Post by beckettologist on Feb 9, 2009 9:59:24 GMT -5
Hollander finds his Dutch gold
Character actor Tom Hollander has finally scored a lead role with 'In the Loop', alongside The Sopranos' James Gandolfini, he tells Ciaran Carty
At the Sundance Film Festival last month, character actor Tom Hollander finally scored a hit with his first lead role. Alongside James 'Tony Soprano' Gandolfini and Steve Coogan, he stars as a hapless British Secretary of State for International Development in Armando Iannucci's hilariously foul-mouthed "anti-West Wing" political satire In The Loop.
It's a spin-off of the deadpan TV series The Thick of It and sends up the so-called special relationship between Whitehall and the White House.
"Are you familiar with it? I wasn't," Hollander admits. "It's Yes Minister with fuck and wobbly cameras. My character is anti-war but says something that sounds like he's pro-war, and gets so much attention that he sort of goes along with it because he's idiotically ambitious."
By the time you catch up with any actor, they're already someone else. Go to Valkyrie and you'll see Hollander as a loyal Nazi colonel giving his life for Hitler. Meet him at London's Dorchester and he's all curly Victorian moustache and sideburns, the effete opposite to a pure Aryan German. That's because he's now John Ruskin, the essayist and critic who became a powerful advocate of the Pre-Raphaelites – the middlebrow art and design group whose stylised paintings of ethereally erotic biblical and mythical subjects were all the rage in 19th century England.
Ruskin himself had a fetish about pre-pubescent girls and at 40 became obsessed with an 11-year-old who at 27 died in his arms after starving herself in a vain attempt to remain the little child he fell in love with.
"I'm playing him in a six-part series Desperate Romantics that will be out on BBC2 in the autumn," Hollander says. "I agreed to grow this beard just to prove I'm butch enough, and now I'm stuck with it. I look as if I'm playing the inventor of the first hairdressing chain."
A diminutive five-foot-five with a deep voice that makes him a natural for radio, Hollander was small enough to make Tom Cruise look tall as Valkyrie's Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg – the ringleader of the July 20 plot that nearly succeeded in blowing up the Fuhrer in his Wolf's Lair bunker in the last months of World War Two. It failed because Hollander's character, a loyal aide, inadvertently saved Hitler's life by moving to one side as the briefcase with the bomb that von Stauffenberg had planted under Hitler's conference table was irritating his calf.
"Instead of killing Hitler, it blew my legs off," he says. "I was just doing my job, really. In real life, I died cradled in Hitler's arms. He made me a general in my dying moments, but this isn't shown in the film."
You'll also remember Hollander as the infatuated Mr Collins rebuffed by Devil's Lair bunker in Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, and again as the suavely sadistic Lord Cutler Beckett who comes between her and Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean. Since leaving Cambridge – where he was involved in the Footlights theatre company and was directed by Sam Mendes in Cyrano de Bergerac – he's turned his deep voice and slight stature to advantage in a wide range of character roles, notably in Gosford Park – and opposite Russell Crowe in A Good Year – and on stage in Cyrano de Bergerac and television in Absolutely Fabulous.
He'd hoped to have fun with a German accent in Valkyrie, but director Bryan Singer instead decided that all the actors – most of them English, apart from Cruise – would speak with their normal accents. "There was a feeling that if we put on German accents it would result in a very expensive episode of 'Allo, 'Allo," he says.
While filming Valkyrie he also found time to play a cameo as George III in the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries John Adams. "I was rather hoping to play him with a German accent too. I thought I could spend the whole summer moving around doing that, but again I wasn't allowed."
So he took on an American accent instead to play a Los Angeles Philharmonic cellist in Joe Wright's latest film The Soloist. It's based on the true story of a musician Nathaniel Ayers – played by Jamie Foxx – who becomes schizophrenic and homeless, and a Los Angeles Times columnist – Robert Downey Jr – who tries to rehabilitate him.
It's yet another character role, but In The Loop should finally see Hollander come centre-stage.
'In The Loop' shows at Dublin's Cineworld next Friday (13 February) as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Both it, and 'The Soloist', open later this year.
February 8, 2009
www.tribune.ie/arts/article/2009/feb/08/hollander-finds-his-dutch-gold/
Character actor Tom Hollander has finally scored a lead role with 'In the Loop', alongside The Sopranos' James Gandolfini, he tells Ciaran Carty
At the Sundance Film Festival last month, character actor Tom Hollander finally scored a hit with his first lead role. Alongside James 'Tony Soprano' Gandolfini and Steve Coogan, he stars as a hapless British Secretary of State for International Development in Armando Iannucci's hilariously foul-mouthed "anti-West Wing" political satire In The Loop.
It's a spin-off of the deadpan TV series The Thick of It and sends up the so-called special relationship between Whitehall and the White House.
"Are you familiar with it? I wasn't," Hollander admits. "It's Yes Minister with fuck and wobbly cameras. My character is anti-war but says something that sounds like he's pro-war, and gets so much attention that he sort of goes along with it because he's idiotically ambitious."
By the time you catch up with any actor, they're already someone else. Go to Valkyrie and you'll see Hollander as a loyal Nazi colonel giving his life for Hitler. Meet him at London's Dorchester and he's all curly Victorian moustache and sideburns, the effete opposite to a pure Aryan German. That's because he's now John Ruskin, the essayist and critic who became a powerful advocate of the Pre-Raphaelites – the middlebrow art and design group whose stylised paintings of ethereally erotic biblical and mythical subjects were all the rage in 19th century England.
Ruskin himself had a fetish about pre-pubescent girls and at 40 became obsessed with an 11-year-old who at 27 died in his arms after starving herself in a vain attempt to remain the little child he fell in love with.
"I'm playing him in a six-part series Desperate Romantics that will be out on BBC2 in the autumn," Hollander says. "I agreed to grow this beard just to prove I'm butch enough, and now I'm stuck with it. I look as if I'm playing the inventor of the first hairdressing chain."
A diminutive five-foot-five with a deep voice that makes him a natural for radio, Hollander was small enough to make Tom Cruise look tall as Valkyrie's Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg – the ringleader of the July 20 plot that nearly succeeded in blowing up the Fuhrer in his Wolf's Lair bunker in the last months of World War Two. It failed because Hollander's character, a loyal aide, inadvertently saved Hitler's life by moving to one side as the briefcase with the bomb that von Stauffenberg had planted under Hitler's conference table was irritating his calf.
"Instead of killing Hitler, it blew my legs off," he says. "I was just doing my job, really. In real life, I died cradled in Hitler's arms. He made me a general in my dying moments, but this isn't shown in the film."
You'll also remember Hollander as the infatuated Mr Collins rebuffed by Devil's Lair bunker in Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, and again as the suavely sadistic Lord Cutler Beckett who comes between her and Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean. Since leaving Cambridge – where he was involved in the Footlights theatre company and was directed by Sam Mendes in Cyrano de Bergerac – he's turned his deep voice and slight stature to advantage in a wide range of character roles, notably in Gosford Park – and opposite Russell Crowe in A Good Year – and on stage in Cyrano de Bergerac and television in Absolutely Fabulous.
He'd hoped to have fun with a German accent in Valkyrie, but director Bryan Singer instead decided that all the actors – most of them English, apart from Cruise – would speak with their normal accents. "There was a feeling that if we put on German accents it would result in a very expensive episode of 'Allo, 'Allo," he says.
While filming Valkyrie he also found time to play a cameo as George III in the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries John Adams. "I was rather hoping to play him with a German accent too. I thought I could spend the whole summer moving around doing that, but again I wasn't allowed."
So he took on an American accent instead to play a Los Angeles Philharmonic cellist in Joe Wright's latest film The Soloist. It's based on the true story of a musician Nathaniel Ayers – played by Jamie Foxx – who becomes schizophrenic and homeless, and a Los Angeles Times columnist – Robert Downey Jr – who tries to rehabilitate him.
It's yet another character role, but In The Loop should finally see Hollander come centre-stage.
'In The Loop' shows at Dublin's Cineworld next Friday (13 February) as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Both it, and 'The Soloist', open later this year.
February 8, 2009
www.tribune.ie/arts/article/2009/feb/08/hollander-finds-his-dutch-gold/