Tarrant Talks - Matthew Dye on saving Charles Dance's life
Edinburgh International Film Festival
A Q&A with director Thomas Clay and the cast of Fanny Lye Deliver’d - Maxine Peake, Charles Dance, Tanya Reynolds and Freddie Fox - will take place at 8.30pm on Monday, 29 June with further events to be announced in due course.
Available for 27 days
Charles Dance claims he thinks he only gets 'posh' roles because of the way his 'face is put together' and not because of his family background.
Talking to the Loose Ends podcast, he said: 'It's just the way my face is put together,' he said. 'But there's nothing posh about me.'
Dance described how he didn't go to drama school in the 1960s but was instead instructed by retired actors Leonard Bennett and Martin Burchardt.
I went to art school but half way through I though, no, I don't want to be a graphic designer, I want to be an actor,' he said.
'I knew of these two rather wonderful old men who lived down in deepest Devon and rang them up and asked if they would teach me.
'And I spent a couple of years with them and I worked as a builder's labourer and a plumber's mate and I would go and see them one or two evenings and they tried to teach me what I would have learnt if I'd gone to drama school.'
Charles Dance: ‘The English did not behave very well’
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“Appearances can be deceiving,” laughs the actor. He is not, despite many turns as a toff and an OBE, anywhere near in line for the throne. His friends call him Charlie. His mother was a parlourmaid who started work at 13. He attended Widey technical school for boys in Plymouth. In 2016 he and other working-class actors voiced concerns about the lack of opportunities for state school-educated actors.
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He attributes his screen and stage grandeur to something about the way his “face is put together”. A 2016 episode of Who Do You Think You Are? – which revealed that his great-great-grandmother, a laundress, had seven children with his great-great-grandfather, a laundryman, despite being married to other people – confirmed his lack of courtly ancestry.
“The English did not behave very well, I’m afraid,” he says. “We made a bit of a habit of that actually.”
I should explain. Hailing from the same tradition as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and 1970s folk horrors, Witchfinder General, Winstanley and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Fanny Lye Deliver’d is the latest film to wreak havoc on dour theologians in capotains.
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“It’s a terrible cliche but it’s true,” says Dance. “It’s more fun being the villain. And if the writing is good and the villain is three-dimensional, well, that’s the most fun. The hard work is done for you. I’ve played a few rogues. It’s something you have to get used to as an actor. If you do something well, they want you to do it again. But you keep working. And I like working.”
He laughs: “To think I used to get cast as the romantic lead.” These days, Dance is most likely to get recognised on the street for his work on Game of Thrones. He has admitted to being “confused” by the infamous final episode, but he remains a cheerleader for the franchise.
“I haven’t seen the notorious pilot episode,” he says. “But HBO saw something in it and decided to put money in and brought in great writers. And that’s what made it the most successful television show of all time. That’s quite an achievement.” Over the past four decades, Dance has worked with an extraordinary array of film directors including Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Robert Altman, Neil Jordan, François Ozon, Woody Allen, and David Fincher. In February, just ahead of lockdown, Fincher completed work on his second collaboration with the actor. Mank will also star Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies and Tom Burke as Orson Welles.
Fincher previously directed Dance in the unfairly maligned Alien 3. It was a troubled production, characterised by unwarranted studio interference and script changes.
“When you walk on to a set with a director like Robert Altman, you can feel it immediately,” says Dance. “They have that sense of authority. And David Fincher, who had only done a couple of commercials at that stage, already had that on Alien 3. I’ve just finished Mank with him which is about the making of Citizen Kane. He’s a dream to work with. He knows what he wants. He’s demanding. But I’d rather have that than a director who doesn’t know what they want.”
Dance should know. He has previously directed Ladies in Lavender, starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and is scheduled – epidemiology permitting – to start shooting a second feature later this year. The Inn at the Edge of the World concerns five people who respond to an advert to escape Christmas and retreat to the west coast of Scotland, and will star Celia Imrie and, returning from Fanny Lye Deliver’d, Freddie Fox. The production will bring him to Ireland, where he has previously worked on Game of Thrones, Your Highness, Michael Collins and – oh yes, Space Truckers. He has fond memories of the latter and anyone who has viewed the scene wherein Dance’s steampunk, metal-buttocked, intergalactic pirate attempts to impress Debi Mazar with his “electrical wang pulse” can confirm he is having a ball.
“I remember having great fun making that film,” he recalls. “And I remember having great fun watching it. But then it came out and everyone decided it was crap. Oh well.”
Fanny Lye Deliver’d is released on digital platforms on Friday
Charles Dance: ‘I’ve been in lockdown alone — but I am robust’
Now single, the actor has had a solitary pandemic, isolating in London. He tells Ed Potton how he handled it
Charles Dance knows why he has played so many aristocrats and military men. “In film and television, at the outset you tend to get offered work because of the way you look. The way my face is put together, I fit some people’s idea of aristocratic, and my face in repose tends to be quite severe, which belies what is actually going on inside me.”
It’s not just the aquiline profile. Dance’s haughty baritone and 6ft 3in silhouette are also perfect for playing poshos, soldiers and posh soldiers — from Sergeant Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown, his big break in 1984, to Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones and Lord Mountbatten in The Crown. He’s right, though — the imposing......
The actor talks to James Mottram about his insatiable work habit, being killed off in The Crown and his latest film, a Cromwell meets Tarantino drama
Charles Dance is a straight-shooter. Here he is, for example, in that familiar clipped English, on his lockdown experience: “It hasn’t been too bad. I mean, at least I’m not living on the 10th floor of a tower block with two screaming kids and no garden.”
Later, I ask the 73-year-old about retirement. “I don’t want to retire,” he says, indignantly. “Actors shouldn’t retire. If we retired, there’d be nobody to play old wrinkly people.”
Dance, whose career has stretched over four decades, knows a thing or two about persistence....he got his big screen breakthrough in 1984 British Raj TV drama The Jewel in the Crown, for which he was nominated for a Bafta. “I wasn’t an overnight success,” he says. “It took 10 years.”
Clay is a fastidious director. He composed the score himself on instruments that originated in the 17th century and insisted on authentic hand-stitched costumes. “You say fastidious to describe Thomas, I would say pedantic,” says Dance frankly.
The low-budget shoot – in a Shropshire valley in chilly March – was anything but easy. “We were put through the ringer with the location, the weather, the catering… but let’s not dwell too much,” says Dance. He pauses, and then decides to dwell anyway. “God, it was the worst I’ve ever eaten.”
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Dance calls it “Oliver Cromwell meets Quentin Tarantino” – and there are elements of the Spaghetti Western. But with its story of female emancipation, social unrest and reform, Dance feels it is also a timely tale. “People have a taste of protest and want things to be done,” he says. “I think there’s a lot that will resonate.”
In September, Dance joins up with Vaughn for The King’s Man,..... “I’ve a fair bit to do in it,” beams Dance. “And a rather wonderful moustache.” The actor is also reuniting with David Fincher, with whom he made Alien³, a torturous shoot by all accounts.
He will also be back in The Crown, with Mountbatten’s death at the hands of the IRA set to overshadow events. “I think the fourth season kicks off with that,” he says. Originally there was talk of Dance playing Prince Philip, “who I bear more than a passing resemblance to on a bad day”, but he was too young to play him at the time.
As reliable a presence as Dance can be, too often he is yanked on screen to play authority figures, such as his military commander in the recent Godzilla: King of the Monsters. “Not a great film,” he sighs. Perhaps there is something of 80s-era Michael Caine about him, selecting perks over projects.
“I’m perhaps not as choosy as I should be, purely because I like working,” he says. “If there’s nothing I really want to do being offered, I’ll do something that I only mildly want to do. As long as I get paid for it, because there’s nothing else in it for me.”
He attributes this way of thinking to a move to Somerset years ago with his ex-wife Jo Haythorn (whom he divorced in 2004, after 34 years of marriage). “Not long after that, I saw spring, summer, autumn and winter [without working],” he says. “And that frightened me a bit. It was that experience which made me say: ‘Well, I’m not going to say ‘no’ very often.’”
He did, however, initially refuse to do Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC’s genealogical series tracing family history. “I’d been asked to do it five years before and I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to.’ I was very grand about it,” says Dance. “Then I thought: ‘F**king hell, Jeremy Irons has done it. John Hurt has done it. Yeah, all right.’” In the end, it proved to be a hugely “enlightening” experience.
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Back in the present, Dance’s determination to keep creating remains steadfast. He is planning his second film as director.....An adaptation of Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Inn at the Edge of the World, it was put on hold due to the pandemic.
“I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to try to make a film.” he says, a touch ruefully. Somehow, you suspect he won’t be deterred for long.
Maxine Peake
Charles Dance plays your husband John in the film, how did the pair of you get on during the shoot?
“Obviously Charles is calibre. He’s so generous and supportive when you’re working with him. We didn’t rehearse much at all, it was just an onscreen relationship that we slotted into very naturally. John is an interesting character because he’s not without compassion, he’s just very much a man of his time.”
director Thomas Clay
Zavvi: And how did Charles Dance come on board?
Thomas: It was actually through actor Dominic West! I was at a festival with him, and his agent suggested Dominic look at the script. But Dominic was busy, and his agent mentioned he represented Charles too, so I said what about Charles, and yeah. It went from there.
Sixty Seconds with Charles Dance
How has lockdown been for you?
I am getting a bit bored with it now, to be honest, but at least the sun is shining. It must be hell if it is p***ing down with rain and you live on the tenth floor of a tower block with two screaming kids. But I am lucky enough to have a garden and I live within five minutes’ walk of Hampstead Heath. So it could be worse – we could be in a war zone, darling.
You are famous for playing frosty poshos and baddies. Why?
I don’t know, darling, I guess that it is the way my face is put together. In this business it really does depend on what people look like. It just happens that my face, in repose, tends to look really quite severe – and I am not at all!
You’re not as posh as you sound, either…
There is nothing posh about me at all, darling, no! Years ago, when I started out, I was up for a BBC television show called The Regiment and at one point I was asked what school I went to. I said that I had gone to a secondary school down in Plymouth. And they said, ‘Well, so-and-so was at Eton and this chap was at Sherborne so it would be nice if you all knew each other back from those days.’ Needless to say I wasn’t offered the part.
Give us the sell for your new film, Fanny Lye Deliver’d.
Oliver Cromwell meets Quentin Tarantino. To enlarge, it is a film set just after the end of the English Civil War. There were groups of people called Levellers and groups called Ranters. The story is set in Shropshire, and I and my wife, played by the wonderful Maxine Peake, live a spartan life on our farm. Then our little life is interrupted by a couple of rather strange young people played by little Freddie Fox, who I have known since he was about ten years old, and Tanya Reynolds, who proceed to wreak havoc – and it comes to a rather dramatic end.
It’s a low-budget British indie. Was it a tough shoot?
It was bloody murderous! It was hell. It was cold, we were up to our knees in mud most of the time and the catering was the worst I have ever had. We worked very long hours and the decision was taken to shoot the film in natural light, which if you are making a film in England in March is a very risky proposition, so we spent a lot of time waiting for the clouds to disappear to finish a scene we started two days ago. But I think it’s a rather remarkable film.
What’s the most luxurious movie you’ve done?
It was Last Action Hero. For the publicity costs alone, you could make four or five independent British films. And if the budget is bigger, the conditions and the catering tends to be better. I don’t want to bang on about catering but it is very important to me. Nothing depresses me more than bad catering. The regiment marches on its stomach.
Do you like to go full ‘Daniel Day-Lewis’ for a role?
We actors pretend, that is our job. But whatever we individually need to do to make our job as convincing as possible, then that is what we have to do. If Danny Day-Lewis feels he needs to do all that, then that is his business. I have never had the opportunity to immerse myself in something like that. I am a working actor. I keep working because I love working and I get very frustrated and bored and irritable if I am not working. So probably a lot of the time I have not been as choosy as I might have been.
Why did you refuse to screen test for 007 back in the day?
I was advised not to by my agent. She was like, ‘Oh no, darling, I urge you not to do it, it will typecast you.’ I took her advice. Actually, I think if I had been offered the part, I probably would have blown it because I wasn’t ready. I was asked to do a screen test for Bond on the strength of a TV series I did called The Jewel In The Crown. It was incredibly successful and you couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without an article about it and about me. But at that point, though I had done a fair amount of work in the theatre, I hadn’t spent much time in front of a film camera and I would probably have f***ed it up.
Can you see what all the fuss is about with Game Of Thrones?
There were some breathtaking things to be seen and it just hooked people right from the beginning, though in my opinion the ending was rather disappointing. I would have liked darling little Peter Dinklage to have been sitting on that throne. He is fantastic.
Any new lockdown hobbies?
Well, I have been trying to expand my ukulele repertoire. It is an extraordinary little instrument. I also like to play a bit of banjo and I’ve been writing – just trying to be creative, darling. And I have been growing vegetables. I have courgettes, potatoes, lettuces, French beans, tomatoes and broccoli because it is good for you, but God, I hate broccoli. It is the most boring vegetable on earth.
Fanny Lye Deliver’d | Q&A with director Thomas Clay and cast
from an interview of Freddie Fox
Added to which, I was very lucky to have an amazing chamber cast around me – Maxine [Peak] and Charles [Dance] obviously, veterans and legends in their own way, quite rightly considered so, and Tanya [Reynolds] who was an up and comer like me. Charles I have known for many years and I’ve been in a couple of things with him before, so I could go to him a lot for advice and we could soundboard ideas off one another immediately. In fact, we ended up living together on the shoot, in a cottage. We rehearsed those longs scenes, all in old English, of which was done in one long take in the cottage like it was a theatre rehearsal, and had the benefit of history and friendship behind us to make it easy.
When you’ve known somebody and worked with them for some time, lie with Charles Dance, what’s it like when you’ve got to be really quite nasty to him?
-It’s always nice to do things you’d never do in normal life. That’s the joy of our job, in a way. You get to explore these shadow sides of personality that you don’t inhabit in your own life in the same way. We sort of relished the violence, actually. Like all filming, on one level it’s a terrific game, and on the other it’s very serious, and I think when you’re playing a game with your friend, and try to make it as plausible and believable as possible, there’s always a great deal of fun.At the end of the day it is make believe.
You’ve talked about how you’ve worked with Charles Dance on building that on-screen relationship. What about with Maxine and with Tanya as you’ve got very different relationships with all three of them.
-With Charles, I felt very protected, in a way. He’s known me for so many years. I took an immediate confidence kick from that – that I had a friend, so I think that I consequently tried to make friends with the others as fast as I possibly could because we had to do so much in such a short period of time after our introduction. Charlie gave me confidence and we were able to knock things around – and we really disagree on a lot of things as well but I felt confident enough to do that with [him], whereas the others I had a reverence of them and so, it descended into a friendship very quickly and both of them are still very good friends. I feel very lucky, because usually on jobs you move on, like ships in the night after you finish shooting, but actually, with those I’ve stayed very close.
Charles in the cast of A patriot
but from news on Eva Green, we learn :
the actress was set to star in an upcoming science fiction movie called A Patriot, which was supposed to film last year. However, production was postponed a couple of times before being cancelled altogether, and now Green is suing the producers to the tune of $1 million that she claims she's owed.
A Patriot was written by, and set to be directed by Dan Pringle, and focused on Eva Green's character, a border guard in a futuristic authoritarian state who begins to question her own allegiance to the regime. Eva Green was set to appear alongside Game of Thrones' Charles Dance and Helen Hunt before the production was shutdown.
It's unclear if A Patriot is essentially a dead project that will never see the light of day, or if it's just shutdown for the moment.....
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