‘I know what I am selling’

Tanya Gold Published: 6 July 2014


Last night, Richard Armitage had the naked dream again. “I am in bed,” he says, “and everyone is waiting for the next moment, but I’m naked, so I can’t do it. I think ‘F*** it’, and I do it — but I’m naked.” He thinks he might have sleepwalked, looking for towels. He does not say this in a — well, the word is surelysuggestive — way. He sounds anxious.

Armitage is almost a Hollywood star. He is Thorin Oakenshield, the moody and overdressed dwarf king in The Hobbit, the third instalment of which, The Battle of the Five Armies, arrives in December. He is also the leading man in the forthcoming schlock disaster movie Into the Storm, in which weather kills people while the audience eat popcorn. (Do not sneer. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the greatest actor of his generation until drugs killed him, appeared in the preposterous 1996 tornado movie Twister.) But before these, he is John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, at the Old Vic.

It is the most challenging role of his career, and his subconscious knows it. It is set in Salem, Massachusetts, during the notorious witch-hunts of 1692, when 19 men and women were hanged as witches from a tree on Gallows Hill, and one old man was pressed to death for refusing to answer charges. A four-year-old girl, Dorcas Good, also jailed for witchcraft, saw her mother, Sarah, taken to the gallows and, according to contemporary testimony, would “cry her heart out and go insane”.

Armitage is deliberately, I think, elusive. The newspaper cuttings, which relate his childhood in Leicester, his unhappy adventures in musical theatre and his TV breakthroughs in the costume drama North & South and, later, as a quadruple (I think) agent in Spooks, tell me almost nothing about him. It is only the bones. I know he has an adoring international fan club, who swap details on how to secure signed photographs, and who are very much like Barry Manilow fans in their persistence and innocence. And I know he is very handsome, the kind of handsomeness that, in an ambitious “serious” actor, can almost be considered a disability — for when the face is handsome, who cares what lies beneath?

He appeared, for instance, as Harry the accountant, the human Boden blow-up doll who married Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley. Harry the accountant never stopped grinning, probably from embarrassment. It wasn’t exactly a part, more a vehicle for denial for women with food issues, for if the fat vicar could get an Armitage, couldn’t we all?

Proctor, however, is something else. He is the flawed protagonist whose affair with the teenage Abigail Williams, one of the great villains in drama, is the original crucible of the story. Spurned by Proctor, who is married to “cold” Elizabeth, Abigail performs a spell to kill Elizabeth and, to protect herself, accuses others of witchcraft. Old scores are settled and a fearful society devours itself. Proctor rarely grins.

Armitage sits opposite me in his dressing room at the Old Vic and crosses his legs in a chair too small for him. He is tall, bearded (for the role of Proctor) and wearing a fashionable green reinterpretation of what I think are supposed to be motorcycle trousers.

He is crying every day, he says. He calls acting “a danger sport”. The play’s South African director, Yaël Farber, is “pulling” him to “the edge of the cliff”. All this thrills him. He calls acting “a public service” and himself a “volunteer”, which sounds absurd and actorish until you see The Crucible, as I did, and realise that, in this case at least, both are true. The other kind of acting he cares for less. “Acting is one thing,” he says. “Being an actor is another.” He never used to have the confidence “to go to meetings and sell [myself]”. But he has worked hard: “I am a worker; I am either shy or really f****** angry at people for disturbing me when I am doing my work.”


So he has got better at selling: “I know what I am selling.” He thinks the red carpet is “ridiculous — so weird. Like a human zoo. The actors are the animals in the cages. People are tapping on the glass.”

All this he says without rancour or self-pity, for which I am grateful: who can bear to hear actors talk about their bad luck? He just thinks it’s odd, which it is; and I’m rather touched that he can still say this when he is headlining Into the Storm for the Warner Bros machine, and will be blown down a forest of red carpets. “We have created a culture,” he says, “where the actors turn up in a blacked-out car and come in through the door with a sheet over their head, and it’s — no.” He looks baffled; on his first red-carpet adventure, he got lost and ended up on the wrong side of the cage. “We are not that. We stand up in front of each other and act something out, so you” — and he looks at me, very directly — “recognise something in yourself.”

He says he does not know why he became an actor; or maybe he just doesn’t want to tell me. He relishes “experiencing life through the skin of a person who is better or worse than I am. I have been described as aloof, I have intimidated people because I am big or tall, so I have tempered my personality not to intimidate people.” Or not to tell them things. For instance, he does “not know” why he is unmarried, but he thinks he does want children. (He is 42.) Is he shy? He used to be, he says, but he has conquered it. He was always “the lanky one at the back”. He shot up one summer, he says; he does not think he is handsome; and he is not the eldest child. (Actors rarely are. An eldest child needs no spotlight.)

He cannot see the handsomeness: “I think I am odd-looking. I have big lines on my forehead.” I squint, looking for them, but he is talking over me, sounding slightly panicked. “I shouldn’t draw attention to it, because then everyone else will see the oddness.”

Personally, I think he was scarred by Cats. He found musical theatre very young, after playing “third elf from the left” in a teenage production of The Hobbit, opposite a dragon with a papier-mâché head. He was good at it, and it paid well; there is still a photograph of him online as an angst-ridden tabby cat, with angry eyes and great whiskers and a torch song of his own. He might have spent his life dancing between Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Cats, but this future horrified him. “I was always being told to smile and ‘Look like you are enjoying it’,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘If I was enjoying myself, I would be smiling.’”

So he spent his days reading and watching the kind of drama he craved. He escaped to Lamda at 23, but musical theatre, in the manner of a spurned lover, chased him down. He was offered the lead in Hair at college and refused it. He preferred to be in the ensemble, since it was musical theatre; and the famous choreographer Gillian Lynne had told him, backstage at Cats: “You do not belong here.” “It was the first vote of confidence,” he says, and he speaks in Lynne’s voice: “I see you. I see you.”

I wonder if he feels objectified. Many newspaper headlines, especially when he played the mill owner John Thornton in North & South in 2004, were simply paraphrased lust. Cold Feet, he says, was “the one role where I felt, ‘I’m just male totty.’” It’s true. I looked it up. He played a swimming instructor in swimming trunks. (In this case, he needed only real towels.) And I daren’t mention Dibley, and Armitage’s darkness-of-the-night attempts, which I can only imagine, but I am sure he endured, to turn Harry the accountant into a proper character with a varied selection of nuanced grins. It feels too cruel. “I really tried hard,” he says, “to craft a well-rounded character [in Cold Feet]. But that wasn’t what was required of me.”

I don’t know how happy he is, since previews are four days away and he is at least half Proctor now. When I ask, he says, “I am contented in my discontent”, and quotes Philip Seymour Hoffman, of all people: “When you do good work, you take a free breath.” And that, he says, “is what makes me happy”.

Laziness is what makes him angry: “Laziness in myself. Laziness in other people. And dishonesty. All things I feel capable of myself. I have a propensity to be lazy and lie about it. Fear makes me rageful. There are words in The Crucible I actually find it quite hard to say.” I beg for an example — The Crucible is in the public domain. “No,” he says, “you’ll see it in the play.” I tell him it will make no sense in print if he will not tell me. But he won’t. So I change the subject. It works. “OK, I will give you a line.” He inflates a little and says: “Is there no good penitence but it be public?” And then: “Were I stone I would have cracked for shame this seven month.”

A serious man. A sensitive man. Of course he couldn’t stay in Cats.

The Crucible is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until Sept 13

He appeared, for instance, as Harry the accountant, the human Boden blow-up doll who married Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley. Harry the accountant never stopped grinning, probably from embarrassment. It wasn’t exactly a part, more a vehicle for denial for women with food issues, for if the fat vicar could get an Armitage, couldn’t we all?

Ich finde den Gegensatz zwischen Richards Aussagen und der Einbettung durch die Journalistin sehr spannend. Egal, wie man den Ton nun findet, kaum ein anderes Interview hat uns bisher je den Spiegel so deutlich vorgehalten, wie wir mit dem, was Richard sagt, umgehen: Wir interpretieren vor dem Hintergrund unserer eigenen Vorstellungen, Vorannahmen und Überlegungen. Keine Ahnung, ob die Journalistin Face-to-face so auftrat, wie sie schreibt. Wenn ja, dann zeigt sich, dass sich Richard nicht mehr so leicht aufs Glatteis führen lässt und das sagt, was er sagen will.

Es ist immer wieder faszinierend, wie unterschiedlich ein und derselbe Text auf verschiedene Menschen wirkt.

Was für mich nur die "kritische Distanz" ist, die ein Porträtist/Journalist in meinen Augen nun einmal haben sollte, wirkt offensichtlich auf andere als "spöttisch" und herablassend"....

Oh, Ziel dieses Interviews war, wie schon viele Male zuvor von seriösen britischen Journalisten, RA und seine Fans lächerlich zu machen. Aber aus "kritische Distanz" betrachtet ist eben ein Körnchen Wahrheit daran. Das eine schließt das andere nicht aus, ich mag nur den Ton nicht, und wie sie RA Dinge unterstellt, die ihre Meinung sind und nicht seine.