Darlington and Stockton Times
Erratic success
9:55am Thursday 11th December 2008
Dean Spanley is the strangest movie so far for Jeremy Northam, he tells Steve Pratt, but it did give him the chance to work with Peter O’Toole.
JEREMY Northam wasn’t looking to get back into period costume after getting the chop as Sir Thomas More in BBC2’s The Tudors. So he was apprehensive when the script for Dean Spanley, which is set in 1904, plopped through his letterbox.
“My heart sometimes sinks when I read another period movie, having done so many,” he explains. “I suppose the reason for that is you feel very often period movies come encumbered with their own stuff. You worry that the audience has to fight through all the stuff to find something they have any possible connection with.
“I suppose the Dean Spanley script used some of those cliches and expectations to its own advantage. I don’t necessarily hold with it, but the notion is that British people are uptight emotionally, particularly in period movies.”
You can tell from Northam’s erratic career that he rarely goes for the obvious or the surefire commercial hit, working on both sides of the Atlantic.
His credits take in The Net opposite Sandra Bullock, Enigma, Gosford Park (as the Ivor Novello character tinkling the ivories at the country house party), The Winslow Boy, Emma and Cypher.
None of them are anything like as strange as Dean Spanley in which Northam and his father (played by Peter O’Toole) become involved with a swami who believes in reincarnation and a dean who may have been a dog in another life.
Talking the film over with director Toa Fraser convinced him they were on the same wavelength over their approach to the story. There was the added attraction of working with Sam Neill and Peter O’Toole, both of whom also appeared in The Tudors. O’Toole took a very definite approach to the role.
“He’s led a very full and varied life. He’s the sum of all that experience now and a much quieter man than he once was.
And gentler,” says Northam.
“He didn’t want to talk about it or rehearse beforehand. He came into my little room, had a chat, a coffee and a laugh. He likes to have fun on set as well as working hard.
“He has these spates of working. I think this was the tailend of three years work which had taken him all over the world.
Peter knew the novella on which the film is based. His character doesn’t appear at all, it was an invention of the script.”
BEING reacquainted with Sam Neill was a delight. As well as being a terrific actor, he’s a lovely person to work with, says Northam.
“He really enjoys his work and makes the most of it. We were shooting in Norfolk, a county I know quite well and was happy to point him in the right direction, to show him around places.”
Quite how much, or how little, he liked making The Tudors becomes clear from his answers.
“I certainly enjoyed working Sam. It doesn’t mean I would do The Tudors again,” he says.
His career has seen him doing some strange things, including riding horses, not an animal of which he’s a great admirer. “I’m not fond of horses and horses aren’t fond of me. They sense it off you,” he says.
“Once I was drafted in to sit on a horse and throw someone a look. They shouted ‘action’, the horse moved and his head was where my head should have been on camera.
Looking like he enjoys horseriding is up there with filming a swimming pool scene on a grey May day. “I was once on a li-lo in the middle of a pool with the director of photography looking at the sky and saying, ‘we’ve got a little bit of sun coming out in two minutes, get on the li-lo and stay there’.”
Guy X took him to Iceland, when one scene required him to play baseball at 3am in horizontal snow.
Then there have been movies that didn’t work. Surprising in some cases, like the sci-fi drama The Invasion with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman.
On paper, it was a good project, a political allegory come satire.
“It all seemed pretty good. Then we waited 15 months and did reshoots with another director,”
he recalls. That echoed what happened on The Tudors when the original director was fired after three weeks and a new one brought it.
“So it’s very hard to predict what will happen, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an independent or a studio production.
“I start to think that as soon as they shout ‘cut’ it’s out of your control. The only time you have any control is when the camera is running and you might as well enjoy the experience.
“I would have hoped to have developed a thicker skin over the years. I still get just as disappointed as I always did.”
■ Dean Spanley (U) opens in cinemas tomorrow.
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