Mark Rylance Mark Lawson Talks To...

This programme contains some strong language

The Olivier Awards and the Tony Awards are the theatrical equivalent

of the Oscars on either side of the Atlantic.

Mark Rylance has won two of each

and for roles that demonstrate the range of his work.

Benedick in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing,

a multiply adulterous architect in the French farce Boeing-Boeing,

and most recently, Johnny "Rooster" Byron,

a maverick traveller facing eviction by the local council

in Jez Butterworth's modern epic, Jerusalem.

Although Rylance's screen appearances have been sparing,

he added a BAFTA Award to the shelf for his portrayal in The Government Inspector

of Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert who was found dead

after helping a journalist with a piece critical of the Iraq War.

Amid these prize roles, Rylance was also artistic director for 10 years

of the recreation in London of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre,

although he's publicly questioned

whether the plays were written by William Shakespeare.

This is the GBS or the George Bernard Shaw Theatre

at RADA, the drama school.

You're a graduate of RADA,

so presumably you have acted on this stage?

I have, yeah. I've done my prize-fight here,

where I played Zorro and dove over a table about where you're sitting.

And I've done Stand Up And Entertain,

which was one of the first things I wrote,

about a mortician who fell in love with a dead body.

It was a very funny piece, I didn't mean it to be funny.

Yeah, I can remember particularly playing Panurge in Rabelais here,

in the third term. But it was a nerve-racking little space, this.

You walked into RADA today, which is what everyone wants, I suppose,

an actor to be in this huge hit that has been in New York,

now back in London, Jerusalem.

And one of the things that fascinates me about actors

is the element of chance in this.

The role, which many people think is one of the great roles

you could possibly have of Johnny "Rooster" Byron in Jerusalem.

It could have gone to another actor,

you could have been centred and turned it down.

Yeah, yeah, you do have an increased sense of fortune

or luck or fate as an actor.

You have one or two, maybe three jobs that last a long time in their lives

and the change is a major thing. We have changes all the time

and it's rare that you work regularly with people,

so there is a sense of fate and fortune.

In this case, this play would not have got done

if Ian Rickson hadn't really kept faith with it.

I thought it would just be a six-week run at the Royal Court,

and then there turned out to be a lot that I, so to speak, had to say

in the role.

We're talking early afternoon on a day when, in about five hours' time,

you'll be on stage playing Johnny "Rooster" Byron again

in Jerusalem for... I mean, you must be heading for what,

300 performances now?

-400.

-400?

Mm. Mm.

It's a huge role, three hours of immense vocal and physical effort,

but is it something you can do quite easily now

or are you all day thinking, "I've got to do that this evening."

I have an injury today in my shoulder, so I am slightly thinking

when I have a moment, do I need to change some things?

Do I not... Should I not lift the girl?

Should I not lift the drum?

Will it be all right?

So I'm kind of monitoring and seeing if this is relaxed or not,

or what's happening. But earlier in my career,

say when I played Hamlet, I remember really from about noon on,

I would be starting to take on the luggage and the worry.

Rooster Byron's not a character who worries,

he kind of has a deep, deep faith in the land

and in fate and spirits and all kinds of things.

So there isn't a lot to take on before, a lot of luggage,

whereas with some parts, like Hamlet, you have to get the right tone of...

really acid wit.

You have to be in a great level of despair,

a sense of meaninglessness, I suppose, and er...

And so that initially took a lot of preparation.

I also played that part for 400 times,

and eventually I would be like this, I would be all right.

And I knew how quickly to go where I needed to go.

But, no, with Rooster Byron, if I wasn't with you today,

I might be doing some physical work,

weightlifting or something like that,

just to keep myself looking as strong as I can.

SHOUTING

I'm standing right fucking here, man!

I'll put you in the fucking ground!

When was the last time you were up here in these woods?

I don't think I've seen you since you was 16 years old,

shooting cans, smoking, you wouldn't have bothered to come, rain or shine.

Hey, do you remember that night we took them cards,

the old ones with the devils on the back,

and I laid them in a circle, didn't I?

Just back in there, in the dead of night, it was pitch dark.

We took a glass of wine, we poured it into a plate, a silver plate,

it was like a blood red mirror,

and you took the candle

and you gazed into the mirror...

and you shook.

It's a huge, huge part and long, long speeches,

so do you, in the way that opera singers have told me, that they

have a little test sing in the morning to see where the voice is?

I mean, do you just do a little bit in the morning,

see where the voice is?

I do make odd sounds throughout the day, yeah.

I wish it was singing but it's more...

GRUNTING

ROOSTER'S ACCENT: Seeing if he's got that down there and what's happening down there.

Because it's a much lower voice than I use,

and so there's a kind of opening of things like that.

I don't quite know why

but I remember the night before the Broadway opening,

I think we had two shows on that day,

and I really went home unable to say a word.

I had not a sound to come out of me,

which is a little bit panicky,

but I thought, "No, I won't call Sonia Freidman or anyone yet,

"I'll see what happens in the morning."

-So you didn't tell the producer?

-No. No.

But you were worried, though?

Yes and no. I'd had a lot of weeks where... This had happened before,

not quite as intensely, but it had happened before

and magically, in the morning, my voice had come back,

often better.

It's a bit of a mystery to me.

And I'm told by people who have acted with you,

and in fact you've told me in the past

that you can be quite a frightening actor

for some people to rehearse with and then to perform with,

because you change things a lot. You improvise a lot in rehearsal

and then you change moves on stage.

Yes, I've been thrown against a wall.

When I was a younger actor at the RSC,

I said a line standing up rather than lying down,

but as we walked around in the other place to the next scene,

the actor, who was much bigger than me,

took me and placed me very violently against the lockers for a moment

and said, "We're not all improvisers."

And I think I'm much more appreciative

of there being many different ways of working now,

and if an actor says to me,

as, for example, Alan David has done in Jerusalem, early on,

he said, "Do you mind if we keep the moves the same in the last scene

"in Jerusalem?" And I said, "Of course."

You don't need to change moves to keep yourself alive,

it just is a nice aspect to be able to do if both are comfortable.

Once I said yes, then I noticed

that he started to change moves all the time.

And now, he's much better than me

in terms of never, ever repeating anything.

He always delivers a fresh performance,

not only externally but internally, and the gift of that

is it makes my job so much easier, in that I don't have to...

I don't have to make up a sense that it's happening for the first time

in a way it's never happened before, because it is happening

for the first time in a way it's never happened before.

But, um...

That's an example of really not forcing your way of working

on other people,

which I hope now people feel,

even though I'm often the leading man and have quite a bit of power now,

that they have the right to say that to me.

I try and be as clear as possible on the first day,

even about my depressions, which I named as a trench to Joanna Lumley

-on the first...

-So you when you were doing La Bete

with Joanna Lumley, you alarmed her on the first day?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, saying...

HE LAUGHS

..trying to introduce myself and what I like to do

and how I like to work,

and on this occasion, I thought,

"I'll try and undermine or get in front of these depressions

"by naming it to everyone, so that they all know

"that it's never about other people."

It's always about me just going into a trench of self-criticism.

-Anyway, she got alarmed, yeah.

-She did get alarmed, yeah.

But she made us all laugh.

So you get depressed because you can't find the role in rehearsal?

I don't quite know all the reasons of it. I...

That is one of the reasons, yeah.

I'm feeling a bit low at the moment actually, and Claire, my wife,

reminded me that I came back...

..a week ago or so and said, "He's gone,

"he's gone, Rooster's gone, he's not there, I don't know where he is."

And, er...

And then I get very, very panicky and frightened.

I don't, um...

I got into acting really and worked so hard at it

because of being terrified of being in front of people as myself,

and so I completely immerse myself in these roles.

So it's very odd the way...

This repetition of a play, a deep play like Jerusalem,

does have an odd effect on your psyche.

Now I want to show you something, Dawn.

You ready?

Did you see it, Dawn?

Did you see that?

-Did you see it?

-Yes.

Well, now... There, now.

When you're in a huge hit, which has happened to you several times,

but is happening now with Jerusalem,

you get that thing that people come to see it.

I mean, everyone comes to see it, but then there might be movie stars,

rock stars, prime ministers, presidents, Princes of Wales

in the audience.

Now, you know that, as an actor, but you can't block that out.

-I mean that presumably changes things.

-Some actors don't like to know who's in the audience,

I really like to know who's in the audience,

whether it's a friend or a famous person.

I'm surprised by it sometimes, but I feed off...

My imagination of who they are sometimes makes me feel like

I'm playing the role like them.

You might not even notice,

but for me, it sometimes quite massively affects me.

Because recently Bob Dylan was in.

Yeah, I'm sorry,

you gave me a nice prompt and I completely avoided it, didn't I?

Yeah, Bob Dylan came, who's always been an inspiration to me,

and um...

You see, the effect there, was one of all the poetry in the play,

the languages and the situations

and thinking "Oh, Bob Dylan's looking at this, what does he make of that?"

I had worked with him back in '86

in a terrible film called Hearts Of Fire,

which we dubbed Farts For Hire, and I played his bass player

and was so full of fantasies of becoming his best friend,

I sat next to him for hours and couldn't say a word,

and eventually thought...

Cos I felt I knew so much about him and he knew nothing about me, where could I begin?

And I would sit there going through thousands and thousands

of opening lines and rejecting them all, so eventually I was going crazy

and I thought, "I'll just say the next thing that comes into my head."

And I said to him, um...

"What do you think's happening in Reykjavik, Bob?"

Because Gorbachev and Reagan were meeting in Reykjavik.

And as I said the words, Mark, I saw them fly in the air towards him

like a terrible cluster bomb that was going to come back at me,

and I thought, "No, Bob gave up politics in the '60s.

"He's going to think you're some kind of spy or journalist or something."

And then he looked up at me, was so askance, and said,

"I don't know nothing about nothing."

It was like a double-barrelled shotgun, I was murdered.

But my wife always said to me that I would meet him again

and she said, "He will come to something that you're in."

Which I just... I said, "This is ridiculous.

"What would he possibly come to that I'm in?"

And there he is, he came to something I was in.

So this time did you say, "What do you think's going on at the European Summit in Brussels?"

No, I didn't. No, I didn't say anything like that.

And actually, it was a blessing cos I was able to say more to him

through playing the part than I could ever say myself.

Without it even being my words,

I was able to say more about what I felt and thought than if...

Which is, I guess, why I'm in acting.

Is there a concern as you come now to the end of Jerusalem,

that after a part of that scale and that success,

that other things will seem small and frail when you play them?

No, I don't worry about other parts.

Difference is... The variety is the spice.

So many friends have died,

my mother and two other elderly friends, close friends, have died

during the run of it,

and so many things have happened to me during the run of it,

and it's kind of opened up a part of me that wasn't opened before.

Um...

And there's a wit and a humour to him and an ease about life,

and a confidence and a devil...

Come what may... That I'm a bit careful and Capricornish

and I'll be sorry to say bye-bye to him

more for the qualities he gives me,

than because of any fear of other parts.

All right, do you want to know what happens? Do you want to know the actual truth?

I was minding me own business,

settling in, spliff, Antiques Roadshow,

when suddenly there's a knock on the door,

so I gets up and I answers it, and standing, just outside here,

is all seven birds off of the Pussycat Dolls.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

They've got a case of Thunderbird, 200 Marlboros and seven Mars bars.

I tried to slam the door,

but they bum-rushed me clean across the kitchenette onto the bed...

We travel back from Jerusalem to Kent,

where everything began, although you can't have many memories of Kent

because you left at the age of two, your family, to go to America.

That's true. I was born in Ashford.

We actually went off before I was two

to Cyprus, and my parents taught at a mining camp in Cyprus.

They were both English teachers, your parents?

At that time, my father was an English teacher,

and my mother was not at that time.

She had done her English degree and everything

but she was looking after us.

When we did emigrate after Cyprus, to America, in '62,

Um... I would...

After a year or so, my father very cleverly got attached to a program

that brought high school students to London for a cultural summer,

and we would therefore have a free flight over

and we would be deposited, in a nice way, with my grandparents

in Sissinghurst in Kent.

So I spent most of my summers

between the house in Sissinghurst and being taken to the theatre

and Stonehenge and all the different kind of the events of the summer.

But the summers in Kent are a time

when I learnt a bit about Rooster Byron too,

cos there were these people, Romani people, living all around,

and we as kids, you know, would hang around them.

With your father being an English teacher,

your mother being a teacher as well,

I assume that education and reading were quite valued at home.

And Shakespeare, who we'll discuss,

became important in your life in a lot of different ways.

Did your father introduce you to Shakespeare?

They took me with the high school students to Stratford-upon-Avon,

and yeah, they adored it.

They adored it.

And my father would do a wonderful thing before we went.

He would gather all these...

A lot of them were from Virginia,

never been to Shakespeare before, so he would tell them the story.

So he would tell them the story of Much Ado About Nothing,

but he would do it very well, and he wouldn't tell them the ending,

and he would say, "Watch. Watch.

"There's a very interesting point that the actor has to interpret.

"It's when the character playing Beatrice says, 'Kill Claudio.'

"Watch Benedick and see what he does."

He would give us these things to watch out for,

like these would be very telling moments in the story,

so he introduced me in that way to drama as stories, as plays

rather than literature.

I was acting Hamlet before I'd read plays.

Plays were always like the ball in a football game,

they were the thing to be kicked around, they weren't to be...

They were never a test or an exam, for me.

They were always a song to learn or a joke to tell.

My mother would be very...

Both of them would be very caught up with it.

I remember us walking away from a first half of Henry IV, Part One

at the RSC, across the gardens there to where the coaches were,

two big coaches to take 90 kids back to Reading,

and my mother saying to my father,

and they were in charge of these kids, and she's saying,

"I can't go, I have to go back and see the second part.

"Life's too short. I have to see it.

"It's so good, I have to see what happens to Falstaff."

And my father saying, "Anne, you can't.

"We've got to look after these... We've got to take these... What will we do?"

"Well, I'm sorry, you'll have to figure it out," she said.

Your first Shakespeare performances

were at American schools, presumably?

Yeah, my first role I played was Hamlet. Put my black hat on.

-Was Hamlet!

-So you started at the top?

Yeah. Though Hamlet would say at the bottom. But um...

Yeah, I know.

And I didn't ask to play Hamlet. I had a very difficult

but very inspired teacher, drama teacher and um...

..who introduced me to a wide, wide range of drama.

Adapted Dostoevsky, did The Brothers Capek, did Shakespeare,

did American musicals, did original plays,

it was an incredible wide spectrum of drama and he, when I was 15,

said, "I think you should play Hamlet next year, aged 16."

And with the bliss of ignorance, I thought, "Well, great."

and I got a little copy of it, I remember, and carried it round

all that summer. Um...

Learning it.

I've still got a tape of it, a little cassette tape,

but unfortunately, this is my excuse, the tape has shrunk and so it's...

"To-be-or-not-to-be..."

It's very high and fast!

It might be that the tape has expanded

and it was actually even higher and faster.

Now, funnily enough, I was going to say exactly the same thing.

That if we had a tape of your performances,

would there be anything you recognised as the roots of the actor you've become?

Or is it all things you've got away from?

Well, it's funny you say that,

cos the actor who played Polonius, came and saw me in Jerusalem

when I was on Broadway, and I hadn't seen Jeff Grygny for many years.

And he said he recognised the same emotional expressions and qualities,

he said, obviously much refined

and now, you know, 30, 30 something years on...different.

But he said at core it was the same thing as he remembered

when I was 15, 16. Mm.

-And the decision...

-There's a Mickey Rooney in us all!

And the decision to come from America to here, to RADA,

I mean, was that an easy decision?

The decision to be an actor, did it happen quickly?

No, no...

And actually, I really hadn't imagined that acting was a profession

that I would enter.

There was quite an ethic of service from my grandparents

into my family and I had thought that I would do something useful

like being a doctor or a lawyer or, I don't know, something professional

and um...

But really, since I was a child,

I had... All my time had been spent, the way I enjoyed spending my time

was pretending to be someone other than who I was

and improvising for hours and hours and hours,

taking plots like a commedia actor might from television programmes,

like Star Trek, where you had the different characters,

and we all knew the rules of these characters

and then you would just improvise for hours and hours and hours, so...

When acting then became apparent at school,

and suddenly other kids were saying, "Oh, you're good at that,

"you're the actor."

And in that time when you're searching for the identity

of who you are, it became a very passionate hobby,

but I still thought it was really a hobby, and then around 16 or 17,

I remember thinking quite clearly, "There are seven days in the week,

"am I going to live...

"work five of them for two where I would be in an amateur company?

"That seems not such a great deal.

"Maybe I should have a try and a go at all seven days,

"being the thing I love to do."

And so I looked into American schools

and they were very expensive and they were also, at that time,

four year courses where you didn't act on stage for three years,

where in some cases you were broken down to a tearful, shaking mess

and then rebuilt again. You know, like some Frankenstein creature.

And though I have nothing against psychotherapy at all,

at that time, that was real panic to me,

I needed acting like I needed food, and I didn't need...

I really at that time was terrified by the idea of someone

breaking me down. Um...

So RADA, on the other hand, you know,

I was acting in this room six weeks after I was here,

with an audience of, bless them, older people that used to come

and watch us.

I thought, "That's where I want to go."

And I really wanted to be a theatre actor too,

so London seemed the place.

But it was a real long shot.

I think my parents were very, very surprised when I got in.

I was surprised.

What kind of student were you? Were you very confident

as an actor then?

I don't... I don't know that I was confident.

I had come from Milwaukee in the Midwest of America.

This was the only school I knew existed in London.

I was, no, I was bloody terrified.

I was...

I thought it would be full of Oliviers and Gielguds

and all the illustrious alumni of this place.

And, er...

I really didn't think I would last very long, and so, um...

I was very, very... I was very...

..solitary and determined, you know, to make a go of it.

Your accent is not easily placeable, there are many elements there,

which I think is probably quite useful for an actor.

But, what, bits of American, bits of English, bits of I don't know what.

Bits of Welsh in there, to me.

When I came here in '78, I really thought of myself as English.

In Wisconsin, I was known as the Englishman

and then the English actor.

So it was a shock to me to go into shops

and be known in this institution as American.

That was confusing to me, and there was naturally a kind of...

Racism is a funny word to use for it,

but there was a lot of assumptions about...

When you heard an American accent, a lot of assumptions,

and some righteous anger from the students too, about Americans

and American policy,

which I knew nothing about.

The news is so bad in America, I only knew about fires in Racine

or other cities in Wisconsin.

So it was a big eye-opener to come to London in the '70s

and be politicised and see how passionate people were

about politics.

So I just needed to cover, I needed to be anonymous

and not be picked out in shops,

and so I adapted to as best an English accent as I could.

I think once you do change your accent, then you become...

The floodgates open and any part I subsequently played,

I...

It would leave little trails of that accent with me,

particularly Irish parts.

It is a kind of painter's palette almost, away from when I'm in a role.

And when you said you were happy pretending to be other people,

growing up, and obviously psychologists

and armchair psychologists will lean forward,

because there is this theory that some actors are actors

because they're happier being other people than themselves.

But you were like that, were you?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was very happy...

..being... I've always felt more liberated, more alive in that way.

I've become... I've had to do a lot of public speaking and interviewing

now to sell tickets and things like that,

so I've become more comfortable with it. But I, um...

I'm a classic actor in that way that...

I remember meeting a kid when I was ten who had been in kindergarten

with me when I was five or six, and he or she said to me,

"Oh, I remember you, you were the kid who didn't say a word all year."

And I didn't, because I couldn't be understood.

Only my brother understood me, I was sent to speech classes and things.

I couldn't speak in a way that was...

I don't think I formed consonants.

Though my father says that the speech therapist

didn't quite understand what...

It was a case he didn't quite understand.

Did you have any sense of your parents being worried about you?

Yes, early on like that, yeah. Yeah.

I can remember being in a train,

maybe on the Charing Cross Line down to Staplehurst,

and speaking excitedly out the window about something I was seeing...

and then looking back and being aware that my father was embarrassed

cos other people in the carriage were looking at me.

Um...

But I don't remember it being a painful thing,

I just kept quiet after a while.

And then gradually, gradually found my way.

I like to think that I found my way by playing other characters

and that when I acted Spock or Captain Kirk, I could speak well,

but I'm not sure that that's the case.

I've picked out various roles from your career,

leading up to Jerusalem that express various aspects of your acting.

Shakespeare, which had been there from school,

and is very strongly present there early on.

At the RSC, there were major roles from very early on,

Ariel, Hamlet, Romeo.

Were you setting out to be a classical, a Shakespearean actor?

No, funnily enough, Mark, I wasn't.

I was really interested in the other companies

and shared experience at that time,

and later on in Complicite,

and indeed formed my own company with other actors

after my first time at the RSC.

But somehow I had this natural... this ability with Shakespeare

that meant I got offered work there.

I was looking to be a different kind of actor, really.

But that's what came about. And, um...

And it was a good thing, it was a great thing,

cos that '82 to '84 season had remarkable actors in it,

and I learnt an incredible amount from that.

-Michael Gambon was there, wasn't he?

-Michael Gambon was there.

Yeah. I wasn't in a production with him sadly.

I never have been,

though he's one of my favourite actors and favourite gentlemen.

I learnt from observation, really, from going and watching him a lot.

Although he is known for fooling around a lot

and practical jokes and pranks.

But do you do that?

I do it sometimes, yeah. I do it sometimes.

I don't do it out of despair.

If I despair, then I actually get very serious.

Michael, in my understanding of him, gets very bored and, um...

has a kind of, um...

has a great suspicion of being an actor.

I despair of some aspects of actors. My own behaviour sometimes.

Such as?

There is a concern with yourself isn't there,

because you're using yourself so there is an ability to lie.

My mother died recently and she left us in her papers all these letters

she had written to her mother when we were young at this school in the '60s.

They were very illuminating but one of them was really interesting.

In it, she said, "Mark has a tendency to lie.

"He doesn't like to erm... He covers things."

It is a temptation which I have to be careful about.

It is a thing I can do because of my ability to act. I can convince myself.

I have to discipline myself about that and not use that ability.

We've talked about you been at the RSC.

As I understand it, director's theatre was the thing at that time at the RSC.

And you have always been resistant to that.

I've always had a bit of an authority problem.

The teacher in school who taught me,

he allowed me to be involved in all aspects of the production.

I was really involved in everything.

The most crucial thing he taught me was that even in the classics,

we're saying something that we want to say.

We are saying something to the audience. This is a communication.

It is behind the mask of a play that someone else wrote.

I really wanted to be involved and I was completely shocked

when I entered the profession and realised that an actor is just a waiter.

You were just expected to deliver the plate.

You had nothing to do with what plate was served, there wasn't even a discussion.

There was some kind of pretend at discussion

and once you'd delivered what they needed, bang, don't change it.

The RSC was called "The kindergarten run by the Mafia" in that season.

It was really one of the birthplaces of so-called directors' theatre,

of conceptions, of plays and parts,

which I think is not a very helpful thing.

After the RSC, my great friend from RADA, David Moylen and I

and five other RADA actors began to explore working without a director.

What would happen if we made a production of Othello without a director?

How would we work? What would that be like if we didn't have that person in the room?

It was very interesting to explore the cooperative movement.

And another of your attempts to take control and take theatre to places where theatre wasn't

was the company, Phoebus' Cart, that you founded.

When I met my wife, Claire, in '87 who was a classical pianist

and we wanted to involve music and dance more.

We had met through a wonderful landscape cosmologist called Peter Dawkins

who came quite a mentor to me.

We had got very interested in the Rollright Stones

and what these ancient circles were about.

Why they were there and how they can be used.

The first thing was The Tempest we did in the Rollright Stones.

At that time, I lived in a caravan with Claire

and we mortgaged our apartment to mount the production.

We were going to do it with the RSC but then they dropped it.

They dropped it.

If they'd kept it, I would probably still be with the RSC.

The early 1990s was a breakthrough period. There were two big awards.

First the Olivier Award for Much Ado About Nothing

but also a TV award, The Radio Times Best Newcomer Award for the Grass Arena.

Now, looking back, that's quite a significant role

because it's an example of total emersion acting of a kind that you've done.

-Again, a figure on the edge. This alcoholic who was a boxer, went to jail.

-John Healey.

Yes, John Healey, based on his memoir.

Then discovered this talent for chess and you got to do both

the physical in the boxing, but also the cerebral in the chess.

It's very challenging to play someone who then comes on set and watches.

He was actually in some of the scenes.

He played a prisoner in one of the scenes.

-That was very remarkable.

-Also, he's quite an intense character.

John? Yes, very intense, particularly if he'd had a drink. Very strong.

He taught me meditation actually. I used to go to his little flat in King's Cross

where he and his mother lived and he taught me chanting,

which had been something he'd used.

He'd had to take on a lot of disciplines to help him

through the initial stages of a chess game.

Once he got to the middle of the game,

then he knew how to deceive people.

But the openings, he could never learn all the openings

and so the openings were very, very tense for him,

that the master he was playing would be better than him.

He would go and stand on his head or do some meditation.

He is a brilliant chanter.

In this little council flat bedroom...

HE GRUNTS AND GRUMBLES

Not a beautiful sound at all.

He was very dismissive of middle-class beautiful chanting. He thought it was rubbish.

His was real guttural chanting for 20, 30 or 40 minutes,

and we would sit there until my knees had gone blue chanting with him.

He is a remarkable character. He is still alive. Really remarkable character.

Psst.

What are you doing?

Rinsing out my brain cells. Helps me to concentrate.

A very significant part of your life, the Globe Theatre,

for the 10 years, from 1995, Artistic Director.

That was again a form of actor power.

Going back to Shakespeare's day where the actor did have that power.

There was a real desire for an actor's theatre.

You say actor power. That's not a power over the director,

but to recognise that the theatre is about the connection between the actor and the audience.

Everything else should be to make that connection as wonderful as possible,

as varied as possible. That's what good directing should be about.

That's what we should help each other to do.

Another thing you explored at the Globe was single gender, male gender performance.

Twelfth Night, you played Olivia.

To some people that was a gimmick, but it was going back to the way it would have been done.

The history of the job was Sam Wanamaker's 25-year struggle,

concluding with his death, to make a faithful reconstruction of this place.

It seemed to me that at least sometimes

we should follow his lead

and we should try and replicate the materials, crafts

and research that went into the building.

The all-male production was an obvious thing to try.

Some of the experiments were so difficult,

like the fact they had rushes and reeds on the stage.

But when we did that in Henry V, it just made me

look like a mixture of a Samurai warrior and Groucho Marx.

I had to come on with this bizarre walk over the rushes and reeds.

Poor Richard Olivier would be cutting them

and rolling them to try and get them as flat as possible,

putting water on them. There were a lot of experiments that we took.

My anger and sadness at the time was that none of the people writing about the Globe

bothered to enquire about why we were trying those things.

They just made fun or called it a trick. No-one seemed to see the apparent logic of it.

And another way in which you went back to the way it was at the time,

was that the audience would join in and shout things on occasions.

Yes, I'm not one who has dinner with someone who just respects me.

I want to be with someone who loves me or hates me.

Respect is a little bit tedious and a lot of people go to Shakespeare,

not least with respect, but with bloody fear that this is a cultural thing.

Yes, I did encourage them at first to throw things

and say things that we were all in the circle together.

The wonderful thing about the space was that they learnt like we did.

They were excessive, we were excessive, at first.

Then we both gradually got interested as the theatre itself dried and the acoustics got better,

because it was like playing a wet Stradivarius at first, or a wet Steinway.

Someone shouted at you once that you were boring.

Someone shouted when I was going particularly slowly on one speech,

"Get a move on."

And he was right. I had slowed down too much in talking with them.

"Get on with it," he said.

-So you genuinely didn't mind that?

-Well...

HE LAUGHS

At the time, it was a bit of a shock.

But in retrospect he was right.

The more I thought about it, I thought, what a great thing.

That would probably be better than any award,

the time an audience felt that much authority and ownership

of a Shakespeare performance to say, "Get on with it. Get a move on,"

in terms of the power being given... You say, actor power.

In a way, I have been an advocate for that but I have become an advocate for audience power

and be more and more appalled by what we have done to the auditoriums of our theatres

and how they were designed originally, these West End theatres

with more thought for the audience than now.

In recent years, you have become very involved in the Shakespeare authorship question

with your play, "I am Shakespeare." A petition you organised with Derek Jacobi.

It is not a petition, it is a declaration to be clear about why we think it is reasonable to doubt.

But at what point in your life and career did you have doubts about Shakespeare?

It was very interesting. I was playing Romeo at the RSC.

I found in the Francis Bacon research through Peter Dawkins,

all this amazing renaissance learning, the Kabbalah, and saw how clearly Shakespeare

had used these structures, particularly in the comedies.

The Cabbalistic Tree as a structure of the psyche.

No-one had ever talked about renaissance learning

because it is a problem if you believe that the man from Stratford wrote the plays.

It is a problem to know that his knowledge of Italy

is incredibly accurate because there is no evidence of him going to Italy.

There is no evidence that he didn't go to Italy.

Why couldn't he have not read in books?

There is not a record of an education book learning,

or ownership of books, or any notes in the margins of books,

or access to the libraries where books were that he had.

It is a problem. It is a reasonable thing to doubt.

There are many benefits from doubting and looking at other things even if you remain a Stratfordian,

you can learn a lot about people who were very influential people at the time.

I think the present campaign by the Birthplace Trust has just been shameful.

The repression of a question.

The hiring of psycho-analysts to psycho-analyse someone like me without ever meeting me

and assume that my scepticism is based on envy.

I'm sorry there is literally evidence for all other writers

who wrote for the theatre at that time.

The kind of thing you would expect from a writer to leave,

some piece of literary evidence that they were a writer,

there is none for the Stratford man in the same categories.

It is an argument that will go on for a long time

and it's about time I stepped away from it because I don't have any faith.

I'm afraid I don't have any faith in Shakespeare academia anymore.

-I think they are a repressive force.

-We get freaks in all profession,

so we could prove that Paul McCartney could not have written The Beatles songs

because he never learned music and he doesn't know how to technically read or write music.

We could argue, and I think some people are snobbish about Shakespeare,

we could say, "Come off it, some guy from a school in Milwaukee who played Hamlet there when he was 15,

"he's not going to become one of the great classical actors." It's just not going to happen.

No, but you would see my attendance at RSC performances,

you would see my parents, their books and you would see the need.

You would see the course. I am not an enemy of imagination or genius.

I don't doubt you can be born with a certain genius,

which I would say is a certain movement towards a certain area of life -

Mozart, Beethoven, obviously they had genius

and the author had a genius,

but no man is born with book learning or life experience

and he is remarkable in leaving no trail.

One of your small number of significant screen roles,

Intimacy, 2001, a Patrice Chereau film based on a Hanif Kureshi story.

It was a literally an exposing role.

Total nudity, very graphic, realistic sex scenes.

Were you apprehensive or wary of that role for that reason?

It's funny as we go through these things, the things I have forgotten. I'd forgotten about Intimacy.

We talk about Intimacy. It shows where it stands in my consciousness.

It was a huge fuss at the time and it was seen as very shocking

and did you go into it thinking this is a shocking, risky piece of work?

Patrice was such a genial man.

I was cast as the alcoholic friend on the back of Grass Arena.

And then the lead actor stepped away and Patrice came to me

and said, "I'd like you to play Jay."

I think that was the name of the character.

I had read the short stories, The Wednesday Woman and Intimacy.

The film is more based on The Wednesday Woman

but he had described to me how the film was about the difficulty

of finding intimacy in life and that was an issue for me at that time.

I don't know how intimate I am with people.

So the film philosophically appealed to me and the script appealed to me.

But it turned out shocking me as much as anything

and I regret many aspects of it.

The too much was seen and done on screen.

Yes.

The story was about two people who don't know each other emotionally, intellectually

in any other way than physically and they just meet on this Wednesday

and have a physical love affair, so it had to be about us being naked and physical

and then there's a moment where, in the story

the man lies back after making love and thinks,

"I've never felt so intimately in love with someone in my entire life as I do with this woman

"who I know nothing about."

And he can't stop himself then following her.

And then you have the demise... What happens is knowledge comes in.

It is a beautiful story, not unlike Last Tango, I guess.

But when you film love scenes... On that film, they filmed all of them in four days,

so it was a disaster physically and emotionally. It was a real disaster for me

and I didn't have the confidence to say after the first day, "I can't do another day like this."

I literally blew a fuse which didn't get repaired for about two months.

It was really that shocking to me.

It's raised my respect for porn stars but it was shocking.

And then on set, in the midst of very low self-esteem, Patrice said,

"I think we really need to have some oral sex at this moment,"

which was the very moment when Jay was to lie back and think, "I've never loved someone."

All my alarm bells were going off about it, not least because it was not what he had ever..

It is in the script but we had asked him a number of times, "Are you going to show that

"or is that going to be off-camera?" "Oh, we'll see when we get there."

To bring that on us, on the day and to be made to feel bourgeois

because one wasn't sure it was the right thing to do

was a big, terrible mistake of mine to say yes to it.

And it ruined the film, I felt.

It ruined the film because it became all that we wrote about.

In the theatre, I would have had more confidence.

On film, I don't have the same confidence and I regret it.

I don't really care... I don't really care for films so much.

I love going to films. I think they're wonderful, a lot of them. But making them is really, really hard.

And there haven't been that many film roles.

A TV one which again worked out extremely well.

The Government Inspector, Peter Kosminsky's film about Dr David Kelly.

He was found dead, reportedly by suicide after being revealed

as the source for the journalist Andrew Gilligan during the Iraq War.

Now this is a particular challenge.

You were playing a real, recently live, recently dead person at a time

when that story was extraordinarily raw and sensitive.

I assume you couldn't speak to Dr David Kelly's family.

No, they wouldn't speak with us. No, his wife and daughter didn't want to speak with us.

It was very, very close. I remember I was filming in the hotel above Charing Cross Station

where the meeting with Gilligan, I think was his name, took place.

We were set up filming and in the one break, I went to the bartender

to get a glass of water and he said to me, "Yeah, that's where they sat, over there.

"Not where you're sitting, over there. It was a year ago."

And it was bizarre,

that the man had been aware of them sitting there,

and here we were within a year of that fatal meeting.

It was very powerful.

This was a story on which most people had an opinion.

They were either pro or against the Iraq War.

They believed that Dr David Kelly committed suicide,

or that he was murdered, or there was some kind of foul play.

Now for you as an actor, playing him,

you have to close that stuff out. You mustn't editorialise.

You are playing Dr David Kelly, as he was to himself.

It has to be from the inside.

I'm playing him in a story that's been devised by Peter Kosminsky.

I'm not playing him in his life.

Undoubtedly, his faith and his scientific training

would have made him intensely, intensely depressed and erm...

shamed by what he was forced to do near the end of his life.

So those things are a given. If he was...

If there was foul play, he was unaware of it,

it would have taken him by surprise.

If he took his own life, the depression

and the other things would have been enough,

I think, which is why... I suspect his family believes that.

And they would know more than me.

It was a wet day in the wood where we were filming

and then really, it was just a very, very sombre...

A feeling of intense loneliness was my memory of it.

And...intense...claustrophobia and isolation.

In recent years, you have, with the roles you've played, you've been setting the bar very, very high.

With La Bete, the David Hirson play, the revival of which you took on in between runs of Jerusalem,

this 30 minute opening speech in rhyming couplets.

I mean, were there times in rehearsal

and reading the script when you thought,

-"I wish I hadn't taken this on"?

-Um... There was a time on Broadway when I wish I hadn't taken it on

but that was partly because of the initial shock of living in that electromagnetic field

really did my system in and I'd have to run on Saturday night

to the Hudson River just to get some sense of something natural. No, I never regretted that play.

I wish we could have done something more to help the second half and the end of it.

But it was very difficult after he'd written such an incredible piece of writing, how to follow it.

That was a real struggle.

Um... I don't learn lines before I rehearse.

I dive in and...

-Even in the case of that 30 minute speech?

-No.

I will go in and I will make it up and I'll look at the script again

and do it again and my making up will be a bit better.

Someone I know who was in La Bette said, "Ask him about the time the building collapsed on the cast."

-What's that all about?

-It was actually when the Music Box theatre collapsed.

A bit of it collapsed. It was after a performance and we were in the dressing room,

-but Joanna was crossing...

-Joanna Lumley.

-Joanna Lumley was crossing behind the set

and we heard what we thought was an explosion in the dressing room.

And it was actually a piece of concrete falling, probably not

bigger than that, falling from the fly tower to the floor of the stage,

literally five seconds after Joanna had walked underneath that space.

And I was very, very er...angry and upset about it.

-I'm told you became like a shop steward and you took on the management over it.

-I did.

I did. I think because of running the Globe and that being so much

about architecture and building and seeing all the danger of...

and looking at lots of maintenance budgets and things.

I knew it was something you could pass by and skimp on.

But the crew were very nice to me there and quietly thanked me.

We're talking in the course of this interview mainly about stage roles, occasional film roles.

Do you essentially see yourself now as a stage actor?

I'm very happy to be a stage actor. I feel very lucky to be a stage actor.

For a long part of my career,

I felt like I was failing by not also being a film and television actor.

But I don't see that that...

I doubt that that is put on Dan Day-Lewis or Robert De Niro,

that because they don't do theatre that they're a lesser actor.

It's a thing that agents often tell actors.

And...after an agent, I took on, really encouraged me

to be in what I feel was a very, very poor film called Blitz,

which was a very violent film, and...

and I did it to appease the agent, I thought, "No, that's it. That's it."

-Have you ever regretted becoming an actor, wanted to be something else?

-I have an odd fantasy

of wanting to be street cleaner. There's something about being out in the...

walking around, seeing people, observing people. There's a part...

That's a part of acting too. Having a job that's very simple, very apparent.

It's done when it's done.

You look back down the street and you've cleared up all this stuff.

But there's something about just getting to know a neighbourhood,

that moving around like an anonymous character in a neighbourhood

and observing it that is curious to me.

And, I guess, clearing up rubbish.

Oh, dear!

And finally, viewers may have wondered about the hat. But you like to have a hat with you.

I do like to have a hat. My brother used to wear hats in high school.

They'd go to the Salvation Army. There were lots of beautiful clothes and hats at that time in the '70s.

We had to wear ties and jackets in this private school my dad and mum taught at.

And so they were very pleased about taking a particular take on it,

a cock up to the uniform by wearing the old '40s suits

and the thin ties and the hats and the...

"If you want us to wear a suit, we'll wear a suit!

"We'll be stylish!" And so we all got into wearing hats.

When I first got the job at the Globe, I was concerned that the Jane Fonda effect would hit me.

When people knew that she was a political activist, they couldn't see her in roles any more.

I thought, "People are just going to see me as the artistic director.

"I won't be believable as an actor." I said to Claire, "I'll wear a mask.

"Every press conference, I'm going to wear a mask." She said, "Like the Phantom of the Opera?"

I said, "Maybe it's not a good idea."

And she said, "No, I don't think it's a good idea at all."

And a friend of mine who had had a mental breakdown and then he died

and he was quite young and his father brought me his hat,

and said, "Jonathan would like you to have this hat."

Funnily enough, I now wear it as Rooster's hat.

But it became my hat for the Globe.

Whenever I did a press conference, as artistic director, I wore the hat.

But I wore it to try and identify myself as the artistic director,

separate from when I was playing a part.

Mark Rylance, thank you very much.

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