Post by Romana on Dec 31, 2008 17:52:59 GMT
Long interview, yeah - but well worth reading. ;D The pic used in the article has its own topic here 
David Morrissey: The incredible disappearing man
By Stuart Husband
Last Updated: 6:00PM GMT 22 Feb 2008
Few actors can claim to be inspired by both Lemmy from Motörhead and Peter Mandelson. And even fewer have considered a move into agriculture after working with Sharon Stone. Thankfully, though, David Morrissey is now working harder - and better - than ever. By Stuart Husband
At first I don't notice David Morrissey. He's sunk into a chair in the lobby of the Soho hotel where we're due to have lunch, face buried in a book, demeanour almost compulsively unobtrusive. Then he says 'all right' in his breezy Scouse accent, a broad grin animating his malleable features as his impressive 6ft 3in frame unfurls itself.
Here is the secret to Morrissey's success: at 43, he's one of Britain's most in-demand character actors, strangely familiar yet oddly unrecognisable, despite the fact that he's cornered the market in ordinary-men-in-extraordinary-turmoil roles over the past few years. From the murderous tax inspector and adulterous MP in the acclaimed television dramas Holding On and State of Play to the tormented schoolteacher Bradley Headstone in the BBC's Our Mutual Friend and a skittish, beetle-browed Gordon Brown in The Deal, his nuanced performances, animated by a fierce intelligence, act like a beacon both to writers and directors (who know that he'll be able to shine a sympathetic light into the murkiest corners of interior lives) and to audiences (who know he'll deliver, even if they can't quite remember why).
This, he acknowledges, as he orders a grilled vegetable salad with goats' cheese, is an enviable position for any actor to be in. 'I try to disappear inside the person I'm playing,' he says. 'I want people to take an impression of the character away with them, rather than think, "Oh, there's Morrissey with his box of tricks again." '
Morrissey's latest chance to disappear occurs in The Other Boleyn Girl, a lavish historical romp of a movie from the novel by Philippa Gregory, which anatomises the power struggles at the Byzantine court of Henry VIII (a glowering Eric Bana) in the persons of Anne and Mary Boleyn (Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson), two sisters inveigled into advancing their family's status by courting the king's affections and, they hope, producing a much-desired male heir. Initially, Mary becomes Henry's mistress and bears him an illegitimate child; but, as everyone with a glancing knowledge of GCSE history knows, the feisty and fearless Anne eventually sweeps both her sister and Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, aside, forcing him to break with the Catholic Church in order to make her his second wife.
The film is fittingly portentous, chock-full of turreted piles, slamming doors and tolling bells, and, despite a preponderance of pavanes and minstrelsy, manages to stay just the right side of French and Saunders-style risibility. But amid the stellar cast - including Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls' parents - Morrissey stands out. As the Duke of Norfolk, the Boleyn sisters' uncle, he's a ruthless political manipulator, treating them like disposable brood-mare commodities in order to further his own advancement (a trick he'd later repeat with Katherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, who also happened to be his niece).
Norfolk is the ultimate backstage intriguer, part-Rasputin, part-Peter Mandelson (Morrissey shadowed Mandelson when researching The Deal, but politely demurs when asked if this aided his preparation for Norfolk), and he endows him with something of the night, whether he's demanding of Mary, in no uncertain terms, whether the king 'fully' enjoyed her favours during a sleepover, or simply brooding on his next move in a smoke-filled corner.
'To me, Norfolk was like a medieval rock star, a sort of Lemmy-from-Motörhead version of a court enforcer,' says Morrissey, grinning as he sips his mineral water. 'He had this almost archetypal lust for power: getting to the top table was everything, and staying there was paramount. It wasn't as if he wanted a Ferrari or something: he was after wealth and patronage for himself and his family. You see him instantly switching to Jane Seymour's side when Anne fails him; it's like that great story about Don King, who went into the ring with George Foreman but came out of Muhammad Ali's corner after he knocked Foreman out, holding his arm aloft.'
Morrissey applied his usual methodical and meticulous research techniques when preparing for The Other Boleyn Girl, steeping himself in the history, literature and mores of the 16th century (similarly, he spent time in tax offices and newsrooms for Holding On and State of Play); he chooses his projects carefully, based on the director, in this case Justin Chadwick ('he did the BBC's Bleak House, which I thought was great'); the writer, in this case Peter Morgan ('I'd worked with him on The Deal and I knew he'd get it right'); and his fellow cast members ('I'm a big fan of Mark Rylance, and of Natalie and Scarlett'). 'This was a hard story to shoehorn into a movie, with all its twists and turns and epochal historical events,' he says, 'but they've managed to do it without tons of exposition; they've got the settings and smells and atmosphere right, which is no small achievement.'
Morrissey's stringent approach to his work means that he's played a key part in some of the best British television of the past decade. So it's something of a jolt to realise that The Other Boleyn Girl - and his recent, acclaimed turn as the saturnine Colonel Brandon in the BBC's Sense and Sensibility - represents a kind of comeback after a less-than-stellar sojourn in Hollywood. Last year he appeared in The Reaping, an overwrought slice of southern Gothic-horror in which he played a schoolteacher who sought professional miracle-debunker Hilary Swank's help when his small town seemed to succumb to biblical plagues.
The shooting of the film was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina's visiting of genuine plague conditions just down the Gulf coast. But while The Reaping was a straightforward genre piece, 2006's Basic Instinct 2 was a whole different paradigm of hokum. Morrissey played the male lead in this ill-advised sequel, a criminal psychologist who gets involved in Sharon Stone's ice-picking shenanigans after her serial murderess Catherine Tramell relocates to London.
It was seen as Morrissey's potential Hollywood breakthrough, full-frontal nudity and all. But if Stone's diva-like demands (which reportedly included Pilates equipment and a 'non-smoking' chauffeur) and habit of screaming at the top of her voice before every take didn't alert him to which way the wind was blowing, then the reviews left him in no doubt ('Acting always involves a degree of self-abasement, but just watching trash like this is degrading' - The New York Times).
I haven't actually seen the film, I tell him. 'I wouldn't advise you to,' he replies evenly. 'What happened was, I thought the original script was good, the director [Michael Caton-Jones ] was good, the Sharon of Casino and the first Basic Instinct was brilliant. And you get there and it very clearly isn't working from day one. So you put your head down and shoot the thing, but then, when it's finished, you have to go out and sell it. That was the really tough part. That's when you politely say it was a learning curve, or words to that effect.'
Did he feel bruised by the experience? 'I did, yeah,' he says. 'I always pick holes in my performance in everything I do, but this time I really felt I'd let myself down. You have to be open as an actor, but this was an occasion when I really wanted to put on a suit of armour. When the reviews came out I thought you know what, f--- it, I'm going to go and be a market gardener, I don't want to do this any more But then I thought, actually, this is my job and I've come this far with it. So I'd better stick with it.'
So he wouldn't rule out doing a Basic Instinct 3? He manages a weak smile. 'I might do it if it was billed as an out-and-out comedy.'
Morrissey's Hollywood loss - he's not involved in the ill-fated movie version of State of Play, to the extent that he asks me if I know who's in it (currently: Brad Pitt out, Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in ) - is our gain. He's always seemed an actor more attuned to the kitchen sink than the poolside buffet. He was born to solid working-class stock in Liverpool: his father, who died when Morrissey was 15, was a shoe repairer and key-cutter, while his mother worked for the Littlewoods catalogue company. Morrissey was the youngest of four children, a factor he thinks was crucial in shaping his future career. 'I was spoilt rotten, indulged in every whim,' he says. 'If any of my siblings had said they wanted to act, they wouldn't have been taken seriously, whereas I could have gone and said to my mum that I wanted to be an astronaut and it would have been fine.'
Morrissey's youth coincided with Liverpool's early-1980s boiling point: the Toxteth riots on one side (the flames were practically licking the Morrissey family home, round the corner in Knotty Ash), Derek Hatton's Militant hijacking the council on the other, and the nascent post-punk music scene - Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, Pete Wylie - coalescing around Eric's Club.
'Academically, it was never going to happen for me,' he says. 'I was lazy, and I went to a terrible school, which I hated.' He failed his 11-plus and left school at 16 (making him largely self-taught, which is why he places such high value on research and preparation). But he'd always loved acting, inspired both by Ken Loach's Kes, which he saw on television - 'It was suddenly like, wow, these people are just like me' - and the city's Everyman Youth Theatre, then riding the Alan Bleasdale-Willy Russell wave, which he started hanging out at.
'My first choice would have been to be a rock star, because we were all in awe of guys like the Bunnymen,' he says. 'I'm still a sort of frustrated musician. But there were a lot of cool people around the Everyman scene, so I thought I'd give it a go. We were taken seriously as people there. We were given responsibility and allowed to be creative, even a bit naughty.'
Morrissey's big break came when, aged 19, he landed the lead role in Russell's One Summer, Channel 4's first drama series (he co-starred with fellow Everyman alumnus Ian Hart, who remains his best mate) about two Scouse lads on the lam. Reluctant to be typecast as an errant Liverpool kid, he was accepted at Rada, and went on to the RSC and the National Theatre. His career built slowly and steadily, thanks to his sterling work in high-profile dramas by leading writers such as Tony Marchant, Paul Abbott and Peter Morgan, and the respect of peers like John Madden, who directed him as a buttoned-up Nazi in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
'All actors think every job will be their last,' he says. 'It goes with the territory.' Luckily, Morrissey has a solid home life to act as a counterweight. His partner of 17 years is the novelist Esther Freud, great granddaughter of Sigmund and daughter of Lucian, unofficially Britain's Greatest Living Painter. The pair were set up at a dinner party by a male friend, and now have three children: Albie, 12, Anna, nine, and two-year-old Gene. He's never been invited to pose for Lucian - 'You have to be asked; he chooses his models very carefully' - and none of his paintings adorns the walls of the family's north London home: their insurance, he says, wouldn't stretch that far.
Morrissey also has a fledgling career as a director to augment his day job. His company, Tubedale Films - set up with Freud and his businessman brother Paul - has made a few short films and the television drama Passer By, and is attempting to raise 'the last £2 million' for a feature called Carnal Artist, based on the life of the S&M performance artist Bob Flanagan, whose 'actions' included impaling himself on skewers. 'That's my passion, the film I really want to make,' he enthuses. 'It would be good to see a movie that took the art world seriously; it's easy to take the p---because it can seem so crazy. But I'm a massive fan of Brit Art in general and Damien Hirst in particular. I think he's an absolute genius and should be celebrated in every way.'
With Carnal Artist in temporary abeyance, Morrissey has shot The Pool, a nano-budget love story set in his home town, in which a jilted drifter runs into a young woman in a betting shop, and the pair end up wandering the city talking their lives out in a Before Sunrise/Before Sunset kind of way. 'It was made for £100,000,' he says proudly. 'Two actors, tiny crew, everyone put up at my brother's hotel. It'll hopefully come out later this year, and I'm hoping to direct and produce more as time goes on. I think it's helped me as an actor.
'Before, I didn't like that I'd research a character thoroughly, then I'd turn up on set on the first day and the director would say, this is your character's house, and I'd go no, he'd never live somewhere like that. It was really starting to annoy me; I'd take it personally. Now I'm much less precious, because as a director I'm making those kinds of decisions. I'm much more appreciative of the fact that everyone's got a job to do.'
In fact, he says while gulping down a coffee, Tubedale amounts to his major indulgence. 'I've got a great family and a beautiful house. I feel very lucky as far as my lifestyle is concerned. I'm not really interested in fame and all its trappings. These days, the company gets the bulk of my time and energy and quite a bit of my money, and that's fine with me.'
On that note, he bids a cheery farewell and exits the restaurant as inconspicuously as his hulking frame will allow. He attracts a few quizzical looks, but there are no shocks of recognition; for now, David Morrissey remains Britain's least-known best actor.
'The Other Boleyn Girl' is out on 7 March
David Morrissey: The incredible disappearing man
By Stuart Husband
Last Updated: 6:00PM GMT 22 Feb 2008
Few actors can claim to be inspired by both Lemmy from Motörhead and Peter Mandelson. And even fewer have considered a move into agriculture after working with Sharon Stone. Thankfully, though, David Morrissey is now working harder - and better - than ever. By Stuart Husband
At first I don't notice David Morrissey. He's sunk into a chair in the lobby of the Soho hotel where we're due to have lunch, face buried in a book, demeanour almost compulsively unobtrusive. Then he says 'all right' in his breezy Scouse accent, a broad grin animating his malleable features as his impressive 6ft 3in frame unfurls itself.
Here is the secret to Morrissey's success: at 43, he's one of Britain's most in-demand character actors, strangely familiar yet oddly unrecognisable, despite the fact that he's cornered the market in ordinary-men-in-extraordinary-turmoil roles over the past few years. From the murderous tax inspector and adulterous MP in the acclaimed television dramas Holding On and State of Play to the tormented schoolteacher Bradley Headstone in the BBC's Our Mutual Friend and a skittish, beetle-browed Gordon Brown in The Deal, his nuanced performances, animated by a fierce intelligence, act like a beacon both to writers and directors (who know that he'll be able to shine a sympathetic light into the murkiest corners of interior lives) and to audiences (who know he'll deliver, even if they can't quite remember why).
This, he acknowledges, as he orders a grilled vegetable salad with goats' cheese, is an enviable position for any actor to be in. 'I try to disappear inside the person I'm playing,' he says. 'I want people to take an impression of the character away with them, rather than think, "Oh, there's Morrissey with his box of tricks again." '
Morrissey's latest chance to disappear occurs in The Other Boleyn Girl, a lavish historical romp of a movie from the novel by Philippa Gregory, which anatomises the power struggles at the Byzantine court of Henry VIII (a glowering Eric Bana) in the persons of Anne and Mary Boleyn (Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson), two sisters inveigled into advancing their family's status by courting the king's affections and, they hope, producing a much-desired male heir. Initially, Mary becomes Henry's mistress and bears him an illegitimate child; but, as everyone with a glancing knowledge of GCSE history knows, the feisty and fearless Anne eventually sweeps both her sister and Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, aside, forcing him to break with the Catholic Church in order to make her his second wife.
The film is fittingly portentous, chock-full of turreted piles, slamming doors and tolling bells, and, despite a preponderance of pavanes and minstrelsy, manages to stay just the right side of French and Saunders-style risibility. But amid the stellar cast - including Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls' parents - Morrissey stands out. As the Duke of Norfolk, the Boleyn sisters' uncle, he's a ruthless political manipulator, treating them like disposable brood-mare commodities in order to further his own advancement (a trick he'd later repeat with Katherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, who also happened to be his niece).
Norfolk is the ultimate backstage intriguer, part-Rasputin, part-Peter Mandelson (Morrissey shadowed Mandelson when researching The Deal, but politely demurs when asked if this aided his preparation for Norfolk), and he endows him with something of the night, whether he's demanding of Mary, in no uncertain terms, whether the king 'fully' enjoyed her favours during a sleepover, or simply brooding on his next move in a smoke-filled corner.
'To me, Norfolk was like a medieval rock star, a sort of Lemmy-from-Motörhead version of a court enforcer,' says Morrissey, grinning as he sips his mineral water. 'He had this almost archetypal lust for power: getting to the top table was everything, and staying there was paramount. It wasn't as if he wanted a Ferrari or something: he was after wealth and patronage for himself and his family. You see him instantly switching to Jane Seymour's side when Anne fails him; it's like that great story about Don King, who went into the ring with George Foreman but came out of Muhammad Ali's corner after he knocked Foreman out, holding his arm aloft.'
Morrissey applied his usual methodical and meticulous research techniques when preparing for The Other Boleyn Girl, steeping himself in the history, literature and mores of the 16th century (similarly, he spent time in tax offices and newsrooms for Holding On and State of Play); he chooses his projects carefully, based on the director, in this case Justin Chadwick ('he did the BBC's Bleak House, which I thought was great'); the writer, in this case Peter Morgan ('I'd worked with him on The Deal and I knew he'd get it right'); and his fellow cast members ('I'm a big fan of Mark Rylance, and of Natalie and Scarlett'). 'This was a hard story to shoehorn into a movie, with all its twists and turns and epochal historical events,' he says, 'but they've managed to do it without tons of exposition; they've got the settings and smells and atmosphere right, which is no small achievement.'
Morrissey's stringent approach to his work means that he's played a key part in some of the best British television of the past decade. So it's something of a jolt to realise that The Other Boleyn Girl - and his recent, acclaimed turn as the saturnine Colonel Brandon in the BBC's Sense and Sensibility - represents a kind of comeback after a less-than-stellar sojourn in Hollywood. Last year he appeared in The Reaping, an overwrought slice of southern Gothic-horror in which he played a schoolteacher who sought professional miracle-debunker Hilary Swank's help when his small town seemed to succumb to biblical plagues.
The shooting of the film was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina's visiting of genuine plague conditions just down the Gulf coast. But while The Reaping was a straightforward genre piece, 2006's Basic Instinct 2 was a whole different paradigm of hokum. Morrissey played the male lead in this ill-advised sequel, a criminal psychologist who gets involved in Sharon Stone's ice-picking shenanigans after her serial murderess Catherine Tramell relocates to London.
It was seen as Morrissey's potential Hollywood breakthrough, full-frontal nudity and all. But if Stone's diva-like demands (which reportedly included Pilates equipment and a 'non-smoking' chauffeur) and habit of screaming at the top of her voice before every take didn't alert him to which way the wind was blowing, then the reviews left him in no doubt ('Acting always involves a degree of self-abasement, but just watching trash like this is degrading' - The New York Times).
I haven't actually seen the film, I tell him. 'I wouldn't advise you to,' he replies evenly. 'What happened was, I thought the original script was good, the director [Michael Caton-Jones ] was good, the Sharon of Casino and the first Basic Instinct was brilliant. And you get there and it very clearly isn't working from day one. So you put your head down and shoot the thing, but then, when it's finished, you have to go out and sell it. That was the really tough part. That's when you politely say it was a learning curve, or words to that effect.'
Did he feel bruised by the experience? 'I did, yeah,' he says. 'I always pick holes in my performance in everything I do, but this time I really felt I'd let myself down. You have to be open as an actor, but this was an occasion when I really wanted to put on a suit of armour. When the reviews came out I thought you know what, f--- it, I'm going to go and be a market gardener, I don't want to do this any more But then I thought, actually, this is my job and I've come this far with it. So I'd better stick with it.'
So he wouldn't rule out doing a Basic Instinct 3? He manages a weak smile. 'I might do it if it was billed as an out-and-out comedy.'
Morrissey's Hollywood loss - he's not involved in the ill-fated movie version of State of Play, to the extent that he asks me if I know who's in it (currently: Brad Pitt out, Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in ) - is our gain. He's always seemed an actor more attuned to the kitchen sink than the poolside buffet. He was born to solid working-class stock in Liverpool: his father, who died when Morrissey was 15, was a shoe repairer and key-cutter, while his mother worked for the Littlewoods catalogue company. Morrissey was the youngest of four children, a factor he thinks was crucial in shaping his future career. 'I was spoilt rotten, indulged in every whim,' he says. 'If any of my siblings had said they wanted to act, they wouldn't have been taken seriously, whereas I could have gone and said to my mum that I wanted to be an astronaut and it would have been fine.'
Morrissey's youth coincided with Liverpool's early-1980s boiling point: the Toxteth riots on one side (the flames were practically licking the Morrissey family home, round the corner in Knotty Ash), Derek Hatton's Militant hijacking the council on the other, and the nascent post-punk music scene - Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, Pete Wylie - coalescing around Eric's Club.
'Academically, it was never going to happen for me,' he says. 'I was lazy, and I went to a terrible school, which I hated.' He failed his 11-plus and left school at 16 (making him largely self-taught, which is why he places such high value on research and preparation). But he'd always loved acting, inspired both by Ken Loach's Kes, which he saw on television - 'It was suddenly like, wow, these people are just like me' - and the city's Everyman Youth Theatre, then riding the Alan Bleasdale-Willy Russell wave, which he started hanging out at.
'My first choice would have been to be a rock star, because we were all in awe of guys like the Bunnymen,' he says. 'I'm still a sort of frustrated musician. But there were a lot of cool people around the Everyman scene, so I thought I'd give it a go. We were taken seriously as people there. We were given responsibility and allowed to be creative, even a bit naughty.'
Morrissey's big break came when, aged 19, he landed the lead role in Russell's One Summer, Channel 4's first drama series (he co-starred with fellow Everyman alumnus Ian Hart, who remains his best mate) about two Scouse lads on the lam. Reluctant to be typecast as an errant Liverpool kid, he was accepted at Rada, and went on to the RSC and the National Theatre. His career built slowly and steadily, thanks to his sterling work in high-profile dramas by leading writers such as Tony Marchant, Paul Abbott and Peter Morgan, and the respect of peers like John Madden, who directed him as a buttoned-up Nazi in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
'All actors think every job will be their last,' he says. 'It goes with the territory.' Luckily, Morrissey has a solid home life to act as a counterweight. His partner of 17 years is the novelist Esther Freud, great granddaughter of Sigmund and daughter of Lucian, unofficially Britain's Greatest Living Painter. The pair were set up at a dinner party by a male friend, and now have three children: Albie, 12, Anna, nine, and two-year-old Gene. He's never been invited to pose for Lucian - 'You have to be asked; he chooses his models very carefully' - and none of his paintings adorns the walls of the family's north London home: their insurance, he says, wouldn't stretch that far.
Morrissey also has a fledgling career as a director to augment his day job. His company, Tubedale Films - set up with Freud and his businessman brother Paul - has made a few short films and the television drama Passer By, and is attempting to raise 'the last £2 million' for a feature called Carnal Artist, based on the life of the S&M performance artist Bob Flanagan, whose 'actions' included impaling himself on skewers. 'That's my passion, the film I really want to make,' he enthuses. 'It would be good to see a movie that took the art world seriously; it's easy to take the p---because it can seem so crazy. But I'm a massive fan of Brit Art in general and Damien Hirst in particular. I think he's an absolute genius and should be celebrated in every way.'
With Carnal Artist in temporary abeyance, Morrissey has shot The Pool, a nano-budget love story set in his home town, in which a jilted drifter runs into a young woman in a betting shop, and the pair end up wandering the city talking their lives out in a Before Sunrise/Before Sunset kind of way. 'It was made for £100,000,' he says proudly. 'Two actors, tiny crew, everyone put up at my brother's hotel. It'll hopefully come out later this year, and I'm hoping to direct and produce more as time goes on. I think it's helped me as an actor.
'Before, I didn't like that I'd research a character thoroughly, then I'd turn up on set on the first day and the director would say, this is your character's house, and I'd go no, he'd never live somewhere like that. It was really starting to annoy me; I'd take it personally. Now I'm much less precious, because as a director I'm making those kinds of decisions. I'm much more appreciative of the fact that everyone's got a job to do.'
In fact, he says while gulping down a coffee, Tubedale amounts to his major indulgence. 'I've got a great family and a beautiful house. I feel very lucky as far as my lifestyle is concerned. I'm not really interested in fame and all its trappings. These days, the company gets the bulk of my time and energy and quite a bit of my money, and that's fine with me.'
On that note, he bids a cheery farewell and exits the restaurant as inconspicuously as his hulking frame will allow. He attracts a few quizzical looks, but there are no shocks of recognition; for now, David Morrissey remains Britain's least-known best actor.
'The Other Boleyn Girl' is out on 7 March
