The Express (The Last Front)
Posted: Friday, November 1, 2024
Iain Glen: Fame can be superficially attractive but it won’t keep you going
Iain Glen likes to play a game with his children when they’re out in public. It involves the RADA-trained actor tripping convincingly, a trick which amused his friends when he was younger and still delights Finlay, 29, Mary, 17, and Juliet, 11. “It’ll look like I really hurt myself in a humiliating way,” explains Glen of his antics. “I’ll be in a restaurant and my children will say, ‘Can you go to the toilet and accidentally fall over?’”
It’s the mark of a man who, clearly, doesn’t take himself overly seriously. He chortles: “I enjoy doing it, even though a lot of people might know who I am.”
Hordes undoubtedly do, thanks to Glen’s fame as Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, HBO’s smash-hit series based on the author George RR Martin’s books. Glen starred in all eight seasons and, five years on, is recognised wherever he goes.
“It’s Thrones, it’s weird,” smiles the effortlessly debonair Scot, who at 63 still boasts strawberry-blond hair, plus sharp cheekbones, and peppers his sentences with vocal impressions and swear words. “Globally it was such a massive hit. I went to film in India recently and it’s scary… you’re stepping off the plane and someone’s wanting a photo.
“We’re in Mumbai or f***ing Iceland. You can be anywhere and get recognised.”
His wife, actress Charlotte Emmerson, 53, with whom he shares his two daughters, is his fame barometer. “She might say, ‘No one’s coming up to you, are they? Are you getting worried?’ Or it’s, ‘You’re very popular today. I can’t move without someone saying something to you!’”
Glen is generally relaxed about the invasiveness of fame – but, like his youngest child Juliet, is naturally shy and values his private space. “She’s got a strange extrovert-introvert personality, which reminds me a little bit of myself when I was younger,” Iain explains. “I would be painfully shy a lot of the time and then suddenly do something ridiculously ‘out there’ for attention.”
Which is why, I suppose, he occasionally hurls his body across the floor of a busy restaurant. Today, Edinburgh-born Glen is speaking to me from his home in Dulwich, south London.
His internet connection is shaky so our conversation, involving one failed Zoom and four separate phone calls, leaves some sentences hanging in mid-air. Nonetheless, he’s amiable and great fun, having enjoyed success on stage and screen – receiving three Laurence Olivier nominations for best actor for Martin Guerre, The Crucible and The Blue Room.
In the headline-grabbing latter, he performed naked cartwheels in front of a half-naked Nicole Kidman. Prior to Game of Thrones, he starred as wealthy media magnate Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey and also plays a leading role in Amazon Prime supernatural thriller The Rig.
These days, however, he prefers to work less.
“I enjoy doing it as much as I ever did but I don’t have a burning desire to be constantly working,” Glen says.
Yet he was keen to do The Last Front, a new drama about the horror of the First World War, as seen through the eyes of ordinary citizens. “It zones in on the residents of a sleepy Belgian village who are torn apart by a German battalion passing through in the early stage of the war,” explains Glen.
“I thought that they must be similar to the people of Ukraine at the start where they had no idea what was about to hit and then suddenly people’s lives were annihilated or transformed.”
Glen stars as a widowed father and farmer who must overcome personal tragedy to save his neighbours from impending doom.
“The film is set in a pastoral, peaceful, idyllic setting in Belgium but it could have been many places in Europe at that time,” he explains.
It’s not a big-action war epic but the film has enough shocking scenes of violent death. How does he prepare for emotionally tough scenes?
“It’s changed over the years,” he tells me. “I do have an emotional recall, little trigger things that I can go to in my head that will access an emotion quickly for me. They might be things I’ve experienced or which immediately make me feel vulnerable or upset.
“But to play the scene properly, you have to go from ‘life’s normal’ to ‘life’s really not normal’ so you have to let things take you in the moment.”
Glen normally requests directors shoot these scenes up close first to capture the actors’ raw emotions before they take the necessary wide-angled shots.
Explaining this reasoning, he says: “It’s like putting yourself through a little car accident. You pretend to yourself through the course of however many hours of shooting something that you’re looking at something distressing. Emotionally, my brain and heart get very confused and I’m pretty exhausted by the end of the day.”
He’s pleased The Last Front has a cinema release, and has been warmly received in Europe, despite it being an English-speaking film with non-Belgian actors.
“This is a Belgian story, but I hope it doesn’t get in the way of most people’s enjoyment of it. Even when we opened in Belgium, the one question I never got asked was, ‘Why the f***k are you doing this? Why aren’t we watching a Belgian film with Belgian actors?’ I feel very lucky that, in the history of film, English has often been used to find a broader audience.”
Does he worry about certain aspects of filmmaking being viewed as problematic these days? “I think maybe it is…” he begins before but deviating into a slightly long-winded explanation about how blessed he is to be a British actor because of the availability of work.
But he does admit to passing on one project recently, telling me gnomically: “It would have involved another actor who had been through quite a troubled past and I might not have been aware of accusations that had been sort of proved against them in a different era.”
He hesitates. “You have to be so careful of saying, ‘I’m not going to do that’, because of unproven claims, but these have been proven. I quite liked the script but I didn’t think that would be a good move. I didn’t want to be a part of the film for that reason.”
He remains immensely proud of Game of Thrones. His closest friend on set was Emilia Clarke, who played the mercurial queen Daenerys Targaryen.
Some of the cast stay in touch on WhatsApp and a few are mutual Man Utd fans.
“There is the odd party here and there, and we keep an eye out for each other,” he smiles.
We’re speaking several days after the sudden and tragic death of Liam Payne, whose personal struggles with fame and alcohol were well documented. Some of Glen’s Game of Thrones colleagues have spoken of their own struggles in light of their own superstardom – and his advice for young actors is to avoid chasing fame.
“If that’s a goal, then I would really forget about it,” he says. “To sustain a lifetime as an actor, you’ve really got to want to do the acty bit and know that there’s a really high chance that no one will ever know who you are.
“It’s the best business in the world but do not get sucked into some notion of when you’re going to be well-known, how you can become well-known and how fame might feel. I do bump into it quite a lot, even with my kids or other people.
“There is an idea that a loose notion of fame can be superficially attractive, but it won’t keep you going.”
Glen has previously said he struggled academically at school and “was a bit of a rebel” who “scraped his way” into Aberdeen University. “Socially, I don’t like big groups of people and I’m not good at that. I prefer a one-to-one [interaction],” he says.
Even giving interviews and attending events can be tortuous.
“I play the game because I have to. I walk the red carpet for the show I’m doing, and believe in it. I can do all that now. I didn’t used to enjoy it, I thought it was agony.”
Did he have to teach himself how to overcome that then?
“Yeah, a little bit. The truth is that most people think if you’re an actor, you’re probably extroverted and it’s just not true for so many actors. What we like is for people to give us a really lovely set of lines that we can learn and pretend are ours to say.
“I can express love very beautifully but it’s only because someone has written a lovely line for me to express and that’s very different from being me, having to be myself. In fact, it’s almost a polar opposite.
“For a lot of the time when I was younger, I would get tied in knots because it felt like nothing to do with acting to me. I would do a play or film and then, having to speak about it or be yourself, be interviewed about what you’re interested in, what you did – it felt completely alien and irrelevant, without being too earnest.”
It is a blessing that global fame came much later for him then?
“I do, I think it would have been very… I come from a very solid family so I would have found it difficult,” he stutters (his mother, Alison, trained as a physiotherapist, and his father Hamish worked in finance). “I don’t think it would have spun me out in a dangerous way but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. It would have made me more insular and self-conscious and I would have found it very difficult to deal with when I was younger.”
Today, despite his vow to work less, he has umpteen projects on the go.
Right now, he can be seen in the Disney+ original series, The Last Days of the Space Age, about the fallout of NASA’s first space station crashing to Earth in Perth in 1979. And season two of The Rig returns in January.
“I left RADA thinking I was going to have a serious career in theatre and my first jobs were in front of a camera,” he smiles. “I didn’t look back from there.”
Occasionally he has a wobble when he looks at his contemporaries, who have scored phenomenal leading role successes in their 50s and 60s.
“I console myself – well, what was so lucky for me that from the age of 20, I was always busy and doing what I wanted to do,” he adds. And that is the key to success, he suggests.
“Success is making active choices about what you want to do, not being forced to do an advert because you need to earn something. I’ve never had that and I do not take for granted how lucky I was.”
The Last Front is in cinemas now.
– Interview by Kat Hopps.
