Nearly three decades after appearing in David Fincher’s ill‑fated Alien3, Charles Dance is back with the director. Screen talks to the actor about his rich run of screen roles.
Charles Dance and David Fincher go back a long way, the veteran UK actor having appeared in the director’s first feature, Alien3, almost 30 years ago. That was an infamously troubled shoot for Fincher and the result much-maligned — neither of which affected Dance’s regard at the time.
“I thought, ‘My god, this guy is smart,’” he says. “It was very apparent, even then, that he could talk to any department about their job on equal terms, there wasn’t an aspect of filming that he didn’t know about. He is a film animal from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.”
They had kept in touch only rarely — “the occasional Christmas card” — so Dance was pleasantly surprised when he received an email from the director, preceding a script for Mank and the juicy role of William Randolph Hearst. He didn’t hesitate.....................
Dance has only a few scenes, but all integral as they chart the relationship between Gary Oldman’s Mankiewicz and Hearst, the press magnate and inspiration for Kane. On approaching his real-life character, he says: “Principally what I needed was in the script, because it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. And we had two or three weeks sitting round the table talking about it, pulling each sentence apart and not leaving any stone unturned.”
Beyond that, he read about Hearst and found what footage there was of the man speaking. “I tried to pinpoint his accent, which really is very strange. There are elements of southern American, but then there’s this sharp, precise Philadelphia sound, so I put all that into the pot.”
Having discovered the power that a newspaper magnate could wield in 1930s America, Dance thought about recent media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. “But I guess I thought more about Donald Trump than anybody else,” he laughs. “And one identifying thing that I could latch onto for Hearst — I bear no resemblance to him physically — is that he did have a rather peculiar hair arrangement, which of course Trump has. So we got a pretty good wig.”
Hearst’s dress sense was all his own. “When throwing his many parties, he was pretty outrageous,” Dance observes. Even in the film’s black and white, his circus costume in the film’s pivotal scene — a fancy-dress dinner upended by the drunken Mankiewicz — looks suspiciously like gold lamé. “Yes! It was something that Elton John would wear… on a subtle day.”
That long, complex scene, taking place in production designer Donald Graham Burt’s recreation of Hearst’s grandiose San Simeon home, epitomises for Dance his director’s perfectionism. “I became more aware this time of David’s eye for composition,” he says. “We were working with four cameras all the time. You set something up and go into a take, and maybe two of the cameras will be right and the other two not quite, so we go again, and then those two are okay but there’s a problem with the other one. So we do take after take after take after take. And then, when he’s happy with the composition, he’ll hone in on the acting.
“So it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain our energy level and focus and concentration. It’s a long process. But although we might moan about it, you don’t moan very much, because you know that we’re contributing to what’s going to be a special film.”
The most takes Dance was involved in for a set-up was “in the upper 30s”, during that dinner scene. “That was very tough on Gary [Oldman]. We got sore arses sitting around for two or three days, but Gary drove that scene, and in every single take he went from beginning to end. It was an extraordinary scene to do.”
Speaking from his London home, Dance is in good form considering he is recovering from Covid-19. “I’m 90% back to normal,” he reports, wryly noting the insidious nature of the virus. “I was at Shepperton Studios doing [Neil Gaiman’s TV series] The Sandman, after that I went to Iceland to do a film [Netflix’s Against The Ice], being tested every day and always coming back negative. Then I get back here and go to do a weekly shop — and I pick it up.”
Work-wise, the actor agrees he has been on a roll, from Lord Mountbatten in The Crown and the stern, dictatorial puritan of Fanny Lye Deliver’d, to roles in Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming The King’s Man and the aforementioned Netflix adaptation of The Sandman.
“The amount of work I’ve had in the last two or three years is remarkable, because I’m 74 now, and as you get older in this business decent parts begin to thin out.” He credits the high demand to his role as the formidable patriarch Tywin Lannister in Game Of Thrones, equating the show’s impact to that of his breakthrough TV series in 1984, Granada’s The Jewel In The Crown.
Despite demand as an actor, Dance is soon to step behind the camera for the first time since 2004’s Ladies In Lavender, for his own adaptation of Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Inn At The Edge Of The World. The film is aiming to shoot later this year, with a cast — previously announced but subject to scheduling — that includes Joanna Lumley, Celia Imrie and Freddie Fox.
Has anything changed in his attitude as he has gotten older? “Not really. I try to do less and less with the work, to demonstrate less. And I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I should get more choosy than I’ve been. I just like working. But I should perhaps have been playing fewer cameos and fronting more films than I’ve had the good fortune to do.”
Charles Dance on Tywin Lannister’s death and resting villain face
Charles Dance is feeling much better, thank you. Just out of isolation from “this wretched virus,” he’s looking hale and up for a discussion of his role in “Mank” (as William Randolph Hearst), but clearly politics are also on his mind. At 74, he’s a stage-trained actor who broke big in “The Jewel in the Crown” in 1984,......He spoke remotely with The Envelope about the size of “Citizen Kane,” battling COVID and having a resting villain face.
I hope your recent illness wasn’t too debilitating.
- It’s not very pleasant. I guess I had a mild version — it was like a bad case of the flu. You feel weak a lot of the time. But let’s not dwell on that. Spring is on the way. It could be a whole lot worse, darling. That awful man could still be in your big White House.
Indeed. So on to “Mank,” in which you’re Hearst. When did you first see “Citizen Kane”?
- Probably when I was about 18 or 19. I admired it at the time as a piece of rather extraordinary filmmaking, and I have the imagery of it seared into my mind still. When I knew I was going to be doing “Mank,” I saw it through much more mature eyes. And it is an extraordinary film. I’d forgotten how actually big it was. I had a memory of it being rather claustrophobic, but there are moments that are almost as big as “Ben-Hur.”
Have you ever visited Hearst Castle?
- No. It might have been useful for me to go there, from a sense of morbid curiosity. But if someone ever asked me to play Donald Trump, God forbid, I don’t know that it would be important for me to go to this terrible club he’s got down there in Florida where he’s going to be living. There are definite parallels between what we know of the life of William Randolph Hearst and Donald J. Trump, though I think Hearst is in a much better class than Trump.
So was Trump in mind when you decided how to play Hearst?
- I did think about Donald Trump. I thought, well, who is the central character [in our modern society] now? Is it Rupert Murdoch or Donald Trump? I bear no physical resemblance to Hearst, nor Orson Welles. Though he did have this peculiar hair arrangement. But this isn’t a film about Hearst; it’s a film about Herman Mankiewicz.
Hearst, as you play him, survives the film. But you’ve actually played quite a lot of death scenes over the years. More than your share, maybe?
- I was thinking that the other day — that I’ve died in almost everything I’ve done. It would be nice not to die. There are a few things that I’ve managed to stay alive in — but most of the time, I’ve died a very ignoble death. Especially in “Game of Thrones,” that was quite a death scene, darling.
Ah, yes, Tywin Lannister gets skewered with a crossbow while on the toilet. What were your thoughts on how the series ended?
- I was underwhelmed. I thought, “No, come on. Really, guys, you could do better than that.” But, never mind.
You bring a kind of contained stillness to your roles, which I find more effective — particularly in villainous parts — than someone who has to flail all over the screen to get a point across. Is that an intentional thing?
- I hope it’s the case most of the time, unless I have a legitimate excuse to flail my arms around and be theatrical. I learned a long time ago the value of that well-worn phrase “less is more.” One of the first actors I noticed and thought, “I’d love to be doing what you’re doing,” was Peter Finch. But I’ve never seen an actor or actress do what Isabelle Huppert does with nothing. You look at her face in close-up, and you won’t see a single muscle move on her face. But a thought crosses her eyes and you know exactly what she’s thinking and feeling. I’m not putting myself in the same league as her. But if I can get close to achieving that, I’ll be a happy bunny.
You played a heroic lead in “Jewel in the Crown,” but it feels as though at some point you began playing more villains. Is that still a good place to be?
- I was doing a podcast recently, and I noted that there was a time I was a romantic leading man. But if you seem to be doing something reasonably well, odds are you’ll be asked to do it again. I don’t know what the first villain [I played] was, but obviously, I did it reasonably well. And my face in repose — unless I’m smiling or feeling very, very happy — my face can look rather somber.
So you have resting villain face?
- Well, the way it is put together, it lends itself to rather severe characters, often villainous. There have been times when I’ve had enough money in the bank to say, “No, I’m not going to do that; no more villains.” But I think I am going to say it with a vengeance now: No more villains. I think I’ve done enough villainy. Though, they can be enormous fun.
Charles Dance at 74: ‘I’m in reasonably good shape for a man of my age’ As he steals scenes in the Oscar-buzzy Netflix film Mank, he talks about having a late career flourish and his new-found heart-throb status
Dance was delighted to work with Fincher again and admits he would have done anything on set.
“Out of the blue, I got this email saying he’s making a film around the making of ‘Citizen Kane’, and how would I like to go over and play Hearst?” Charles tells The Daily Telegraph magazine. “He said, ‘It’s a glorified extra, but I’d love you to do it’. I read the script and thought it was a bit more than a glorified extra, more of a telling cameo, but I said, ‘David, I would come and change light bulbs for you’.”
“I read a couple of books, tried to get examples of his voice, (but) also thought about people of my generation, like Rupert Murdoch and – although he’s considerably down the intellectual scale – Donald Trump. Hearst was an extraordinarily wealthy man, but he was a bit of a megalomaniac, and veered between being entertaining and charming and being a complete b**tard.”
Fincher famously has exacting standards and shot most scenes dozens of times, with one lengthy dinner scene taking over 40 takes to perfect, which Charles admitted was “very hard” on lead actor Gary Oldman.
“It was very hard work for Gary, because wherever David was shooting, it was either on Gary or a reaction from one of us – so Gary, rightly but also generously, was just firing on all 12 cylinders [in every take],” he explains.
