft making independent and television films in Britain, Frears became an international name with 1984’s The Hit, an existential thriller/road picture starring John Hurt, Terrence Stamp, and a young Tim Roth. This was followed in quick succession by the acclaimed films My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Dangerous Liasons (1988), and The Grifters (1990).
Frears returned to England recently for the acclaimed television film The Deal, starring Michael Sheen as Prime Minister Tony Blair, and for last year’s hit Mrs. Henderson Presents, starring Dame Judi Dench. His latest, The Queen, starring Helen Mirren in the eponymous role of Queen Elizabeth II, follows the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, and how the British royal family’s image was nearly destroyed, then resurrected, as the world mourned “the people’s Princess.” One of the year’s best films, with a sublime turn from Helen Mirren in the lead, The Queen is currently in release.
Stephen Frears sat down with us at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills to discuss his latest cinematic outing.

In many ways, The Queen is a companion piece to a film you did a few years ago called The Deal, which dealt with Tony Blair (also played by Michael Sheen).
Stephen Frears: Yes, it dealt with British domestic politics. It was of no interest to anyone else in the world, so I made it for British television. After I did it, they came to me and asked if I’d be interested in making another film with a similar theme, about the events during the week of Princess Diana’s death, and how it affected the Queen, with Helen (Mirren) playing the Queen. So Helen and I met, Peter wrote the script, and here we are.

Looking back at your body of work, you’ve always been sort of an armchair sociologist.
Is that right? Well, if you’re British you can’t really escape that: addressing the class system.

Did you feel that this would be a controversial film?
I knew the making of it would be, and it was. I could see that there was nothing in the film itself, however, that should be viewed as controversial. Just the idea that you’re making a film about the Queen is very, very cheeky. The response to the film has been hugely successful back in the UK. I can’t quite believe it, but no one’s come out and said that this film shouldn’t have been made.

Well, it’s quite a reverent film, really.
Yes, I’m ashamed of myself…(laughs)

It portrays everyone warts-and-all, which is one reason it works so well: everyone’s human.
We’ve been praised for being fair, not a quality I normally admire. (laughs) You just realize they’re sort of sitting ducks, really.

Yes, it would’ve been easy to make them caricatures, and for this to have been an animated film. But you took a very neo-realist approach, which makes sense since you were mentored by Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson.
Yes, they were influenced by the Italians and the French, as were people like Ken Loach. So sure, that’s fair to say, although what I really want to do is make Lord of the Rings. (laughs)

Somehow I don’t see that being a successful marriage, Stephen.
That’s been my problem all along, you know.

The Rings trilogy would’ve been very different: they all would’ve had bad teeth.
(laughs) Yes, absolutely!

Tell us about working with Helen.
She’s just very, very good at her job: very talented, very intelligent. A decent woman. I can’t praise anyone more highly than that. She’s terrific. England is full of these rather extraordinary women: Helen, Judi Dench, Vanessa (Redgrave).

Of course you worked with Dame Judi on your last film, Mrs. Henderson Presents. When you work with an actor of that caliber, are you fairly hands-on, or do you just cast well and get out of the way?
Cast well and keep out of the way. I mean, if doesn’t make sense to you, then you say so, or you conduct an intelligent conversation about what they’re doing. We all have the same pool of knowledge about the Queen: everyone knows a great deal and absolutely nothing at the same time.

So where was most of the character that you and Helen and Peter Morgan created culled from?
I should think from our lives, really. You know the Queen is reticent. She’s a rich country woman who likes going for a walk in the rain, and you start from that assumption. It’s really in the text: would the Queen say this? Helen was always very strong about voicing her opinion if she felt a line didn’t ring true.

The other person I’d like to talk about is Michael Sheen, who equally inhabits the role of Tony Blair.
He’s a very good actor, and very, very individual. The truth is, you would never think that he would turn into this very disciplined character actor. He’s just terrific, very intelligent. There’s no real process to discuss, he just sort of does it. Michael said something interesting once: that I push people quite hard.

How do you do that?
I stab them, I think. (laughs) People always said that about me. John Malkovich said that about me, that I reminded him of his father. I never met his father. I assume there is something in my presence which is authoritarian. But I certainly don’t see that. I could see there is a silent way of where I could be like “We’re making this kind of film, and not that kind of film.” I just expect everyone to be very good. John Gielgud always said “If you’re lucky, you know what film you’re in.”

The other smart thing you did in this film was to cast actors who are virtually unknown to audiences outside the UK, save for Helen and James Cromwell. So they seem to inhabit their characters that much more.
That always helps when the actors aren’t well-known, oddly enough. Sometimes you make a film where the audience get a lot of pleasure from actors they’re fond of, that they know. Sometimes you make a film that depends on that bit of knowledge, and sometimes you make it the other way around.

The other thing the film really drove home to me was the ebb and flow nature of politics.
Yes, today one person’s on top, tomorrow it’s someone else. Explain that to your President.

Yes, which makes me think of that final exchange between Helen and Michael.“This will happen to you one day, Mr. Blair.” And it has.
The only time the Queen ever really had a downward curve in terms of popularity was during the aftermath of Diana’s death, although I think it was a long, slow descent that had been going on for about 15 years.

But hadn’t there been rumblings since the ‘60s that the monarchy had become antiquated?
Well, that’s a tough one, but the Queen has made sense of it in a way that has kept it going. I will say that it was clear to me from the beginning that the marriage was barbaric. People like me were very depressed. The celebrations were so grotesque, and you knew that what was going was barbaric.

I was in London a month before the royal wedding in ’81, and I remember vividly the amount of merchandising that went on, that you were constantly bombarded with. It felt less like a wedding, and more like The Who were on tour.
(laughs) Oh, Diana would’ve liked that! But yes, the merchandising which never really stopped, turned her into this pop culture icon, which I think is the antithesis of what she wanted. But it was apparent from the get-go that the marriage was dishonest and really, really savage, and that it would end horribly. It was done for all the wrong reasons.

And when the Queen passes?
Then I think there will be changes made, yes. She’s made it work. There’s nothing written down, no bill of rights, it’s all just…implied, I suppose. Because of her personal qualities, which might well include lack of imagination for all I know, she’s made it work. But for that one week, she went wrong, she misjudged.

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Tim Roth: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Tim Roth

TIM ROTH IS TELLING NO LIES
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the March issue of Venice Magazine.

One of the film world’s great chameleons, Tim Roth was born in London May 14, 1961, the son of a journalist and a school teacher. After dropping out of art school, Roth was discovered by maverick British director Alan Clarke, and cast in his incendiary 1982 study of the skinhead movement in the UK, Made in Britain. Tim Roth hasn’t stopped working since, with over 70 feature and TV roles to his credit including such iconic titles as The Hit, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Vincent and Theo, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, and most recently, the lead in Francis Coppola’s first feature in ten years, Youth Without Youth.

Roth stepped behind the camera in 1999 to direct the critically-lauded family drama The War Zone and was nominated for a 1995 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his scene-stealing work in the period drama Rob Roy, as one of the great villains in film history.

Tim Roth takes the lead in a television series for the first time in Lie to Me, which premiered January 21. Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, an interrogation expert who relies on his unique system of lie detecting based on the subject’s body language. Co-starring a fine cast that includes Kelli Williams, Monica Raymund and Brendan Hines, the show runs Wednesday nights on Fox.

Tim Roth sat down with us recently over coffee and croissants to discuss film, television, and the brutal brilliance of Lawrence Tierney. Here’s what transpired:

Your character’s talent in Lie to Me is very specific. Is there a consultant you’ve been working with to prepare for it?
Tim Roth: Yeah, there’s a guy who specializes in microexpressions, who developed The Facial Coding System. It’s not just to determine if you’re lying, but if you’re deceiving: if your body is saying one thing while your mind is saying another. He can do it without the other person talking, with the person speaking in a foreign language, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about body language. He studied for years abroad, in places like New Guinea, studying the tribes out there, and started developing this system from the ‘60s onward. Now he has a lab, and his system is used by a lot of people. He can train you in it, and also does some kind of government work. His aim is to tell people that they don’t need to torture, that torture is not only inhumane, it’s useless, and produces useless intelligence. I played a torturer back in England on a TV program, back when I first started acting, and I spoke with a guy who worked for the British side of that, and used that seven point system of torture which is reflected in those pictures from Abu-Ghraib. And when those came out, people were talking about it as if it were new.

If anything, that system has been used for centuries. Pasolini’s film Salo, which took place in WW II, had images that were virtually identical to Abu-Ghraib, and it was made in the mid-70s.
Yeah, restrained brutality, sensory deprivation, and sometimes not-so-restrained brutality. It’s all useless.

Tim Roth in Fox TV's Lie to Me.

From an actor’s standpoint it must be an interesting process since actors, in many ways, are professional liars, or at least professional pretenders, who have to believe their own lies, so to speak.
I suppose so, yeah. I never trained as an actor, so there’s two sides to it. A lot of what we do as actors involves deception, smoke and mirrors. When this guy Paul is around on our set, it’s a bit nerve-wracking sometimes because he can really spot everything you’re doing, every level of your engagement.

Has he taught you anything that has left you unnerved, in terms of gauging the honesty of others, which could be especially disconcerting in show business?
I’ve tried not to learn it too literally for just that reason. (laughs) I didn’t do the training, which I could have done. I know enough based on what they put in the scripts to get by.

I know you started out in television back in the UK, although this is your first time where you’re carrying a series as the lead. How is it different from doing a lead in a feature?
Oh, it’s completely different. I’ve never done anything like this before. First of all, it’s harder work in general: the hours are longer, the daily page count is huge. You’re basically doing a little independent film every week and-a-half. Not only that, but the writers keep trying to up the ante with every episode as the characters get more set. During the eight days of shooting, you get the next script that you begin the next process of doing while you’re simultaneously working on another script. So it’s very intense, quite exhausting. A bit like doing theater, actually, because you’re playing the same character in a variety of situations, which is interesting for me. In film, once you’ve done it, you can’t really go back, save for doing re-shoots sometimes, whereas in TV, you can keep going at the character until you feel you’ve got him right.

One thing that makes this show very timely is how it addresses the geo-political map is changing since Obama’s election, and as a result, the way Americans have begun to redefine their idea of law enforcement.
Well, I think everyone, on both sides of the pond, were anxious to get rid of (the Bush administration). They were just diabolical, but absolutely brilliant the way they screwed us all, and they kept doing on their way out the door, which is even more amazing when you think about it. It was like the Borges. It’s a fantastic time to study, if you’re fascinated by people like Machiavelli, but not a good time to live, especially if you’re brown and poor, and we do try to touch on that in the show, although hopefully in a way that’s not too obvious. I think George Bush and his henchmen, his gang really, cut across the planet in such a way that the recovery will take centuries. As they seem to have no remorse and no conscience, I suppose on the one hand, that makes them consummate politicians, although for my money, a true politician should be just the opposite.

You grew up in London. Your father was a journalist and your mother was a teacher.
Yeah, she was a painter, as well. She went to art school up in Birmingham, where she grew up, but ended up being a teacher in primary school teacher. My father was a painter, too.

Your dad did something interesting, which was to change his Anglican name of Smith to the Jewish name of Roth. It’s usually the other way around.
(laughs) Right. That irony has never been lost on me. My dad was a devout Communist, and left the party in the ‘70s. During the war, he was 17 and underage when he joined the air force and became a tail gunner, and did a lot of very dangerous things: dropping people behind enemy lines, that kind of thing. I don’t know what he saw necessarily, but when he did change his name, I think it was to remove himself somewhat from his family, and the name he chose was a Jewish name, I think in tribute to all the Jews who died during the war.

So you’re not Jewish?
No, but I get invited to an awful lot of Jewish functions! (laughs) My dad always considered the struggle against the Nazis to be a humanist one, and in many ways a class war, as well. He said “Remember, the camps were full of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and many other groups of people that the Nazis just sort of randomly decided were ‘undesirable.’ This will come again, and there will always be (Fascists) like the Nazis who think that this will be the solution.” So he really made my sister and me very aware of history, politics, how societies around the world functioned.

When you mentioned he wanted to distance himself from his family roots, was your dad upper class?
No, working class through and through. They came out here for a time, from Irish heritage, and dad was actually born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Then they wound up in California and his dad did stunt work in westerns for a while. They ended up going to Liverpool when he was eleven, to work in the brick factories that were there. He and his sister said they’d run away from home if they didn’t get out of there, because working in factories in the North was bad in those days, really bad. Then they moved down to Kent, in the southwest of England, and worked in the hop fields and paper mills there. He got himself an education till he was 17, then was self-taught, learned to speak fluent Italian when he was stationed in Italy during the war…he was quite a crazy fellow. He passed away in ’89.

He lived to see you succeed, anyway.
Yeah, somewhat. I was doing a film in Ethiopia when he passed. I based my character of Vincent Van Gough in Altman’s film Vincent and Theo on my dad, and Van Gough was his hero, oddly enough.

You went to art school as opposed to drama school, so when did you figure out that you were an actor?
When I was 16 or 17 a friend and I auditioned for a play in school as a joke, and it wound up backfiring when I got the part. The drama teacher could see that I was a complete mess as a kid and really took me under her wing. I kept doing plays from there, when I was in art school, wherever I could: theaters, churches, pubs. (laughs) I was doing more theater than I was doing art, and they finally sat me down and said “Look, you’re taking the piss. Either get serious about this, or go try and be an actor. We’ll hold your place for you if you decide to come back.” I went to the dole office, and signed on. They said “What are you?” They needed a job description, so I said “Actor.” And I started getting work right away, and never stopped, and never had to go on the dole again.

Roth in Alan Clarke's Made in Britain, his film debut.

The first thing you did was Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain.
Alan was one of the greats, left us far too soon, and that was probably the best time I ever had as an actor, as well. I was selling advertising over the telephone when I got that part, which is something a lot of people in Britain do when they’re trying to subsidize themselves as actors. I had a flat tire, and was looking for a pump, and went into this theater on the west end. They mentioned that there were auditions happening for this TV film, and did I fancy having a go. And I said “Cheers, sure.” I went in and met Alan, who was a real character from Liverpool: a traveler, a joker, a troublemaker, very kind of handsome, and wild with women, and he was a filmmaker on top of all of that. And he was a filmmaker at a time when the BBC and a lot of other companies were allowing you to make these controversial dramas and were willing to take the flack for them. So Alan came up in the company of people like Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, a big group.

All the British neo-realists.
Exactly, they were just fantastic, these guys. Of all of them, I think Alan was the best, and I think Ken would agree.

Look at his eye for talent: he discovered you, Ray Winstone, and Gary Oldman.
Yeah, he did have a great eye, but it was his choice of subjects and how he went about filming them that I loved. When we filmed Made in Britain, he took me out with Chris Menges, who’s an extraordinary cinematographer, and it was the beginnings of SteadiCam, and these sort of flowing shots, which gave you total freedom as an actor, and also total madness. It was my first time in front of a camera, and a great way to enter. I knew nothing about film acting at that point, other than the fact that I wanted to be one, and that I didn’t want to be a stage actor.

Next you worked with Mike Leigh on the TV film Meantime. He’s renowned for his unique process of preparation and filming.
Mike’s got a lot of gusto. We didn’t have the luxury of the long rehearsal and prep process that he’s become renowned for, but we still had about 14 weeks, and for a TV film, that’s bloody good, with about five or six weeks of that to develop character, to live as the character, a more condensed version of what he does now. I’d love to work with him again. He’s got a twinkle in his eye. Pam Ferris, who played my mother in the film, were buying groceries and Mike was behind us, sort of leaning in, watching us, taking notes on this pad he carried with him everywhere, with that great beard of his, and his hat pulled down low over his eyes. (laughs) Real character.

Roth in Stephen Frears' The Hit.

The first film I remember seeing you in was The Hit.
Yeah, Stephen Frears did that, and we actually just did the Criterion audio commentary for that. It was a beautiful little thriller really, an odd little film, but beautiful. It was a great group: Terry Stamp, John Hurt, Bill Hunter, Laura del Sol…for me, and I hadn’t seen the film in years because I never watch my stuff, and I thought Laura’s performance was probably the best in it. We talked about it in the commentary, that each of us was from a very different school of acting: I came up from the Alan Clarke school, John came from RADA, Terry came from the whole ‘60s, working class-boy-makes-good school, and Laura, who came from the streets and was a Flamenco dancer. And here we were, among all these giants, and Laura, who’d never really acted before, gave a performance that was the most modern, in many ways. She’s stunning.

Your character seemed like one of those dim-witted kids that we now see here who watched Scarface too many times as a kid, only your guy had watched Get Carter 150 times, and wore those yellow sunglasses, and wanted so badly to be the movie version of a “hard man.”
(laughs) Yeah, right. I don’t think he’d ever held a gun before and suddenly they give him a thousand pounds and tell him he’s going to be the driver for these gangsters and he was like “Yeah! Cool!” and he just didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. When that yellow sunglass lens was blown out, I almost lost my bloody eye. That was my idea, actually. I had wanted him to get shot through the teeth, but that wasn’t possible to pull off, so they put this little charge on the inside of the glasses that was directed outward, and covered up my eye, but it still hurt like hell. I was young, and it was a bit dodgy, looking back. Shouldn’t have done that. (laughs)

You got to work with the great Robert Altman on what many feel is one of his greatest films, Vincent and Theo.
The full cut, which was only shown on TV in Europe, runs over four hours and almost goes by quicker than the version which was released theatrically here and cut in half. I’ve never seen that cut, and I’m desperate to. So if there’s anyone out there who’s reading this…(laughs) I was working on a film with Peter Greenaway at the time, and I got a call saying that Altman wanted to meet with me. I said “Is that the MASH fellow? He’s great!” (laughs) I didn’t know too much about film at that time. So I go to his hotel, and he wouldn’t let me see the script until he decided whether I was going to do it or not. I thought that I was too young, and too young-looking. I looked much younger than my years for a long time, which is useful in some respects, but bloody annoying in others. So I was actually talking myself out of a job, stupidly. But the more we talked, the more I talked myself into it. We talked about the man, and I talked about my father with him a bit. Altman said, “Just listen to your dad. Read the letters (between Vincent and Theo) and talk to your dad. Forget about everything else.” So he hired me on, and we had the most extraordinary time. Being abroad, being someone I deeply admired, being with someone I deeply admired, was just extraordinary. We spent three months together, just sort of knocking around Holland and France.

Roth as Vincent Van Gough in Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo.

He was renowned for giving his actors a great deal of latitude.
Yeah, Bob gave us the script and allowed us to rewrite it. I remember coming in one morning and he said “Where do you want the camera?” (laughs) You never felt that you were overstepping your mark. You always felt that he wanted you to do that. It was “Okay, we’re doing a scene about color. Why don’t you go in the kitchen and make a salad?” That was our way of dealing with what he wanted and dealing with what he wanted. He was happiest when we were sort of wild and took over. He encouraged it. We didn’t realize how much we were being directed at the time, and therein lies the art.

Left to right: Michael Madsen, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, Chris Penn, Lawrence Tierney, Tim Roth, and Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs.

Which brings us to Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs. Did you realize at the time that it was revolutionary, or was it just another job?
I thought it was a bloody great script. I thought it was hilarious, and brutal…it was just the writing that got me. I was halfway through the script, and got on the phone and said that I wanted to do it. But it didn’t come easy. Quentin wanted me to play one of two other characters, but I wanted to play Mr. Orange, because he was the actor, right? There were lots of battles trying to get me to read, which I don’t like doing because I’m not very good at it. I think The Hit was the last time I did a formal audition for something. So it was a bit of a battle on that front, but eventually he gave it to me, and it was madness. Controlled madness, but madness, with all those actors, and all those egos (laughs), and we found ourselves all getting along really well when all was said and done. Although Lawrence (Tierney) was really crazy. (laughs)

Everyone I’ve met who worked on that film has a great Lawrence Tierney story. What’s yours?
Lawrence really didn’t like me, I don’t think—actually he didn’t like most people—at least in the beginning, but then he decided he did. I ended up in bars with him, and he’d introduce me to all these characters, like the guy who invented the yo-yo that would light up. I had this very lovely, tall black girlfriend at the time, and all sorts of offensive things would come out of his mouth when I brought her along that I won’t bother repeating. (laughs) She wanted to pop him. He was a bizarre fellow. Then he decided suddenly that he didn’t like me again. (laughs) So he was mad, but great. Back in the day, the cops really, literally threw him across the state line of California because they were so sick of busting up fights that he’d start in bars, and so on. So he went up to New York, and he hated New York, he was so bored. So to liven things up, he’d be in a bar, and call the cops, saying “Get the hell down here, there’s a huge fight goin’ on!” So the cops would arrive, and he’d beat the cops up. (laughs)

They don’t make guys like that anymore.
Well, there are guys like that out in the acting community now, but with Lawrence I think he felt he never really got his due from this town, and I have to say I think he was right. It’s tougher now if you’ve got one of those oversized personalities because the business is so different today. It’s all these giant conglomerates and corporations who don’t give a fuck about anybody unless they’re making money, but for us, and anybody who had an interest in film history, we thought Lawrence, and those like him, were really remarkable guys. And Eddie Bunker, too, and those guys. You paid attention when you were around these guys. Eddie was a literary man, and told me some incredible stories about his life as a criminal. But there’s no room for them in today’s climate. The powers that be seem to like a sameness in their big name actors. I remember one night we had a dinner out at Harvey Keitel’s place by the beach, right before we started shooting. I was the only Englishman there, and was really nervous that I wouldn’t fit in. And Mike Madsen was so cool to me, and started talking about poetry and painting, things like that, and he was the first one sized up and thought “Oh Christ, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to deal with him.” (laughs) But he really took me under his wing, and was incredibly warm and articulate and we would end up with bars, with Chris Penn, talking about poetry and about art. It was wonderful. Mike is one of those very rare, special human beings. So they do make guys like that still, but it’s rare, and it’s hard for them to get their just desserts in this town.

Tell us about Tarantino.
It’s hit the ground running. If you’ve ever seen an interview with Quentin, that’s what he’s really like. It’s full speed ahead and you don’t stop until they say it’s a wrap. I don’t know what he’s like with the new films. We were trying to get together on Inglorious Basterds, but my schedule was too screwy. But, I found it to be a very creative and high speed process. He was all about the actor. I found him to be really articulate about the process, particularly considering it was his first effort. I remember Harvey Keitel turning to me on the set at one point saying “I think this is going to be quite good. But let’s not jinx it!” (laughs)

Roth as the evil Archibald Cunningham, his Oscar-nominated role in Rob Roy.

This brings us to my favorite role you’ve ever done: Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy, who has to be one of the greatest screen villains in history.
(laughs) My wife drives me crazy about this, because I thought I was going to get fired, since it was so over-the-top. A lot of the credit has to go to the director (Michael Caton-Jones), because I love physical acting and there’s not many people that do anymore. A lot of acting now is behavior, where your range is about being as normal as possible. And I don’t like that particularly. I always think of Charles Laughton’s quote: “Method actors give you a photograph, real actors give you an oil painting.” And my feel is that you go at it. So Michael encouraged me to go down this road, and we did it emphasizing the grandness of his behavior, and I thought ‘When the studios see the dailies I’m fucked. I’m going to get fired for sure.’ So I called my agent and told him to find me another job. (laughs) Then I heard that the powers that be were liking it, so I kept going in that direction. My whole aim was: underneath the powdered wig, and foppish exterior, is a skinhead. Underneath the wig is a psychopath, and all the rest is dress-up. My wife was showing me books with portraits of these 18th century guys, who just looked like the worst transvestites, almost comical. But these guys were also deadly with a sword, and they used it, and they enjoyed it. They were slave owners, up in Scotland. The aim was to get to the place where the wig comes off, and his character changes, and you reveal the real guy.


Roth and Liam Neeson's climactic sword fight in Rob Roy.

That final sword fight between you and Liam Neeson is probably the greatest screen swordplay since Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone’s fight in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Bill Hobbs, who choreographed the fight, is one of the all-time masters of sword fighting. His philosophy was “Don’t learn to sword fight. It’s about your character. How does your character fight. You fight as an extension of yourself.” So he studied our performances, and then came up with a style that was in keeping with our characters. It was a very complicated fight. In reality, Liam would have been dead in a second, because it was brute strength versus finesse.

That film was written by one of the great screenwriters, Alan Sharp.
Alan was fucking amazing! Great writer and as a human being, I just love him. He wrote this amazing, definitive script about Christopher Marlowe, that I’m dying to do, but it’s just too damn long. It’s either a TV thing, or it’s two films. He gave it to me at that time with the idea of me playing Marlowe, but now I’m too old for it. Not only does he understand the history and the underbelly of what we were doing, but he gets what actors need to come out of their mouths, and really knows how to write for the cinema.


Roth in Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth.

More recently, you worked with Francis Coppola on his first feature in ten years, Youth Without Youth.
I think it’s one of those films that will have some kind of life, although many people found it a bit esoteric. I always felt that it was, at heart, a film about what Francis was feeling about his life at that time, about his successes and failures, about what it felt like for him to be growing older, and if you look at it from that perspective, it’s pretty great. We spent six months in Romania shooting it, most of the crew were under 30, so it was exciting to be working with all these young people that were really passionate about film and filmmaking. With Francis, you couldn’t touch the dialogue, which for me was difficult, because it was the translation of a book that was, by itself, quite difficult. So, you have that…(laughs) As sophisticated as the story and the concept were, I felt that the dialogue was not always so sophisticated. It was difficult to actually speak, and that was the hardest thing to get by Francis, so you had to let go on that. The film is a triumph, however, of color and texture and mood, and he was very open to that and very spontaneous towards ideas for different shots. So visually, it was a remarkable experience to be a part of, whereas the dialogue side, a bit of a pain in the ass. I really got stressed out over it, when Francis said I shouldn’t and looking back, I should’ve listened to him. (laughs) I really love Francis. He’s a conundrum. He was also the first person on the set and the last one off. So as much as we actors like to bitch about how tough we have it, all you have to do is look at the bloody crew, who are working much harder than you are. So I’d say the experience of working with Francis was one of the best I’ve ever had, even though aspects of it were awful. I look back on it overall with great fondness.

You made your directing debut in 1999 with The War Zone. What was it like stepping behind the camera?
For me, that’s the best job in the world. That’s part of why I’m doing the TV thing: it’ll hopefully give me enough financial clout to take some time off and do some more directing. I never want to direct myself in anything, but I have two things I want to do. One of them is an adaptation Harold Pinter wrote of King Lear for me to direct.

Ray Winstone and Lara Belmont in The War Zone, Roth's directing debut.

What is it that fills you up about directing?
Everything I’ve acted in I’ve done for someone else. Every performance is what a director wants. Film is really a director’s medium, not an actor’s medium. You serve the director’s vision. You can create. You can be of independent mind, and put your mark on it, but the director has something in mind, and your aim to straddle both your world and his world, and leave him with something that’s as close as possible to what was in his mind. That’s the deal. That’s the gig. When I came around to the directing side of it, I got to talk wallpaper, paint color, lenses, make-up…I had a finger in every department. It was wonderful. It’s a completely megalomaniacal, but sod it, it’s my turn! (laughs) And for the first time ever, I got to make a film that was about me. It had my imprint on it. As an actor, you don’t do that. They give you the Oscar at the end, but it’s really the director’s gig. Theater is the actor’s gig.

And the writer’s.
Yes, and the writer. Same with television. They gave the writer the power in television, and look where it got them, because there’s no balance.

How did you prepare? Did you study the films of directors that you’d admired?
No, I remembered all the mistakes directors made who I’d worked with in the past. The bad directors I’d worked with were the most influential.

We started talking about television, so why don’t we end on the same note: many actors I’ve talked with who have made the transition from features to TV say they really enjoy the job security that television offers. Is there always that fear, even at this stage of your career, that every job might be your last?
Absolutely! The idea of unemployment is a great motivator for most actors, I think. It fills up all your time, and at the same time frees you up. The plug can be pulled tomorrow, and it’s not my jurisdiction to say whether we’ll stick around or not. There are a lot of things I don’t like about working within the TV system, and I really want to slap it around sometimes. It shoots itself in the foot constantly. It could be so much more powerful than it is, but they keep moving toward the middle. Those kinds of fights are exhausting, but doing the performance and fleshing out this character, I really do enjoy that. And the cast are all really brilliant too, and lovely people, which makes it much easier to go to work every day. (laughs) I wouldn’t have been able to get through those first eight episodes without them.

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