Every time there is a new Hamlet,” says Jonathan Pryce, “you scan the review.
You want to see if you are getting the namecheck. It was David Tennant's,
and the critics were doing their top ten. And there was one list, and I was
No 1. And I was thinking, great, 28 years on, No 1! And then I realised
that, even with ‘P', it was alphabetical. So I was a little sour. Still,
it's nice to know you've had some impact, and that it hasn't all just been
frittered away. On sitcoms.”
Pryce was 33 when he played Hamlet at the Royal Court. Way back in 1980, it
won him an Olivier Award and established him as one of the finest, most
heavyweight, actors of his generation. He's now 61, and his career since has
been impressive, but also let's be honest, bonkers. He's a very serious
actor, basically, but he doesn't always do serious things.
Such as Clone, his series on BBC Three, which has brought us together today in
a London hotel. A sitcom. Indeed, a sci-fi sitcom. There is a pleasing
symmetry to it. As Doctor Who goes to Stratford to do Hamlet, Hamlet heads
to the Beeb to do sci-fi.
“I wasn't looking for a sitcom,” shrugs Pryce, whose real voice, which we so
rarely hear, still has a vague Welsh lilt. “But every time I thought I'd do
Lear, someone else did it before me. This was McKellen's year and a couple
of others. I thought I'd do a sitcom instead.”
Clone is an oddity, in that half of it makes you belly laugh, and half of it
is dreadful. Pryce plays a scientist (Dr Victor Blenkinsop) who creates the
world's first human clone. The plan is to clone a whole army, but because
Clone 1 (Stuart McLoughlin) is weak, stupid and irritating, the real Army
(led by chief baddie Mark Gatiss, of The League of Gentlemen) decides to
have him killed and shut the project down. So Dr Frankenstein and his fey
monster flee to the countryside. Hilarity, occasionally, ensues.
Pryce is, of course, excellent in Clone, but at times he does have to carry
the whole thing. The series is the brainchild of Adam Chase (of Friends),
and Ash Atalla (of The Office, The IT Crowd), all of which should make it
rather better than the opening episodes suggest. Still, there are flashes of
something wonderful in there, and Pryce hints that later episodes are an
improvement.
For an actor of his calibre, either way, you'd think it something of a risk.
But then Pryce is not a man afraid of risk. This is a man who, in the late
1980s, in his early forties and with a growing and sombre credibility on
stage and screen, suddenly decided he fancied doing musicals.
“I was doing Macbeth at Stratford,” he explains. “I organised the first- night
cabaret, and I sang Witchcraft, backed by my three witches. We had Simon
Russell Beale on the piano. And my agent, who had been my agent since drama
school, he said, ‘You know, I'd forgotten you could sing. You should do a
musical.'”
There followed a series of meetings with the musical director of The Phantom
of the Opera, from which Michael Crawford was soon to depart. “Then I met
with Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber,” says Pryce. “And they were
very keen. But they said, ‘Have you seen it?' And I said, ‘No.' And they
said, ‘You probably should.' So I went the next night, and, well, it wasn't
for me. And so, like a News of the World reporter, I made my excuses and
left.”
Some months later, Nicholas Hytner was casting Miss Saigon, once again with
Cameron Mackintosh. Mackintosh remembered Pryce, who auditioned, and was
cast as the Engineer. He played the role for about a year, and then followed
the production to New York.
“And I wasn't desperate to stop,” he says. “It was a great ride. And in New
York, the response is so much bigger. The way you are treated, everything.
If you're not careful, it can go to your head.”
Since then, Pryce has also sung and danced in a clutch of musicals, including
Evita with Madonna and the ill-fated West End production of My Fair Lady,
which very occasionally also starred Martine McCutcheon. And yet he seems
unsullied by the widespread assumption that the musical, to be polite, is
not exactly art at its highest form. If Michael Crawford expressed
impatience to play Lear, in other words, you'd laugh in his face. With
Pryce, it still seems like destiny.
In an interview, he's quite a tricky chap to get your head around. The son of
parents who ran a grocery in Holywell, he initially planned to be a teacher.
In his manner, I suppose, there are flashes of some innate schoolmasterly
reserve. He's not exactly chilly, at first, but as he starts to relax, you
really feel the difference.
His professional eclecticism, he thinks, comes from his early days at the
Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. This was where he went after leaving RADA,
for almost three years, performing and then directing. “It was fairly risky
theatre,” he says. “The performance style was quite anarchic. So that's how
I see it. It's just another job. It's just another way of expressing
myself.” The theatre world, he concedes, has changed, but back in the early
1970s, leaving RADA and moving to Liverpool was a perfectly respectable
thing to do. Other Everyman alumni included Bill Nighy, Julie Walters, Pete
Postlethwaite and the writers Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell. “There was
nowhere else,” says Pryce, “that I wanted to be.”
He left eventually, building a stage career in the UK and the US, taking
Trevor Griffiths's The Comedians from the National to Broadway, and winning
a Tony Award. Then came Hamlet, and then came Hollywood.
“As the story goes,” he says. “I was offered two films. One was Time
Bandits with Terry Gilliam. The other was this bollocks called Loophole. There
I was, having played Hamlet for months, on £92 a week, and absolutely broke.
And Loophole offered twice as much money as Time Bandits. So instead of
being in this absolute classic, I'm in, uh, Loophole.”
He would work with Gilliam eventually, most notably on Brazil in 1985. The
Time Bandits role went to David Warner. “In retrospect, I'm glad,” deadpans
Pryce, “because he had to wear a terrible hat.”
By now, fully thawed, Pryce is loping between anecdotes like an old pro. And
yet, over the years, he has given remarkably few interviews. He doesn't like
to read press about himself, and says he won't read this. It makes me wonder
if, being such a chameleon, he's afraid that his own personality might get
in the way.
“Well,” he says. “Maybe. I did find it a shock when Robert De Niro started
doing interviews. And Paul Schofield? I always admired him, and I knew
nothing about him at all.”
Pryce has been married to the Irish actress Kate Fahy, whom he met at the
Everyman, since 1974, and they have two sons and a daughter. “I don't do my
home life, or my kids,” he says. “It's a matter of record who they are
because everything is on the internet. You know, when I was starting out,
they didn't have the outlets for all this stuff. You weren't being
photographed. If they'd photographed everything we did at the Everyman...
bloody hell. Our careers would have been over.”
“These guys,” he continues. “I really feel sorry for them. I've been around
Madonna [in Evita] and she's very clever, how she handles that publicity.
But most of these young people, their lives are tyrannised.”
Like a proper thespian, Pryce worries about the craft. He worries about the
lack of decent regional theatres and the conflation of actor and celebrity.
“You burn out pretty quickly,” he says of Hollywood culture. “Some of those
young American actors mature, but a lot of them disappear.”
Get him talking about the big film roles he has recently played (Pirates of
the Caribbean, Leatherheads, De- Lovely), and he sounds surprisingly nervy
and unfulfilled. “I've never seen them. They're probably terrible. I'm more
frustrated than satisfied when I see myself on film.” An exception, he says,
was David Hare's My Zinc Bed for the BBC. “That's the performance I've been
most happy with. It came out as I intended. But that's rare.”
This doesn't come across as tortured, exactly. More yearning. As though
despite four decades of acclaim, Pryce hasn't actually quite figured out
exactly what he wants to do. “I'm least comfortable,” he says, “singing as
myself. I occasionally do charity concerts. I produced one at the Almeida
last year. It was a swing night. We had Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton,
Michael Ball, David Morrissey and me. And I get nervous doing things like
that. It goes back to when you're very young. People pointing their fingers
at you, going, look at that prick. Who does he think he is? Frank Sinatra? I
sang a duet with Judi Dench. She was wonderful, but I've never seen her
looking more afraid. But that's singing.”
And then he leaves me with my coffee and, to be honest, I still haven't quite
got the measure of him. He's a Shakespearean in a sitcom, a veteran with
nerves, a serious actor who sings, an interviewee who tends not to give
interviews. So it's ironic, I suppose, that he next appears in something
called Clone. Because he's not like anybody else.
Clone, Mon, BBC Three, 8.30pm
