Rufus Sewell

It's really amazing that you've had these two roles, and 13 years apart.
[Laughs.] To be perfectly honest, I loved doing Arcadia, but I never thought I was particularly great in it, and I'm not saying that for any reason but the fact that it's true. It was a fantastic part, but I don't feel I did anything special with it other than kind of play a certain part at a time when I looked the part and it was similar to people's idea of me and stuff. But I don't think it defined me in terms of my acting at the time. I never felt particularly satisfied with the job that I did on it. I mean, I thought it was wonderful material but it was never a benchmark of acting for me because I never thought I'd done that well in it.

Well, you must have been dazzled to be in that production.
Absolutely: In that way, certainly, in terms of the job itself and of being in something just as fabulous as that—all that was certainly a benchmark in a way that I think was quite useful for me, but it wasn't a benchmark in terms of personal achievement in my acting. It was an important step for me, but also something that I needed to get away from as soon as I'd done it, you know what I mean? The way I appeared to be in those two jobs—Arcadia and Middlemarch—crystallised me in some people's imaginations as the kind of actor they thought I was, which is actually both helpful and not helpful.

Rufus Sewell in Middlemarch

Middlemarch , as I recall, was being filmed at the same time.
Yeah, so I had the same hairdo for both. [Laughs.] If ever I am irritated by people regarding me as a certain type of actor, it tends to be that stereotype generated by those two roles, you know? So it was important in that sense but not something I'd want to maintain; it was something I was happy to get away from, even though at the end of my career, it will probably count as one of the great experiences for me but no sooner had I done that than I wanted to get away from it

The eternal conundrum of the actor. But your attitude must be healthy: it means you're always looking not to repeat the experience.
Yes, but unfortunately you can look not to repeat the experience as much as you like but if the only scripts you get sent involve wearing a plum-red Georgian coat and arriving on a horse, there's a limit to what you can do with the material. I speak from a position of actually feeling I've got away from that now, but it's taken a long time. Most scripts I receive, or did receive up until a few years ago, would start with that premise. Or at least a good 60-70 percent of them did.

It's interesting that you feel the theatre has that kind of lingering effect since one tends to think of theatre as so ephemeral.
For years I did plays because I loved doing plays but also because you got a chance to do staggeringly different stuff: I did Rat In the Skull with Stephen Daldry, as you know. But over the past few years, it has seemed as if a lot of things coming my way were sort of like Haymarket productions, with me as some slightly kind of romantic lead, as if that was their idea of the kind of thing I liked to do.

Oscar Wilde?
Or Terence Rattingan. All of it was good stuff, any one of which would be fantastic as an exercise, but as a group of things, you begin to step back and see that they're all kind of similar, and it's not attractive: one would be fantastic to do right after Rat In the Skull but not as a group. I did Luther because it was very different and fantastic, but then other ecclesiastical things were offered to me after that, though that could be more coincidence than anything else. I don't know what I've been waiting for to say yes to but I knew when Rock 'n' Roll came along, that was it.

What about the Scottish play?
In terms of my thinking, I regard that as something I'm not very happy with, although [producer] Thelma Holt is wonderful, and I'd love to work with her again and indeed all the people involved. But it was never my intention to do it on the West End: I never realised when it was first mooted that was where it was going to go. I thought it was going to be in some small theatre, you know.

Like the Donmar?
Something like that. That was the idea, as far as I knew: A funky little tryout to see how it goes. It suddenly seemed to transmogrify while I was filming away for months in Papua New Guinea where I got a satellite call saying it was going to be in the Queen's Theatre and there I was not quite knowing what the Queen's Theatre was and later finding out and being horrified. The play had initially been more about the idea of having a go, confident in the knowledge that you can fail, you can succeed, you can come somewhere in between and who cares? But something about it being this West End production made me kind of uncomfortable.

That didn't deter you from going to Los Angeles and being introduced around town as a Shakespearean actor.
That was before [laughs], when I hadn't even done any Shakespeare. I was described as a Shakespearean actor simply because I was English and I thought, well, if there was a drink in it for me, I'll just nod my head.

You lush.
[Laughs.] Yeah, that's me—I love a lager. A Bloody Mary, probably more to the point. But in terms of the experience, it's not a performance I really feel I landed and in terms of would I like to do it again, not really: I don't like the idea of repeating something so I can get it right, as if I was trying to prove some point. I normally love being on stage, but I didn't love being on stage in that.

Have you done any other Shakespeare?
You see, I want to do Shakespeare: I want to do lots of Shakespeare but I don't want to do Shakespeare and be starring in the West End. I don't think that's a very sensible, a very attractive proposition for me. Right now it would appear to be someone trying to make some point about me as opposed to my just trying to learn. I played assorted little parts years ago at the Crucible, Sheffield, in an As You Like It directed by Mark Brickman: I was Le Beau and various others. I like the idea of being part of a company, whether with a medium-sized part, a large part, a small part, but I haven't done a lot.

Tom Stoppard & Rufus Sewell

Had you and Tom Stoppard flirted with other opportunities along the way?
Not The Invention of Love. The Coast of Utopia I read, but that didn't work out for a number of reasons. So, yes, I was very glad when they came back again with this.

And, of course it's unusual to have a contemporary playwright associated with an actor—it's a bit like Alan Bennett and, say, Maggie Smith.Yeah, it's fantastic. Before this, I was just like someone who had a job in a Stoppard play; now, it has something of a slightly different feel to it, which is wonderful.

Tom should write another for you in 13 years—if he's still writing.
Or if I'm still acting. Let's not tempt fate.

Did it feel like a homecoming, with Trevor Nunn there as well?
No, I try to avoid any cosy sensations like that. Now that the play is up and running, almost with the benefit of hindsight already at least as regards the opening of it, I can see the way it's regarded at least. But at the time it was just a part in a play and the main concern as ever was it not being rubbish, me not letting people down. So, no, the idea of [the role of Jan] being a kind of slightly ghostly doppelganger of Tom Stoppard or anything like that, all those thoughts I just thought were really profoundly unhelpful or kind of scary. I just regarded it as a script.

The Stoppard alter ego thing is fascinating: Jan seems as close as he's yet come in a play to writing some sort of alternate version of himself.
Yeah but it's certainly not fascinating while you're doing it. At the time, it was just about rehearsals and "this is quite a nice part"; I tried not to think symbolically about any of it or about what any of it meant. These things are not useful to have in your head.

I remember you telling me about Arcadia that, as you put it, "I don't know if I could explain Arcadia but I could be in it and that's more important"—which I thought was great.
Yeah, exactly.

Did this feel like the same kind of slab of intellect?
Yes, though with a very different character to it. It felt like a completely new experience because Arcadia is just this fizzing, delicious kind of cake. It had a certain deliciousness, a kind of dexterity, a pyrotechnical joy to the language in Arcadia specifically, which is part of the character of that play: this fantastic wit which is very much characteristic of Arcadia. Rock 'n' Roll is less showy, in a way. It still has that brilliance: it's evidently intellectually incredibly astute—people think and talk with brilliance. But it seems kind of muscularly different. As a result, it never felt like this is the second stage of my Stoppard education. It just felt like a completely new job, with a completely different energy to the characters as well.

I think the title is interesting, since "rock 'n' roll" is a phrase that seems recognisable to an awful lot of us, whereas Arcadia from its title onward suggested something ``other''—albeit, as you say, deliciously so.
[Laughs.] Well, I'm sure we're getting people who are coming to see us because they've seen We Will Rock You.

Hmmm. Now, there's a thought: Tom Stoppard meets Queen.
But there is that thing about Stoppard in my experience, which is his generosity. It's like he loans you his intellect for a few hours until you get home and then suddenly it starts to vaporise. It's like in the cab home, you could probably quite confidently phone your mother-in-law and explain the plot to her and the next day, you'd have to reach for the script. It's like, "Oh no, it's simple the reason Sappho is connected to the play; oh, hold on, why is it? Hold on!" You know what I mean?

Indeed I do.
But you do feel Tom loans you his brilliance.

That's a lovely phrase. People often say with Stoppard plays that they feel smarter afterward than they did when they went in. So does he anatomise the play for his actors in rehearsal?
Trevor does that, though Tom will come into it if absolutely necessary. Often it's quite interesting to have Trevor explain to Tom what Tom's done and that's wonderful, you know. And he does: it's a great relationship; Tom has total trust in Trevor, and Trevor has the confidence. And there's humour in it, too. Tom will remain quite quiet but you know if it goes off course, he's there to steer it back.

How did you connect to the role? You mention having been to Prague so many times for your various films, so presumably you knew the culture in which the play is marinated.
Well, yes, though that's potentially misleading. I know Mammon: I know Hollywood-in-Prague: the Prague I know is dangerously different if one were going to use it as a reference point.

Rufus Sewell

Do you have friends there?
I do. There's Milan, who's been my driver. But in terms of identifying with the part, when I first read it, I just thought, well, that's a great part but I mean Jan's not like me, really. In the end you use your own energy where applicable. It's not like I read the play and thought, oh I so understand this. But I had the confidence that I would learn to.

And that the parameters of it were at last reasonably familiar: the terrain, the accent.
Yeah, and also when you're working with someone like Trevor Nunn, you think, I'm not certain how I could play this but I guess he sees how I can. I didn't go into it with the confidence that I could do it but that blind leap is part of the job sometimes if you're lucky. What I kind of live for as an actor are these times when you think, Oh Christ, I hope I can do this rather than two pages in going, yeah I know I can do this, which is actually patently sad

But why all this film work in Prague?
Just that it's cheap. I did A Knight's Tale there, Tristan and Isolde, Charles II there, The Illusionist: [to himself] what else did I do? Well, that's enough for the moment. After a while I thought, I don't want to go there again and then a few months later I'd think, oh why not. I don't want to be the sort of person who counts the location as the important thing; It's always got to be about the work. I love Prague but you can get bored with anywhere. And I'd rather be bored with somewhere I like than somewhere I don't like.

You have an amazing facility for accents, as Rock 'N' Roll proves, with your deft vocal weave from English to Czech and back again. You should do some American work.
There are so many things I'd like to do. I've always loved doing accents; I love the freedom it gives me. Those limitations, those impositions: they kind of free up the other bits. It's like if you want to physically pull yourself up, tie yourself to a chair. In Rock 'n' Roll, Tom would remark when the accent was getting too strong, so that the words would recede behind the accent—the meaning would disappear. Accents are fine as long as what you're saying takes precedence.

You have spoken of waiting your entire career as an actor to be the age you are now, as if you were growing into a possible vision of yourself.
I'm 38, and I think this was the age I was supposed to be as an actor. I feel kind of in myself in a way that I wasn't before in many, many ways. I 'm hoping that reflects itself in my work; whether that reflects itself in my career is entirely out of my hands, but I do feel connected to the work in a way I haven't felt before.

Well, women are told that after 30 it's all over. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Maybe the business is that way for some men as well. It's certainly true that there are some actresses who come into their proper age at 38—whether they come into their career is a different question and out of their hands. Looking around at drama school when we were all 20 or 21 years old, you would look around and think, That person's an 18-year-old actor and that person's a 30-year-old actor: you have a feeling some people have an age they should be in terms of their work, and I feel I've always been in my 30s. As a young actor, I never believed myself physically. That's why I always felt an imposter when I was supposed to be romantic or a juvie. I never quite bought it.

Miranda Colchester & Rufus Sewell in Rock 'N' Roll

It's that thing of becoming a character actor.
Absolutely. I think I now have the confidence to know actually that, good or bad, whatever I am is enough. When you're younger, there's that thing of second-guessing what other people think you are because if you don't think you are what other people are telling you you are, then you get into that bizarre realm of trying to impersonate other people's idea of you—which I have never felt the pressure of when I doing what I've regarded as a character part.

And there was all the pressure around Interview with the Vampire: being groomed to be the next Tom Cruise. Maybe that never leaves?
I don't know. I think the things that come to me easily at least come to me for a reason—because I don't particularly want them. [Laughs.] But generally the things work-wise I really want to do are those that I have to fight for and I don't resent that, you know? But I expect for a long time to have to fight and test for the parts I really want because the reason I really want them is because I haven't done them before and if I haven't done them before you can bet that's because there's a bunch of accountants or not particularly imaginative people who think I can't do them. In the main, they want someone who they've seen do it before, and if I have done it before, I wouldn't want to bloody do it. And so invariably at the moment, if there's a part I would burn to do, then I'd have to fight tooth and nail to do it.

You're talking movies. Presumably you get your theatrical pick.
I don't know. In this country I haven't been offered a Chekhov play ever, or Ibsen. I would love to, but I've never been offered one. That's just the way the cookie crumbles—there's plenty of things I'd like to do.

And, I gather, plenty of films on offer.
I've got a bunch coming up. I did this retold version of The Taming of the Shrew, which for me was a walk in the park because it was so much fun and quite similar to my natural energy, but as far as the people making it were concerned, they weren't sure whether I could do comedy; I did try to get over my initial irritation at that thought. But the point is that I have been in a situation where I've just had to kind of recast my stereotype every few years. In a way I should try to see that as a compliment: if I do the job well enough that that's all people think I can do, then that's probably good.

Exactly. Where did Cold Comfort Farm fall into the Middlemarch glamour boy scenario?
That was me trying to do a pastiche and sort of kill it, and it didn't work. That was my idea. Then it was baddies for a while. I've also had a run of kings—but that's fine, as long as it keeps changing. And Tristan and Isolde in which I played a goodie, and I even got asked, “Did I think I was capable of playing a good guy?” It was so difficult not to tell her to fuck off. And The Illusionist, a film I've done with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti: that's a really twisted and kind of unhappy character, an Austrian, and in the trailer that's me shouting.

I would think you'd love working with Paul Giamatti.
Paul's lovely; I had great fun with him. Then I did Amazing Grace, Michael Apted's film about the abolition of the slave trade: an English film and Wilberforce and Pitt, with Ioan Gruffudd and Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Romola Garai. I play Thomas Clarkson, who was one of the first anti-slavery campaigners, one of the first humanitarian campaigners—a gruff, huge man so it was quite a physical transformation. It's a great part. Then there was The Holiday, which is a big American film, and I have a small part, and I like to say that I'm showing my versatility because not only can I play assholes, I can now play wankers as well.

Tell me more.
I play a wanker in that—that's all you need to know. I didn't have great fun in it. I'm just a British wanker in L.A., and I'm not going to qualify it with any more explanation than that. But that's Jude Law and Kate Winslet and Jack Black and Cameron Diaz and Eli Wallach.

How amazing.
The trade-off for me to be in such illustrious company is to play a twat but he's quite fun, this particular twat. But he's definitely [stops himself]—you know, there's a certain amount of pressure to talk up your character and dignify him but no; this one is just a wanker.

I recall a few years ago when Jude Law was in six movies and everyone was talking about this extraordinary season of Jude. This sounds like a similar season for you.
Well, this is all going to be much smaller. The good thing about this is that there's nothing riding on it. It can't hit or fail as far as I'm concerned; there are no films riding on my name. If nothing really happens with them, then that's OK. All I want to get out of this is to show people what I can do.

Did you make a decision to let them all happen at once?
No, if I'd had these parts before I'd have done them before. But the reason it's a good time is that finally I'm getting these parts which hadn't been coming my

Sophia Myles & Rufus Sewell in Tristan and Isolde

way. The parts I've wanted to do in films are ones where I've seen the films and thought, “Oh why didn't I get seen for that?” It seems that's changing; I'm getting a look-in now. People are beginning to realise I can do these things

It sounds as if you did five or six things on the trot.
Not really on the trot but they're coming out in such a way that it would seem like that. Tristan took about four months, and then James Franco hurt his knee so we had three months off but the knee didn't recover in time and three months later he hurt it again, so we're talking about the last two to three years of work all coming out now, though, I mean, Tristan has already come out. But it's all part of the same thing for me: they're all different roles.

And roles where the thing itself doesn't depend on you, as it more or less does in Rock 'N' Roll, where Jan is the lynchpin of the play. At the moment it's hard to imagine someone else doing the role.
I just don't want that to happen for as long as possible and unfortunately that means me doing it. If I could just stick a kind of actor's doorstop in there!

Has this play changed your rock and roll listening?
Not really. There are plenty of things in the soundtrack that I liked anyway. I always liked the Velvet Underground, but I was never a bong-smoking Pink Floyd man.

Did you attend their recent reunion concert at the Albert Hall?
Yeah we did, but that was a school outing with Tom. We were there on the night David Bowie came on. We're also going to see the Stones on another school outing. That's great to go with Tom because then we get to go backstage with sandwiches.

Mick Jagger & date L'Wren Scott at the opening of Rock 'N' Roll

I like the idea of these school outings. On Arcadia, did you all flock en masse to Capability Brown gardens?
I think we did but I didn't go.

How did you actually get this role? Did Tom send it to you?
I was doing Amazing Grace when I got the offer, and I had lunch with Trevor and he gave me the script and then I met up with him again so he could explain it to me. We talked about the play and then I read it again and phoned him and said yeah, I would do it.

Are you a good reader of scripts? Judi Dench famously says, for instance, that she is not.
People get superstitious and find ways of reading scripts that work for them. It's difficult. I need to read it, give it to close friends, then read it and read it again. The thing is, you automatically know when something's good. With Rock 'N' Roll, it wasn't about working out whether it was good or not but working out what the shape of it was, what the shape of the character was.

Do you believe in the much-vaunted division in Stoppard between head and heart?
I don't know. I've done two plays of his, and I find they're both very emotional plays, so I don't know. I'm familiar with the kinds of things people say but you know I don't always agree. I think it's Tom's passion for the intellectual things that makes the plays interesting; if it were just the intellect, none of it would be interesting. I only really know two Stoppard plays intimately, so I don't feel qualified to talk outside those, but I think those two plays are very emotional. This one even has an happy ending, but only because Tom chooses to end it in 1990

What was opening night like with Vaclav Havel there in the audience seconds from Raine Spencer [Princess Diana's stepmother]?
[Laughs.] I didn't really feel her presence I have to say.

And David Gilmour and Mick Jagger? You must have known Havel would be there.
Yeah, we knew Havel would be there, and it was extraordinary. At the party afterwards, I had a bigger knot in my stomach than I'd had on stage; I had to occasionally pretend I was going to the bathroom in order to kind of stand outside and do some breathing every once in a while. It wasn't nerves, it was just a knot, since it was all very intense. We'd had previews for 10 days when I was used to having a cigarette and going back home on the Central Line and then suddenly to do [the opening] and have this hoopla going on.

God, in New York a play as ambitious as this would have previewed for five weeks.
Would it? Ten days of previews for us was an extraordinarily long amount of time, and it was vital. The play changed a lot over the course of those 10 days.

So what did Havel say?
It was a handshake and move on. I didn't want to try and get anything important out of him. In fact, I was kind of a little uncomfortable talking to him; it was all a little too close. I didn't want to get too close to see if he liked it or not. I would rather just imagine that he did and keep out of his way in case the truth got in there.

So is this the optimal time now in life of a show, when you've opened, had the West End transfer, and everything's kind of settling in?
I'm wary of saying anything like that an hour before I go and perform it. I suspect so, insofar as this is when the production can find its balance. From there on, all sorts of strange things can happen to a production; it can leave your grasp and come back again.

Alice Eve & Rufus Sewell in Rock 'N' Roll

Will this be longest sustained theatrical run you've had?
Yeah, I think it will. It's going to be an interesting test. You get into the habit as an actor of saying you're a gypsy, so it's slightly embarrassing suddenly finding that the routine is actually quite pleasant: I don't want my mates to find out. I'm enjoying the routine of it at the moment, but we're relatively early on, you know.

It's a shame that Translations didn't run longer in New York.
It's a stunning play, just stunning, and I regard that as a really happy memory, even though we closed. But I don't know how much I would have got it, having never seen it before, and I certainly never saw our production. I do know that one of the people who purported to be one of the producers came back and talked to us before opening night and asked whether there was any chance of bringing on more people at the end. [Laughs in disbelief.] That was very interesting: "Just bring more people on at the end." That was his kind of number.

And you almost came to Broadway early last season.
I nearly did [Conor McPherson's] Shining City recently [playing the role of the therapist at what was then the Plymouth Theatre]. But two days before my family was supposed to come out, I got a call from the producer saying that it wasn't happening. I was really looking forward to it but you know, as it turned out it was good that it didn't happen because other stuff happened instead. What was a shame was that I'd already gone out and found the apartment and put down months and months of money on it.

Which you got back, I assume.
Not all of it. Then two days before, I got a call saying it's not happening and the reason I was given was because of a tiff between the producer and the director because of his apartment. But then I don't think I'd be doing this play now for example, if I'd done that.

Did the producer compensate you?
As a way to make it up for me, he rang to ask me whether I would like to appear in Chicago for a brief stint.

You're pulling my leg.
No. I didn't reply. [Laughs hard.]

Do you sing by the way?
If I did, I wouldn't tell him.

So we're waiting for your musical.
Well, keep waiting. It was part of my Central training but it was the part where I was in the second-year shower room, smoking.

I love the way you refer to the Central School of Speech and Drama as the Central School of Screech and Trauma: did you coin that phrase?
No, it's not a Rufus original.

Did you enjoy it?
It was OK, it wasn't a defining time for me. They had their favourites, and I wasn't one of them, but that was probably good for me. I learned a lot but it wasn't like a fabulous time for me. I know other people who liked their time at drama school more than I did. What was interesting was that drama school gave me my instincts by taking them away: you kind of voluntarily give them up. I'm not even sure I was asked to but you do, and you stop doing all the stuff you did that kind of worked well. When you then start to do it again, you hold on to it, and then it's a lot more resilient. What you learn is that what might have seemed the airy-fairy things I might do for myself are now encased in iron and I will protect my right to do them.

And here you now are in Rock 'n' Roll ageing 22 years every night as you switch countries—and wigs. How many wigs are there backstage?
Just two: there's my hair which I do various things with, and then a very short wig and then a long wig which I have in and out of a ponytail. [Laughs.]. No one knows what's me and what's not.