The Times (The Last Front)
Posted: Saturday, October 26, 2024
Iain Glen: ‘Acting was better before the Instagram generation’
The Scottish star says young actors now have to worry about honing their social media profiles as well as their craft.
There is a certain age when a man with a successful career and a happy home life might be thinking about retirement. But not the actor Iain Glen.
“Maybe you’re right and I don’t have to keep going,” he says with a smile and shrug. “I can make active choices to work less, but the only reason I want to work less is because families are commitments. When I work, I enjoy it as much as I ever did.”
Over nearly four decades since he graduated from Rada in 1985, having won the Bancroft gold medal for best actor, Glen, 63, has been a headline stage act, whether turning cartwheels naked in front of the half-nude Nicole Kidman, in David Hare’s The Blue Room, a 1998 sensation, or for winning awards as Shakespeare’s Henry V.
On screen he is world famous as the lovelorn Jorah Mormont, present through all eight seasons of Sky TV’s Game of Thrones, with scores of other notable performances including three leading roles in the Resident Evil blockbuster franchise, and on the small screen, as the villainous Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey, Throughout, his finely chiselled chin, contrives to make his bad guys almost more compelling than his romantic leads.
The last big newspaper profile homed in on his being a “sex symbol in his sixties” but he bats away that notion away with an embarrassed wave of his hand. “You know, I live with it, I shoulder it. It’s …” he reaches for a word. “… funny. What else can I say?”
Among a handful of projects his latest movie, The Last Front, has been a particular pleasure. Glen revelled in acting as a senior as much among the cast and crew on the real-time set, as he did in the fictional world of his character.
He stars as a widower, Leonard, a loving father, whose life is torn apart in the early days of the First World War when a German platoon with a psychopathic leader marches on to his farm, killing at random. Leonard survives but when the soldiers decide to head towards the local village, his neighbours turn to him for salvation.
Unusually the scenario depicts the war before its descent into mutual annihilation in the trenches. Love stories, class distinctions and deep family allegiances are tangled up in the plot, though resolution arrives in the time-honoured confrontation between good and evil with, as one admiring US reviewer put it, Glen “going full John Wayne” in the finale.
A first feature film by Julien Hayet-Kerknawi, the young Belgian director had the good sense to lean on his star for help and advice. Glen says he “enjoyed being a kind of senior voice on the piece.”
The director had a “strong hold” on what he wanted but would ask his star, “What do you feel about this? What do you think?” or, says the actor, “we would find ourselves in some of the group scenes and I could see that someone needed to step in.
“I had a group of actors around me who I think looked to me for how things might be staged or for affirmation. Without treading on anyone’s toes, I enjoyed that part of it. I felt it mirrored the role that I was playing within the piece. My character Leonard is being asked to be the figurehead of resistance.”
Glen looks almost absurdly relaxed speaking over Zoom, from his “man cave” in the garden of the home in Dulwich, south London, he shares with Charlotte Emmerson, his wife, and their two school age daughters. He has a son Finlay, a theatre director, by his first marriage.
On the wall behind him are two portraits of his wife, and others of Marlon Brando “just because I like the shot”, David Bowie, a musical and theatrical hero, and Samuel Beckett, the Nobel prize-winning writer.
He met Beckett thanks to a role alongside Billie Whitelaw in an Eighties television drama. Soon afterwards he was in France and Whitelaw, Beckett’s muse, invited him to attend a play rehearsal held in a café near the writer’s home in Paris.
“Beckett had no peripheral vision so I was able to sit quite close without disturbing them,” Glen recalls. “He guided Billie through the monologues offering the odd adjective to capture the tenor of any given line. ‘more plaintive Billie’ or ‘softer, elegiac’ that sort of thing.
“After the rehearsal Billie introduced me and he was utterly charming. He was like an owl erect, still, wise with penetrating eyes. He had that wonderfully lined face with all contours leading to those eyes.”
If it feels like a tale from another era, essentially it is. Face-to-face auditions, meetings with famous directors, writers and fellow actors are no longer a given in an age when social media is dominant.
Not so long ago Glen was advised if he wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram he would be in trouble, because the studios “are looking at your followers”. He had never paid much attention until he was working on the first series of the Amazon thriller, The Rig, and his daughter visited the set in Leith, she then posted about it on social media.
Glen went to his co-star Emily Hampshire, the Canadian actor who made her name as Stevie in Schitt’s Creek, and said, “Listen, can you get rid of this for me? I don’t know what my daughter’s done, but she’s put something up in my name.”
Hampshire did the opposite, he recalls.“Emily took a series of pictures of me looking confused about Instagram and then delighted. She did a little montage thing, and made it funny.”
She helped him open an account and “before I knew it, I had hundreds of thousands of followers. I can’t go back now.”
Social media has created other tyrannies for his profession. Over ten years filming Game of Thrones, Glen played opposite Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen, increasingly aware of how hard his younger co-star was working off-set to win her next part.
“At the weekend she was self-taping here, self-taping there,” he said. “My God — when I started out, you simply went to a casting director or met a director. It was by choice, because they couldn’t get the world and his wife into every audition.
“Now, literally, they put the word out. ‘OK, we’re looking for such and such’ and then all the casting rights go to an agency. They might watch 100 self tapes, so people have to self-tape all the time. I feel very lucky I’ve somehow body swerved that, it wasn’t part of my thing.”
His modus operandi ,“call me old fashioned” he says, is to perform as best he can in any role, leaving the producer and director thinking, “I’d quite like to work with him again.” He adds: “That’s the best way to find the work you want to do — not by boosting your half a million followers on Instagram to a million.”
He says he feels awkward talking about himself, and one aspect of showbusiness he never much enjoyed is publicity, still less on the few occasions when he has found himself at the heart of unwanted attention.
In 2001, a couple of years after The Blue Room closed, Hollywood’s golden couple, Kidman and Tom Cruise split. Glen took a flight to Sydney to comfort Kidman, his former co-star and when his own first marriage to Susannah Harker broke down the following year, although all parties deny the incidents are connected, the tabloids were on him.
For years afterwards, this “perfect storm” always came up in interviews, he recalls. “Honestly it was just boring. I feel for other people whose lives are torn apart or exposed [in the press], but I cannot complain. It was very minor.”
Glen, from Edinburgh, is the third of three sons. His mother, Alison, was an occupational therapist by training and a good amateur painter, while Hamish, his father, was manager of the Scottish Investment Trust, and a lover of Scottish country dancing.
He attended Edinburgh Academy through a period in the school’s history now infamous for child abuse. It was Glen who first exposed the scandal with an interview in 2001, describing how he and other boys were sexually assaulted by masters in the showers after rugby.
Only a “minority of masters” were involved, he said, “they got you at an age where you are not quite sure what’s going on.” In the interview he added, there was a continual “air of violence” around the school.
Now he says: “It was an honest appraisal about what happened and what I felt about it. The police got involved to some degree, and then everyone forgot about it.”
When the issue re-emerged in recent years, he remained silent. “I don’t want to speak about it,” he says. “A point comes when time passes so far that you think the battle should have been fought.”
At school, he was a contemporary of the broadcaster Nicky Campbell, one of his great friends. They were “cheeky chaps,” Glen says, fond of pranking a local radio phone-in, by faking ever more bizarre characters, their calls occasionally dominating the show.
The actor adopts the wheedling voice of one of his creations, a fictitious manufacturer who rang in to say he had invented “a glue that’s safe for the children to sniff, they can sniff away to the heart’s content but it’s still got a great adhesive quality.”
Glen went on to the University of Aberdeen where he joined a drama society and something clicked. He says: “The moment I started doing it, it gave me the desire to get to know this strange thing, performing in plays. I had a laser focus immediately.”
Forty years later, he says he is considering a return to the stage in the new year although, typically, he already has projects lined up across many other platforms.
On Apple+ Glen is Pete Nichols, the estranged father of Juliette, the heroine, played by Rebecca Ferguson in Silo, a dystopian science fiction thriller, and he has been praised for his standout performance in The Last Days of the Space Age, a dramatisation of real events for Disney+, when Skylab, Nasa’s first space station, crashed to earth in Western Australia in 1979.
This weekend he is doing a turn at London’s Comic Con exhibition, to promote the second series of the Netflix thriller, The Rig, in which he plays Magnus, the charismatic production manager of an ill-fated North Sea platform.
Will he ever stop? “No, I can’t see myself retiring. Success is nothing to do with publicity, of being known for this or that, or for being a superstar. Success to me has always been about having choice in what I do. And in that I’ve been incredibly lucky.”
The Last Front is in cinemas from Friday November 1
– Interview by Mike Wade
