Post by beckettologist on Jun 20, 2010 17:25:29 GMT -5
This was taken down or archived by the Sunday Times. I had the foresight to PDF it but can't seem to get a PDF into Photobucket so here is the text:
Thank god for small mercies
Tom Hollander’s brilliant new BBC2 sitcom about an inner-city vicar finds him in a more humble mode than we've previously seen him
The Sunday Times
Jasper Rees
Published: 18 June 2010
A few years ago, something curious happened to Tom Hollander. He grew up. As a brilliant young actor, he won an Ian Charleson
award for a series of stage performances whose governing tone was mercurial energy. But as he moved into film, the sense was of an actor who was more eager to be noticed than believed. In the past few years, however, he has found a vulnerable side, most recently as a hapless minister in In the Loop, and has become much easier to love.Hollander, 42, has a suitably modest explanation. “If you change as a person, your acting changes accordingly,” he says. “Life leaves its marks on you. I used to get cast as cocky so-and-sos. Now I find it easier to access that area of myself that is hopeless and doesn’t know what the hell is going on. I’ve had experience of that. Very few people get through thinking everything is a series of rewards for their own magnificence. That would be insane. That’s one of the lovely things about acting: it’s a diary of your own progress.”
The latest entry in the diary is Rev. A thoroughly engaging sitcom, it stars Hollander as Adam Smallbone, an inner-city vicar who, each Sunday, preaches to a thin congregation of lowlifes and losers. The Vicar of Dibley it very much isn’t.
Adam is regularly squashed by the visiting archdeacon, hassled by indigent doorsteppers and thwarted in his efforts to get a sex life going with his eager wife (brilliantly played by Olivia Colman). The six-part series sees Hollander take his first ever leading role in television (BBC)
The role, which brings out persuasive new shades of watchfulness and decency, is a gift for Hollander 2.0. It’s a gift, it should be added, from himself. The idea for Rev was the actor’s own, arising from whispers he heard on the west London party circuit.
“Somebody told me a bit of local gossip about a vicar becoming hugely socially significant because members of the then shadow cabinet were trying to get their children into his school. He’d become west London’s most invited man. The idea that an Anglican vicar — who you might conventionally imagine to be a socially awkward and slightly excluded figure — should become somebody people are falling over themselves to meet struck me as terribly amusing.”
He went to James Wood, who wrote Freezing, the (sadly shortlived) sitcom about an actress, in which Hollander played a version of his own infamous agent. They talked it through. “We didn’t know that much about it, so we had to learn. We were going to church a lot for a year. It felt like it was quite an onerous responsibility, making a programme about the church.” Hollander describes himself as a “church-at-Christmas person. As I get older, I find myself more drawn to hocus-pocus. I started really enjoying going to church”.
They went for a year. They also interviewed vicars. Hollander built his portrayal partly on observing their role in society. “Their predicament is fascinating. They are at the heart of our culture, and yet they are often quite sensitive outsiders themselves, certainly in my experience. They have to be the one person who can’t say, ‘Please go away, I’ve got something better to do’, to people who are a complete pain in the arse.”
Out of these thoughts grew a series of comic scenarios, built on the rich joke that is tolerance and virtue. The politician who doesn’t believe
in God but wishes to avoid paying school fees turns up in episode one.
In other episodes, Adam decides to take a leaf out of Islam’s book and become authoritarian; and loses faith in God. It feels right that Hollander should take a more proactive role. In conversation, he is extremely funny, mostly against himself. He recalls being presented to the Prince of
Wales, for example, “and feeling totally let down by my kneecaps. I was thinking all sorts of republican things, like, ‘I’ve got to meet Prince Charles, how irritating’, and then as he came past me, my kneecaps wobbled up and down and I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ They shook. I can’t escape the fact that I have been born into a monarchy, and at some level it’s so deeply ingrained, I can’t help myself”.
Belittling himself works physically, too. In one Rev episode, Adam’s church is invaded by a charismatic priest who towers over Hollander. It’s a sight gag that evokes memories of Gosford Park, when Hollander’s parasitic Meredith cowers in the face of a heightist remark from the ramrod-tall Charles
Dance. For what felt like the first time ever, Hollander allowed himself to look wounded.
With the volume turned down again, he was subsequently a revelation in The Lost Prince as George V, the father of an epileptic son and cousin of the warmongering Kaiser Bill. That was the turning point. “I thought, ‘Oh, good, I can actually do proper acting, rather than showing off.”
The showing off worked on stage. He was a firecracker Government Inspector at the Almeida.
In The Judas Kiss, he was a plausibly shrill Bosie. But when film opportunities came his way, the results were less edifying. “I always felt like I wasn’t supposed to be in front of a camera, so there was an insecurity. You sort of think, clearly some people are just utterly beautiful and mesmerising, and that’s where they should be. I thought I probably ought to be on stage, where my energy would be as compelling as somebody else’s beauty would be in front of a camera. I was going, ‘Look at me, look at
me.’ When you see younger actors employing the same gambits you employed, it’s painful — and deeply irritating, as well.”
Hollander grew up in Oxford, did a lot of acting, and went to Cambridge, where he did a lot more acting. He was directed by Sam Mendes. In his final production, he was Cyrano de Bergerac. One of the knights was the current deputy prime minister. However, anyone who scours In the Loop for hints of Nick Clegg will be disappointed. “My memories are few and far between. All I can remember is him coming round to our house and showing me how to cook sweet-and-sour prawns, which was very exciting. He was a terribly nice chap.”
Besides, as Hollander explains, his lovely turn as a pistol-whipped minister was, at least in part, a selfportrait. “You tend to take certain aspects of yourself and expand them to fill the space required. So a lot of me is in it, but that’s not me wholly. I did a scene or two in the last episode of The Thick of It, where I was playing a front-foot character, a Tory Malcolm Tucker as it were, and that was very challenging, because you’re having to best everyone all the time and they’re all taking you on. I now realise why Peter [Capaldi] was under such strain.” (That casting was not the only evidence of - Hollander’s gift for portraying both sides of the coin. He has also played both Burgess and Philby.)
Rev feels like another ministry entirely. Not before time, it’s Hollander’s first undisputed lead role in a television series. But for what insurers call an act of God, he should be in a dog collar for years to come.
Rev starts on BBC2 on June 28 at 10pm
Thank god for small mercies
Tom Hollander’s brilliant new BBC2 sitcom about an inner-city vicar finds him in a more humble mode than we've previously seen him
The Sunday Times
Jasper Rees
Published: 18 June 2010
A few years ago, something curious happened to Tom Hollander. He grew up. As a brilliant young actor, he won an Ian Charleson
award for a series of stage performances whose governing tone was mercurial energy. But as he moved into film, the sense was of an actor who was more eager to be noticed than believed. In the past few years, however, he has found a vulnerable side, most recently as a hapless minister in In the Loop, and has become much easier to love.Hollander, 42, has a suitably modest explanation. “If you change as a person, your acting changes accordingly,” he says. “Life leaves its marks on you. I used to get cast as cocky so-and-sos. Now I find it easier to access that area of myself that is hopeless and doesn’t know what the hell is going on. I’ve had experience of that. Very few people get through thinking everything is a series of rewards for their own magnificence. That would be insane. That’s one of the lovely things about acting: it’s a diary of your own progress.”
The latest entry in the diary is Rev. A thoroughly engaging sitcom, it stars Hollander as Adam Smallbone, an inner-city vicar who, each Sunday, preaches to a thin congregation of lowlifes and losers. The Vicar of Dibley it very much isn’t.
Adam is regularly squashed by the visiting archdeacon, hassled by indigent doorsteppers and thwarted in his efforts to get a sex life going with his eager wife (brilliantly played by Olivia Colman). The six-part series sees Hollander take his first ever leading role in television (BBC)
The role, which brings out persuasive new shades of watchfulness and decency, is a gift for Hollander 2.0. It’s a gift, it should be added, from himself. The idea for Rev was the actor’s own, arising from whispers he heard on the west London party circuit.
“Somebody told me a bit of local gossip about a vicar becoming hugely socially significant because members of the then shadow cabinet were trying to get their children into his school. He’d become west London’s most invited man. The idea that an Anglican vicar — who you might conventionally imagine to be a socially awkward and slightly excluded figure — should become somebody people are falling over themselves to meet struck me as terribly amusing.”
He went to James Wood, who wrote Freezing, the (sadly shortlived) sitcom about an actress, in which Hollander played a version of his own infamous agent. They talked it through. “We didn’t know that much about it, so we had to learn. We were going to church a lot for a year. It felt like it was quite an onerous responsibility, making a programme about the church.” Hollander describes himself as a “church-at-Christmas person. As I get older, I find myself more drawn to hocus-pocus. I started really enjoying going to church”.
They went for a year. They also interviewed vicars. Hollander built his portrayal partly on observing their role in society. “Their predicament is fascinating. They are at the heart of our culture, and yet they are often quite sensitive outsiders themselves, certainly in my experience. They have to be the one person who can’t say, ‘Please go away, I’ve got something better to do’, to people who are a complete pain in the arse.”
Out of these thoughts grew a series of comic scenarios, built on the rich joke that is tolerance and virtue. The politician who doesn’t believe
in God but wishes to avoid paying school fees turns up in episode one.
In other episodes, Adam decides to take a leaf out of Islam’s book and become authoritarian; and loses faith in God. It feels right that Hollander should take a more proactive role. In conversation, he is extremely funny, mostly against himself. He recalls being presented to the Prince of
Wales, for example, “and feeling totally let down by my kneecaps. I was thinking all sorts of republican things, like, ‘I’ve got to meet Prince Charles, how irritating’, and then as he came past me, my kneecaps wobbled up and down and I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ They shook. I can’t escape the fact that I have been born into a monarchy, and at some level it’s so deeply ingrained, I can’t help myself”.
Belittling himself works physically, too. In one Rev episode, Adam’s church is invaded by a charismatic priest who towers over Hollander. It’s a sight gag that evokes memories of Gosford Park, when Hollander’s parasitic Meredith cowers in the face of a heightist remark from the ramrod-tall Charles
Dance. For what felt like the first time ever, Hollander allowed himself to look wounded.
With the volume turned down again, he was subsequently a revelation in The Lost Prince as George V, the father of an epileptic son and cousin of the warmongering Kaiser Bill. That was the turning point. “I thought, ‘Oh, good, I can actually do proper acting, rather than showing off.”
The showing off worked on stage. He was a firecracker Government Inspector at the Almeida.
In The Judas Kiss, he was a plausibly shrill Bosie. But when film opportunities came his way, the results were less edifying. “I always felt like I wasn’t supposed to be in front of a camera, so there was an insecurity. You sort of think, clearly some people are just utterly beautiful and mesmerising, and that’s where they should be. I thought I probably ought to be on stage, where my energy would be as compelling as somebody else’s beauty would be in front of a camera. I was going, ‘Look at me, look at
me.’ When you see younger actors employing the same gambits you employed, it’s painful — and deeply irritating, as well.”
Hollander grew up in Oxford, did a lot of acting, and went to Cambridge, where he did a lot more acting. He was directed by Sam Mendes. In his final production, he was Cyrano de Bergerac. One of the knights was the current deputy prime minister. However, anyone who scours In the Loop for hints of Nick Clegg will be disappointed. “My memories are few and far between. All I can remember is him coming round to our house and showing me how to cook sweet-and-sour prawns, which was very exciting. He was a terribly nice chap.”
Besides, as Hollander explains, his lovely turn as a pistol-whipped minister was, at least in part, a selfportrait. “You tend to take certain aspects of yourself and expand them to fill the space required. So a lot of me is in it, but that’s not me wholly. I did a scene or two in the last episode of The Thick of It, where I was playing a front-foot character, a Tory Malcolm Tucker as it were, and that was very challenging, because you’re having to best everyone all the time and they’re all taking you on. I now realise why Peter [Capaldi] was under such strain.” (That casting was not the only evidence of - Hollander’s gift for portraying both sides of the coin. He has also played both Burgess and Philby.)
Rev feels like another ministry entirely. Not before time, it’s Hollander’s first undisputed lead role in a television series. But for what insurers call an act of God, he should be in a dog collar for years to come.
Rev starts on BBC2 on June 28 at 10pm