Miles Teller cheated death to become a star – now he is reliving his horrific car crash on screen again
First Rabbit Hole, then Whiplash, now Bleed for This...
Miles Teller blacked out shortly after the car crash that, on another day, would have killed him. It was the summer of 2007 and the 20-year-old New York drama student was heading back to his family home in Florida. The car was doing 80mph when the friend driving lost control of the wheel. They crossed three lanes of traffic and flipped eight times. “All I knew was that I had been thrown through the window, I was covered in blood and I couldn’t feel my legs,” Teller says. “Then I woke up in the hospital. It’s how the brain copes. The people it was most traumatising for was my parents, getting the phone call. And my friend. I do remember him saying, ‘Please don’t die.’” Now 29, Teller is one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young movie stars. He’s a little like Elvis in the face, and his sleek leather jacket looks dizzyingly expensive. He makes good company. There have been times in his career when remarks about his plans for acting greatness have seen him on the brink of a bad reputation. Today, he’s nothing but courtesy and wisecracks. The only evidence of the crash now is a couple of light scars striped across his chin, and if you look closely, more on his throat. Discussing the accident doesn’t faze him. He has, after all, had to relive it on screen – and more than once. In the most successful role of his career so far, as a gifted young jazz drummer in the Oscar-winning Whiplash, his character is made late for a show by a viscerally rendered road accident. Putting Teller’s drummer under the guidance of a bullying music teacher, the director of Whiplash, Damien Chazelle, said he wanted the film to feel like a boxing movie. Miles Teller and JK Simmons in Whiplash Now Teller is starring in the real thing – Bleed for This, a biopic of Vinny Pazienza, the Rhode Island brawler who won world titles in the 80s and 90s. But Bleed for This isn’t really about the ring. Remarkably, the film involves another car crash, as horrific as Teller’s own. Pazienza was left with a broken neck. Doctors told him he should, with time, be able to walk again – but his boxing career was over. He insisted on ignoring their advice, choosing the hugely risky path of recovering with a metal head brace called a “halo” screwed into his skull, before making one of the most unlikely comebacks in sports history. Was it tough having to re-stage another car crash on camera? Teller insists that it didn’t trouble him. After all, he says, it’s not like he recalls much about his own. What he remembers is the recovery. After the accident, Teller never lost sight of how lucky he was to be alive. “The doctor told me when someone is ejected from the car going as fast as we were, literally 99.9% of the time, they’re dead or paralysed.” But there was a catch. “A lot of scars, all across my face. Very red… raw… prominent.” The adjustment would be difficult for anyone. But Teller was an actor ambitious enough to have planned what his breakthrough role was going to be: an indie drama opposite big names. Now though, casting directors were telling his agent that, while he had talent, the scars were a problem. “I assumed you could cover them up with make-up. Turns out you couldn’t.” Instead, every couple of months for the next three years, he had the kind of laser treatment used for tattoo removal to reduce his scarring. “It’s extremely painful,” he says casually. Bleed for This Back in small-town Florida, he hung out with the same friends he made in school (even now, he says the group are inseparable). But mostly he stayed indoors. The sun was bad for his scars. “I would just sit in the house and ask myself whether this was going to stop me having the career I always thought I was going to have.” Then came a turn of events you might suspect to be the work of a scriptwriter. With the scars finally reduced, he went for a part in just the kind of indie drama he had always planned for. The film was Rabbit Hole; the role, a man who had – by now this will not surprise you – killed a boy in a car accident. The boy’s mother was to be played by Nicole Kidman. When he auditioned with her, being around a real movie star made him blush. Noticing, she decided this unaffected kid should get the role. The effect was instant. Although Rabbit Hole was only a moderate success, Teller was singled out as a gleaming prospect, his scars now an advantage. As the film’s director John Cameron Mitchell told him, “they suggest a mystery”. Suddenly, Teller pulls back his T-shirt to show me a dark welt across his collarbone. “I mean, there are others that aren’t so great,” he smiles. Strangely he says, the ones left on his face may actually have helped him get the career he craved. “Until the accident, the actor I used to get compared to was Shia LaBeouf, who got pulled into the Transformers movies.” After a handful of comedies and action movies came another professional lightning strike – Whiplash. Teller says he was paid less than $10,000 to make the film, but the reward was a critical hit that won three Oscars and ensured he rose to the status of a leading man. Yet he’s still the strategist who mapped out his career at acting school. While Bleed for This is another scrappy contender, he makes no apologies about wanting to be in the biggest movies in Hollywood. In interviews now, he admits, he has learned to measure what he says while still being honest. “I love acting, but I also do this as a job. I’ve been able to pay off my parents’ mortgage, and that wasn’t going to happen just doing independent films.” Bleed for This is in cinemas from Friday 2 December
Judi Dench and the stars of Tim Burton’s new movie share their childhood secrets
The cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children have a tale or two
Tim Burton's adaptation of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the debut novel by Ransom Rigg, is an eccentric, fantastical, mysterious story of childhood. Read about the early memories of its stars Judi Dench, Tim Burton, Eva Green and Chris O'Dowd, below... Tim Burton: “I was young but I felt 80 years old” I grew up in Burbank, California, which I remember being very bright, very square and very stark. I ended up watching a lot of monster movies on TV. My parents said even before I could walk I was watching them. I was never a studious kid. From the beginning to the end, I faked my way through school. You put those things together, and that’s probably why I became a director. I was a shy boy. I don’t think people realised I could speak until I was into my 20s. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I did have a subversive streak. Part of me enjoyed staying home and drawing, but I also liked scaring the other kids in the neighbourhood, faking alien invasions with weird homemade wreckage and footprints in the park. And eventually I started making little movies with a Super 8 camera, roping in those same kids to help out. The huge thing for me was Jason and the Argonauts, which I saw when it came out in 1963. I was five. I saw it at this old movie theatre on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, this old amazing cinema covered with murals of sea life. It was like being in the sea, and the movie hit me like a dream. Seeing it on the big screen, I think it shaped something in me. The world is such a different place now. I was a television kid myself... anyone seeing me would have said ‘Get that kid away from the TV.’ But I do think the world of screens kids live in now is different, because there’s always more than one of them and it feels like they end up getting in between the kid and a real experience. But that’s not just children, it’s everyone. When I was young I felt 80 years old, but now I still feel like the kid I was. Whenever I’m back in suburbia, it still feels too bright for me. And all these years after seeing Jason and the Argonauts, I still love skeletons. Judi Dench: “I missed my parents terribly” When I think back to my childhood I remember an enormous ottoman we had at home in York filled with dressing up clothes. No television, of course, so we were always dressed up, my older brothers and I. And there were bike rides, swimming and roller skates. Idyllic is the word for it. We made our own entertainment. There were picnics. We would paint. I would get enormously excited pressing flowers. Which child would want to press flowers now? It would probably distract them from Pokémon Go. I was at boarding school not far from home, and although I liked it, I missed my parents terribly. If it was raining when we had games lessons, we were supposed to go for what they called a “wet walk”. So I would phone and get my father in the middle of his surgery – he was the local doctor – and he would say ‘Hang on! Hide!’ Then he came and fetched me, and we would go home for tea, and when it was time to go back my mother would get the watering can and soak me in the garden! But I enjoyed school, even though I wasn’t an academic girl. I was all right at English, and fond of Geography, but I couldn’t understand algebra – or why I might possibly need to know about it. And I had a rebellious streak. My Ma was from Dublin, and could be very fiery indeed, so I must have got it from her. On my very first day at boarding school, a friend of mine and I set off a fire extinguisher, and my poor Pa had to pay for the damage. It took me a while to learn to toe the line. It also took a while for me to get interested in acting. But when I was young, my eldest brother Peter was in a school production of Macbeth. He played Duncan, so his first line was ‘What bloody man is that?’ And I thought ‘Christ – this is for me! Not only Shakespeare but swearing!’ It’s funny, but the friends I made at school I’ve kept. A lot of my really close friends are people I’ve known since childhood, and I appreciate how rare and lucky that is. It’s part of why I still feel so connected to who I was as a child. Chris O’Dowd: “I was 6ft when I was 11” My mother tells me I was quiet when I was very young. She always says I was ‘easy’. I slept well. I didn’t get into trouble. My actual childhood, I remember pretty clearly, because I ended up going back and putting most of it on TV in the Sky series Moone Boy. The setting in late 80s/early 90s Boyle in rural west Ireland, the three older sisters, the dad who’s a sign writer and mum who’s a Weight Watchers instructor, all of that was taken from my life, because frankly my imagination is very poor. Back then everything was an adventure. Being part of a big family, there was a lot of arguing, then a lot of laughing, then more arguing and more laughing. And wool – I think all of us wore nothing until we were 17 but hand-knitted woolly jumpers. But really the thing about my childhood was my height. I was 6ft when I was 11, and when you’re towering over everyone else like that, it can leave you feeling a bit insecure. So I started being funny, although my memory in Boyle is being the fourth funniest kid in the class. Predictably, I got into sport. I did relatively well at Gaelic football, but I wasn’t terribly talented. It was just sheer size takes you a long way and I always looked like I was in the wrong age group. Then as you get older the perk is that you become the guy who can get served in the pub when you’re 16, and the girls flirt with you a bit so they can get beer out of you. But even then I was never very interesting. I was still well behaved. Eventually, I got obsessed with music. I was a Britpop kid. My friends and I knew that Noel and Liam Gallagher’s mother lived down the road from Boyle, so we felt a real affinity with them. I don’t know that the Gallaghers felt the same about us. And of course I was in a band. We were called the Basket Weavers, and if that isn’t rock ’n’ roll then I really don’t know what is. Eva Green: “I was terrified of being the centre of attention” I’ve always felt a little peculiar. Growing up in Paris I was always quiet. Very shy. I was scared of going to birthday parties, because I couldn’t play games and I didn’t like being in a group. I have a twin sister, and she had that bravery, she could join in with the group. But for me, it was painful. On my sixth birthday, another girl and I had a shared party, and I was so nervous I vomited. I know how crazy it is – from that terror of being the centre of attention, here I am as an actress. My parents made some home movies when I was three or four and I was already in my own bubble, looking away from the camera, thinking my own thoughts. Now I’ve tamed my demons but if I have to appear as myself in public, it’s hard. Deep down the child is still there. As a girl, I used to go to the cinema on my own. I hate it when people say the cinema is an escape, as if making small talk about the weather is more real. I loved the films of Ingmar Bergman and also A Room with a View. I saw it first when I was about eight, and I loved it immediately. At 16, I studied for a year at the American School of Paris, and that was a revelation. The French school system is very judgemental. There, everything was about the pressure to get a certain grade in Maths. Who cares? I don’t remember a thing I did in Maths. But at the American School, the individual was celebrated. I’d never been into fashion, but I would dress up every day, wilder and wilder. I did art, drama, photography, even sports. It was an epiphany for me. If enough people call you weird, you start to see yourself as weird. But in adult life, it can be a strength, too. And sometimes I do still feel like I belong to a different planet, where all the peculiars should go. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is in cinemas from today
Bryan Cranston's life goes on after Breaking Bad
The critically acclaimed actor talks about moving on from one of the most popular shows in history and his new movie, Trumbo
For 50 years, Bryan Cranston was a stranger to fame. Not any more. On my way to meet him, a teenage boy passes me in a T-shirt he might have bought in a thou- sand different places. Printed on it is a crude sketch of a man’s face – a flat black hat, moustache and sunglasses. Many of you would instantly know it as Heisenberg, the brutal alias of Walter White, the character that made Cranston a star in the wildly successful series Breaking Bad. A little later, Cranston himself sits quietly sipping coffee. A few weeks off 60, he is kind- eyed and sandy-haired, dressed in knitwear and cords. When I tell him about the T-shirt, he smiles wryly. “An odd world, isn’t it?” Is he often recognised in the street, given he is now a pop culture icon? “Not a lot. I keep my head down. Becoming famous has changed me, and not necessarily for the better.” You can’t just leave that hanging, I say. “Well, I often now opt to stay home, when I may have had a desire to go out. I’m less social than I used to be. I have a tendency to hide away.” Cranston is deeply likeable company. For him this is a happy moment: he is in the running for a best actor Oscar, nominated as the star of the movie Trumbo (with winners to be announced on 28 February). It’s the story of Dalton Trumbo, the flamboyant left-wing Hollywood scriptwriter who was blacklisted by the studios during their postwar anti-communist purges. You wonder if he saw Trumbo as a risk. It still feels daring to play a paid-up communist, and the blacklist remains a dark memory for Hollywood. “Right, it was shameful, which was exactly why I wanted to be a part of exposing it.” He is confident audiences of all persuasions can relate to Trumbo, a man whose politics didn’t preclude him “loving being rich”. Still, the film enjoys slaying sacred cows: John Wayne is depicted as a bullying phoney. But then, for Cranston, debate is king: “You and I could have a conversation from different sides of an issue, and I would find it fascinating. I want to talk to people who don’t believe in climate change! Someone who finds the idea of gay marriage an affront, tell me – why? I’ve been married 27 years, and I don’t see how anyone else’s relationship affects mine at all. But I am truly curious.” Cranston has an adult daughter. His own childhood was difficult, growing up in LA the son of two actors. His father, forever unem- ployed, walked out when he was 11. Much of the drama in Trumbo comes from the writer’s attempts to support his family. Did growing up with similar insecurity draw him to the part? It’s the one subject he skirts around. His answer is a long tribute to Dalton Trumbo, leading to the issue of alleged communists being asked to “name names”. “The Nazis offered that same deal. ‘Where are the Jews? You don’t know? Oh, so you’re helping the Jews?’ We always need to be alert to that tactic.” A valuable point, if not an answer to my question. Which is, of course, his prerogative. Despite his father’s example, he too found himself drawn to performing. He tells me how, in the 70s, he and his brother were on a road trip across America, riding motorcycles in the Appalachian mountains. One day, a storm left them stranded. Cranston had a copy of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler stuffed into his bag. Hours later, having lost track of time reading it, he realised he wanted to act. “The idea was to do something I loved and become good at it, rather than do something I was good at and hope to love it.” So began a solid career. There were adverts and voiceovers, then guest slots on TV and bit parts in movies. In his 40s, he won a regular role in the fondly remembered sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. All this suited Cranston fine. “I never had designs on becoming a star. Fame and wealth weren’t the goal. I just wanted to make a living acting. That is still my most cherished professional accomplishment." Then, in 2007, he was contacted by TV producer Vince Gilligan. The pair had worked together on an episode of The X-Files almost a decade before. Now, Gilligan was developing a pilot about a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer, who starts selling drugs to provide for his family. Cranston says he always knew how good the scripts for Breaking Bad were, but had no idea if anyone would watch. But that central idea of a family man transformed into a callous drug lord helped propel the show to acclaim and awards. “It taught me that everyone has the potential for evil. I could find out what scares and threatens you, push your buttons, and you might do ugly things, too.” He grins genially. “But we’re also all the mother whose love for her child means she can lift up cars to save them.” In his 50s, Cranston was suddenly famous. The transformation has been double- edged. Recent years have seen him star in movies like Oscar winner Argo and cult favourite Drive. But ordinary life has been curtailed: “Let me say clearly, I highly appreciate my good fortune. But there is a price.” Interviews, he says, trouble him. “Normally, I wouldn’t talk about myself. I’d want to know which museums to visit in Britain, or why when I was here last year, everyone thought Labour had a shot at the election. I want to have that conversation!” In social situations, he says, he now seeks out older people, as they won’t know who he is. After Breaking Bad’s finale in 2013, he has only returned to it in one context. About 60 times a year, he says, his agent is contacted by someone terminally ill whose wish it is to talk to Walter White. So he slips into character for at least a phone call or, when he can, a visit. “I try to be playful, ruffle their feathers. If they’re in hospital, I’ll say as Walter, ‘Hey, you want me to break you out of here?’ They enjoy that.” Otherwise, the past is the past. “I don’t miss the show. I miss the people who worked on it. We were together six years, and a lot of life happens in six years. But we had a beautiful beginning, middle, and end. And you have to know when to end.”
Ian McKellen on playing an ageing Sherlock in Mr Holmes
“When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’”
On a damp day in London, Ian McKellen clutches his side. His body contorts. An agonised wince takes hold of his face. “So that’s what you do,” he says, suddenly cheerful. This, in brief, is the McKellen guide to playing characters in old age. “You imagine aches and pains, and how the person accommodates them is part of who they are.” He smiles. “It’s just acting.” When we meet, McKellen has just celebrated his 76th birthday, a rangy, white-haired figure in a lilac shirt and charcoal suit. A few years ago, he says, birthdays began to slip by unnoticed, but as a keen user of social media, he is now wished well online. He looks a little tired, but he’s faultlessly polite. “Ah yes, ah yes,” he says when I remind him of the last time we met, at an interview before a charity screening of The Hobbit. He brought along the hat he wore as Gandalf, offering fans the chance to wear it (he made me model it for them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qng3t9RZk6Q His latest film involves another much-loved literary icon: Sherlock Holmes. Mr Holmes is a charming yarn set in 1947, with its hero now 93 years old. Retired to the country with little company beyond his housekeeper and her son, he tackles one last case, although his own frailty proves more pressing. There is a further twist: instead of the fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective is a real man whose exploits were immortalised on the page by Dr Watson. What he calls the “cheek” of the film (in cinemas from Friday 19th June) also, he says, distinguishes his Holmes from those before him. As a young man, McKellen’s favourite was Basil Rathbone in the films of the 1940s, though of course, for many people, Holmes currently means the version played on TV by Benedict Cumberbatch. McKellen says he watches Sherlock – “Oh yes, great fun” – but feels no rivalry. “I hope Benedict doesn’t feel we’re trampling over his territory.” None of his predecessors daunt him. “It’s odd. It doesn’t worry me one little bit,” he says, his accent still flecked with the Lancashire where he grew up. He points out that in his stage career he wasn’t the first actor to play Hamlet, either. But if Cumberbatch’s Holmes is at the height of his genius, McKellen’s is reaching the end of his. Finally, that brilliant mind is starting to fade, his memory dwindling. “We all have intimations, don’t we, however old we are? But there are times in a life when the memory really does get worse and the mind doesn’t work as it should. And if you were to get to the stage where you couldn’t remember anything at all, well, that would be very distressing. Fortunately, I’m not there yet.” “Lines get more difficult to learn,” he goes on. “When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’” He recently filmed an adaptation of the play The Dresser for the BBC; learning his dialogue, he says, took six months. He spent eight getting ready for No Man’s Land, the Harold Pinter play he starred in on Broadway in 2013. “That was just memorising the lines, and that was working on it every day. But it’s not yet that bad for me. I can do it. But for some of my friends… well, if you can’t remember lines, you can’t really act. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL-TAqJBxqE “But if it’s Shakespeare, God bless him, he’ll have written them with a rhythm, and possibly a rhyme, and those things make it easier.” I mention music has been found to be a help for people with memory problems. “Ah! Makes sense.” Then he sighs. “Age. As Bette Davis said, it’s not for sissies. My version is that age should come with a health warning. All your life you bump into old people. First it’s your grandparents, and then your parents turn into old people. But you never think you’re going to be one of them. And I’ve just turned 76.” He shakes his head, apparently stunned: “What?” I ask when he first started to feel old. “Well, when someone you’ve known forever dies, you can take that quite personally.” He looks directly at me. “It’ll happen. You wait.” Always a physical actor, McKellen makes his Sherlock gnarled and stumbling. Does it feel like a premonition, working out the movements of a man 17 years older than you? But McKellen says he won’t end up quite like that because he isn’t Holmes. For one thing he won’t retire to the country. His home has long been Limehouse in east London, and there he plans to stay. “I belong in the city. I wouldn’t like to not be able to see the theatre or just drop in on friends. Wouldn’t suit me. I’d have to find the nearest cow and have a chat. Friendly and inquisitive, cows." McKellen recently went to see Julian Clary perform in London. Leaving the theatre, he found he could hardly move in the late-night crush of Piccadilly Circus. He loved it, he says. Although he now stars on TV in the comedy Vicious, he says he doesn’t get recognised so often that life becomes difficult. When he is noticed, people are sweet. He thinks they might be wary of him because of his roles as Gandalf and Magneto, the super-villain he plays in the X-Men movies. I wonder if it’s because, for all his good manners, he doesn’t seem to crave the love of strangers as much as many actors. “Well, I don’t. I’ve spent my life wanting people to come and see me in Shakespeare, because if they do he’ll enrich their lives. It’s not about being famous. In fact, I’m nervous about pretending I’m more interesting than anyone else.” He would be doomed, he says, on Big Brother. “I would be bound to be thrown out because I’m so boring. Other people are wonderful projectors of the life force purely as themselves, but I’m not. I don’t want to draw attention to myself as I am.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGDXnr8YXZg His body language has grown cagier on cue, his arms and legs both crossed. “I don’t really like doing interviews,” he says. I can tell, I reply, and he sniggers. “I just find it uncomfortable. We become actors so we don’t have to be ourselves!” There are things he feels expert in: acting and the campaign for gay rights. “With those, I’m confident that I’ve got something worth saying that people might be interested in. But politics, or art, or this, that or t’other? My opinions are no more or less special than anyone else’s. Why would they be? I don’t get it. Never have.” He unwinds a little from the chair discussing the recent vote to legalise gay marriage in Ireland – “It will reverberate” – and the schools he visits, where kids are now taught not “to mock others for what they can’t change”. I say he seems optimistic, and he says you have to be, don’t you? “What I’ve learned at 76,” he says, “is that we live in a world that’s always changing. But some of those changes aren’t altogether unhelpful.” Mr Holmes is in cinemas now
Mark Strong: Benedict Cumberbatch can't walk down the street. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy
The Before I Go to Sleep star on why he's frightened of fame...
Mark Strong looks at me with distaste. “I can’t stress enough how totally uninterested I am,” he says. Fortunately, he is talking about fame. “There is no part of me that wants to have to pull the blinds down when I’m talking to my wife about dinner because some photographer is in a bush outside.” One of Britain’s most respected character actors – and perhaps its very busiest – he’s aware of the irony in criticising celebrity while giving an interview. He does them, he says, only when he has made a film he believes in. He has two such movies coming out, thriller Before I Go to Sleep (in cinemas from Friday 5 September) with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth and The Imitation Game (opening in November), a portrait of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. Strong will be Stewart Menzies, head of MI6; Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Given his aversion to fame, Strong can only sympathise. “It’s awful, because everyone wants a picture for Facebook, and if you’re Benedict you now can’t walk down the street. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and I think he’s lovely.” Strong met Cumberbatch on the 2002 TV drama Fields of Gold where he also met his wife, producer Liza Marshall. “It was Benedict’s first job. Tiny part. He was a guy being told to get out of a toilet. I remember being by the bar at the wrap party and wishing him good luck.” Before I Go to Sleep (left, also produced by Marshall) is a twisting tale where Strong’s Before I Go to Sleep (left, also produced by Marshall) is a twisting tale where Strong’s villainous image sits front and centre, echoing his icy stillness in Kick-Ass, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. “Well, heroes don’t get the outrageous costume or the fantastic one-liner. And I find villains interesting because they’re exotic. I don’t actually go home and menace the neighbours.” Sipping bottled water in a crisp blue shirt, he looks a figure of gleaming health at 51, amiable and dry with a certain steel beneath. He could be any professional family man who gets to Arsenal games when he can and moans at his two young sons to tidy their room, “so that in 20 years I’ll have spared two women being stuck with guys who can’t pick their pants up”. His own father was Italian and his mother Austrian. They met when she came to London at 18, in the early 1960s, but soon afterwards dad disappeared and mum raised him alone – changing his name from Marco Salussolia so he might be more easily accepted in England. “As an only child, particularly if you’re a boy without a father, you have to work out for yourself who you’re going to be. And I do think, over the years, I’ve developed a need for control.” He has no PA. He says he would spend all day checking up on them. He also loathes being “infantilised” on movie sets. “An assistant director said to me the other day, ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘Across the road.’ And she said, ‘Wait, I’ll get someone to take you.’ And I had to remind this 12-year-old, I actually cross the road on my own most days.” He grins, though with limited amusement. “And they all have walkie-talkies so you hear them muttering: ‘Mark is now walking to the set. Mark is now going to the toilet.’” He shakes his head. “I have literally had to tell people to stop putting my socks on for me.” As a young man, Strong might have been lost to Britain. At 18, he arrived at university in Munich, to become a lawyer, “complete with BMW and raincoat”. Once the reality of German legal textbooks sank in, he sped back to London. The taste for performance he had stumbled on in teenage punk bands evolved into studying drama, and from there into a theatre career. On TV, he graduated from The Bill through Prime Suspect, on to the award-winning 1996 drama Our Friends in the North. But among a cast that included Daniel Craig and Christopher Eccleston, he seems to have been left behind.“I was sharing a flat with Danny, and he didn’t work for months afterwards, whereas I went straight back into a play. So I’m making £300 a week, thinking, ‘Poor old Danny.’ ” Though his co-stars have variously played Sherlock Holmes (Cumberbatch), James Bond (Craig) and Doctor Who (Eccleston), there is no hint of envy. Still, desperate to get into movies, he took the decision to stop doing TV because, “with films, you have to be available”. I ask what advice he might give a young actor facing the same dilemma and for once, he looks flustered. “I can’t imagine I’m that guy now.” Why not? “Because I don’t feel experienced enough.” He half beams, half grimaces. “And frankly, I don’t feel old enough, either.” Before I Go to Sleep is out in UK cinemas today
Brenda Blethyn: “I’ll always be working class”
Vera star talks shoes, dream jobs and her fascination with people
Brenda Blethyn is fresh off the Eurostar. She’s spent the last three days in a Paris hotel promoting a film she’s in with Forest Whitaker. He was there, and so was her husband, Michael Mayhew, though her workload confined them to meeting in the evenings. But he did buy her some shoes. “Hang on, I’ll show you,” she says, producing a pair of elegant black-and-white numbers. “Spats! That’s what me and him call shoes! Isn’t it a nice word?” It’s lunchtime, and the actress takes a seat in the bar at London’s National Theatre. She looks spruce and lively, younger than her 68 years, her hair russet red, a blue scarf around her neck. It’s on her way back home to south London, she says, and anyway, she’s done enough plays here that the place makes her feel comfortable. Right on cue, an old colleague notices her and delivers a giant hug. It’s exactly now I realise the batteries in my tape recorder are dead. Blethyn is eager to help – and a National Theatre sound engineer is dispatched to find me new ones. It would be useful to have her with you all the time. She is frequently funny, occasionally pensive. Married life is still a novelty – she and Mayhew were together 35 years before they wed in 2010. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am to have him.” Her best-known role is probably still Cynthia, the troubled heroine of Mike Leigh’s 1995 film Secrets & Lies, for which she was Oscar- nominated – but it’s one accompanied by four decades’ work on stage, film and TV. Today she’s actually here on behalf of Vera, the ITV detective drama set in Northumberland that’s about to begin its fourth series. Playing the lovably dishevelled DCI Vera Stanhope, a woman unlikely to have French spats in her wardrobe, the show has struck a chord with viewers. A fifth series has already been commissioned. “I’ve got my teeth into it now,” she says. She talks fondly about the setting – “the people up there are so warm” – and Vera herself is someone she respects, “a female of a certain age without lipstick.” She doesn’t want to be mistaken for her, though. A publicist arrives with potential photo- graphs for this article. In one, she winces, she looks more like Vera than herself. “Oh dear. I look like my mum in this one.” Interviews in general strike her as “funny. I don’t like being up on a pedestal.” But they are, she knows, part of the job, and to her the job is important. Acting appeals to the side of her that’s fascinated by other people. “If I’m on a train, I’ll do this thing where I look at someone and think, ‘Did they sleep well last night? I wonder how much money he’s got in his wallet? Is she happy?’” She uses a similar process building a character. There has never been any plan behind her career. “I have no ambition. I’m devoid of it!” Brought up in Ramsgate on the Kent coast, she worked for a decade as a secretary for British Rail. In her early 20s, she was asked to help out the Euston Players, British Rail’s am-dram society. A spark was lit – and three years later, she left for drama school. “It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I hadn’t made it as an actress. I enjoyed being a secretary.” Now, she’s never not busy, a one- woman two fingers to the old showbusiness rule that good roles for actresses dry up after 40. Still, she is, she says, careful with money. “I hope I’m generous, but I make sure the bills are paid. And that there’s a bit over at the end of the week, if you know what I mean.” She was once Brenda Bottle, the youngest of nine children from a mother then 42 and a father in his 50s, born when Victoria was still Queen. Her parents met while they were both in domestic service. She was a maid, he was a chauffeur. “My mum and dad were funny. They rowed like cat and dog, then the next minute they’d be laughing. But making ends meet with all those kids...” She trails away. Her parents’ age used to make her “morose. I’d get frightened and sad, and my mum would say ‘What’s the matter, ducks?’ And I’d say ‘You’re going to die!’” Childhood was hard. “We had sod all. One cold tap in the house. No heating. Gas mantles for light. Do you know what a gas mantle is? I’ll draw you one.” She grabs a piece of paper, sketches a shapeless gauze bag. “But everyone was in the same boat, on our street anyway.” In 1961, the Bottles moved to a council house, complete with indoor toilet. “I used to listen to the cistern filling. It was heaven.” When she watches Downton Abbey, she can’t help but think life below stairs has been “a bit glamorised. I love the show, but you don’t see how cold it is in the kitchen.” What did her parents want for her? “To have some change in my pocket. And to be respectable, don’t put yourself as number one. Share things. Be happy to share things. And it’s funny, because they always voted Tory but I wanted to vote Labour, and it seemed like their values were more Labour, really.” She worries about the state of Britain. She wants people in charge “that can help people who need help. I’m not clever enough to know how to do it. But I did always think someone could have helped my parents more.” She pauses. “I wish I could have helped them more, but I didn’t have the money when they were here. It makes me sad sometimes.” Does she still think of herself as working class? “Oh, I’ll always be working class. She never had children. “It just didn’t happen. Maybe it’s selfish. It just never seemed… appropriate.” She doubts she had the “commitment” to be a parent. With eight siblings, there’s always been an army of nieces and nephews, regular visitors. “And that’s lovely, because I love them. But then you send ’em home!” She’s been in her patch of south-east London for 35 years, in the same house almost 20. These days, there is also a place back in Ramsgate. The whole area brings her to life – “lovely Broadstairs”, “poor old Margate,” her hometown itself. “I love Ramsgate. Love it!” She asks where I grew up, and I tell her Brighton. “Nah, Ramsgate’s better than Brighton. Brighton always seems a bit in love with itself. Ramsgate tolerates itself!” She says the Kent coast is changing. “But the problem now is you’ve got everyone, not just kids, on the computer, on the games, staring at their phone. When I was growing up, people talked, danced, went to the skating rink! You could interrelate. Have a conversation. Letter writing! You could be eloquent in a letter.” She refuses to text. “I will not abbreviate.” Right on cue, her phone goes off. Her cab is outside, ready to take her and her new shoes home. “Which way are you going? Do you want a lift?” I tell her I’m staying in town, and she sticks out her hand: “Good luck! Good luck!” See Vera Sunday at 8:00pm, ITV Follow @RadioTimes
Richard Ayoade on acting: "My range is so ridiculously narrow I don’t know if it counts"
The IT Crowd star is back in the director's chair for The Double, but auditioning for his own film made him shudder
Richard Ayoade is often recognised when he’s out. “People say, ‘Oh – you sound exactly like Moss.’ And I think ‘Ah. OK. I don’t feel that I sound like that’.” He looks perturbed. “It’s a strange sight, I guess – this thing that was contained in a rectangle in their living room, now floating freely is Asda. They look at you as if there’s been a spillage. The confusion of his fans is understandable. For seven years and four series of The IT Crowd, Ayoade played socially inept computer techie Maurice Moss in one of TV’s most beloved shows. But in fact, he doesn’t sound like him at all, though he could be his worldly older brother. Dapper in a modish suit, he considers each question, littering his answers with self-deprecating asides and references to Kubrick and Kafka. However, he’s not here as a sitcom star, but as a film director. His second movie, The Double, is about to be released in cinemas (from today Friday 4 April). It’s another story of office life – but one that’s a long way from The IT Crowd. Rather, The Double is a loose adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella about a timid clerk (Simon) befriended by his arrogant doppelganger. Both parts are played by Jesse Eisenberg, who’s the face of a nightmarish but very funny film infused with the surrealist spirit of David Lynch. Ayoade’s first film was the coming-of-age comedy Submarine, the story of a precocious 15-year-old schoolboy doing battle with the world in Swansea. Now, he’s moved on to working life – but his two protagonists still have plenty in common. “Each of them may seem sweet or vulnerable, but ultimately they’re really not that nice. In The Double, Simon isn’t actually interested in other people. He just wants to collect them.” If Ayoade isn’t Moss, he also isn’t Simon. In a certain light he can pass for awkward – photos of him routinely capture an expression somewhere between confused and terrified. But his manner is wryly self-aware, and while his characters exist in un-splendid isolation, he is a husband and father (his wife is actress Lydia Fox who appears with her father James in the new film). It’s just that he doesn’t like films about heroes. “The stories I’m drawn to, start with there being something about the person that needs to change. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, there’s something wrong with the character. Whereas in Hollywood stories, there’s never anything wrong with you – everyone else just has to realise how great you are.” These, he says in words that will horrify fans of Moss, are “nerd fantasies”. Now 36, the son of a Nigerian father and Norwegian mother, he’s a longtime Londoner, though he grew up in Ipswich. Eventually, there was a law degree at Cambridge. But the real work was taking place elsewhere, in the comic training ground of the Footlights. Friendships were made, characters honed. Soon after university, Ayoade stole the show as rogueish Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, the spoof horror series he co-wrote for Channel 4. He also directed this glorious pastiche of bad writing and worse production values, realising the importance of how to present a script. Recently there have been trips to the US, including a role in Ben Stiller romp The Watch (Tuesday Sky Sci-Fi/Horror). But the thought of more time there makes him uneasy. “I just never want to be away from my wife or children for longer than eight hours. And we live in England. I mean, we made The Double in Wokingham, and even that felt like joining the navy.” Professionally, he says, there’s never been a grand plan. And it’s strange but true that, for all his success, he has ended up famous for some- thing he’s not interested in – acting. “I’m grateful to have been in Graham’s show, it was very nice to do, but that side of things is odd.” “Graham’s show” is The IT Crowd, created by Graham Linehan. His entire career has involved being roped in by friends. So it was with Moss. Ayoade was making music videos for the Arctic Monkeys and hoping to move into films. Then the show took off. “I never expected that. I was just there to say Graham’s words. The pleasure of it was rehearsing with others. I never about when it was going to be broadcast.” He winces when I ask if he watches himself on TV? “Not willingly. The thought of staring at myself with nachos in my lap… no. Just no. That’s the bit where you hide.” On paper, his relentless modesty might look contrived. He knows that himself: “This will sound disingenuous...” he says more than once. But he does seem genuinely to dislike his acting. “My range is so ridiculously narrow I don’t know if it counts. It’s just every couple of years someone I know has been stupid enough to put me in something.” At first, directing seems even more unlikely – few men could be further from the stereotype of a maniac with a loudspeaker. But in a job that’s chiefly about making endless tiny decisions amid bedlam, he’s nothing if not quietly forceful – witness the cut of the suit, his shudder when I suggest he could have starred in The Double, the curatorial knowledge of film. He says his love for movies started in the 90s, when Quentin Tarantino briefly made it cool to check out the French New Wave. At the same time as he was falling for film, he was smitten with bands like Nirvana. He learned guitar. Inevitably, he formed a band. “We were loose,” he recalls. “We were not a tight outfit.” After some badgering, he tells me their name was Dave. Sadly, Dave didn’t last. What stopped them, I ask? “Talent,” he says. “Well, I could play with relative competence, but I realised [Stone Roses guitarist] John Squire was better than me. So I stopped.” You can’t stop playing music just because you’re not as good as John Squire. “Oh, you have to be,” he smiles, with absolute certainty. “If you can be as good as John Squire at something, then it may actually be worth doing.” His films don’t share Tarantino’s bloody swagger, but maybe the pair aren’t so different – both are film nerds channelling their passion on screen, driven to match, or outdo, their idols. See Richard Ayoade on tonight's The Graham Norton Show, 10:35pm, BBC One Follow @RadioTimes
Dustin Hoffman on directing national treasure Maggie Smith in Quartet
"She will put her foot down, and she will say, I don’t know what the bleep this scene is about. And when she says it, you pay attention!”
Why now? Dustin Hoffman smiles and sighs. Why, after a life in front of the camera, has he waited until the age of 75 to direct his first film? “Well, it has to do with our demons,” he says. “But at my stage of life, you get a glimpse of the end of the tunnel – so the question becomes if not now, when?” The voice, that familiar nasal rush of words, is unmistakeable. His hair stands in a luxuriant shock, now more white than grey, his shirt sleeves rolled up as he prepares to discuss his belated debut – Quartet, a gentle tale of retired British opera singers starring Maggie Smith (who has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance) and Tom Courtenay. “You know, a friend said to me recently ‘live your dash.’ I said, what do you mean? and he said, ‘On your tombstone, there’s the date you’re born and the date you die – and in between there’s a dash.’ So maybe I finally realised how to live my dash.” He smiles again, a pithy description of a 45-year process – the urge to direct starting, he says, soon after his breakthrough in 1967’s The Graduate. Between then and now were decades of procrastination, ending only when a friend passed him the script for Quartet before a flight home to LA. Abruptly, struck by the story’s portrait of the ageing process, he decided to make it himself. “Which is not to say,” he goes on with a snuffling laugh, “that my wife and my agent didn’t both then have to spend the next year coaxing me along before we started. I was constantly aware these were uncharted waters.” So there were moments when he thought of backing out? “Long moments.” These would be the demons. It’s strange – for all his gifts, it can’t be easy being Dustin Hoffman. As a young actor, an early lack of success and hang-ups about his looks and his Jewishness propelled him into therapy, where he’s stayed “off and on” ever since. Even now, while some stars of his status would barely acknowledge an interviewer, he’s obliging verging on the anxious. “If you want me to stop talking, just scratch your nose,” he tells me – later apologising when he thinks he’s rambling: “This is why I never finished school.” And all in an industry where time is money, and the money is usually other people’s. “Films are expensive,” he says. “You can’t always fix things, because every day costs $150,000. So it’s hard to commit to directing a movie. If you’re a painter you don’t have to get it right first time. But directing is like bungee jumping. You have to get it right first time, or...” Splat? “Or splat.” In fact, Quartet proves to be a sweetly human comic drama set in an opulent retirement home, with Smith and Courtenay pondering the annual operatic fundraiser alongside Pauline Collins and Billy Connolly. The funny thing is it also looks a safe bet for the money men. With the movie business going through chilly times, a rare piece of good news has been the discovery of a large, loyal audience right in front of its nose: Hoffman, a grandfather of two, lights up as he describes how older cinema-goers have become the dominant force at the box office. “Hollywood has finally woken up to the fact that films for and about older people make money. The kids are no longer the money makers. They go to the movies, but they go to a movie. Otherwise they’re on the computers, the laptops, doing everything but going to movies. So who’s left? The babyboomers. People my age. I’m a child of the ’30s, I grew up going to three movies a week. And my generation keeps up that tradition – so if you’re making films, they’re the audience.” Sometimes as Hoffman talks, a passing expression will call to mind one of his indelible characters – Midnight Cowboy’s tragic Ratso Rizzo, Tootsie’s cross-dressing Michael Dorsey, Rain Man’s autistic savant Raymond Babbitt (Sunday, ITV3). But the last of those came in 1988. Lately, he agrees he’s slipped into the background – to many, his biggest recent role would be the peevish Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2 (Friday, Sky Family). He nods fiercely at the idea that time stops for no man so much as a movie actor. “Yes! It’s the truth! It’s harder for women – studios think actresses are used up at 40 – but it’s not so different for actors. I mean, I got lucky. I played a 21 year old when I was 30 in The Graduate, and for the next decade I had my choice of scripts. But the lead parts were characters in their 20s and 30s. Then in my 40s I looked younger – they said! – so I still got the leads. But at 50 suddenly all you’re offered is supporting parts. Now, it’s nice you get days off, but you’re rarely challenged and your characters never get enough screen time to become three dimensional. So then, to come back to your first question, you think: ‘Maybe I’ll direct...’” I still sense ambivalence. In Quartet, Michael Gambon’s retired opera director is a monster in a kaftan – while during the opening titles, Hoffman’s credit as director hovers briefly in the corner of the screen before vanishing apologetically. His eyebrows fly upwards: “I hope it’s not apologetic or my shrink will come after me! Films are about the actors. It’s just my opinion but I don’t think you should focus on the director in a film. What keeps you in the story is the actors. I told them, wouldn’t it be nice for people to see a side of you guys only your friends normally see?” Which brings the conversation to Maggie Smith. A bona fide national institution in the wake of Downton Abbey, her character in Quartet at least starts out as a walking nightmare. How was it working with the Dame? “She doesn’t pick any bones,” he says, then frowns. “is that the right phrase?” He starts again: “What’s wonderful about Maggie is there’s nothing more important to her than doing first-rate work. Nothing. So she will put her foot down, and she will say, I don’t know what the bleep this scene is about. And when she says it, you pay attention!” And then? “Then you say OK, you let everyone leave, and you sit down with her and she’ll tell you what seems fraudulent about it. And she’s always right.” In the end, he says, their relationship found its balance – she coming up with her own lines, he tweaking her performance: “She has great instincts, and she does things that no director could ever think of, but sometimes I would simply say to her” – he makes a shrinking gesture with his finger and thumb – “and it just meant less, less, less. Because as actors, we don’t think we’re interesting if we’re not doing something. But on a 70ft screen, no one is doing nothing, and I would say to Maggie: ‘You’re there. You don’t realise it. Just sitting, resting between takes, you’re there.’” He’s clearly fond of Britain and the British, a chunk of his time regularly spent in a townhouse near Hyde Park. But despite the apparent deep-seated Britishness of Quartet (shot in a Buckinghamshire country house), he says its setting didn’t influence his decision to make it. “For me, the film was never about nationality. What grabbed me was that I understood it emotionally. I understand what it’s like to be at the top of your form, and then the ageing process starts to compromise your gift. The injustice of life, you know! So no matter what your nationality is, I like the idea of having combat with God.” I ask him to explain that phrase: “Well, I think that’s the only way to go. It’s a duel! Because He or She is the one who decided you’re temporary. I mean, at least we all go, it’s not as if some people die and others don’t. That would be a bummer. But even so, once you know you just have this short time, you realise how ludicrous, how absolutely nuts it is for us not to really live every minute.” Quartet (12A) is currently showing in cinemas nationwide