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the trailer for W.
Watch the trailer for
Frost/Nixon
What is a character actor? As compliments go, the term always seems a bit of a
backhander, the type handed out to “handsome” women. Beauty fades, it
implies, but a face that couldn’t launch even a single ship is for ever.
While pretty boys play Romeo, generations of uncomely Mercutios have been
advised at drama school that their career won’t actually get out of the
traps until there are a good 40 candles on the birthday cake.
Toby Jones, 41, holds a rigid hand, in profile, diagonally across his
distinctive features. The gesture succinctly illustrates that Jones’s is not
a straight face. “I’ve no idea what a character actor is,” he says. “They’re
technically not handsome. They’re technically characterful, which is a
euphemism for asymmetrical.” A decade ago, Jones’s cameo in the film Notting
Hill, as an overeager fan of Julia Roberts, was cut. Most actors would have
chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his
short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a
drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel, he obtained
permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or
listening to it on Radio 4, would have placed long odds against the actor
once cast as a stalker of stars ever landing the lead in a Hollywood film
alongside Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sigourney
Weaver. That is what happened with Infamous, in which Jones played the
writer Truman Capote.
Not that his run of poor luck was quite over. Philip Seymour Hoffman had a
simultaneous crack at the effete, high-pitched author in Capote, and won an
Oscar for it. The producers decided to hold Infamous back for a year, but
felt guilty enough about pressing the pause button on its star’s career to
circulate rushes to generate work for him. Jones has not looked back. In
that year of waiting he filmed The Painted Veil and Amazing Grace, and
played Robert Cecil to Helen Mirren’s queen in Elizabeth I. Three more films
have been queuing for release with Jones’s crinkly features in the mix. He
plays Bill Murray’s side-kick in the sci-fi fable City of Ember, and the
presidential campaign manager Karl Rove in Oliver Stone’s Dubya biopic, W.
In Frost/ Nixon he puts on the thick-framed specs of the Hollywood
super-agent Swifty Lazar. None are leads, but the high-profile character
roles are coming in droves.
“We always knew it was there,” Jones says of the rival Capote film. “Daniel
Craig had auditioned for it, so he told us the script. We went, ‘That sounds
incredibly similar.’ No one seemed worried. What was hard was the hiatus
before the release. But I never thought for a second I would ever be a lead
part. Everyone tells you anything can happen when you’re an actor, but you
know the chances of being the lead in an American film are very , very
small. And I was aware that I was lucky Infamous was even going to be
released. In fact, if the other film had died, our film probably wouldn’t
have been.” Has he ever compared notes with Hoffman? “Never met him.” But
he’s been working in the West End, directing the play Riflemind. “Hang on,”
says Jones, looking aghast. “I’m directing a play called Rifleblind . . . Oh
f***! Oh f***!” he jokes.
The performance that got Jones noticed was in 2001’s The Play What I Wrote, a
homage to Morecambe and Wise, in which the Right Size comedy duo, whom he
knew from his years on the devised theatre circuit, initially invited him to
play lots of tiny roles. “I said, ‘Please don’t say you have loads of little
parts. I want to play a part.’ They said, ‘Well, let’s make it a part – a
guy who has to play lots of parts. He’s a stooge.’ ” The play’s unique
selling point was that every night a surprise celebrity would come on stage
to have the mickey taken.
Once it was up and running, each night’s celebrity walk-on became “a terrible
barometer of stardom”, as audiences either gasped in astonishment or gawped
in ignorance. Jones’s job was to impersonate them all, from Ralph Fiennes to
Dawn French in London and Holly Hunter to John McEnroe when the play moved
to Broadway. It was in New York that a casting director was struck by his
likeness to Capote and tried to cast him in a play. That didn’t happen, but
she tipped off the film director Douglas McGrath, and Jones found himself
screen testing for the role of a writer he had no idea he resembled. “None
whatsoever. I had no knowledge of Truman Capote. Obviously they had a
confident executive that day who just went, ‘Yes, we’ll take him.’ ” Some
say his performance was superior to Hoffman’s. It gave rise to bizarre
offers. Oliver Stone said he could have any part he wanted in a Vietnam film
called Pinkville. “I read the script thinking there doesn’t seem to be any
part in here for me. I walk in and literally there are all the guys who
should be there, and Stone says, ‘Listen, man, whatever you want to play in
this.’ I went out to rehearse for two weeks with Bruce Willis to play his
colleague, researching the My Lai massacre. It’s been shelved because Willis
pulled out.”
The consolation prize was Rove in W, a film in which everyone is younger and
better-looking than their characters. Even Jones. Bush’s electoral finagler
is “possibly the hardest character I’ve ever had to work on because he’s
known for his very invisibility. They talk about ‘the hand of Rove’. That
basically meant you couldn’t detect Rove’s participation in what must have
been his plan.” As for Lazar, the man who brokered Nixon’s interview deal
with David Frost, “he’s someone who doesn’t see himself as absurd, but who
looks patently absurd. I’ve spoken to people who’ve known him and they’d go,
‘Swifty was really . . . quite a character.’ They wouldn’t ever say, ‘What a
great guy, funny guy.’ I don’t think he was any of those things”.
Jones is both. And modest. His one concession to the fame game is to dye his
hair blond. Today he’s also wearing a flamboyant shirt. But this is
window-dressing. You know you’re a career character actor if, even when cast
to voice an animated character, you get to play the “technically not
handsome” elf Dobby in Harry Potter.
It has been a valuable calling card whenever Jones works with the Book Trust
to promote reading in schools. He was most recently involved in Everybody
Writes, a nationwide promotion in which every primary school child in the
country was involved in a writing project. “I was drafted in to brain-storm
them in new ways to stimulate their writing.” But there is a wider lesson
that Jones, whose father is the actor Freddie Jones, can teach children:
that talent and patience can work their alchemy in the unlikeliest places.
“Having grown up with an actor,” he says, “I have the advantage of knowing
that it’s possible to succumb to the feeling of being a victim. And I’ve
tried very, very forcefully to resist that temptation.”
