Iain Glen – The Russian Icon

Game of Thrones fans know him from TV but to followers of Russian theatre Iain Glen is the go-to actor. The stage is like a drug he can’t stay away from, he tells Nick Curtis, as he prepares for his latest role in Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool.

If there were any doubt about the power and pull of the London stage, we should consider the case of Iain Glen. The 52-year-old Scottish actor has been directed on the big screen by Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Ridley Scott, appeared opposite Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider and Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil moneyspinners. He was the father of Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in the Iron Lady and you can barely make a big TV series these days, from Downton Abbey to Game of Thrones, without casting him.

He has one six-year-old daughter, Mary, and an eight-month-old, Juliet, at home in Dulwich with his partner, actress Charlotte Emmerson (as well as an 18-year-old son, Finlay, from his earlier marriage to actress Susannah Harker). Yet he’s spending his Christmas at the Old Vic, starring in the UK premiere — 160 years after it was written — of Ivan Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool. His character, Kuzovkin, is a distressed and homeless Russian country gentleman hiding a terrible secret, a tragicomic court jester to a crowd of mockers led by Richard McCabe’s Tropatchov. It’s a demanding, unglamorous role, so why did he do it?

Horse power: Glen with Emilia Clarke and Elyes Gabel in Game of Thrones

“The bottom line is, there’s nothing that matches the high when something works in front of a live audience,” says Glen. Theatre holds a greater prospect of either “exhilaration” or “tangible failure” than film, “and I certainly don’t do it for financial reasons. But I can’t resist the challenge. It’s like a drug”.

He is, of course, a superb stage actor as well as a reliable screen presence. An early Hamlet at Bristol Old Vic won critical acclaim and I remember his Aufidius better than Ken Branagh’s Coriolanus at Chichester in 1992. He was a magnificent John Proctor in The Crucible for the RSC in 2006, played the lead in the musical Martin Guerre for a year in 1997, and most notoriously had his full-frontal cartwheel upstaged by Nicole Kidman’s bare bottom in David Hare’s The Blue Room at the Donmar and on Broadway in 1998. I suggest this show, dubbed “pure theatrical Viagra” by one critic, may have been the moment London theatre became properly glamorous again: he is modest but doesn’t entirely demur.

Recently, he’s matured into the older Ibsen and Chekhov roles: Trigorin, Judge Brack and then Pastor Manders, in a production of Ghosts which he also directed in the West End. His subsequent, well-received Uncle Vanya at the Print Room, in a version by Mike Poulton, directed by Lucy Bailey, indirectly led to the current show. Poulton had adapted Fortune’s Fool for a 2002 Broadway production starring Alan Bates and Frank Langella: he suggested it to Glen, who suggested it to Bailey, who suggested it to the Old Vic. Glen is genuinely excited to be playing at the Waterloo institution for the first time, having devoured the recent Arena programmes about the founding of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre there. “Since I left Rada I have had this old-fashioned idea of the Olivier school of acting — that you should bring versatility and variety to the stage,” says Glen.

Life imitating art: Glen with partner Charlotte Emmerson in Uncle Vanya

Of Kuzovkin, he says: “I could see a slight overlap with Vanya. He is basically a forgotten soul, this gentleman who has lost all his power and wealth and lived off the benevolence of another household for 30 years. The role, as written by Mike, captured the personality that that kind of neglect and need might create. If we can make it work it will have the qualities of a good Chekhov: the funnier elements and the crueller and more tragic elements will be heightened. But to me it’s not a surprise that it’s a Christmas show, because there is something festive within it.”

The play arrives in a boom time for Russian theatre in London. Howard Davies is working his way through the country’s neglected classics at the National, and Andrei Konchalovsky brings Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters to the West End next year in the wake of visits from the Sovremennik and Vakhtangov companies.

“Maybe there is something in the Russian soul or the Russian spirit that seems to speak to us,” muses Glen. “But they are very different. We talk a lot [in rehearsal] about the ever-changing emotions of the Russians, which is very un-British. Maybe we enjoy the difference.”
Glen himself, it turns out, read Russian literature at Aberdeen and “fell in love with Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Gogol, Pushkin” before dropping out to go to drama school. He had been an “erratic” youth, competitive with his two older brothers until he “bumped accidentally into acting” at university. His father, who worked for the Scottish Investment Trust, and his mother, an occupational therapist, supported his career change and paid his RADA fees.

Since then it’s been acting that’s driven him: his decision to direct as well as appear in Ghosts was, in hindsight, a mistake. “To be honest I found it a little grown up for me. As an actor you come in at the eleventh hour when everything has been set, do the visible bit then bugger off and forget about it. Directors have to generate the show, see it through, have the answer to all the questions. I found the responsibility of it quite … unsuitable. I’m too superficial. I am quick-witted as long as I am reacting. But when asked to show someone where things go on a blank piece of paper I’m a bit thick.”

TV Blockbuster: Michelle Dockery and Glen in Downton Abbey

He’s equally brisk about actors who whinge about the travails of working on high-budget film or television (“it’s a doddle”). He is full of admiration for the sheer scale and bombast of Game of Thrones, in which he plays Ser Jorah Mormont, the perpetually loyal and lovelorn lieutenant to Emilia Clarke’s minxy Daenerys Targaryen. The producers have told him they enjoy working with the large number of Brits in the cast “because they feel we are uncomplicated creatures — not too bothered about Winnebagos. We turn up, tend to know our lines, and just get on with it”. But he does also think that all the actors could be removed and replaced with others of comparable calibre and “it would work just as well”.

Glen is fit, slim and cycles everywhere, but the extreme beauty of his youth has weathered into something harsher and more interesting. Does he mind getting older? “It is easier for us [male actors]. We can look a bit old and knackered, move on to pastures new. I love life and have a distant sense that it is shorter now than 20 years ago, but nothing strong. I have very young children and I am very, very childish myself, and very good with children. That is very youth-making, although when you’ve only had five hours’ sleep it doesn’t feel like it. Being around children is very good for the soul and stops you taking life too seriously in the wrong way.”

Fortune’s Fool is at the Old Vic, SE1 (0844 8717628,oldvictheatre.com) Dec 6-Feb 22.

– Nick Curtis

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– David Hollingsworth

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He’s a man of many parts, is Iain Glen. He was the dastardly Sir Richard Carlisle, Lady Mary’s suitor in series two of Downton Abbey and he played Margaret Thatcher’s father, the redoubtable Grantham grocer Alf Roberts, in The Iron Lady, alongside Meryl Streep. On stage, he did a memorable turn – literally – cartwheeling while stark naked opposite Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. He’s tackled most of the major Shakespearean roles and appeared in Doctor Who, Spooks and Game Of Thrones.

Now, here he is again as Jack Taylor, a rough and ready ex-policeman in an eponymous new Channel 5 crime series set in Galway, and 51-year-old Iain couldn’t be happier. ‘I think I’d like him if he existed,’ he says in his soft Edinburgh burr. ‘He drinks much too much but he’s a moral man who dances to no one else’s tune. In his own, cackhanded way, he’s trying to solve society’s woes. He’s willing to pursue crimes that the government or the police have given up on. He’s a loner with a slightly dangerous edge that women find attractive.’

So far, five feature-length dramas based on writer Ken Bruen’s stories have been filmed. It’s a world away from the glittering white-tie-and-tails dinners at Downton. Iain says he loved playing Sir Richard, not least because he already knew several of the cast. ‘Hugh Bonneville is a very good friend of mine. I know Jim Carter [Carson the butler] and I’ve worked with Dame Maggie before. In my opinion, Lady Mary and Sir Richard would have been rather well-suited. They’d have had quite a sparky time together. And being a baddie gives you a little bit more room to play with. But I wanted him to be a genuine threat to Mary’s feelings for Matthew. The audience had to believe that the relationship could have had legs. Then, when it was clear his feelings weren’t ever going to be reciprocated, he resorted to the threat of black-mailing her by exposing in his newspaper the death of the Turkish diplomat in her bed. Good stuff.’

His most memorable theatrical experience, he says, was in The Blue Room. ‘It was one of those dream jobs. The director Sam Mendes sent me a letter. Everything was in place. Nicole Kidman had already been cast. We’d play it in London and then on Broadway. Would I like to do it? Three-and-a-half seconds later, I was on the phone to him.’

He met Nicole Kidman at Sam’s house. ‘We were going to be working together, intimately, for a long time. It was important that we got on. I needn’t have worried. I found her so focused and rather brilliant as an actress. We had a very happy rehearsal and then it turned into this phenomenon.

‘It’s a personal quirk, but I’ve never minded being nude in public. In this case, the play revolved around the sexual act so it was justified. But it was slightly comical. ‘There was I, cartwheeling, doing handstands and playing the piano without a stitch of clothing to little or
no reaction. And yet, when Nicole briefly slipped out of her dress, her back to the audience and showing only the hint of a buttock, you could
feel a frisson run around the theatre.

We stayed good friends for about two or three years but life moves on.’ In his defence, he has rather a lot of demands on the domestic front. His son, Finlay, by his ex-wife, actress Susannah Harker, is 17. He met his cur- rent partner, actress Charlotte Emmer- son, ten years his junior, when they were appearing at London’s National Theatre in different productions.

They have a five-year-old daughter, Mary, and Juliet, born at Christmas. How’s he coping with fatherhood again in his early 50s? ‘If I think ahead to how old I’ll be when Juliet goes to university, it does give me pause for thought. But I’m lucky I’ve got quite a lot of energy. There’ll certainly be no chance of vegetating on the sofa.’ He’s just returned from Morocco where he’s been filming Series 3 of Game Of Thrones in which he plays Jorah Mormont. And there’ll be further forays into Jack Taylor’s dysfunctional world. ‘You’re looking at a happy man,’ he says.

– Richard Barber

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Busiest actor in showbiz talks to Bridget Galton about his Hampstead role in debut play reworked from Checkhov short stories.

There’s a tangible buzz of excitement around Hampstead Theatre these days. When I arrive to interview the venue’s latest big name actor, the “House Full” sign is pride of place on Eton Avenue and the foyer is thronged with matinée-goers who’ve secured the last tickets for outgoing play Di and Viv and Rose. The last time I visited, they were patiently queuing for returns to see Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss – a show now running in the West End.

It’s all so different from the pre-Edward Hall wilderness years when play after play received a critical drubbing and even loyal audiences lost faith.

It looks as though that sign will become rather weather-beaten in the coming weeks since the next play, starring Iain Glen, Tamsin Greig and John Sessions, is close to selling out before opening night. Longing is the debut play of novelist William Boyd, of Reckless and Any Human Heart fame, who has turned the characters and settings of two Chekhov short stories into a full-length drama that ploughs the familiar furrow of painfully humorous unfulfilled hope in provincial 19th century Russia.

Glen, possibly the busiest actor in showbiz at the moment, insists: “We are not doing a Chekhov play, we are doing a play in the world of Chekhov.

“It’s inspired by those two stories but he has reworked them so they are unrecognisable.” The actor has recently finished playing Uncle Vanya, but adds: “Chekhov is the master and you can’t get too much of it really. It’s very exciting to do a new play. That was the big draw, as well as William, who is a brilliant novelist. I read the script and thought it was marvellous. It’s a big shift from a novel to writing a play, which has to unfold through dialogue but this is very, very good.”

The 51-year-old, who turns out to be a courteous and relaxed interviewee, plays a successful Moscow lawyer who returns to the country estate where he spent his salad days as a tutor. He once again excites the affections of Greig’s character, one of the daughters of the family, who are seeking his help with their financial woes.

“He’s coming back after a long period to the people he spent this idyllic period with, but there are ulterior motives, and the estate is in jeopardy. He’s a solitary man, although loved by women he’s never been able to commit to a loving long-term relationship. He’s a commitment-phobe.”

The play is billed as humorous, though when I put to Glen that Chekhov too often barely raises a smile, he agrees. “Chekhov can be treated too seriously and forbiddingly and be seen as full of melancholic people and it’s a mystery how he could be misinterpreted that way because he made it clear in his lifetime that he felt the first productions of his great plays were being misplayed and took to writing “comedy” in brackets after the title.

The truth is, like many great plays, they are a mixture of both sadness and humour and should make you laugh and cry. He portrays human nature as messy, unfocused and full of misplaced longing.One of the reasons his plays are universal is those qualities about human nature remain the same.”

Glen’s enviably diverse and consistently busy career has taken in classic stage roles from Shakespeare, to Ibsen, Chekhov to Tennessee Williams. When we meet, he’s enjoying the “different frisson” of rehearsing an untested script.

“Rehearsal for me is my happiest time, a time of risk and play,” he says. “Representing a piece of writing in theatre, without the pressure of an audience is the most exciting time. I love playing with the actors and director about how something can become manifest, that’s the reason I went into this job, not for fortune or walking down a red carpet – to play with lines and make them feel they belong to me.”
As opening night approaches, he admits to a certain anxiety, but never fright.

“The closer you get to having to put it in front of people the more there is a nervousness that focuses you. But fear isn’t very useful, I try not to be fearful it stops you being playful, and the longer you have been in the business you realise you can’t always please all the people all the time. Things go wrong. Life goes on.”

Not only does he move easily between theatre, radio, film and TV, but Glen is unusual in being freely cast across all classes and types, and his supremely unprecious view of the profession even extends to the unactorly comment that: “I don’t mean to negate what we do but there are some programmes which could be recast and be just as successful.”

Right now he’s appearing as an exiled knight in worldwide mega-hit Game of Thrones, a working class convict in BBC1 gritty Prisoner’s Wives and an Irish detective on Channel Five’s Jack Taylor series.

“Class is an obsession for some, and for me not to be typecast classwise was terribly important. It was perhaps helpful that my Scottish accent wasn’t too strong and was hard to pin down. I feel very grateful that I can chop and change, I would feel very bereft if film or theatre was taken away, I relish the change and differences each brings, and I think I would have had more fallow periods if I hadn’t been available wanting to work in all mediums or had insisted on only doing movies.”

But while he enjoys adopting dialogues and is “a bit dog like” with a new part, he’s not the type to become haunted by discarded characters.

“As an actor you come in at the eleventh hour and do the visible thing that gets noticed, on any given night you have to be very, very present but once it’s finished you can bugger off and forget about it rather quickly. That suits my superficial nature. When I exit a film set on wrap, I’m out of there like a rocket. I change myself out of costume and make-up and am off back to family and home.”
That home is in Dulwich with actress Charlotte Emerson and their daughter.

And while there are enthusiastic fans (Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey), it’s nothing like the frenzy surrounding his appearance at the Donmar Warehouse in 1998, opposite Nicole Kidman in sexual-merry-go-round drama The Blue Room.

It brought unwanted paparazzi attention to both his own first marriage and Kidman’s marriage when she split from Tom Cruise a few years later.

“I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to play a role in a hugely successful film that gave me world wide recognition, but how I would be with the degree of scrutiny of a Tom Cruise, I don’t know. I’ve had times when I became recognisable and got a taste of it. I am not unhappy with how things have panned out.”

– Bridget Galton

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ACTOR Iain Glen’s done it all… but the star of new crime drama Jack Taylor says he has finally tracked down his dream role.

FEW people would argue TV needs another detective, but Iain Glen believes there is room for private investigator Jack Taylor.

There is the character himself for a start – a roguish alcoholic who seeks justice for lost causes – then there are the acclaimed books by author Ken Bruen, which form the basis of the new series of five feature-length films, not to mention the Galway setting that provides a ruggedly beautiful backdrop.

All of the above helped make a case for the Edinburgh-born actor but the chance to doff his cap to 1970s film Chinatown was also too good to miss.

He said: “I’ve always fancied playing a private eye, ever since I saw Jack Nicholson play Jake Gittes in Chinatown.

“It is familiar territory but I think there are various aspects that individualise it.

“One is Ireland’s west coast, which has a stunning coastline, and the town of Galway itself. We are using the locations Ken Bruen uses in his novel series as much as possible.

“Jack Taylor is the rogue central character who sets up as a private eye when he is kicked out of the police force. He has a burning sense of justice and wants to investigate and pursue crime that others in positions of power are not willing to do.

“The big advantage of taking stuff from books as well written as Ken Bruen’s is that he offers you fantastic dialogue. It’s kind of Philip Marlowe with American, quick, dry one-liners all the way. It’s lovely to play.”

Not that it is an easy ride. As befits a maverick gumshoe, Jack Taylor has issues. Lots of them. He’s bloody minded and he’s a boozer. He has an attitude, which gets him beaten up, and a soft heart that compels him to defend the lost and the broken.

Plenty, then, for the 51-year-old to get his teeth into.

He said: “I think it probably portrays real life. Private eyes are probably quite isolated people because it doesn’t help the job they do to live in a lovely warm environment. His main demon is alcohol. Ken Bruen’s brother died of alcoholism, so he knows what he is talking about and he doesn’t sell you short.

“He is pretty searing in his portrayal of that. As long as it is connected to the story I don’t mind going to those very dark places.

“It is not a cute and cuddly drama.”

The actor is no stranger to pushing the envelope for his art, be it his intense performance as Barlinnie prisoner poet Larry Winters in Silent Scream, for which he won the Silver Bear award for best actor at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1990. He also appeared naked on stage with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room.

More recently, however, he’s become a fixture of prime-time TV entertainment, be it guesting in BBC1’s Ripper Street, as Sir Richard Carlyle in ITV smash Downton Abbey, as exiled knight Ser Jorah Mormont in fantasy drama Game of Thrones, or playing a married inmate in BBC1’s Prisoner’s Wives.

He said: “It’s a funny one. I don’t think I had done a repeat TV in my life up until a couple of years ago. I just happened to land in a couple of TV series that were popular, which was a treat.

“It’s a curious thing. Some of the work I am most proud of is my film work, which invariably nobody sees because it is more arty. It is nice to be in stuff that is being seen.

“When you accept something like Game of Thrones, you have no idea if this is going to be a disaster and die after the first year or if you are just going to do the pilot.

“Downton was different because that had enjoyed a really successful first season. I did a have a feel that Game of Thrones was material that would fly but you can never second guess how things are going to go. Life would be a lot easier if you could.”

He hasn’t done a bad job of guessing right. His career is an enviable one that has included acclaimed stage productions. He is currently working on William Boyd’s Longing – an adaptation of Anton Checkov short stories – alongside Tamsin Greig and John Sessions.

Jack Taylor, which starts this week on Channel 5, reunites him with director Stuart Orme. Former Aberdeen University student Glen worked with him in his first big breakthrough role – as a gangster in 1988 drama The Fear – after leaving the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. It has given him cause to reflect.

He said: “That was my first role out of drama school and it is lovely to be reunited with him. When I left Rada and started work, I got into a good position fairly quickly.

“I was very lucky and I do feel I have enjoyed every second of it. I have had the mixture of doing theatre, TV, and film work in the way that, when I started out, I thought I would love to do. So I can reflect and I am really happy. I don’t take it for granted. I’ve been one of the lucky ones.”

The same cannot be said for the people Jack Taylor deals with.

The opening episode, The Guards, finds him turfed out of the Irish police, being asked to find a missing daughter and then uncovering Galway’s seedy underbelly when four girls’ bodies turn up.

He said: “We’ll see how it goes but I love playing the role, I love getting the scripts through.

“It’s familiar but I think it is familiar with twists.

“There’s definitely the material to do more and I certainly hope we do so.”

– Steve Hendry

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As five stagings of ‘Uncle Vanya’ hit UK theatres in a few months, why does its existential gloom speak to us so profoundly?

In a rehearsal space in east London the actor Ken Stott is poking disconsolately at the contents of a Tupperware box. It’s his lunch and he is clearly on a diet that is affording him no fun. “You won’t be able to see me by Monday,” he observes, gloomily.

It’s a moment that could almost have been lifted from the play he is rehearsing. Stott is playing Uncle Vanya, a grouchy old so-and-so, who, in Christopher Hampton’s version of Anton Chekhov’s 1897 original, even says of himself: “I do nothing except grumble like an old sour grape.”

Stott is in good company: his Vanya will be one of five to grace British theatres within a few months. Indeed the production, directed by Lindsay Posner, opens in the West End within days of a Russian-language performance by Moscow’s Vakhtangov company, directed by the renowned Rimas Tuminas, with leading Russian actor Sergey Makovetsky in the title role.

So why is this self-styled “cantankerous old codger” so much in the spotlight? Is it a coincidence? Or is there something in his grumpiness, self-mockery and frustration that speaks particularly to our time? And if so, why should that be?

Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is a masterpiece: a humane, funny and heartbreaking study of wasted potential. But boil it down and you end up with something as dull-sounding as suet pudding. It opens on a run-down rural estate painstakingly maintained by Vanya and his niece Sonya. We first meet the local doctor, Astrov, complaining about the tedium of provincial life, and then encounter Vanya who, at 47, is undergoing a mid-life crisis of epic proportions, kick-started by the arrival of his brother-in-law, a pompous professor, and his beautiful wife. Nearly everyone feels sorry for themselves – particularly Vanya. So why do we warm to him so?

Makovetsky thinks the appeal lies in recognition. “All of us are Uncle Vanyas,” he says. “Most people who see the performance say that it is about them.”

Stott agrees. “Most of us spend the vast majority of our time complaining about something,” the actor says. “And everyone reaches the stage where they become preoccupied with what is going to happen in the second half of their lives. In this play everyone is in a crisis about that.”

Vanya’s crisis is specific: he has spent his life maintaining the estate in order to support the professor’s career. But when the tetchy academic arrives in person, Vanya suddenly feels a fool. He senses that he has wasted 25 years servicing an opinionated charlatan. Iain Glen, who played Vanya this spring, suggests that his predicament, though particular, is universally recognisable.

“I think Vanya is particularly poignant for middle-aged people who suddenly think: ‘How do I find myself here?’ ” he says. “Nearly all the characters are suddenly brought to a point where they begin to ask themselves those life questions. ‘Why did I make that choice, why have I ended up with this person, where did the time go?’ ”

What is also important is the fact that this introspection strikes at a moment of enforced indolence. Like most of us, Chekhov’s characters start to brood when they are tipped out of their normal work routine.

“One misconception about Chekhov is that his characters were idle sort of people with not enough to do,” says Glen. “That’s certainly not what Vanya’s about. These are people who are usually very, very busy, and then something happens and they grind to a halt. It’s the arrival of this professor: the way he wants to live his life is completely at odds with the way the house has been run. Everyone is brought to a halt and in that halt starts to look inward to where they are.”

But while the frustration may be general, it is Vanya who is singled out in the title – and as “Uncle” Vanya. It’s an affectionate appellation, but not one designed to confer heroic status. It draws attention to the unfulfilled potential in his life: Vanya is not a father, grandfather, husband or lover.

“He’s only uncle to one person,” says Glen. “But he is that figure within the Russian household who kind of looks after things: the worker, the person who they could all depend on. He becomes unpredictable and undependable and inconsolable and it throws everyone’s world upside down.”

But does the play’s current popularity arise only from its timeless qualities? Or does this emotional tumult feel particularly pertinent for a 21st-century audience facing a precarious future and the loss of old certainties? Tuminas, director of the Vakhtangov’s Vanya, suggests that this might in part be true. “People nowadays are very desperate,” he says.

Tuminas describes a disorientation in Russia: “The main feeling is the loss of a dream. I agree with the great Russian philosopher who said that a country is defined not by its geographical location or by the language of the nation but by whether it has its dream or not. Liberty and democracy were once a dream for us but it hasn’t been eternal.”

Tuminas’s production is groundbreaking. Wildly physical, darkly comic and gleefully absurd, it dispenses with all the usual Chekhov furnishings. His characters rattle about on a near-empty stage, propelled by their feelings. “It’s a physical realisation that time is slipping through your fingers,” he says.

The American Richard Alger is co-director of Theatre Movement Bazaar’s Anton’s Uncles, which toured Britain earlier this autumn. He too feels the resonance of the panic in Chekhov’s play. “I think the idea of not fulfilling your dreams is very big in the Zeitgeist,” Alger says. Anton’s Uncles strips down the original, emphasising its wild fluctuations of mood. “You’re left with something very raw and that’s what’s appealing about his work,” he says.

It’s not just what Chekhov says that feels fresh then – it is how he says it. Recent English productions have shaken off the reverent melancholia of earlier stagings and embraced the emotional rawness and trapped, febrile energy in the play. When the characters soliloquise, we seem to listen in on their thoughts. Stott says this demands truthful delivery: “You have to be doubly careful to try and achieve that nakedness: stripping off a layer and showing the soul.”

Posner, his director, adds: “It’s not the plot that’s dynamic. The journey of the characters is the source of dramatic tension.”
In its earliest form, the play incorporated a suicide and a happier ending. But Chekhov changed this for a failed shooting and a more ambivalent ending: Vanya and Sonya return to their labours in a final scene that contains both solace and aching sadness. His characters may despair, but in the end they keep on keeping on. Less dramatic, perhaps, but far truer to most people’s experience.

In the end it is this profound, sympathetic honesty that speaks to us. “People always have the sense that life is just slightly better over there,” says Iain Glen. “There are very few of us who think, ‘You know what, I’m really happy right here: this is perfect.’ That’s not what we are. And that’s what Chekhov wrote about.”

– Sarah Hemming

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Iain Glen and Lesley Sharp talk about their roles in a new production of the perennially shocking ‘Ghosts’.

It’s a sign of the huge scandal that Ibsen’s Ghosts caused that it didn’t receive its world premiere in Norway, but in Chicago. Such was the consternation that greeted its publication in December 1881 that for some time it was considered untouchable in Scandinavia and beyond – simply as a printed script let alone as a play fit for performance. As one commentator noted: “In Stockholm on the day of publication – there was a rush to the bookshops. But the excitement vanished in silence. Absolute silence. The newspapers said nothing and the bookshops sent the book back to the publisher. It was contraband. Something which could not decently be discussed.”

Set in rainy, western Norway, this tale of a woman (Mrs Alving) who once tried to leave her philander-ing, abusive husband but was persuaded by the local pastor (Manders) to return to him – bearing him, as a consequence, a son cursed with syphilis – horrified the English press, too. The Daily Telegraph famously joined the chorus of disapproval when Ghosts (in Norwegian Gjengangere – the translates as “Revenants” or “The Ones Who Return”) premiered in London in 1891.

A leader column in the paper denounced it as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open”. The actor Iain Glen, who is directing a new translation by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness for a West End production in which he himself plays Pastor Manders, found a brief break during his hectic rehearsal schedule to sit down with his co-star Lesley Sharp (Mrs Alving) to discuss its enduring appeal. I began by asking about that astonishing initial reaction and why Ghosts haunts us still.

Iain Glen:
It was as if Ibsen had dropped a bombshell, wasn’t it? People couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. Ghosts was regarded as disgusting, immoral, nihilistic, meaningless. Some of the things people were very shocked by, we are obviously less shocked by now, particularly his depiction of religious morality – how it can twist people – but at its heart, the play strips away a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and son and that’s still very perturbing.

Lesley Sharp:
The great thing about the play is that it’s about the truths in a family that don’t get told. There may be very good reasons for that, but it can do enormous damage. And that’s still happening today. Mrs Alving sent her son Oswald away to protect him, but in the process she damaged him irrevocably. Having tried to be the best mother she could be, she has been partly responsible for his unhappiness and it’s unbearable. It’s a fantastic story – she’s tearing herself up with guilt every day for what she did to her son. Psychologically, it feels very accurate.

DC:
Critics often praise you for roles in which you’re withholding apparently uncontainable emotion – is that why you were drawn to the part here?

LS:
I’m drawn to characters that are interesting, it’s simple as that. I’ve just played Mari, the mother in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, and she’s the antithesis of Mrs Alving – she’s a bipolar alcoholic who can’t keep her mouth shut. That was great to play! What is never good is if you’re playing a character and they are described as “a mother”. Then you’re just playing a character who is in relief to the child, so it’s the child’s story. What you want to see is the mother’s story, too.

DC:
Iain Glen, you’ve had recent experience in Ibsen – playing Judge Brack in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed 2005 revival of Hedda Gabler. Do you see similarities between Brack and Manders – they’re both intensely controlling, aren’t they?

IG:
In some ways, he’s a cousin part to Brack, but he’s also the complete opposite. Brack is very world-weary, with a cynical view of society, while Manders has a naivety about him, an innocence that a lot of religious-minded people can have. I think the play is more complex if we can’t readily dismiss Manders.

LS:
There’s also a lot of sexual feeling that he’s repressing. He has had a great internal struggle. If you say he’s just dessicated you’ve given yourself nowhere to go.

DC:
Something that’s novel about this is the fact that you’re making your directorial debut here, Iain Glen, as well as acting in the play. That sounds like a tough gig.

IG:
It’s in at the deep end, isn’t it? I’ve had a few things like that in my career. The first Shakespeare play I did was Hamlet and I’d never spoken Shakespeare professionally before I did that. This was [producer] Thelma Holt’s crazy idea. We’ve had a good relationship for many years, cemented by The Crucible, which she produced in London and which was a very happy experience for me. We’d always said we’d try and do something else again and I’ve often expressed a desire to direct.

Thelma feels very strongly about Frank McGuinness’s translation and has worked on two previous Ibsen versions of his – A Doll’s House and Peer Gynt – both of which were successful. To do both jobs, you have to surround yourself with people who support you. As an actor in rehearsal, you’re used to these spurts of energy where you investigate a role and then have someone sit on the side and respond to it. Not having that assessment could be a bit mind-blowing but I have a brilliant associate director [Amelia Sears] who is providing that crucial pair of eyes.

DC:
How are you finding this rather unusual arrangement, Lesley Sharpe?

LS:
It’s not something I have had experience of before, but Iain is absolutely there as a director. He has a vision of the piece. In essence, we’ve got two directors but the two of them are completely simpatico. It would be very confusing if they were giving different notes.

DC:
The subsidised sector lays claim to so many classics. Does the case need to be made for Ghosts being revived in the West End?

IG:
It’s not the easiest of sells, is it – Ibsen in the West End? We simply want to attract an audience that is drawn to a fantastic rendition of a masterpiece. We will try to serve up the best production we can, and hope people respond to it.

LS:
I think that there has been a snobbish attitude to the work that happens in the West End, as if the good work takes place in the subsidised sector and the West End is where the commoners go. But there’s a buzz about the West End now. You can go and see Sheridan Smith being fantastic in Legally Blonde. You can see Mark Rylance being fantastic in Jerusalem. And it’s really exciting as actors to feel we’re part of that too, with Ghosts. We’re just saying – “Here’s a chance to see something else which we think you’ll really enjoy as well. Come and take a look!”

– Dominic Cavendish

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“I’ve been aware of the work I do as an actor being directorial in feel,” he says, “I have ideas about how a play could manifest itself, a sort of overall picture. But 95% of the time, I keep my mouth shut.” And it might have remained that way, had the producer Thelma Holt not intervened.

Glen first met the “eccentric and delightful” West End veteran in 2006, when she oversaw the London transfer of the RSC’s The Crucible (in which Glen, as John Proctor, gave an incendiary performance). Holt was casting around for new projects for him, but nothing came to fruition, until he took part in a test-run private performance of a new version of Ibsen’s Ghosts, by Frank McGuinness. “Afterwards, I went into flights of fancy about the play and how one could realise it,” says Glen. “That seemed to be enough for Thelma to say, ‘Well, why don’t you direct it?'”

Which is why for the past few weeks he has been locked in a rehearsal room in a former factory in London, preparing for his directorial debut. “I’ve never been so wired,” he says. His elder brother Hamish is a director – he runs the Belgrade in Coventry – but Glen hasn’t sought his advice. He doesn’t need to: in his 25-year career, he has worked with Nicholas Hytner, Richard Eyre, Michael Boyd, Declan Donnellan, Dominic Cooke and Sam Mendes, soaking up influences that other fledgling directors might never encounter.

Glen is also performing in his production, playing Pastor Manders, whose stern morality forces the other characters to live lies that unravel. “It’s not as mad as it might seem,” Glen says of his dual role. “Once Manders establishes the strictures that everyone else is living under, he steps back, and the heart of the play is the relationship between a mother and child.” Nonetheless, he admits he is finding it tricky. “As an actor, I’m familiar with having bursts of energy, where you’re giving things a try, and then you have down time. Here, I have those bursts of energy and then, snap, it’s for you to dissect what’s gone on. I’m happiest when I can just be a director, and watch.”

Is a career change on the horizon? “I’m too in love with acting,” he says. And he’s not sure he likes the demands placed on a director. “You have to have conviction, in a way that you don’t as an actor. The danger in theatre is always that it looks staid and rehearsed, so it’s healthy for actors to be unsure and playful. With directing, there are concrete decisions to be made: is it going to be black or white? Are you going to be here or there?” Initially, Glen says, he dithered; now, he is more definite. “Directing is very grown-up, in a way that I’m not. I’m too much of a big kid.”

You wouldn’t know it to see him on stage: whether he is performing in Miller, Chekhov or Shakespeare, Glen is a commanding presence, meticulously illuminating a character’s psyche. In person, though, this 48-year-old is as fidgety as a toddler. He tugs at the collar of his blue linen shirt, rubs his tummy, does up a button, stretches out his legs, snaps upright, scratches his ankle, musses his hair, cups his blond goatee. Sitting next to him in an auditorium must be a nightmare.

This restlessness is evident in Glen’s CV: beyond the classics, it takes in everything from independent British movies to Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, via BBC costume dramas, a nude appearance alongside Nicole Kidman in David Hare’s The Blue Room, and the musical Martin Guerre. No wonder he’s never been typecast: he has never settled at anything long enough. Glen left Rada in 1985 trained only for theatre, yet went straight into the TV film Blood Hunt, with actor Andrew Keir. “Suddenly I was in front of a camera with this lovely older actor. The world transformed for me.”

While he’s mildly frustrated that “invariably the things people have seen are your least proud work”, he appreciates the advantages of appearing in big-budget Hollywood fare. “It pays well, and that allows you to have a certain quality of life, to do that interesting radio play. I have a problem with actors who get involved in these things and complain: you make the choice and you should do the best you can.”

Prank calls and leotards

Glen started acting while at school in Edinburgh, but not in the conventional way. Instead of “dressing up and pretending to be Brutus”, he and his friends, including the future DJ Nicky Campbell, would terrorise locals. Glen would lie in a pile of leaves and pretend to be dead, until a passerby spotted him and panicked, at which point he would leap up and laugh. “I would give trauma to people,” he says, properly ashamed. He and Campbell also called a talk show on Radio Forth with a series of fake personalities. “I would say I was a mugger, or a glue manufacturer with a product that was safe for kids to sniff.”

By his own admission, Glen was a “teenager from hell”. He was unhappy at school and at home, locked in competition with his two older brothers. Acting, which he discovered at Aberdeen University, allowed him to escape himself. When he dropped out to study at Rada, Glen transformed into “an annoyingly good pupil. I was into my leotard, doing my vocal warm-ups before anyone, asking what more I could learn. I was disgustingly obedient.”

His fractious youth is now “the cause of great laughter” in his family; he is lucky that his own 14-year-old son Finlay, from his marriage to actor Susannah Harker, isn’t giving his father the same hell. “Finlay’s a mellow soul,” says Glen. He and Harker divorced in 2004; Glen met his current partner, Charlotte Emmerson, while they were acting in different productions at the National Theatre. The couple have a two-year-old daughter, Mary, whose “manic ebullience” sounds more typical of her father – and who ensures that he stops thinking about work the moment he arrives home.

Not that Glen lacks distractions: he keeps busy with sport, plays piano and guitar and still has the odd rock-star fantasy: “If I could go on stage and be Mick Jagger, just for one song, that would be brilliant.” It’s never going to happen, but Glen doesn’t mind. “If the next five years of my career could be like the last five, I’ll be happy. But a time will come when I won’t want to do it any more. All I would wish for – and it’s wishing for a lot – is that I’ve put enough aside to say: OK, I don’t need to work now, I can retire.”

– Maddy Costa

Ghosts is at the Duchess Theatre, London WC2, from 11 February.
Box office: 020-7492 1593.

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Paul Dale meets one of Scotland’s finest living film and theatre actors and now guitar hero – Iain Glen.

It’s the eyes. I’m sitting in an Edinburgh member’s club, and I’m looking at the 46-year-old Edinburgh born actor Iain Glen. I’m trying to work out what has compelled me to follow his career since his remarkable turn as poet, artist and Barlinnie inmate Larry Winters in David Hayman’s excellent 1990 biopic Silent Scream. It’s those eyes – watery aqua blue, full of pain and seriousness set above impressive aristocratic cheekbones. It’s not hard to see how he came to be cast as Richard The Lionheart in The Kingdom of Heaven, and it’s no surprise that he has just wrapped on Churchill at War, an HBO special in which he plays King George VI to Brendan Gleeson’s wheezing Churchill.

He’s come to sip a latte and talk about Small Engine Repair, a micro budget Irish film about an aging country singer’s thwarted attempts to make it in the music business. It’s a slow, low-key, idiosyncratic affair that brings to mind Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. ‘It’s quite elegiac in feel, I really admire [writer and director] Niall Heery for trusting himself internally and letting things unfold gently and slowly.’ Glen talks with the clarity and enunciation of someone who has spent a lot of time with dialect coaches, his Edinburgh accent having long faded away.

One of the draws of the film for Glen was the fact that it called on him to perform musically, ‘I’ve played guitar since my early teens but never utilised it professionally so it was lovely to involve those skills. It was a huge bonus for me having a script this good and being able to work on the music as well.’

Another reason for doing the film for Glen was a chance to work with rising star Steven Mackintosh (The Jacket, Sugarhouse). ‘Steven and I realised quite quickly that though we had never worked together there was a strong connection and an awareness of each other’s work, which is really important because the film is a buddy movie about these two small town characters, about their friendship and betrayal. It’s a country poem.’

Glen, who spends as much time working in theatre as film has three films coming out in the next few months. Besides Small Engine Repair there’s Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution in which he stars with Catherine Tate as an ardent British communist who convinces his wife to go and live in the GDR with catastrophic results and Resident Evil: Extinction where he returns to his well trodden role as Dr Issacs. Ultimately he knows where his heart lies. ‘It’s a cliché but the reason I wanted to get in to acting was because I saw De Niro in a double bill of Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, and that sense of complete transformation appealed to me. But to access that kind of variety you need the very best writing, and the finest scripts come with the lowest budgets, that’s just the way it is.’ As he lowers his cup, disappointment fills those remarkable eyes.

Small Engine Repair, Cameo, Edinburgh and selected release from Fri 7 Sep.

– Paul Dale

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“MOST MEN LEAD LIVES OF QUIET desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, in what would have been a perfect tagline for Small Engine Repair, a new film written and directed by Niall Heery and starring Edinburgh’s own Iain Glen. In it, Glen plays Doug, who’s lost his job and his woman and just about all of his self-belief. For years Doug has been carrying around a demo tape of self-penned songs. Though he longs to have it played on the local country and western station, he makes excuses every time his friends try to pop on the cassette and press play. But life is full of surprises. Not only does opportunity come knocking, but Doug turns out to have genuine talent.

Glen had agreed to play another character, Burley, who’s fresh out of jail after a fatal hit and run and spoiling for the man who shopped him. “It’s a funny thing when you’re asked, would you like to do a role, and you read a script and all the time you’re thinking,” Glen whispers this: ” ‘Oh God, I wish I was doing that role.’ But I liked the script as a whole very much.” The part that leapt out at him was Doug, not because it’s the lead, but because it offered a chance to show off his musical abilities. “Three weeks later I got a phone call from one of the producers asking if I’d think about changing roles. I thought he’d maybe say the postman who delivers the mail in the first scene, but he said it’s to play Doug, because we know you can sing and play the guitar. I said, ‘Do-you-know-I-will-think-about-it-I-thought-about-it-and-the-answer-is-yes.’ ”

The voice is unexpected. Whereas his speaking voice is reedy, when Glen sings – in this film, at any rate – what emerges is a deep, gravel-strewn nod to Johnny Cash. He’s always played guitar and sung, mainly folk music, just never publicly or professionally, except once in a long ago musical. To reassure Heery he made preliminary recordings at home using his Apple and a GarageBand programme. Later, he laid down the tracks properly.

His cracking singing voice is not the only surprise in store. Glen, one of Scotland’s handsomest men, plays it downright dowdy, his good looks obscured by a beard that reduces him to a pair of the bluest eyes and a much-furrowed brow. Actresses pay lip service to the joys of playing ugly because it’s a stretch, how was it for him? “Really good fun! [Doug] is careworn, weather-beaten, hapless, very benign and sort of hopeless, then something changes inside him. It felt interesting territory to go into. I bearded up to create a messiness. My features are naturally quite cheek-bony and angular and as a result you can look a bit tidy. I wanted to round out my face a bit and mess up the edges. I saw him as a big bear of a man, and again, I’m tall and thin. You try to adjust physically to suggest that.”

Doug and his friends aren’t so much leading lives of quiet desperation as the howling version, and as a viewer I found this frustrating, I admit to Glen, who laughs. “Yes, as a woman I think you do want to shake these men – that’s the way his partner feels at the start of the film.” So what happened? How did Doug become so badly damaged? “I think there are a lot of blokes who have a vocational aspiration – for him it’s music – that is not seen through,” says Glen. “They are fundamentally frustrated by what life is giving them. I’m eternally grateful I was able to act, but if I hadn’t been able to realise that for myself, or if I hadn’t succeeded at it, I really don’t know what I would have done. There was no Plan B. A lot of people are silently frustrated by their occupations.”

Although he says it’s wrong, he feels that men, more than women, care enormously about how they’re perceived professionally. “We want to be judged by that. We think it’s terribly important, too important, and some of the more important emotional stuff we can lose sight of. I think it’s not uncommon for people to be slight failures to themselves. But while I see the film as very elegiac in tone, it made me laugh reading it and it made us laugh doing it, and I’ve seen audiences laugh watching it.” ‘Men are fundamentally frustrated by what life is giving them’

Beautifully shot in the woods of Northern Ireland – resembling the American northwest much more than what we think we know about the Emerald Isle – Small Engine Repair is a model of taste and restraint. But while the adjectives “quiet” and “sleeper” certainly apply, Heery injects notes of danger and tension. Then, each time the action threatens to spin off into another genre – notably the violent revenge movie – it dances away gracefully, and it’s the better for it. “I know exactly what you mean,” agrees Glen. “Even though I know what happens, when I watched it I had the sense of, ‘Oh please don’t do that.’ It’s a familiar sensation, maybe 50 per cent of the time, finding that finished films are not quite what you thought you were making. This one really matched what I remember I saw on the page and remember as the experience of filming it. Like it or not, that’s what was intended. That’s what the director wrote and wanted to shoot. I love the tone and the fact that the film trusts itself.”

Is that because the same person wrote and directed? “I think so, but it’s also one of the things they get right in Ireland; somehow they can make these [small budget] films, where the director has independence and no producer is saying they’ll only give you the money on the proviso that you let them suggest what should happen.” Lately Glen’s been shooting roughly a film a year in Ireland, and I wonder what they’re getting right that Scotland’s film industry still hasn’t cracked. “Ireland does seem to financially support film-makers in the way they don’t seem to in Scotland. I think there’s a Northern Ireland film fund where if you film a percentage of the film there you can get part of your budget covered. And Small Engine Repair will do OK in Ireland, however it does in the rest of the UK or the world, because there’s an audience that want to go see films there.”

Audiences in every country are sure to relate to these men because they’re achingly real. Like most of us, who, according to Glen, “spend our lives having little victories and little failures”, their desires are small, making it all the more poignant when they fail to come to fruition. Steven Mackintosh, for instance, appears as Bill, an even sadder sack than Doug, who is desperate to keep his grown son alongside him in the family business. But the claustrophobic, dead-end lives Bill and his friends lead hold little appeal for the young man. Knowing that Glen has a 12-year-old son, Finlay, I wonder how he’s coping with the inevitable changes that come as a child grows up and grows away. How hard is it to stand back and watch children make their own mistakes?

He grimaces, making all sorts of faces before answering. “[My son is] still young enough not to be pulling away, or maybe I just goosestep over him all the time! I used to love this book of a bear teaching a younger bear what to do, and every time the father bear would say, this is how you ride a bicycle, then he’d get on and have a terrible accident, and he’d say, ‘So son, that is what you should not do.’ I’m probably a bit like that, saying, ‘Oh, you should be doing it this way,’ and it all goes horribly wrong. But I think I’m going to find it very, very difficult to be able to stand back and let him make his own mistakes and find his own way.” With two actors as parents (Finlay’s mum is Susannah Harker), is he destined to tread the boards? “I don’t know. It’s like at Christmas parties people always f***ing say to me, ‘Oh you’re an actor, you’ll be charades captain.’ ” He groans. “He’s been given lots of opportunities to act at school. The most common trait of young actors is to. Pronounce. Every. Word. Very. Carefully. So they will be heard. That’s what they’re taught. Finlay sort of mumbles in a Brando-esque way – so he’s either really good or really awful.”

Twelve is probably too soon to choose a career path, but if Finlay does fancy acting, he’d do worse than follow his father’s example: “I look for good writing, because I know that’s what will flatter me.” And that, he says, now means more independent films and less television. “Call me old-fashioned but the idea that a writer might use his talent to script something that has a beginning, middle and end, a bit of plot and a story, that might be enlightened by good performances and a bit of visual direction to construct something that actually might be worth pausing to look at for a couple of hours, it’s so rare to see on television. I’ve done much less television over the last decade.

“There used to be things like Screen 2 and Play for Today, and one-off films. Those exist still, but they’re very few and far between and tucked away in the schedules. Struggle though they may, independent film-makers do manage to get their films made and still have creative freedom in the making of those films, but it’s relatively small in the grand scheme of things.” Small yes, but often perfectly formed.

– Lee Randall

Small Engine Repair is released on 7 September.

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ACTOR IAIN GLEN, 44, takes a no-nonsense approach to health, and sailing helps to ground him.

You hit the headlines doing cartwheels naked when you appeared with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. Was it a trial?
I prefer to look at that experience from the other end of the binoculars. If you take your clothes off on stage, the audience’s sympathy goes out to you. I’m not a great exhibitionist, but I wasn’t too worried about it. The play was about sex, so nakedness was absolutely a part of it and any shyness I might have felt was taken away by simply playing the part.

How about getting candid for the camera?
Yes, I have done but it’s not like theatre. There is much more censorship in film and that particular male appendage is not particularly photogenic anyway, I find.

Is keeping trim top of the agenda?
Well, I try to keep fit and healthy by incorporating exercise into my day. There is something desperately futile, I think, sitting on a bike pedaling away in a gym and expending energy. I would much rather play tennis with one of my two brothers, than go for a workout. I excel at nothing but I love all sports.

So tennis whites are a daily uniform?
No, if I have one obsession, it’s riding a bike. I adore it.

Do you keep your bike wheels well oiled?
I cycle to and from Dulwich, South London, to the theatre every day. That’s about 15 miles, which feels the right balance for me, and gives me a level of physical activity within each day. The city looks glorious from a bicycle saddle. I cycle fairly aggressively.

Are you a BMX bandit?
Yes. As long as I don’t frighten pedestrians, I do anything to avoid traffic. And I admit that includes going the wrong way down one-way streets and cycling on pavements.

Any spills?
I have never fallen off. I’ve been pushed off, though, by an irate driver. I was studying the A-Z and the lights changed to green. I was too slow to get going and this driver jumped out of his car and shoved me off my bike. I think he was a person who was furious with his life.

Not a feeling you share?
No. I am a fairly sunny soul. I can get troubled, withdrawn and frowny, but it’s short-lived.

What’s your secret?
A good night’s sleep.

Not one for spiritual solace?
I do have a faith but not in the traditional sense. I was brought up in the Church of Scotland, and I do have a spirituality. I believe in prayer, as a notion of sending good thoughts people’s way. But religion has screwed itself up for centuries. So I would say for me spirituality, yes; ownership of a particular religion, no.

No vices?
Smoking is a huge pleasure, when I do do it. I have gone through 30-a-day phases, but I never like the feeling that I have got to have one. A cigarette tastes much nicer when you have a pair of oxygenated lungs to start with.

And the sauce?
I love wine, but I don’t drink every day.

GP or green tea?
GP but, more often than not, nothing. I treat all GPs with extreme caution.

Any particular reason?
A sailing accident. I love sailing; I once had a Laser, a fiberglass dinghy from which you can lean out while sailing. Once, in a moment of exhilaration, I thrust my head backwards into the water. Afterwards I had a terrible headache. I went to the GP who suggested aspirin. It did no good. Eventually I went to a specialist and it transpired that I had ruptured an artery in my neck that had hardened. I was put on warfarin for a few months. Which thinned my blood and ensured that a clot didn’t form.

Fairy godmother, please change?
There is nothing that I would change with surgery.

You seem remarkably well balanced for such a neurotic profession.
I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve done all right.

– Rosie Millard

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For an actor who is equally happy on stage and screen, Iain Glen is fortunate enough to have a foot in both camps. He tells Nick Smurthwaite about his current role in The Crucible with the RSC

If a British actor is young, good looking, talented and sexy, we tend to assume it is only a matter of time before he gets into movies, preferably American ones, since that is where the money and the kudos reside.

Think Jude Law, Paul Bettany, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, all of whom spend their working lives hopping across the Atlantic.

The mystery of Iain Glen, who ticked all the boxes when he burst on to our TV screens in the late eighties as a white collar thug in The Fear, is that big-time celluloid success seems to have eluded him, even though he has continued to amass a formidable body of stage and film work for which he is hugely respected.

In a publicity-shy tradition of Tom Courtenay and Michael Kitchen, Glen is a quiet, self-effacing man who just wants to get on with the job, never mind all the media bullshit, and then ride his bike home to the anonymity of suburbia when it’s all over. He has no interest in living the life of a movie star.

Getting to know Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise during the London run of The Blue Room in 1998, was clearly an eye opener. He recalls Cruise saying, of being in the public eye: “For every door that is closed to you, another door opens. But as Glen points out, it seems a curious equation to have the wherewithal to charter a private jet when you can’t walk down Oxford Street without being mobbed.

Glen prefers to be able to push his trolley around Sainsbury’s untroubled by the celebrity circus. “I hope I’m not precious about it, he says. “I mean, if Ang Lee or Martin Scorsese came knocking at my door, I’d be off to the States like a shot. But I never did that thing of moving to Hollywood just to speculate. I’ve done my share of shite but I try and keep it to a minimum. Besides I don’t think I’d be very good at doing most big commercial films, I’d probably fall flat on my face. What I want is to have a degree of choice and to do things that challenge me.

He has made more than 20 films many of which have received accolades at European film festivals. “When films get made beneath a certain budget it usually means that the director has control, unfettered by studio influence. My experience is that they offer actors some of the most satisfying work even though they may be perceived as not being big box office.

But currently Glen is playing John Proctor in The Crucible, universally acclaimed and surely destined for award recognition. One critic called it “the most commanding performance of his career. Typically perhaps, Glen talks about his preparation for the role as if he were describing the run-up to the best man’s speech at a wedding. “If you’re intimidated by previous performances in the role, you may as well stay at home. I don’t have any particular method, I just read the play again and again to get the lines into my head. It’s a huge bonus when a play is as well crafted as The Crucible.

If he does get stressed out by these big theatrical challenges he is not the sort of bloke to show it. Indeed, he prides himself on staying cool, calm and collected for the good of the company, as well as the audience. “You can’t let nerves come between you and the audience because they pick up on it. My way of dealing with the stress is to become very calm and relaxed, even when inside I’m not feeling that way at all.

This cool exterior must have been sorely tested during the run on Martin Guerre in the mid-nineties. Playing the eponymous hero in the Boublil-Schonberg musical for a year was, he recalls, “bloody hard work and not a little frustrating, From the outset, Glen and the producer Cameron Mackintosh disagreed about the basic matter of whether or not the mysterious Martin Guerre was who he said he was. “I told Cameron what I thought and he had a very clear counter-argument. He felt that in musical theatre the audience needed to be in the know. The other characters wouldn’t but the audience would. It allows the music to fly otherwise the evening would become muted and not suit the composers. He may well have been right. I felt it undermined the suspense to give away the secret. In the end he was the producer and my boss. Besides, I had my work cut out trying to sing on stage with a 20-piece orchestra. That was enough to think about.

Growing up in Edinburgh in the sixties and early seventies, Iain Glen had no thoughts about being an actor or anything to do with showbusiness. “I had always struggled academically and I was quite distracted in my teens, to put it mildly. I was all over the place. But when I finally got into Aberdeen University I discovered drama and that changed everything. The first role I played was Marshall Herrick in The Crucible. I’d had no connection with or interest in drama prior to that. I just loved the idea of pretending to be someone else, putting on other clothes, speaking eloquently – possibly because I was so ill at ease with myself at the time.

By the end of his second year at Aberdeen, Glen and his fellow thespians were importing shows to the Edinburgh festival and he had made up his mind that he wanted to do drama.

“My family were quite skeptical at first but they soon came round to it when they realized how committed to it I was. I took it all desperately seriously. At my audition to get into Rada, I practically got down on my knees and begged the principal to give me a place.

When Glen left Rada in the mid-eighties, equipped with the Bancroft Gold medal, intending to concentrate on theatre, he landed two plum jobs in television, quickly followed by two films – Gorillas in the Mist and Paris by Night. It was the kind of kick start every drama school graduate dreams of but his early success never quite satisfied Glen’s appetite for live performance.

“I have never let go of that desire to keep a foot in both camps, stage and screen. Both excite me equally and they can feed each other. Film requires a truth, spontaneity and relaxation, while theatre needs more expression, greater use of language, a physical command and of course you try and bring all that back to your film work in various degrees. When you spread yourself thin, as I have, the possibilities for diversifying tend to come along more often.

Other actors must envy Glen’s ability to land consistently challenging and high profile work, while retaining his sense of mystery and anonymity. “You’re never really in control of your career,î he confides. “All the jobs I did last year came out of the blue. And I don’t mind playing second fiddle if something is well written.

“We have a fantastic theatre tradition in this country, we can produce high quality television and radio drama and the film industry produces good stuff intermittently. There is an opportunity to work all these outlets. British actors are very fucking lucky.

He switches back to film after the three month run of The Crucible, with a leading role in something he describes rather coyly as, “not a million miles from Tomb Raider. But at the time of our conversation, it is a low-budget independent film, Small Engine Repair, made last year, that he is most excited about. It was filmed in rural Ireland by first-time director Niall Heery and Glen is cast as a wannabe country singer who finds the courage to fulfil his dreams.

“I’ve always sung but mainly just to family, so it was a real bonus to sing and play the guitar as part of a role. The guy I play is a complex man with many different sides to him but basically a good soul who doesn’t always know what’s best for himself. It was a gift of a role.

The producers are looking for a screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the springboard for so many cult successes. Watch this space.

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Iain Glen sits still long enough to tell Times 2 about Hedda Gabler, —and the truth about Nicole Kidman.

Iain Glen is effortlessly striking a pose. This 43-year-old actor is regularly referred to as a “Scots hunk”. Today, with his fair hair pulled back into a tiny, straggly ponytail and sporting a pointy-tipped moustache, he’s a little rough around the edges. But he has a warm, intensely masculine presence and a sharp wit. As he tilts his profile towards the light, facing the photographer the perfect angle without for one second allowing his attention to wander from our conversation, it’s not difficult to see what makes Glen one of our most magnetic performers.

We’re in the Almeida Theatre’s rehearsal rooms in North London to discuss Glen’s latest role, as Judge Brack in Richard Eyre’s new production of Hedda Gabler. Ibsen’s 1890 domestic tragedy is, as Glen puts it, “psychologically astute”, even when the characters’ behaviour is at its most extreme.

Glen is surprisingly reluctant to talk about how rehearsals are going because, he says, at this stage he genuinely doesn’t know. “This is always a vulnerable time,” he says. “Really you are clueless and searching and you don’t want to give any secrets away if you feel that you have had some kind of revelation.”

Nevertheless, he agrees to divulge what he has so far uncovered about Brack, a powerful and manipulative man who attempts to contrive a situation whereby he can conduct an affair with the newlywed Hedda and continue his friendship with her husband.

“He’s an enigma, and I was drawn to him because I feel he’s very open to interpretation,” Glen says. “He’s not untypical of a certain sort of man – he’s unable to commit to a married state, so he creates triangular relationships. There are men who can divorce, well, not exactly sex from love, but they can compartmentalise their lives. Yet Brack’s feelings for both Hedda and her husband are in earnest. It’s subtle and complex.”

Glen’s record as a classical actor is impressive. His RSC debut as Henry V won him comparisons to Olivier and McKellen, and he was a rivetingly febrile Edgar in Max Stafford Clark’s King Lear at the Royal Court.

More recently he starred in Peter Stein’s much-admired The Seagull in 2003 and blasted his way from under the shadow of Brando as a fierce wiry Stanley Kowalski opposite Glenn Close in the National Theatre’s 2002 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The Blue Room (1998) directed by Sam Mendes in which he and Nicole Kidman played all ten roles sent the Donmar Warehouse box office into meltdown as the public clamoured to see them in David Hare’s update of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Both actors gave scintillating performances – and the play’s huge impact had some unexpected knock on effects. According to Kidman, The Blue Room revitalized her career, it gave Glen a taste of celebrity life and a continuing close friendship with his co-star. But his relationship with Kidman came under less welcome scrutiny when their marriages broke down – hers, to Tom Cruise, in 2001, and then in 2002 Glen’s to the actress Susannah Harker, with whom he has a son, Finlay, now aged nine. There was no affair with Kidman, but that didn’t stop the speculation.

“It was difficult, but you have to handle it with good grace and move on,” says Glen whose partner now is Charlotte Emmerson, also an actress. “I mean, if I was taking my son to school and a photographer was there taking pictures, I don’t know how I’d react. Maybe I’d kick the living daylights out of him. But so far it’s never been bad enough to upset me. It’s part of the business.

Still, he clearly doesn’t relish it – one reason why he’s never likely to move to Hollywood. Besides, he says, there’s a much more satisfying variety of work here, where he can switch between film, television and theatre. “I like to spread myself quite thin. When I’m working I’m focused, but when it’s done, it’s done. I jump into the next thing.”

Right now, he’s on our screens playing the Jacobite rebel Alan Breck in the BBC’s Kidnapped. And RŽgis Warnier’s Man to Man, in which Glen stars as Victorian Scientist in search of the missing link, recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and is due for general release later this year.

“I’m someone who likes to get a lot done in a day,” he remarks. “I don’t think I’d have stuck with acting if I hadn’t worked pretty solidly. It’s so painful for actors who don’t work. If acting had meant I was just sitting around, I couldn’t have done it.” And with that he’s off. Let’s hope the acting profession continues to keep him busy.

– Sam Marlowe

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Alan Taylor talks to him about his Aberdeen days, and why he will never turn his back on the theatre.

Resting, in acting parlance, is a euphemism for unemployment. At one time or another, all actors, unless they’re one of the long-term residents of Coronation Street or Albert Square, have periods when they’re doing nothing, when they’re between jobs.

But Iain Glen has rarely been without work for long. Usually, he is simply biding his time, counting down the days until filming starts or waiting for rehearsals to begin.

Meanwhile, he reads scripts, practices on the piano and the guitar, hangs out with his family, bashes tennis balls or does what ever he has to do to prepare himself for a forthcoming role. Just recently, Glen says, he’s been attending a dialect coach in order to perfect an 18th century Highland accent.

It is early on a summer’s afternoon in Dulwich, the drowsy, south London suburb he calls home. He is dressed casually in loose-fitting shirt and trousers and sandals, a cigarette never far from his lips. Soon, he explains, he will be flying to New Zealand where he will be making a new version of Kidnapped for a three-part BBC series. He, of course, will be playing Alan Breck, Robert Louis Stevenson’s enigmatic Jacobite who has “a grand memory for forgetting.î

“It’s a shame in a way that we’re traveling to the other side of the world to film such a quintessentially Scottish novel,î he says. “Financially, apparently, it makes sense. You can buy twice or three times as much and it’s cheaper to fly the principals out.î

But in terms of the landscape, he says, that can be easily reproduced in New Zealand and, given the amount of time he is likely to spend in water, the balmy South Seas are more appealing than the temperature of the North Sea.

He relished re-reading the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, which he had not picked up for years. He couldn’t put the script down, he says, and was fascinated by the character of Breck, who is “Larger than life: and “a wonderful extrovertî. What particularly appealed to Glen about him, however, was the aura of enigma which engulfs him.

“You don’t really know where he’s coming from. He seems to be pursuing something that entails sacrificing his freedom. That passion. That belief. And yet he seems to be doing it in a slightly vainglorious way.î As Glen says: “It is a fantastic adventure story.î

He could just as well be describing his own career. Throw him a challenge and he’ll turn into a performing seal to catch it. Nor is he ever reluctant to move on from one project to another. On the contrary, he says, it is a part of the business he finds easy to accept.

“I suppose deep somewhere in the actor’s psyche you celebrate the fractured nature of the lifestyle. I love getting very, very absorbed in whatever it is I’m doing. But a moment comes when it’s time to let it go and I can do that disgracefully easily.

“I don’t have an aftermath when I’m trying to recover and hopefully there’s something round the corner that’s going to fully engage me. Different things require a different kind of involvement. Some things you don’t want to think about at all and some things you want to prepare for way, way up front.î

He first got into acting at the University of Aberdeen, when he enlisted to study English. It was, Glen recalls, towards the end of his second year, that he was truly bitten by the bug. There was no stage tradition in his family. His mother was an occupational therapist who painted as a hobby. His father, a keen country dancer, worked for the Scottish Investment Trust. He and his brother, Hamish, who is a theatre director, often wonder how they came to go into the same profession. Neither apparently, has found a satisfactory answer.

“I had no notion of acting whatsoever,î says Glen. “I don’t really have any vivid memories of watching a great deal of television or films. I don’t know what I thought. I certainly didn’t think there were actors and that was a profession you could pursue.î

During Freshers’ Week, fate, in the form of a couple of friends, steered him towards the drama society. It was, he now appreciates, “the death knell of his academic aspirations. In his first year, he played in Friedrich DÙrrenmatt’s The Physicist and in a comedy review written by Nicky Campbell, the DJ and TV presenter.

A year later, he made his debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Martin Sherman’s Bent, about the persecution of homosexuals under the Nazis. Did the reviewers recognise a star in the making? “I got enough to keep me going,î he concedes modestly.

It was time to decide whether to commit himself fully to acting or academe, but it was never really in doubt which path would choose. He left Aberdeen at the end of his second year and got an agent, his essential Equity card and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Glen had fond his m³tier. “I’d got my act together.î

With the benefit of hindsight, he says, he was always performing in one way or another. As teenagers, he and his mates would call a Radio Forth phone-in “week in, week outî pretending to be whoever took their fancy. One day he’d be an investor who’d discovered a glue that children could sniff without any harmful side effects, the next he’d be a self-confessed vandal who wept over the worthlessness of his lot.

It must all have stood in good stead because he emerged from RADA in 1986 with the Bancroft Gold Medal and a couple of parts.

Throughout his career he has shuttled between the movies and theatre, playing Charlotte Rampling’s lover in Paris By Night then Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. “I was always available for theatre,î he says. “I always wanted to do that. Hopefully you duck and dive to avoid being typecast.î

There was a point, he reckons, when he could have made a greater commitment to the movies and perhaps become a more bankable name, but he was never inclined to turn his back on classical theatre.

“I don’t crave Hollywood,î he once said. “It’s a different beast altogether.î Rumours that he is about to replace Pierce Brosnan as James Bond are no more than that. He is flattered to be mentioned in dispatches, but isn’t waiting by the phone for whoever is the new Cubby Broccoli to call.

He seems to take parts as they come, judging them initially on the good quality of the script. “If the script is really good,î he says, “that’ll say something about the director. Directors want good scripts as much as actors. Of course, there’s a grey area where a script is good, but could be very good and you think you can play a part in influencing that.î

As an actor, Glen says, there is always the worry that you will be found out. But he is also sufficiently confident in his own ability to realise there comes a point in every production when he has mastered his role and feels he won’t be find out and is really going to enjoy it.

In essence he says, acting is about inhabiting the lives of different people, changing skins like a chameleon, whether you’re the King or the Fool. At university, he says, he rather admired student politicians whose passion was to change the world. His passion, belatedly discovered, was for acting, what Sir Ralph Richardson described as “the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.î

At 43 Glen is in his prime, part of a golden generation of Scottish actors which includes Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Alan Cumming and Dougray Scott. And he has followed from afar the campaign for a Scottish National Theatre, in which his brother Hamish, was one of the key champions. When we met, it had already been given the go-ahead and its first director, Vicky Featherstone, was appointed subsequently. When asked if he would be keen to be involved in it, he says: “I definitely would. Of course.î Which, one trusts without being too presumptuous, must be music to Ms Featherstone’s ears.

– Alan Taylor

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Iain Glen on the boy he was and the man he’s become.

As Iain Glen answers a call on his mobile, I grab one of the hotel coffee tables to drag it closer to our sofa but I lose my grip, the trestle legs collapse and the heavy metal top crashes to the floor, two millimeters from his toes. He doesn’t flinch. “Are they insured?” He shakes his head. “I bet your cheekbones are,” I say, Reckoning that when you’ve just come close to crippling your interviewee, a bit of flattery is the best policy.

And at least it is honest flattery – because I really haven’t seen such fine cheekbones since the Russian seamen’s choir last visited Edinburgh Festival. The Shakespeare-to-Tomb Raider actor is every bit as lean, sexy and sculpted in real life as he is on stage and screen. Much as I rated his performance as a sports journalist in the BBC TV drama Glasgow Kiss however, I’m always chary of interviewing thespians – they want to talk craft; I want to get personal. But no such problem with Glen.

He is promoting his latest film Gabriel and Me, in which he plays the cancer-stricken father of 11-year-old Jimmy Spud, a Newcastle lad who wants to become an angel.

In the film, Glen, a smoker, appears as a haggard, sunken-faced shadow of himself: “It was a shocking journey to go on. Part of my research was visiting surgeons and doctors and I vowed that I would give up smoking because the statistics are frightening. I haven’t but I will.”

Shocked by the news of his illness, Jimmy seeks help form the Archangel Gabriel -Billy Connolly- to save his father, a redundant welder, and reclaim the fun, loving relationship they shared before lung cancer was diagnosed.

Although Glen’s childhood was a far cry from the grime and poverty of the North East, where the film is set, his was not without its difficulties. The product of a middle class youth in a leafy corner of the capital, attending fee-paying Edinburgh academy, Glen shatters the suburban idyll with tales of abusive teachers.

“There was a lot of stuff going on that was outrageous. There was abuse of a minor but significant kind – you could get felt up by masters. There was violence in the school as well. You could get seriously punished, the strap and the clachan.

“My Dad worked very hard to get me in there and give me a good education but the honest truth about it was that it was a really dire education at that time. Unluckily, it was the dying vestiges of a Victorian style education.”

Glen is at pains to stress that “it’s a very different school now”, but at the time he and his schoolmates took what revenge they could on the dominies of the Day.

“We used to phone up all these masters and pretend to be different people and they wouldn’t have a clue. The power of speaking to somebody who’d just beat the s**t out of you: ‘Guess who I am?’ We’d psyche them out a bit; stuff like: ‘We’re watching you.’”

As a 40-year-old, Glen winces at how he treated his parents: “In my latter teenage years I rejected everything my parents represented but in a half baked way. I had a real chip on my shoulder about being middle class. I felt I’d been removed from a whole area of Scottishness I wanted to be a part of. I remember going on holiday with them and refusing to eat at the same table as them. I was so horrible.”

Iain Alan Sutherland Glen’s battle for the attention of his brothers (the eldest Hamish is artistic director of Dundee Rep; Graham is “Something in the city”) started at a very early age and moulded his childhood and teens. “I was basically ignored by Hamish so I was always competing in a rather pathetic way to draw attention to myself.” He says it’s unconnected but as a toddler Glen climbed out of the playroom window and crawled along a gutter two storeys up. At eight, he dived from the top board of the Commonwealth Pool to impress his brothers but they pretended they had missed it and Iain went straight back up to do it again. He ended up winding himself so badly that an attendant had to help him from the water. By secondary school, he and his pals were going into the city centre to stage “traumatic experiences” for other people: one boy would bury himself in a mound of leaves, leaving only one arm hanging out, while the others watched the shocked reaction of passers-by. “Hamish was pretty wild as well but I had to top him,” recalls Glen, who even today is still pleased to describe himself as the “most troublesome” of the family.

“Through my childhood years I was pretty difficult. I got in trouble with the police at times. Nothing heavy; it was probably all very tame. I used to steal my parents’ car and I was caught and was up in court with the police. I think I made legal history by getting two endorsements on a license I didn’t possess.”

Later, Iain and his school friend, the DJ Nicky Campbell, would call local radio phone-in shows and indulge in role playing and mimicking: “We’d invent different people. We had it down to a fine art,” recalls Glen. “We’d say: ‘I’m a glue manufacturer and we’ve got this glue that’s completely safe for the kiddies to sniff.’”

After having to repeat his final exams he went to Aberdeen University, ostensibly to study English but embarked on a steep learning curve of another kind.

“I definitely dabbled in most of the drugs that were around at the time. In Aberdeen it was magic mushrooms which were grown everywhere; even the cattle were tripping. The students used to go out harvesting them and then dry them for winter. They were great fun but dangerous. There was a time at University when we’d smoke a joint most days,” he says.

When friends asked him to speak six lines in a drama society production of The Crucible, Glen admits without any hint of irony that it changed his life. “Acting was the thing that sorted me out. Part of the reason for taking drugs is to make the mundane more interesting. Zapping your head. But then when there’s real interest there you don’t need to enliven it with a stimulant.” To the initial dismay of his long-suffering parents, Glen dropped out of university in the second year to pursue a career in acting. By then Hamish – four years his senior who had also studied at Aberdeen – had given up a career in law in favour of theatre. Now widely respected as the artistic director of Dundee Rep, it was Hamish who had the foresight to found the theatre’s acclaimed rep company.

“Hamish will probably dispute this – he’s wrong – but I got into acting before he started to do anything in the theatre,” says his brother mischievously. ‘Hamish fibbed that he was in the drama society and ran it but he never went anywhere near the drama society when he was at university. I’m probably blowing all his gaffes now – he’s probably still got it on his CV.”

Somberly, he adds: “We had quite a major falling out during university where we just didn’t get on for a couple of years which was really because we’re very similar. My brother Graham was always the sweetest of the three brothers; always very liked. I was fighting for air space and Hamish was being bullyish, probably. Then we got it back together and I completely adore the guy and think he’s great, what he’s done at Dundee, all the work he does in Scotland but irrespective of all that, as a guy, I just think he’s fantastic and we’re the best of friends.”

Indeed, it was a one-man play directed by his brother, which got Glen an agent and an equity card and provided him with the speech for his successful RADA audition. Having used up his entitlement to a student grant, his parents agreed to pay his drama school fees, where his friends included Ralph Fiennes, Alex Kingston, Jane Horrocks and Imogen Stubbs.

Fiennes and Kingston are now divorced but in drama school days, Glen recalls, they were inseparable: “Ralph was just so in love with Alex and they would sit and long for each other’s eyes, like lovebirds.”

Having found his vocation in drama, Glen is one of the fortunate few actors who is constantly working. As he tucks into smoked salmon and cheese sandwiches – with chips on the side – I ask him about accepting parts at any price, such as those that would involve performing a live sex act. Glen, who once cartwheeled naked across a stage with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room and whose actress wife Susannah Harker has a role in the controversial film Intimacy, is ambivalent on the use of explicit sex scenes.

“Very fundamental to that story was the central thing which they got up to which was having sex. It lent itself to being quite graphic because it was very much the heart of what they were doing to the point where they didn’t communicate with each other. All they did was have physical contact.”

In the film Susannah (Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice) gets to keep her clothes on as the wife of an adulterous husband (played by Mark Rylance) who embarks on a passionate affair with Kerry Fox (partner of journalist Alexander Linklater).

It is one thing being naked on stage and another having sex with a woman who is not your wife. Would he do it? “I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t necessarily be put off from the role. Probably nine out of 10 films in which I might be asked to do a scene in which my penis would be sucked I would probably say ‘no’ because the chances are they wouldn’t be terribly good films.”

Given the column inches male (and female) theatre critics devoted to writing about Kidman’s body, one could easily be forgiven for forgetting that her co-star was also textile-free but Glen shouldn’t be put off – it is to be expected.

What he took from doing the play in London and New York that seems to matter almost more to Glen than any accolades, is a close family friendship with Kidman and, until the break-up, Tom Cruise.

The two families saw in the new millennium together in Sydney but since the divorce there has been a change. “Nic was always the person who I really got to know because we were doing this play together so we established a really, really good friendship. I’ve only ever seen Tom through Nic so now Tom and Nic are not together I’m less likely to see Tom.

“We used to play golf or go out with the kids and stuff. Nic is a good friend and I’ll always be there for her as a friend if she needs me. When you’re going through separation stuff you feel like you want the feeling of support from friends around you so that’s all I’ve tried to do.”

In showbiz terms, Glen and Susannah have been together for a long time – 15 years, married for eight. Their main home is a terraced house in south London but they also have a farmhouse in France, which Glen, his brothers and their parents bought together, where they escape to as often as possible. With another film on the horizon for Glen, (as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in the movie My name is Sabine Spielreen) they have been too busy with work commitments to spend much time there.

One senses, though, that Glen’s not quite finished with Gabriel and Me. At the press conference following the Edinburgh preview, Connolly – his Archangel Gabriel sports gold eyeshadow and gold painted toenails – pooh-poohed the idea of celestial fixers: ” I have trouble with religion and things flying around. Belief in God is one thing but I get tired of people who believe in angels. It’s a bit in the aromatherapy field for me; a bit hocus-pocus.” But Glen is less dismissive and wants to follow up the point.

“In the same way that Billy is very wary of saying ‘I believe in angels’ because it’s got a slightly voodoo-herbal number to it, I get wary of people saying ‘I don’t believe in angels’ – angels being symbolic of a whole spiritual craving within us and if we lose sight of that and lose sight of a sense of the unknown and inexplicable then the world shrinks in a very mundane way. So I believe in angels in the sense of wishing and believing the world is a very complex, wonderful place that I will never really get to understand.”

Does he believe in Religion?
“In its simplest sense, not to do with the buildings, or the books or God as an entity – maybe I dilute it to the point where it becomes not religion but something else – I believe in the heart of it, the wish of it and the spirituality which is really just about a lovingness between people, altruism, the idea of prayer and thinking about other people and wishing good for other people.”

Back to reality, the mobile call Glen received was from his mother and he has to go. While he has been as patient as any interviewer could wish, Finlay has come north with him and he is keen to spend as much time with his family as possible. Not so keen that, just before saying ‘goodbye’, he does the very actory thing – they never lose their sense of insecurity – of saying that he hopes he will come across as ‘intelligent and likeable’ in the finished piece. Happily I’m able to reassure him that that won’t be difficult at all.

– Lennox Morrison

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Since starring opposite Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, Iain Glen has become the most sought-after leading man in the country. So why is he now taking the part of a Hollywood baddie? He explained all to Will Hodgkinson

The Scottish actor Iain Glen arrives for our interview looking particularly mean. His hair has been dyed black, swept back and extended for a classic evil baddie look, to fit in with his role as Lara Croft’s malevolent nemesis in the feature-film adaptation of the computer game Tomb Raider, in which he stars opposite Angelina Jolie. Then he goes and ruins the fa­ade by being nice.

Glen is at that position in an actor’s career where he is the first choice for a certain recognisable television role – the boyish, slightly off-kilter, but down-to-earth bloke who understands women, typified by his sports journalist in Glasgow Kiss – but not to the extent that he has been typecast, meaning that he can play a cad too. The ITV two-parter Anchor Me seems perfectly suited to his particular abilities. He plays Nathan, a Somerset boy who has educated himself out of his class, returning home to his dying mother with the hope of making his family face up to the death of a younger brother. What starts off as typical Barratt-Homes Sunday-night middle-England drama develops into a web of intrigue spun by fraught emotions, with the classic British trait of keeping up appearances at the root of all the problems.

“This felt more like classical writing – you reach as far into it as you possibly can. It’s not about you trying to improve it, it’s about you trying to meet its potential.î

Glen’s character is also trying to deal with a communication breakdown with his son, and a loss of excitement in marriage, on top of coming to terms with the long-buried family tragedy. On returning home he reaches back into the salad days of his childhood as all these crises loom down on him, and unfortunately finds consolation in the arms of his teenage sweetheart, now married to his rather brutish brother.

“Most television dramas are reduced to the point where you only have a simple objective to convey by a simple line, but the stuff of life is often when we’re saying we’re incredibly happy with something when in fact we’re fiercely jealous and so on. So if writing conveys that, it’s easier to play because you’re immediately in a familiar situation. Underpinning the whole drama is the idea that people miscommunicate.î

Another theme is the sibling rivalry between the one who escapes from the nest and the one left to fend for the family in the shadow of the more glamorous other. Surprisingly Glen claims to be of the latter category. “As my brother so touchingly and wittily put it in his best man speech at my wedding, he didn’t recognize I had a personality until I was 18, so it was hard to remember anything flattering to say about me. I felt in his shadow when I was young – I’d like to put it down to the fact that he was four years older than me, but maybe it was just that I wasn’t very capable at anything much. Anyway you use this kind of experience for acting – it’s broadly what you would call emotional memory. You probably remember it bigger than it was to sharpen the feeling to make it useful.

Glen has reached that stage where he is sometimes mistaken for his characters. “I played a serial killer once, and had guys coming up to me who had decided I was fucking hard and dangerous and they wanted to take me on. When it happens I get very mincey and run.î Recent projects could up the danger ante further. He played a cad in last year’s adaptation of Wives And Daughters, and next year his diabolical villain will bring a British flavour to Tomb Raider. “It has an English setting – and I’ve got to be careful here because we’ve all signed secrecy contracts – but Lara’s looking for mysterious elements for the good of the world, and I’m doing it to destroy. That’s safely vague. I’m enjoying it immensely. We were shooting at Battersea Power Station at night, and the whole sky was lit up, vast machines were going through the shots, smoke everywhere, multi-coloured welding effects falling from the skies, and I’m thinking, what am I doing here, wee Iain frae Scotland! But my character was making it all happen. It’s a real treat.

– Will Hodgkinson

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There can be a certain predictability about meeting square-jawed, handsome actors. They are either so far into themselves on some wavelength that couldn’t be picked up on a Geiger counter, or they are so charming, so self-deprecating and so desperate not to appear idiots that they give away little. Not Iain Glen. He is different from the usual thespian mental patient. Oh yes. He doesn’t have temperament. He thinks there is no reason why an actor should be more temperamental than a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a preacher. Being the focus of press attention is a burden he accepts gratefully but hasn’t quite got accustomed to.

With those piercing, soulful eyes, impeccable manners and an air of inner strength, this man was born to be a romantic lead. Which is why he is being interviewed today, Edinburgh-born glen has starring roles in two totally absorbing six-part dramas upcoming on television: in Glasgow Kiss, for BBC1, a love story about a top sports reporter smitten with the hard-nosed company executive who arrives to swing the axe at his terminally ailing Scottish evening newspaper and in Anchor Me, for ITV, a meticulously detailed, almost painfully analytical script about family life and the fractured relationship between two brothers.

He puts in a platinum-class performance as the husband and father whose previously secure middle-class existence is suddenly threatened by the dreaded doldrums of a midlife crisis. Glen is a serious actor, who is seriously good in both parts.

We had arranged to meet up during a preview night at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The event is a real wine-and-canapés luvvie night at its most self-congratulatory, involving a serial army, the ranks of which are largely made up of the cast and crew from Anchor Me, along with members of the Academy. In the crowded cocktail bar there’s lots of meeting and greeting, the usual cheek-to-cheek air-kissing stuff. Glen arrives 30 minutes late, cursing the London traffic. But the Glen charisma is very much in evidence today. The look he’s wearing – leather jacket, silk shirt, dark slacks – is more eighties than new millennium man. For this chat he is ushered into the tranquil setting of the preview theatre. Bathed in the glow of a single spotlight, which accentuates cheekbones high enough for snow, he is perched on the edge of a seat in the back row and proceeds to light up a filter cigarette. It’s easy to see why director Sam Mendes, since an Oscar winner for American Beauty, picked him to share the stage with a nude Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. He’s such a virtuoso in his job that there’s not an actor he can’t go into a scene with and be absolutely confident that he can do it.

He has a reputation for being quite intense, though always charming, and, we’re rather sternly forewarned, he has no deep interest in discussing his private life.

Glen is married to House of Cards actress Susannah Harker, whom he met 15 years ago. The pair have a four-year-old son Finlay, and live in London. And you immediately wonder: considering the hormone-cranking caliber of this guy’s leading ladies – Sigourney Weaver, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Charlotte Rampling, Helen Mirren, Mrs Tom Cruise etc – does Susannah have to pin a St Christopher medal to the pyjamas she has packed in his overnight bag when he goes on location? But whoa, not so blunt, we’re supposed to be aware of where the boundaries lie here.

So, with stealth we attempt to tip-toe into the subject of his personal life simply by suggesting that he might identity with his screen character, Nathan, in Anchor Me. Experiencing one of the gawdawful “where do I cone from, where am I going and how long have I got” type mid-life scenarios. Nathan is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Sarah (Julia Ford) and decides to seek a trial separation.

He must also undertake the onerous task of informing his teenage son of their mutual decision to split. The way Iain plays the scene it is as if someone has taken a sword and drawn it through his gut. Could Iain, a loving husband and devoted father, etc, possibly ever have entertained such thoughts in real life? It’s at this point that a usually guarded actor spouts off the clichéd response received acidly – “I don’t want to go into any depth about this” or “I have no interest in discussing my private life”. But Glen decides to broach the issue with a straight-from-the heart reply. He says: “Yes. I have been there at times. I mean, I am in a 15-year-old relationship.

“In any long-term relationship, unless you are incredibly lucky or you are a better person than I am, you go through periods where you contemplate having had enough. Ideas fling about your head. How do we deal with that? How do we cope with that? How do you extricate yourself from this situation? You feel binded. Then next week you are okay and you are not entertaining those thoughts. There is no right or wrong to it. Whatever you do, as long as you do it with care and love. Nathan, this character, finds it very difficult. I think he is typical of a certain kind of male. I think he wants to say, well, it is tough enough to make that decision that I think we should separate. And so his wife is left to deal with all the fall-out”

So, Mr Glen seems to be a bit of a rarity then – a Scottish male who is at least in touch with his emotional side. He explains: “It is a lot to do with my profession and the job that I do. In a very simple sense the notion of acting is the notion of expelling emotion through the vehicle of another person. You are pretending to be someone else and going through all those emotions, whether it’s anger or love or hatred. That’s your food on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Shakespeare or TV writing. You have got writers dealing with human nature and how people behave and, of course, if things ring bells you think: ‘This could be so true of me’. That is one of the beauties of acting. It does teach you things about yourself all the time and you just hope that you live and learn a little bit along the way.”

In Glasgow Kiss, Glen’s performance as the hot-shot sports scribe, Stuart Morrison, a widower and lone parent, is as different from middle-class Nathan as chalk from parmigiano. There is a great line where Morrison spouts this interior monologue, spoken in sportswriter argot, about creating a balance in life: “Work and home – that is your striking partnership. They have got to complement each other. Otherwise, you just end up a loser.” Likewise, Glen’s job takes him away from home a lot. On Glasgow Kiss, he was working 12 hours a day, six days a week for many months. Having a young family has its problems, especially when your partner’s in the same business.

“One thing the nature of this game gives you is taking you to different places, through film and television particularly. You have to be very careful not to become too isolated. There is something fundamentally isolating about acting. It is something that you do on your own and you refer to yourself as you do it. You need isolation. You need to be alone. But certainly nowadays – maybe not true of 10 years ago – when I work, I work and when I don’t, I really don’t want to think about it. The moment I walk off a film set, my head is somewhere else. I want to be with family. I want to be at home. I think if you can escape from work – it depends on the nature of what it is that you are doing – you come back to it with fresh eyes. Anyway, you are spoilt on the film set. You have a spoiled lifestyle. They are petrified you are going to walk under a bus so they look after you. When your wife is an actress, too, there is a bit of co-ordination needed. I think I am right in saying there’s been no time when Finlay has not been with one or other with us.”

Fatherhood was important to him. It helped things fit in terms of the jigsaw puzzle of life. “It just thrust a completely new perspective on things. Your priorities change. More than anything else what a child brings is an altruistic love, which feels like the first time it has been in your heart if you were really brutally honest with yourself. You love adult partners but with provisos and with conditions. A child doesn’t allow you to do that. They don’t think that way. So basically it’s instinctive. It feels like an altruistic love. You are giving without any sense of return. You get a huge return but that is not why you give. You don’t give for that return but it is just there on a day-by-day basis. Prior to fatherhood it was the last thing in the world that I could have imagined, and if I did imagine it I would think I would be terrible at it. It was very hard to project ahead and think of it. But the moment there is a third being, this extra one, I couldn’t possibly imagine not being a father.”

Here are some facts about Iain Glen. He is 39. Over 6ft tall. He was born and brought up in a fairly middle-class background. His mum and dad, Alison and Hamish, enjoyed country dancing. Two years into an English course at Aberdeen University, he left for RADA after getting rave reviews for a performance in Bent at the Edinburgh Festival. Fellow actors Ralph Fiennes, Jane Horrocks, Alex Kingston, and Imogen Stubbs were in the same year. A good group of people he avows. The tutors seemed to have high hopes for them. “We were a really tight group of people. We weren’t that serious. Ralph was quite serious. He was madly in love with Alex. We had our wild days. A nucleus of naughtiness.”

Early on in his career, Iain won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his portrayal of doomed Barlinnie lifer Larry Winters in Silent Scream. His RSC work has won him comparisons with Kenneth Branagh. Yet the blockbuster success has been denied him. Some put it down to the choices he has made. Others emphasize Glen’s own tendency to put quality over quantity or any burning desire for fame. He merits nary a mention when critics run out their spurious list of usual suspects in the so-called Jock Pack.

“You are at he mercy of what is there,” he says. “I have a degree of choice which I value. Anyone who is a part of this Jock Pack is not there out of choice. It is just something that has come along called The Full Monty or Trainspotting and it has transformed things for them. I’d be at the mercy of that if something came along that ended up being the most popular British comedy, for example. Then the world will perceive you in a different way because of that piece of work.”

And working with Nicole Kidman? Performing with a superstar, does that necessarily decree there must be a pecking order?

“Definitely not. You are two actors. You have both got a tricky job on your hands. You don’t want to trip or make an arse of yourself. You are there to help each other out. That’s really what it is about. Now, if one of us was different, or if we hadn’t gelled, then maybe that sort of thing could come into it. I hate all that. Any sense of status. I never want to impose a status on another actor or a group of people and I never want them to impose their status on me. I have got no time for it. Whatever the world is saying, at the end of the day you have got you, you have got them, and you have got a director and you are just trying to put it together.”

Being married to an actress can make the relationship strained – but for him it was the only choice. “I could say that it’s a gift being with somebody who is in the business, because so many of your neuroses, or your concerns, or your hopes, or your failures or your successes can be shared. I think to non-actors it can all seem very, very silly. The way that you can spend energy or focus on tiny minute things. I don’t know, perhaps it would be very hard for people outside to understand. The gift is that it gives you a shared passion which is wonderful.”

But what about the competitive element – the professional jealousies? “I don’t think there is competition, but one would be lying if one didn’t say that it can be hard. If someone is less busy, those things can change and sway. A piece of really good news is great and you are really pleased because you love them, but perhaps you think: ‘Oh God, I wish I could have some good news.’ That’s not competitive that’s just human nature.”

He will be 40 on his next birthday. The Big Four Oh. “In my healthier moments I don’t give a shit,” he laughs.

“Statisticians and mathematicians can tell you your average life expectancy. I think it is all unnecessary. I know how I feel and I feel roughly in the middle of life somehow, I don’t really care whether I’m 42 or 38. I have done a hell of a lot in my career. I want to do more. There’s always things that you could wish for that you don’t have. Just constantly being offered fantastic scripts in film. But I spread myself thin across the mediums. There’s good writing and there’s bad writing in all the different areas, so if you spread yourself thin then you are more likely to pick up satisfying work all over. You make connections and things will come back. But the last thing I would want Sam (Mendes) to be feeling when we meet is that I’ve got a look in my eye that says: “What are you up to? Is there a part in it for me?”

“If the right thing came along then he would, I hope, offer me something. We had a lot of fun working together. It is just a waste of mind space thinking about what you could be doing that you are not. It is just not worth it. You just do what you have as best as you can. I don’t regret much either. I don’t regret decisions that I’ve made and things that I’ve done. If the next 10 years were like the last 10 years then I’ll be a happy bunny.”

But you only have to take one look at the Glen physiognomy to realize that nature is going to be very kind to him. What you see on screen as the manifestation of a sex symbol actually looks even more handsome in the flesh. Oh lucky man. He says: “I feel about six inside. That’s why I can relate to my son as well as I can. I can’t take it seriously. Have a giggle.

“Being an actor in the first place is such an absurd thing to do, really. It’s a thing in which you play about with realities. When I’m old I would like to be sort of as irreverent and careless about things as I am now. I can’t see why old age needs to bring you down or make you earnest.”

– By Gavin Docherty

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He’s famed for taking on dark roles – but then Iain Glen has never been interested in the conventional.

Meeting Iain Glen is scary. All razor sharp cheekbones and muscled body, he writhes in his seat, meditating over questions. Any moment, he could strike, cobra-like, grasp your throat with his long, powerful fingers and slowly squeeze…

Of course, Glen is only that scary if you saw him in Lynda Plante’s Trial and Retribution, in which he played a slice-and-dice serial killer who, it was hinted, was Satan himself. Cold rage burned in his eyes. His body transformed into sinewed evil, he was chillingly mesmerising. Not the kind of man you’d want to be left alone with in an anteroom off a deserted restaurant with only a tape recorder to defend yourself with.

If you also saw him in the costume dramas Wives and Daughters and The Wyvern Mystery, you still might be uneasy, as he played men with secrets and secret agendas (though admittedly you might not be looking at his forehead and wondering what he’d look like with devil horns).

But even if you didn’t see him in The Blue Room with Nicole Kidman, You still wonder what he looks like naked. Doing cartwheels. This last thought effectively combats the fear he may otherwise provoke.

“I have done a few things that were on the extreme of human behaviour,” he laughs. “For Trial and Retribution, there was l lot of research inherent in the writing, but I did study serial killers and found that one thing that unites them is that they have very little guilt.

“They live normal lives and then this demon emerges. I remember when it was revealed Dennis Nilsen had severed heads and cut up bodies and there was a huge surprise at the Social Security office where he worked. They knew him as this amiable, quite shy guy, and there he was responsible for these terrible crimes.”

Glen is an astonishing actor. He goes from inhabiting and embodying one kind of character to another completely different one, being so convincing as both that you can only marvel at the depth and breadth of his talent, consistently demonstrated in the many major theatre roles he has taken on at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal Court in London. He modestly attributes his talent to a “childish ability to imagine myself as someone else.”

“It’s about your capacity to say: ‘I will be this person and get inside them and allow it to play through me’. It sounds a bit pretentious but that’s the gist of it. I watch my four-year-old child and nothing excites him better than me saying: ‘Okay, now we’re in a submarine and we’re underneath the water and a shark’s coming.’ As an actor, you never really lose that childish ability.”

Glen says he finds it comfortable and therapeutic to inhabit a situation other than his own while under the media’s gaze. ” Any situation in which I am asked to be myself, like film premiers, I feel a little uncomfortable. I used to be much more neurotic about it, flattering myself that I had a bit of the Robert De Niro about me, but it’s actually a genuine thing – it seems nothing to do with what I do.” Hence the shifting in his seat and constant fidgeting. Nervous more than murderous.

Now, Glen is turning his “childish ability” to two parts which are yet another departure for him: they are ordinary blokes. In Anchor Me, the latest drama from Ashley Pharaoh, he plays Nathan, a disenchanted married man who falls in love with someone else. In Glasgow Kiss he is Stuart, a widowed sports writer bringing up his son and trying not to fall apart or fall in love. With a beautifully written script, from Glasgow-based writer Stephen Greenhorn, an exquisite supporting cast and the city of Glasgow as much a character in as a backdrop to the story, Glasgow Kiss will dispel any thoughts you had of Iain Glen as Satin in disguise.

Jane Featherstone, the producer of Glasgow Kiss, says she was instantly attracted to Glen for the part of Stuart. “He needed to be sympathetic, warm and vulnerable without being weak, but he also needed to be funny, and a man Cara [Glasgow Kiss‘s leading lady] could fall in love with. It’s a great challenge for an actor to get the balance right, but Iain’s performance has incredible strength composure and humour.”

She is right. But Glen attributes much of the strength, composure and humour to the writing. “It’s hard to find TV like this. It is a lovely piece of writing. To find something like this that has a very light touch, is comedic and very moving is a blessing.” He continues: “Anchor Me and Glasgow Kiss are about ordinary people and ordinary issues. Whether the people are dealing with bereavement or falling in love, there’s a normality about the life they are leading.”

Glen tries hard to make his own life as “normal” as possible, even when circumstances- and his career- conspire to make it extra-ordinary. “I miss picking my boy up from school and reading to him at night. But it goes with the territory. I love being a dad. I never thought about it before I was one. I thought, ‘God. Imagine me as a father. Poor child. But now I can’t imagine not being a dad. I adore him and I don’t want to look back and think I should have been around for my child and I wasn’t.”

“Apart from last year – and I don’t intend to repeat that – I think we spend as much time together as the average family who work nine to five. Even if you’re working hard, you can have a month or two free here and there. It’s a trade off. The key is having quality time, and the time we have is glorious. My boy doesn’t try and give out guilt at all; it’s not in his nature. I’d understand if he said, ‘You’re going away again’, but he doesn’t. He waves from the window and says, ‘See ya! Have a lovely time! See you when you get back.’ He is such a positive sweet sort, and maybe it would be harder if he wasn’t.”

Glen says that the benefits of the job cancel out the difficulties, while work also provides the resources that soften the blows that living the life of an actor deals. With his mum and dad, Finlay has traveled to America, Africa, Australia (where the family spent New Year on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s yacht in Sydney harbour with the Hollywood ‘ber-couple and the then only Oscar-nominated director Sam Mendes), France and Ireland.

“I think it’s enormously important you also make sure you have time as a couple. If you’re scrambling between feeling guilty about being away and concentrating on your child, that will be at the expense of your relationship. You have to make time for yourselves too, otherwise what would be the point of any of it?” The very thought of Iain Glen with devil’s horns evaporates. What an angel.

– Gareth McLean

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Lloyd Trott:
It was good to see you back on stage in The Blue Room (David Hare’s new version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde in which Nicole Kidman played all the female roles and Iain all the males) at the Donmar Warehouse. It was highly effective theatre and a glamorous event, not least because of your stunning execution of a full cartwheel in a state of complete dishabille!

Questions have been raised as to whether our largest stages like the RST at Stratford-upon-Avon will be operable in the future without microphones, or at all, although this season’s Othello was a triumph. How did you find playing Henry V on that stage in 1994?

Iain Glen:
We were warned from the first day of rehearsal of the difficulties. Of course the play’s language, summoning up huge armies requires a heightened force, and in many ways lends itself to a large house.

But generally directors and actors should be careful of larger spaces. It can encourage a lack of detail. Initially I always imagine the performance in a studio space because it is the ever-changing detail that keeps an audience watching and listening. Once psychologically detailed, our job is to expand it vocally and physically to suit the space. There is a related problem: we are losing the ability to adapt to new spaces. The flexibility that came from the extensive touring of large-scale pieces is no longer a regular experience for younger actors. I was excited by the prospect of transferring The Blue Room from the small Donmar Warehouse to New York’s Court theatre, a 1,000 seat turn of the century theatre. The space was very congenial, but despite what I have said, it was impossible to recreate the intimacy at the Donmar. That sense of the audience being in the same room as us, being party to the private act of love making. But hopefully the detail remained and perhaps the production gained a clarity from the proscenium arch.

LT:
Did it improve during the run? Could have continued for longer?

IG:
The pre-bookings broke records, so we could have run for a very long time, but I think we had both had enough. It was a really special experience for Nic and I and we didn’t want it to spoil. Better leaving with a feeling of wishing you could do more.

LT:
I remember you had begun a professional career before coming to RADA, with at least one television play being broadcast during your training.

IG:
I acted while at University in Edinburgh. Performing in ‘Bent’ by Martin Sherman. I was noticed by an agent who managed to get me an Equity card, but I craved the substantial training that RADA offered.

LT:
What was the most significant component of your experience at RADA?

IG:
The opportunity to perform in 15 to 20 productions across the two and a half years, much much more than was provided by other drama schools. You were permanently employed as an actor. It also made so much more sense of the other classes within the training. All class work could be specifically related to the play on which you were working.

LT:
Is there anything you would have changed about your time at RADA?

IG:
I wish there had been more training for working with cameras.

LT:
We are planning much more – there is even a Media Working Party. You are maintaining a good balance between stage and screen; to what extent does the one inform the other?

IG:
Film begs spontaneity, freshness and relaxation. Being comfortable with yourself. It needs a different kind of concentration. Film gifts you this reality: You don’t have to imagine a lake, it is right there in front of you. This feeling grows with the intensity or abnormality of a role. For instance, when playing a prisoner (Larry Winters in Silent Scream) I had to be on my own when not filming through the day to maintain the appropriate level of isolation. It’s obvious really. It just helps your imagination towards the right place. Spontaneity and freshness are good things to take back into theatre, which can become stale through repetition. And theatre rehearsal, where you structure a role with a sense of the whole, is good to take to film, which often has no rehearsal and is always shot out of sequence.

LT:
Has the combination of your RADA training and subsequent performing experiences made you director-proof?

IG:
I’ve been lucky to work with really good directors. I shudder to think where some performances might have ended up without them. But I’ve worked with the odd crap one too. Nothing seems to provide an antidote to the depressing early days of rehearsal for a play when you lose faith in the director’s taste, followed by the creeping sense that these doubts are shared by your fellow actors. Then you are on to survival tactics.

If the material is less than good – and a lot of TV writing is less than good – you have to try and compensate. A common fault in weaker writing is to highlight the subtext. Instead of leaving the actor to reveal buried history, it over- states it on the surface. Characters inhabiting a context will reveal that context early so the story moves forward. Unconfident writers feel the need to state the context early so the audience understands why characters behave as they do. Chekhov was the master of buried exposition.

And of course I have fucked up a sweetly written script! In The Blue Room, where I desperately needed the guidance of both David Hare and Sam Mendes I would have been up shit creek within a week without them. Acting with Nicole was very comfortable. When rehearsals are going well, I can relax and go for indirectness. People become more and more indirect the more familiar the situation. ‘I love you’ expressed in a new relationship is probably direct, but four years later maybe while yawning and making a cup of tea. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it is less meant.

LT:
David Hare has spoken recently of the importance of rhythm in plays, which he has been made all the more aware of in translating Brecht, Chekhov and Pirandello. Colleagues at RADA concur. Yet it seems to elude many contemporary directors, which is frightening when you consider it’s the equivalent of a conductor forcing musicians to play out of tune. To what extent were you aware of the rhythm of The Blue Room?

IG:
I was all the more aware of the play’s musicology because the writing is so sparse. It was wonderful how open David was to changes that developed his intentions and Sam is never a director who settles early and rigidly, but goes on listening to the text through runs and rehearsals. Not a single sound cue that was in place for the opening night had been there in the previews.

Sam wrestled to find a concept that would reflect the quality of the sex that occurs between each new combination of man and woman in every scene of the play. Productions of La Ronde have usually either suspended the action or used a straight black out during the coitus. Sam hit upon the idea of projecting on the backdrop the running time of each coupling. This stark device conveyed surprisingly a whole range of information, comedic and sad, about the quality of the lovemaking.

But Sam wanted to support this with sounds. Initially white noise was used but in the first previews this sounded cold. Sam replaced this with individual cues for each scene, so there was Indian music for the actor and the model, lapping water for the politician and his wife in Venice, and so on. This seemed too cute. The final choice of crackling electricity conveying both temporary interruption of the visible action and the excitement of sex was very insistent but did not push the audience away.

LT:
Were there any textual alterations at the same stage to accommodate audience reaction? In La Ronde the successive sexual encounters seem to take place in a relatively short space of time, but in The Blue Room quite clearly a year has passed between the first and final episodes. I loved the fact that unlike La Ronde, where the characters only know the partner they encounter, some of The Blue Room characters know about or, as in the case of the student and the politician, have known each other for a very long time. This adds such resonance to the action.

IG:
What you are describing was developed further in previews. For instance the opening scene of perfunctory, grabbed sex between the girl and the cab driver, where he wants a quick lay but she is reaching out for more, used to end with her shouting after him “Fucking Wanker”. Sensing the preview audiences immediately warming to Nicole’s portrayal, David thought the line too harsh and changed it to “I’ll be here tomorrow”, which has a forward energy, ultimately picked up in the final scene when she tells the aristocrat that she has been seeing the cabbie for a year.

LT:
The exposure of The Blue Room in New York can only increase your visibility to film producers in America. How do you feel about this, especially if it led to more work there? How would it affect your family life?

IG:
Susannah and I have pretty much got the measure of each other now, and our relationship withstands short separations. It is difficult for our son (Finlay, 5). I hate being away from him for more than a week, and that is certainly a contributing factor to why I have never wanted to spend long speculative periods in L.A. However, I would like to make more movies.

LT:
Well, you will have packed a healthy number of U.K. screen projects into 1999: a TV classic serial (Elizabeth Gaskill’s Wives and Daughters, screened by BBC1 last Autumn/Winter): The Wyvern Mystery, a BBC film co-starring with Derek Jacobi; a feature film, Paranoia; a Granada drama, Anchor Me, with you playing a family man; and finishing the year with a Scottish film, Beautiful Creatures. Did you enjoy working with Derek Jacobi?

IG:
Yes, he was a treat. Jack Davenport and I couldn’t resist being irreverent, I told him my autobiography would be entitled My Days with the Knight. He’s very playful as an actor, but very focused. His speed of thought is phenomenal. Any actor who wants to see how you engage by swift-changing thought and emotion should have a look at Jacobi.

LT:
I have caught you in London during a week’s rehearsal for Anchor Me in which you play a father with a nearly grown up son. Did the luxury of a week’s rehearsal for a TV piece help acclimatise you to this advanced parenting?

IG:
Of course it’s a fine script by Ashley Pharoh and good writing demands rehearsal, it needs investigating. Sadly, it’s a mark of how barren some TV and film writing can be that no rehearsal time is scheduled. To be honest you would not know what to do with it because there’s bugger all to think about. If you have the luxury to pick work, make your first priority the writing, not the medium, the pay, or the venue.

– Lloyd Trott

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