Looking back at the beginning part of your career, there was always this charming aspect of the personas that you inhabited. And now recently, i want to say it’s a much richer, darker spectrum, whether “a very english scandal” or the gentlemen. As an actor, how much more interesting is it to shed that in a sense when audiences wanted you to be that type of person, and now we are seeing a much more complex type of array of emotion.
Richard Curtis...The screen writer of Bridget Jones's Diary. He always found it hilarious that the public may have thought that I was that nice guy I played in Richard’s films. He knew very differently and that’s why he quite enjoyed helping to write the “Bridget Jones” character. Cause that’s never been me, really, those Richard Curtis films, that was a character performance, because I am not that Mr. Nice Guy. And the other thing is, it’s a weird thing that the camera is a very odd thing I believe, it’s kind of like a lie detector, it loves truth, it picks up truth that you didn’t know really existed, it can sort of smell them. And one of the things it loves is evil in human beings. You look at some of the great films of Tarantino or Scorsese, why are we enjoying it so much? Because something is real there, it’s touched a reality. And, I think it’s because we are evil and civilization has a very, very thin veneer on top. And so, it’s sort of, when you play someone who is pretty unpleasant, there’s a reality there that the camera quite likes. So that’s what I think and it’s what makes playing good guys, playing nice guys actually in many ways much harder than playing bad guys.
WHAT HAS FATHERHOOD, OTHER THAN LOVE, HAS IT CHANGED YOU? AND WHAT ARE YOU SHEDDING AS YOU BECOME 60?
I am trying to be a young father in an old man’s body and it’s rough. Yeah, I don’t get to go and play golf anymore. But I would say it’s worth it, it’s just damned nice isn’t it? I haven’t really realized what a long gap there had been between leaving one family when I was 19 and left home and then having another one, that was a few years ago. And you sort of need a family. I get that now; I think I had turned into a slightly scary old golf addicted bachelor and I am glad to see the back of him.
WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND TO SOMEONE WHO HAS THREE OR FOUR HOURS IN LONDON, WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND?
Well, I think it’s very important to see a Football match.Because this is one of the few times the British are happy, or animated. So, I would recommend going to a Fuller match of course, because they are the best team in London. So, I would do that. I would, I think there’s a very good ghost tour, which I went on, because one of my children was obsessed with ghosts. I shouldn’t have done it, it’s made them much worse, they never sleep. But to my astonishment, it began at the house that I had nearly bought about 15 years ago, with a previous girlfriend, and we both came out of it saying there’s something very, very wrong with this house. And we didn’t know that it was the number one most haunted house in London. And she had claimed to see a figure moving through a mirror, I don’t even like to think about it, it’s giving me goose bumps now. But I quite like all that stuff.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST LIFE LESSONS THAT YOU’VE LEARNED SO FAR?
Don’t do anything just for the money. And I think the other lesson, which I try to preach to my children, is you got to have some discipline and work through the hard bits. It’s so easy to shy away from the hard bits and then you never achieve anything and if you never achieve anything, you never have any self-esteem. And if you never have any self-esteem, you are quite a toxic person, I’ve come across that. And if you don’t achieve then you don’t have self-esteem and then you get nasty. So, I think you have got to work.
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT TELEVISION THESE DAYS AND WHAT IT’S GOT TO OFFER? Well it has everything to offer doesn’t it? I mean I can’t complain. It’s got marvelous writers, it’s got the best actors, it’s got incredible directors, “The Undoing” is directed by Susanne Bier, whose Danish films I adored, a proper filmmaker. And I have just seen a rough cut of “The Undoing” and it’s astonishing, I mean there’s no way that’s not a film, it doesn’t look like a film at all. So, these are all soothing to my innate snobbery about television.
MOVING FORWARD, I KNOW YOU ARE DOING “THE UNDOING” WITH HBO. WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT IT, HOW MUCH DID YOU ENJOY WORKING WITH NICOLE KIDMAN ON THAT ONE? It’s very difficult to say much about it without spoilers.
HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK? Well I have read enough of the book. Actually, we diverge from the book quite early on and quite drastically. Nicole is a New York shrink living on the Upper East Side married to me, I am a lovely child Cancer doctor and we have a kid who goes to a nice posh prep school here and everything is dreamy. And then one of the mothers at this posh prep school gets horribly murdered with a hammer blow to the face. And I disappear, that’s the end of episode one.
TR
