Credits: @221braggadocio

Richard Armitage (R)

Question (Q)

Q1: Any place in the US that you really liked, and any differences you notice between the UK and USA?

R: I thought Mt. Rushmore was very impressive, I went to see it once very early in the morning. One thing I noticed that was different is that Americans are always talking about eating something, where as in the UK they always talk about drinking something. Time in America is measured by the last meal, in the UK it’s measured by the last drink.

Q2: My question is about Francis Dolarhyde’s becoming, because it feels like at the end he becomes something more than just himself and more than the dragon. After Francis’ argument with the dragon about sacrificing Reba, he conquers the dragon and it feels like he becomes something else entirely. I was wondering about your take on that.

R: Obviously it’s a fictional character, so Harris writes it in the novel. In investigating the push and pull between Francis and the Dragon, he [Francis] probably used the Blake painting as inspiration, almost a religious icon that he could worship, so that’s why it’s on an easel in his room and he refers to it, he looks to it, and then creates the tattoo on his back. So in the early stages of his evolution (or devolution), he’s aspiring to something, and then he steps over the line, and the inspiration consumes him and is more powerful than him, and then he grows inside of it and begins to harness that power, and eventually conquer it. But it’s all in flux, it ebbs and flows. And there’s that scene where the dragon and Francis are fighting which was one of the most crazy exciting scenes I’ve ever shot, and figuring out how to do that and what the dynamic was was probably one of the singularly most exciting things I’ve ever had to do.

Q3: You come from a very professionally trained, classical, British school of acting kind of background, so what kinds of methods do you use to get into character?

R: Interestingly the drama school that I went to, which is just down the road in Hammersmith, LAMDA, what they offer you is lots and lots of methods and systems, and you study Stanislavski, you work with a different director every time and it brings you something new, and they never really lock you down and force you to do something that isn’t appropriate to you, you find your own way through and that’s something that I’ve done. I don’t have a method of approaching every single role in the same way. I start in the same way, like a regime. I like to read around the subject and I like to do mental, physical and emotional preparation. But then when you get on set with the director, the director will guide you and lead you into all kinds of different methods. The Crucible was one of those moments where the director’s method was quite radical and some people were able to yield to it and some people weren’t. I guess that’s what I’ve always prided myself on, is being open to new ideas, and even very late in your career you can do something that surprises yourself if you think like that.

Q4: [hard to hear- question about a project in the works with questionable prospects of being finished]

R: I think it’s still up in the air at the moment, it was due to be filmed in April but it’s being moved later into the year because of the work I’ve been doing on the Netflix show. It’s not fully funded yet so it could work, but it may not work. We’ll see.

Q5: I had a question about the name John Crane, that you wrote to check in to the Brooklyn Museum. Was it a name that you came up with?

R: I think it’s from the novel. Is it? Yeah, it’s from the novel. See I read the book.

Q6: You’ve done a variety of different roles, I wonder what influences you to pursue those roles?

R: More often than not, you go where you’re wanted. So getting hired is still kind of a revelation to me, a shock and a surprise. Sometimes you have very flat periods, where I don’t really care what comes next, I just want to work on something. I feel like I’ve got a little cloud of luck over my head so the right thing always seems to come along. But again, I’m easily excited about literature and stories, so I’ve always said I don’t really pursue glory, I’d happily do acting for two people in my living room if it was a role that I really enjoyed with a story I’d really like to tell. So it’s chance, I would say.

Q7: Some time ago we were talking in the fandom about what we would like to see you in, and what we came up with was a British production on a small screen and you speaking in a British accent, preferably northern. And out of nowhere, Brian Percival* popped into the Twitter feed and said “oh yeah, I’d be up for it.” So I was wondering if you’d be up for it, and what your experience was working with him.

*Previously worked with Richard in North & South.

R: Up for what?

Q7: I assumed for directing you.

R: Do you think he was referring to something in general?

Q7: I don’t know, it was like a mirage, he came, we goggled, and he went. Frankly, I was in shock.

R: Yeah it’s interesting, because I’ve reached a point in my life now, and my career, where people who gave me opportunities really early on seem to be circling back now, or maybe I’m doing the circling back, so I’m about to work with Nicola Shindler again, who was a producer on Sparkhouse. Her career has ascended and become a really incredible producer. She was a really incredible producer then but she’s really risen, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we are a few more years down the line. Brian’s another one. We’ve passed each other on another project that didn’t work out, but he’s a director, one of those people that change your life. I’m also talking to Daniel Percival, about collaborating on something. Daniel directed Strike Back and he’s been running The Man in the High Castle, so our friendship has kind of been rekindled. I think it’s really nice to bring something back to those people who gave you opportunities when you were really young and starting out on your career. I really cherish that, and I’m really looking forward to maybe working with Brian again.

Q8: Once in an interview about Thorin, you were asked what your arkenstone was and your answer was respect. I like this answer a lot. So I was wondering what’s your red dragon? As you said yesterday he’s a character who sheds his skin, improves, and becomes something. I was wondering if there was something you’d like to improve, become?

R: I guess the antithesis of that is disrespect. Do you mean in myself?

Q8: Yes.

R: Yeah I try not to be too disrespectful. I guess I value the truth. I think we’re living at a time at the moment where the truth is warped and there’s a word that’s been in my head for a long time, and particularly recently it’s come to the surface. When I was studying Macbeth, at the RSC, I read a long thesis about the gunpowder plot, which was one of the things they thought that Shakespeare (or whoever Shakespeare was) was stimulated by to write Macbeth. And the word equivocation was used in this thesis, it was actually about equivocation and what equivocation is. And if you look it up in the dictionary, at the moment most politicians are equivocating. When you don’t answer a question, or you bend the truth to make it seem like you are answering the question, and in fact you’re telling a lie. So I would say my red dragon would be equivocation.

Q9: In the episode where you’re introduced as Francis Dolarhyde , The Great Red Dragon, it’s fairly silent, you had very few words. But as a viewer watching it, I was more focused on your body movements, the language there can convey everything about Francis. It was predatorial, animalistic, and I was wondering how did you achieve the level where you were satisfied with it. Was it through theater training, was it a form of dance?

R: Really good question, the answer is both. I come from a physical theater background and I’ve always maintained that I would have liked to have been a silent movie actor. I feel that language and words are amazing, but sometimes they stop something, they make it cerebral. It can shut down a possibility rather than open up a possibility because language is very specific, as we’ve just talked about with regards to equivocation. But the first port of entry for emotional response is a physical feeling, whether it’s feeling sick or your hair standing on end, and trying to project that through a visual image is something that I’m still fascinated with. So there was something that Harris picked up on in his psychological profile of Francis Dolarhyde which was this form of Balinese dance, and I thought, “okay, I don’t think Dolarhyde is enjoying a dance number in his living room, he’s using it as a way to express his discomfort or his displeasure.” His physical transformation way a way of making up for his lack of speech. So to me that was the most exciting part of the character.

Q9: How long did that take to perfect, that first shot of just bodily motions like a predator?

R: I’d just come off the Crucible and I had a movement director who I loved, who I contacted when I was doing this role. I said I need some kind of physical expression and she guided me towards a Japanese discipline called butoh, which is a kind of movement expression which was born out of the trauma of the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. It was evolving in the 50s and you can watch it online on youtube (1 2 3 4). It’s the most fascinating art form. When I went to see some at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I saw a butoh master and his troupe, and it was everything I needed. I didn’t manage to do any classes in butoh, I was really just using the visuals to create this physical discipline which we moved into a type of yoga, but I didn’t want it to be soft like yoga, it needed to be kind of hard and aggressive. It was an experiment.

Q9: Thank you, and you did a great job.

Q10: This is a very similar question, but I noticed that Dolarhyde is self-conscious about utilizing verbal speech.But because of this he has an interesting verbal quality also. Which (the verbal or the physical) came first, and how was it marrying those two aspects of him? He also had a different physicality in public than he did alone.

R: For the speech impediment, I listened to a lot of recordings of post-surgery cleft palate voices that had recovered from that condition because Dolarhyde had had the surgery but it wasn’t a particularly successful one. So there was a quality that I was listening to. Then there was the physical form that I was studying and observing, but also, I do sometimes enjoy locking myself away in a room and reading a book or just doing something alone, and you sometimes can go a couple of days without speaking to anybody. I don’t know whether anyone else experiences this or whether I’m just a weirdo. But I find that when that happens my voice changes, and I always forget how to make a noise, I have to do a warm-up before I go into the world and start speaking again. And I felt like it’s a little bit like pressing against atmosphere, like when you’re alone in you own atmosphere you warm up the room with your own presence, but when you step outside of your comfort zone, you change the air that you walk through, and I feel like Dolarhyde was sensitive to that. And I feel like he was almost like a person who can’t see or hear, that his senses were really heightened, so if somebody moved quickly he could react to it. And I think that was part of the fascination with Reba, because she was deprived of some of her senses, so there was a connection there that he really enjoyed, I think.

Q11: I was wondering if you’d be interested in directing a movie or a play, and if yes, what kind of movie or play would it be?

R: Good question, I don’t feel like I could be a regular TV actor directing episodes. I know how to do it, it’s fast, you get the shots and you move on, and I don’t think that would be for me. I’ve always been quite fascinated with that middle ground between dance and theater, and because of my skill set I think I could move towards something like that, I think I could work with bodies on a big scale.

Q12: About your production company, do you have plans to do anything and would you consider crowdfunding for a film?

R: Well, the production company is in really early stages, I’m still doing searches to make sure that I can trade under the name that I want to, but when we sort that out, it will be very relevant and clear to everybody that the name of the company really means something to me. But the reason that I’m starting it is because I’m collecting stories that I want to develop, and I feel like I need to do that not as a guest or a passenger or as an actor that brings financing to someone else’s project, I need to start owning the material that I’m doing. The second half of your question was… crowdfunding. So I’ve been asked a considerable number of times to help other people crowdfund in the past, and I’ve considered it myself, but I do think that it’s one of those things that you can only really do once. It’s like charities, you have to be very careful about asking people for money. I don’t like to do it. I think if people want to give money to a charity, it’s because they feel a personal connection to the charity, not to me. So I’d be very careful about crowdfunding. Unless it was something that I really couldn’t achieve without it, but I would only ever do it once.

Q13: I have a comment and a question, but don’t worry, they’re related. At your Q&A yesterday, you said we never saw Dolarhyde do something really terrible. As a fan of Frederick Chilton, I would like to object.

R: It wasn’t that terrible, it was quite pleasant actually.

Q13: That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about! What was it like filming that scene with Raúl Esparza?

R: Come on, he deserved it, didn’t he? It was funny and really quite disturbing. Tell me the name of the actor that played Chilton because my brain isn’t working.

Q13: Raúl Esparza.

R: Raúl. Okay, so very recently I was doing a play reading in New York with Michael Mayer, who directed Love Love Love. It’s like a test for a musical, I won’t say what it is because I think it’s being developed, but Raúl Esparza walked in, and I was like “hi Raúl, c’mere let me give you a kiss.” He didn’t want to, I don’t know why. No, it was funny, we laughed about it.

Q14: Many years ago when the Lord of the Rings was produced, I remember you said you wanted to audition for Legolas but your agent laughed you out of the room. Which is a pity, but. How was it with Thorin Oakenshield? Did you actively apply for the role or were you approached by Peter Jackson?

R: I remember exactly where I was when I sat in front of my manager saying “oh I heard they’re doing Lord of the Rings, do you think they’d give me a role? I really like Legolas” and he was like “darling they’re nearly at the end of the filming process, you’ve really missed the boat.” It was so disappointing. And then my perception of myself, that I could somehow play this lithe, lighter than air [character] and then actually what I end up getting is cast as is this kind of dumpy dwarf. It’s like a wake-up call, isn’t it? I was working on Spooks, and again I remember exactly where I was, I’d just done a scene with Laila Rouass, and I’d done a stunt where I’d hurt my back, so I was wearing a back brace, which was almost like a corset because I wanted to keep working and I was in a lot of pain. But then my agent called, and he said “look, Peter Jackson’s in town, two days, they’re literally going to every major city on the planet casting people. Here’s the script, go in and do something. Whatever you do, just don’t do silly dwarf voices. Interpret it and be yourself.” So I went to the casting. And that morning when I woke up I was in so much pain, I could barely get out of bed, so I just took loads of pain killers. Couldn’t even carry my bag, it was so painful, and I remember sitting outside the casting office thinking “I don’t know how to do this, how to go in,” because I was sort of sweating and grimacing. But I went in and there was Peter and Fran and Phillipa, and a bunch of other casting people and we just did the scene over a number of times. And the scene that they gave me to audition was the scene in Baggend, between Thorin and Balin, where he’s saying “I don’t know if I can do this” and “what am I doing.” That was the scene that we auditioned with. So I did it a number of times and then went away, back to work. And I think I was on the set of the Vicar of Dibley, is my brain going crazy? And the call came back about whether I got the job or not, and of course I walked out of that audition thinking, what you think most of the time: “okay, didn’t get it, move on, what’s next,” and so I’d left it way behind. I knew something was different because my agent said, “shall we go out for dinner?” And then a couple of the other agents were coming for dinner with me so I was like “okay, I know something’s up now.” So then they told me that I got the job. And it was kind of life changing.

Q14: Your performance as Thorin Oakenshield made me prefer the Hobbit over the Lord of the Rings, actually.

Q15: I was wondering if you ever had to pull out of a project because it felt wrong or something, and what is the point where you say “nope I can’t do this”?

R: Um, no. But that’s partly to do with the fact that I have a lot of loyalty, probably too much loyalty for my own good, really, and there’ve been moment when I’ve been on board a project, and actually it happened this year with The Lodge, I was already on board that project and something else came along which was bigger and better and brighter and more money, and your agent says “look we can pull you out of The Lodge, they can probably recast it,” and here I think “I’ve already started this process, I don’t want to let people down,” and I don’t have a problem with that at all, I never have any regrets over the things that you miss or the things that you decide not to do, I think there’s a strong enough reason why you’ve decided not to do it, but in general no I haven’t ever pulled out of something. There was one television show I remember, I’m not going to say what it is, but after the first readthrough, I did call my agent and asked, “can I get out of this?” And then he quickly got back to me and said, “don’t do it. Don’t build a reputation built on disloyalty.” So I try not to.

Q16: What is a character that you loved playing so much that you’d like to revisit? Alive or dead, since they’re mostly dead.

R: Yeah they are mostly dead aren’t they? A character that I loved that I’d like to revisit. I suppose I would say John Proctor, mainly because I think that I’m likely to revisit him if I’m not too old. I would like to revisit him on film, actually. I’d like to take that work we did in that stage play and somehow put it on film. Not as a piece of film to theater, but as a feature film or something. There was an amazing film of the Crucible back in the 90s, but something more organic and more like what Yale did with that piece of theater I think could be really interesting.

Q16: Second question, what have you got in your pockets?

R: My phone, headphones, I’ve got a credit card, and some sunglasses. Sums me up there.

Q17: Thorin was my favorite character in the Hobbit, so thank you for playing him so perfectly. And you looked really cool in that armor. Can you talk a little about how you put it on, did you have any troubles with it?

R: I don’t know if anyone’s seen the pictures of all the fittings we did, it was really extensive work. The amount of sketches that happened, and the amazing technicians that created the armor. Richard Taylor was helming the design. He really wanted something which created almost an impossible shape, because Thorin is so small but he wanted him to look like a warrior, and it needed to be sculpted and tailored and Richard Taylor’d, but the end result was this incredible almost like a tank that they would drill me into, so there were no fastenings, you couldn’t just step out of it. They put you in with a hammer-drill, so they would kind of bolt it together. It was so tight around the middle I had to sit [really straight] the whole time, I couldn’t really breathe out, again kind of like a Victorian lady in a corset. I was almost having fainting fits. But it looked great, so I was really happy with it.

Q18: I think you are very handsome, but your character Francis hated the way he looked, how did that make you feel?

R: Francis hated the way he looked? Yeah. I guess there is something we relate to in that. Without getting too personal, I don’t always enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. I don’t do it very often, to be honest. I do it just to be sure I don’t have food on my face. I do it in character, actually. I do spend a bit of time studying my own face when I’m playing a character, which is interesting because your face does change. Again I’m going to go back to the Crucible, but the way that I looked on day 1 of rehearsals compared to the way that I looked in the last week of performances was like a different person. I didn’t recognize myself. I think I aged ten years. Nobody was sad about that, by the way, it was exactly what the director had predicted and even now I’ll meet with her and talk about the project and she looks at me and says “I don’t recognize you, you’re not this character anymore and something’s changed in your face.” With Dolarhyde, I think it was an extension of that. So he looked at himself because he wanted to study his lips and learn how to speak properly, but he couldn’t look at his own eyes, he could only look at his mouth. So I just used that.

Q19: Could you tell us about your thought process on Francis and Reba’s relationship?

R: My thought process did shift a lot from reading the book to reading the script to meeting Rutina. And you have to do this. I’ve always felt like you concentrate on your own character and you can’t make any decisions about another character until you’ve met the actor that is going to bring that character into the room. And it’s where a lot of people fall down, because they made a decision about the relationship before it even exists. And what the other person can bring to the room can change everything. It could be a completely different interpretation than what you expect. And you have to be open to that. And she was incredible, it was really quite different to how I’d read it in the book but I loved it. And some of the most interesting scenes that we played were almost in the dark, in that dark room, where we asked them to turn the lights down, and I would almost blur my eyes so I couldn’t see her, I could only hear her because in that environment they were almost equal, because she didn’t have sight, and in the dark room, neither did he. And then I’d catch glimpses of the way they lit her face and these moments leaping out of the dark kind of hook you. I love art, I study art, and I love the impressionists, but there was something that the old masters did which was painting on a completely black or dark brown canvas, to just bring these shreds of light through. In a way to me that was what Reba’s character was, these glimpses of the light through darkness which pierce Dolarhyde, and I think that’s where the relationship came from.

Q19: That is far more beautiful an answer than I could have hoped for. The second question is about Ocean’s Eight. You’re great in Ocean’s Eight. What was it like working with all those amazing women?

R: Can I just say I actually haven’t seen the film?

Q19: You were in it! It doesn’t matter.

R: It wasn’t deliberate, I was just somewhere else when the premier happened, I did try to get there but… And I just haven’t seen it. And I’m really adamant about not watching movies on planes, I think those weird little screens are crazy. It happened by accident. I came to the project really late. I was back at home in England for Christmas and I got a phone call saying “can you get on a plane and get to New York in about 24 hours?” Because they’d hired the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two weeks. So I had to prepare the character really quickly. But I still worked really fast, it was the same thing I’d do if I had three months I just had to do it really fast. But what was brilliant about working with those actors was Sandy Bollock is obviously the producer on that film and she’s the lead actress, and she gave me her phone number and email and said, “whatever you need, whatever information you have, just ask me, talk to me.” So I was bombarding her with images and documentaries about art fraud and she’s busy being a director and Sandra Bollock but she still took time to respond to absolutely everything. She watched everything that I recommended, she pulled things from that and got it into the script. She was so fun to work with. She starts every single take with a little giggle, which sort of sums her up, really. There’s something about her which is just on the edge of laughing. And that really appeals to me because I’m the same way. I take the job really seriously but there are parts of it that are just really ridiculous. And the same way with Anne Hathaway. I mean they were the two actors that I worked most with. And Helena, who I’d worked with before, because I played both Helena and Anne’s father in Alice Through the Looking Glass. And then I’m standing against a wall kissing Anne Hathaway in a scene. So I was like “this is kinda weird, I was your weird English dad in a weird wig.” But she was brilliant as well. Most of the work that happened with her was on night shoots. So we’d start at 6 in the evening and finish at 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning. Which is such a weird thing to do because everyone’s like having jet lag the whole time, you’re not really yourself. And you’re in this room in the middle of the night trying to stay awake. And she kept everyone laughing. And she made me absolutely belly laugh in takes, because it was a lot of improvisation. She’s a lot of fun.

Q20: I’m a big Audible fan. Thank you for your narration of Hamlet. Do you also listen to audiobooks and do you have any favorite narrators? Or do you prefer the experience of reading a physical book?

R: To be honest I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks. I certainly don’t listen to my own. But in terms of my own enjoyment of audiobooks, I’ve had some really amazing experiences just sitting in a room telling a story, and this is where the idea came from to start a production company, because I see reading a book or performing a book as the first bridge between literature and the realization that this could become something visual. I don’t want to assume that everyone does this, but I see the pictures in my head and then describe it. And actually, the author of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, David Hewson, we had a long conversation after I recorded them, he was the one who gave me the term “kopfkino” which is a German word meaning “cinema of the mind,” and I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I see the images in such detail and then you just describe what you’re seeing. Some of the Angela Carter material that I read for International Women’s Day from The Bloody Chamber. The Wolf-Alice story completely pinned me to the wall, and there’s another one as well, a really short story, a warped Snow White fairytale. I looked up those [stories], and I thought “these two pieces could be something incredibly visual on film.” And I think Angela Carter was responsible for the Company of Wolves movie. That’s something else that would really appeal to this audience. But it was a long time ago, wasn’t it? But there’s a potential for her writing to reemerge on film because it is so brilliantly visual. So that had a big impact on me.