He’s an amiable sort of bloke, is David Thewlis. Which is a bit disappointing.
Thewlis has such a great line in manic psychos and creepy villains - Naked,
Prime Suspect 3 and now as the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp in
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - I was hoping for at least a glimpse into an
actorly heart of darkness.
Instead, we’re sitting in the garden of the Chateau Marmont hotel, just off
Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, the sun is shining, of course, and
Thewlis, who has the slightly shambolic looks of a younger Ralph Richardson,
is meandering through another amusing story. I’m thinking it would be hard
to meet a more contented man. He is even telling me how much he loves LA.
“There are a lot of British people in this business who slag it off, but I
think it’s great,” he says in his still strong Lancashire accent. “I live in
a beautiful house. I like driving. I’ve got great friends here. There’s
loads to do. You have the ocean and the mountain and the desert. What’s
wrong with that? I’m from Blackpool, you know.”
He is indeed, and it’s been quite a journey from there, growing up above his
parents’ little toy shop, to here, the glamorous Chateau Marmont and all
that. Thewlis, Anna Friel, his girlfriend of eight years, and their young
daughter, Gracie, have been living in LA for a year now, and may be here a
good while more. Friel is starring in the hit American television series
Pushing Daisies, and Thewlis says he doesn’t much miss England. “London is
packed with people who sit around pubs saying they’re going to do this and
they’re going to do that,” he says. “I kind of ran away from that, really.”
Which is a little disingenuous. Thewlis is not really doing a whole helluvalot
in LA these days, and he likes it when the pressure is off. As Friel copes
with the gruelling pace of an American television series’s shooting
schedule, Thewlis has eased into the role of house-husband, padding about in
the garden of their home up a canyon just under the Hollywood sign, taking
three-year-old Gracie to school in the mornings and picking her up in the
afternoon. In between, when the mood catches, he’s working on his new novel,
a follow-up to his well received art-world satire The Late Hector Kipling.
Thewlis wasn’t always so high on Los Angeles. He first came when he was going
out with the director Beeban Kidron, before anyone knew who he was. “She was
being courted by Hollywood and I was the boyfriend at the table, so I wasn’t
really taken much notice of. You can imagine that situation.” It’s not so
much different these days, he says, when the paparazzi “elbow me aside to
get to Anna”. He came back to Hollywood in his own right after winning the
best-actor award in Cannes in 1993 for playing Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked.
“I met Spielberg, I met Jack Nicholson, I met the Coen brothers, I met Robert
Altman,” Thewlis says. “I met a ton of people. I’m not going to say it
wasn’t exciting. It was wonderful. But I got a big pile of scripts and I
realised that the bigger the budget, the worse the script. I got offered Die
Hard 3 or 2 or whatever, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to come here and sell
out and do rubbish.’ So I turned it down. It was the part Jeremy Irons
played.
“My agent kept saying, ‘You must do a studio film, because then you can do
what you want.’ So I crumbled. Instead of doing Die Hard, which I probably
should have done, in retrospect, I did this thing called Dragonheart.” In
which he played the evil King Einon, you’ll surely recall. That was followed
by the even more disastrous The Island of Dr Moreau, loosely based on an HG
Wells novel and starring the ageing Marlon Brando. When Thewlis arrived on
set in Australia, he found that the original director had been fired and the
actor first chosen to play his role had left after having a nervous
breakdown.
“I landed in this chaos,” he recalls. “Val Kilmer took me out for dinner and
said, ‘Go home! Get out while you can, because this is hell.’ ” He wishes he
had, though he later wrote a story about it all that got him the agent for
his first book.
In retrospect, he is amused by some of the Hollywood rubbish he’s done. He
played the detective in Basic Instinct 2, partly for the fat cheque, but
mainly because he had it written into his contract that he could finish
shooting three weeks before his daughter was due to be born. He says Sharon
Stone was “quite nuts” and insisted on sitting in on his wardrobe fittings.
“She chose my belt. It wasn’t hard, I was playing a detective! There was no
discussion of the character or anything like that, just what she thought was
a good belt.”
What does he think of the film? “Really awful.” He does feel a twinge of guilt
about some of the interviews he did publicising it. “When you are actually
promoting it, you have to say, ‘I've always wanted to play a detective.’
Bullshit. I knew it was a piece of crap.”
To his credit, Thewlis has worked on big-budget Hollywood films that turned
out a lot better, including Seven Years in Tibet, with Brad Pitt, Kingdom of
Heaven, directed by Ridley Scott, The New World, directed by Terrence
Malick, and, of course, the Harry Potter films.
Now 45, he seems to have hit a sweet spot, segueing easily between popular
character roles in big Hollywood movies, such as the werewolf Professor
Remus Lupin in the Potter series, and the kind of smaller independent
productions that first made people sit up and take note 15 years ago, when
he channelled the sociopathic urban philosopher Johnny in Naked. Last year,
Thewlis returned to British television after a long absence to play
identical twins in the award-winning BBC drama The Street, scripted by Jimmy
McGovern.
Whatever the flatteries and seductions of Hollywood, he prefers the more
intimate, collaborative working environment of lower-budget films such as
his latest, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has been adapted from the
best-selling novel by John Boyne. It’s about a young boy whose father,
played by Thewlis, is the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. The son
strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Jewish boy imprisoned in the
camp.
“The strange thing is that it was a really happy time making the film,” he
says. “It was quite a small crew, me and Vera [Farmiga, who plays his wife]
and the kids most of the time, and we all had a very nice relationship.
Maybe we needed to have such a light time because it was such heavy subject
matter.”
Although the camp in the film is not Auschwitz, Thewlis based his performance
on his research into Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz, who
was tried after the war. Prior to his execution, he wrote an autobiography,
published as Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz.
What’s so disturbing about Thewlis’s performance is that he plays the
commandant as a good family man, a loving husband and father, even as we
know he is sending hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths.
“I was given a copy of a letter that Hoess wrote to his children before his
execution, saying goodbye to them,” Thewlis says. “It is a beautifully
written letter. I left it lying on a table in my home in Windsor, and a
neighbour saw it, read it without knowing what I was doing and said, ‘What
is this? It’s a beautiful, beautiful letter. He obviously loved his children
so much. Was he sick?’ Because it’s clear this man is about to die. I said,
‘Yes, he was very sick. He was the commandant of Auschwitz.’ It’s
unbelievable when you read the letter.
“It’s important to try to understand the people who did this, to realise that
they weren’t necessarily monsters on the surface, that you could meet them
and not suspect a thing.”
Thewlis became so engrossed in research on the Nazis and the concentration
camps, he eventually stopped. “I didn’t think it was doing me any good to
immerse myself in this level of darkness on a daily basis,” he says. “I
remember I put a Peter Kay video on. I thought, ‘I’ve got to watch some
comedy, I really have.’ I just felt a weight lifted.” While they
were shooting the film in Budapest, Thewlis had to walk through the streets
to and from the set in his Nazi uniform. But he stopped doing it after a
couple of days. “There were some very old people around,” he says, “and I
felt really guilty, because they might not have understood what was
happening, seeing someone walking through the streets dressed as a Nazi.”
He’s nice like that, is David Thewlis. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is
out now.
Watch an exclusive clip from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas at
timesonline.co.uk/film
