Martin Freeman, interview: 'Shakespeare invented Gollum'

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Интервью Мартина Фримана, которое он дал перед премьерой "Ричарда III".

Martin Freeman, about to play Richard III on stage, points out the similarities between Shakespeare's villain and the twisted creature of The Hobbit.

интервью

The Telegraph
By Craig McLean

The man sitting in front of me in a south London rehearsal space doesn’t look much like a bottled spider or a foul bunch-back’d toad. He’s upright in his chair, trim, almost prim, in dress trousers and top-buttoned Lacoste shirt. Only the rough, grey-flecked beard hints at some incipient transformation.
This is Martin Freeman, three weeks shy of the opening of Richard III. The actor is playing the deformed Machiavellian regent at Trafalgar Studios in central London. It’s his first play in four years, since a production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park at the Royal Court.
But for all the variety of his screen work – The Office to The Hobbit, Sherlock to Fargo – the actor has described the production as his “first professional Shakespeare”. Does that mean Freeman has turned in some sloppy, unprofessional ones that we didn’t know about?
“There have been amateurish-in-drama-school ones,” he replies with a smile. At London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, the 42-year-old from Aldershot tried his hand at As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. “But yeah, I can’t believe it – I’ve been out of drama school 19 years, and this is the first time I’ve done it professionally. I’m surprised,” he says, the unsurprise writ large on his seemingly mild-mannered face.
So Freeman is glad to be treading the boards again. Still, “it’s been long enough to find it slightly bewildering being back in the rehearsal room. But it’s a reminder that it’s absolutely where I want to be,” he says firmly. “It’s where I learnt how to act. It’s a zone that I feel extremely comfortable in.”
At the helm of the staging is Jamie Lloyd. Last year at the same venue he directed James McAvoy in a dystopian, very physical, very gruelling (for actor and audience), in-the-round reimagining of Macbeth. Now, he and Freeman’s Richard III has been billed as “provocative”. How so?
“I don’t know what I can give away…” he says. “Ours isn’t a futuristic dystopia; it’s an imaginary dystopia from a few decades ago. Twentieth century. When I first met Jamie he asked if I’d seen this documentary about this political event in our British history.”
Freeman – Mod fashion plate, Sixties music aficionado, history-savvy, a reader, celebrity-phobic – is very much a doc-watching kinda guy. “And I had seen it, and I knew all about it. And he said, ‘That’s good, ’cause that’s what I think is going to be the setting of this.’”
Was that event The Profumo Affair?
“It might be,” he says lightly. “I’m not even trying to be coquettish… But it is set in a real political time – a parallel universe setting, but a very recognisable one if you’re over 40.”
Hmm. The deposing of Margaret Thatcher? Freeman isn’t telling. He wants to honour the sanctity of the rehearsal room, and preserve the surprise. As much as anyone, he knows that his onrushing small- and big-screen fame – a blockbuster Hollywood trilogy here, a glorious BBC detective drama there, a cult American drama series over there – will be pulling many a Bilbo Baggins/Dr Watson/Lester Nygaard fan into the Trafalgar’s atmospheric cave.
Freeman says Lloyd’s retelling of Richard III is “totally alive. Jamie and I have a shared interest in people not being bored in the theatre. Or not being bewildered in an unhelpful way – and covering that bewilderment with keeping quiet ’cause no one wants to admit that they’re bewildered sometimes when they’re watching Shakespeare.”
Not helping matters is the fact that Richard III is a long play – the second heftiest in the Shakespeare canon. “Not any more it’s not! Jamie’s cut it judiciously.”
What about the hunchback?
“Well, you’ve got to have a hunchback. So, yeah, I’ll have physical deformities – a dodgy arm, a hump and a limp. I think people would want their money back if you just gave him a twitch. But also it feeds into how Richard sees himself. If the world has told him that he’s ugly, or he doesn’t fit, or he doesn’t work properly, that has had a severe effect on how he sees his place in the world. So it starts basically with Richard telling the audience that he’s going to be a real s---, and he’s put lots of plots and devices into action,” says Freeman brightly.
“So if you start with that, you have to somehow make sense of why he’s doing that. Otherwise he’s just a boo-hiss villain. And in 2014 we want a bit more than that.”
All that said, this “funny, vaguely camp” Richard III, who is also (to quote the text) “rudely stamp’d… deformed, unfinished…” – well, he does sound vaguely familiar. He could be, in fact, Gollum.
Freeman nods briskly. “Well, yes. I’ve just been rehearsing a scene where Richard is having a little diatribe to himself, where his schizophrenic personality comes out. And it’s absolutely Gollum, it’s totally Gollum. It’s like Shakespeare invented Gollum 400 years ago.”
This Christmas Freeman’s own history-making, there-and-back-again Hobbit journey finally comes to a close. He’s been front and centre with Peter Jackson’s second Tolkien trilogy for over three years now. What, then, does he make of the recent comments made to the Telegraph by Viggo Mortensen – a star of the Lord of the Rings trilogy – that Jackson’s Middle-earth epics were increasingly sacrificing subtlety for CGI fireworks?
“I’ve never liked him,” he replies, deadpan. “No, I do like him. All I can say is: I hope that’s not the case. I know Peter and the team who make those films, they’d be horrified to think they’d jettisoned all subtlety. Yeah, there’s a lot of CGI, an awful lot of that business going on. But they are still very, very interested in story. They want the human side of it to be absolutely pivotal.
“Beyond that?” he muses. “Of course it’s a question of taste and I respect Viggo’s opinion.”
And what news from the Sherlock camp? Interviewed earlier this year, Freeman said that filming on series four was looking unlikely to happen this autumn as originally scheduled. He confirms that today – Cumberbatch seems to be making multiple movies simultaneously, while Richard III runs until the end of September. But he adds that an early 2015 shoot “looks pretty likely”, before Cumberbatch follows Freeman into Shakespeare with Hamlet on stage at the Barbican. Does that mean transmission would be pushed to the notionally graveyard slot of summertime, which is when the original series premiered?
“Ah, no,” he begins, squirming slightly. “If that’s gonna be a special – I’m speaking off-message here; if this was New Labour I’d get fired – I think that might be for next Christmas. A Christmas special. That’s what I understand.” (This was later confirmed by the BBC.)
In this year’s third series, his real-life wife, Amanda Abbington (Mr Selfridge, Case Histories) joined the cast to become his on-screen missus. Has she become a permanent cast member?
“Certainly yes for the foreseeable future. While we play fast and loose with the original stories, we generally follow the trajectory of what Conan Doyle did. So he gets married, and then Mary dies – so at some point presumably she’ll die! But she’s certainly in… at least the next one,” he says, carefully, alert to any amateur Sherlocking on my part.
When I interviewed Abbington last year, I asked her about her partner and she observed with pride: “Martin plays a good villain. He did a thing called Jump Mr Malinoff Jump, where he played this quiet psychopath. Yeah, he’s terrifying. Everyone does think he’s really Mr Nice Guy. And he’s not, he’s a fiend. You’ve got a scoop,” she said with a laugh. “‘Partner is evil.’”
That might be stretching it. But Freeman’s relish for getting his teeth stuck into Richard III seems of a piece with his enthusiasm for playing Lester Nygaard. The play is unveiled just as his much-praised performance as Fargo’s leading man comes to an end on Channel 4.
In the violent-yet-offbeat series based on Joel and Ethan Coen’s cult 1996 film, his mild-mannered, chewy-accented insurance salesman has found his life spiralling out of control through a combination of circumstance (hideous wife, hideous hitman). And in simple terms, Lester and Richard are both villains. You can tell from his performance in Fargo – and I can tell from the intense way he discusses Richard III – that Freeman is enjoying these roles with turbulent emotional depths.
Unlike Richard, though, Lester doesn’t start out as a baddy. He’s a baddy the way that Breaking Bad’s hero is a baddy.
“Yeah,” says Martin with a nod of recognition. “When I read the sсript I thought, ooh, that’s quite Walter White-ish. But where Lester Nygaard starts off with you sympathising with him, and everything he does is understandable, Richard just starts off going: I am a c---, and here’s why I’m a c---…” (Freeman, it must here be said, likes a good swear.) “He’s revelling in it. Whereas Lester would never consider himself a tosser. Like most people don’t.”
Lester, a small man in a small town, was bullied at school. The ongoing torment of his childhood is one of the reasons for the implosion of his respectable, middle-aged, suburban life. Freeman wasn’t bullied, but he was mummied by girls who thought his stature cute. Perhaps that evoked feelings not unlike bullying?
“Yeah, probably, I’m sure…” begins this youngest of five. “I can be reasonably embarrassed sometimes, but as a person I’m more confident than Lester, obviously. But I can easily tap into that feeling of mortification. There’s a scene where the woman I eventually do the dirty on is kind of flirting with me and doing this little dance. And Lester doesn’t know where to look,” he says with feeling, “or where to put himself. Yeah, that stuff was easy to tap into. You just remember what you were like as a 12-year-old,” he laughs. “Do you know what I mean?”
Of course Freeman missed his family while filming Fargo – he and Abbington, his partner of 14 years, have two children, Joe, eight, and Grace, six, and live in Hertfordshire, just outside London. But the five months filming in snowy Calgary, standing in for snowy Minnesota, were, he acknowledges, worth it. “It definitely helped being in a cold, white-on-the-ground environment. I don’t know how would create that world in, say, southern Spain. There was something about the uptightness of that culture that we’re playing that is served by being really cold.”
Still, the shooting experience was even more isolating than his long stints in New Zealand filming the three Hobbit movies. But how did he get the job in the first place? Even in an American TV landscape studded with well-regarded Brits (Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead and Jonny Lee Miller in their version of Sherlock, Elementary, to name but two), Freeman’s casting was interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he’s never seemed much of a careerist – the actor previously refused to audition for any American show, loath to be locked into their standard seven-year contract. Secondly – and we shall return to this, as interviews with Freeman inevitably do – he is perceived (and I stress the word) to have a straight, uncomplicated, and you might say very British appeal. And thirdly, it seems as if he’s never been one to play the actor game.
Earlier this year Freeman was interviewed for Radio Times by Sherlock co-creator (and co-star) Mark Gatiss. The actor/writer recounted how Freeman’s first audition for the part of Dr Watson was underwhelming. Partly, it seemed, because Freeman had had his wallet stolen en route.
“You know what?” says Freeman when I mention this. “I completely have no recollection that I had my wallet nicked. I might have said that at the time…”
To excuse his shambolic interview?
“Yeah, I might have done, because I know I was in a bad mood. And I’m sometimes not very good at hiding that. So I wasn’t really doing the dance. And that was probably being reflected back at me in the audition.”
A week later his agent rang. The Sherlock team of Gatiss and Steven Moffat thought the actor wasn’t interested in the part of Watson. Freeman insisted that he was and asked for another chance.
“I met them again and did the dance – and, well, read with Benedict. And that’s what clinched it – ’cause then it wasn’t theoretical. It was very, very clearly happening between us.”
Cut to the final days on filming on the most recent, third season of Sherlock. Freeman, by now a global face (if not a name) courtesy of The Hobbit, hears about Fargo. How did the audition for the American drama compare with his stop-start Sherlock tryout?
“I didn’t audition for Fargo,” he shrugs. “It was a straight offer. They didn’t even ask to hear the accent.”
Really?
“I know! It could have all gone very, very badly. Yeah, I was surprised that they didn’t want to hear that. ’Cause I could have had a cloth ear. And fortunately I’m not bad with accents, although I’ve never done that [Minnesotan] one before… He might have had to be English. Lester Nichols,” he chuckles.
They must have really loved his work, I suggest.
“Yeah, I know,“ he smiles. “I was pleasantly surprised just to have the straight offer. That was nice. I mean, I’m not being funny – I think they were right! ’Cause I thought I could do it, but there’s other people who could also do it who are already American, or already have a hit TV show there.
“And I’m glad that they saw what you’ve said: that underlying something else. [Show creator] Noah Hawley had seen something else I’d done and spotted that I wasn’t all sweetness and light. That there was a bit of fire in the belly.”
The widespread assumption that Freeman is – to use an adjective he hates with a passion – an “everyman” really gets his goat. To his mind, it’s pejorative – a lazy way of typecasting and diminishing him as nicey-nice, inoffensive Tim From The Office in every part he plays.
But in the end, will the audience find his Richard III likeable?
“I hope not. I know people will. I know people will,” he repeats. “Which I think is a critic’s way out when they don’t know how to deal with the fact that, oh, I’m playing it!
“No, he won’t be too likeable,” he insists. “But he’s kinda funny, and he’s kinda witty. And if you didn’t play that you’d be missing something. But I know that because I’m playing it, it’ll be: ‘Oh, he’s a bit like Tim from The Office!’”
Equally inevitable, he thinks, is the review that says, “he brings a certain everyman quality to Richard III”. A slightly weary shrug. “I can’t control what people think they’re seeing.”
He’s smiling still, but his voice is rising, and he’s repeating the point, and he’s going ever-so-slightly ranty.
“Characters’ actions have to justifiable – because Pol Pot’s were, and Kim Jong-il’s were, and Stalin’s were… they were all justifiable to themselves. They didn’t get up in the morning and eat a baby. They were charismatic, they were likeable, people wanted to be led by them and they wanted to be f---ed by them.”
That does indeed sound like a provocative Richard III.