Richard Armitage interview: 'I felt like my parents wouldn't be proud of me anymore if I was too open about my private life'

Jane Mulkerrins

6 January 2020 • 7:00am

Onscreen beefcake tells Jane Mulkerrins why he's ready to drop the tough-guy act, and why he's now more carefree about discussing his personal life

Richard Armitage is not a man who does things by halves. This month, for example, the actor is getting his hands very dirty indeed with the Forestry Commission in Dartmoor, as part of his preparations for playing Astrov, the brooding doctor and proto-environmentalist in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which opens in the West End next month.

‘I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to plant trees, I feel like: just go and do it,’ Armitage shrugs. It’s not full-scale Method, he insists; he just finds it easier, when getting into character, to create real memories for himself, rather than having to construct fake ones. During the making of Spooks, in which he played the enigmatic MI5 agent Lucas North, he famously asked to be waterboarded.

‘Cut to me, 30 seconds into being waterboarded, going: “Get off, get off, get off.”’ He rolls his eyes. ‘What was I thinking?’ Later, when discussing his experiences on the set of Captain America, in which he played the assassin Heinz Kruger – a role that involved some ‘quite traumatic’ underwater filming – he confesses that he has a genuine fear of water. He looks sheepish. ‘Yes. I know.’

For a portion of the film-watching public, 48 year-old, Leicester-born Armitage is probably best known as Thorin Oakenshield, the haughty dwarf king in The Hobbit trilogy, a casting decision which seems faintly ridiculous as he strides into the lobby of The Marlton hotel in Manhattan, where he has been based for five years, a strapping six foot two. He is, at least, sporting a beard that Tolkien could get behind, though not for his own aesthetic reasons. ‘This is Astrov, this is the beginning of him coming.’

To television fans, Armitage is probably more indelibly the sexy mill owner John Thornton in the miniseries North & South, or the damaged triple agent Lucas in Spooks, or, perhaps, the protagonist John Porter in Chris Ryan’s Strike Back – all roles which made the most of the actor’s good looks and honed physique.

Armitage is still notably handsome, but, within minutes of meeting him, it’s apparent how incongruous it is that this bookish, sensitive, self-described ‘melancholic, philosophically-minded softie’ and ardent fan of The Great British Bake Off was cast as beefcake killer totty for a considerable part of his career. ‘It’s ridiculous. It’s the complete opposite to who I am. I’m such a pacifist,’ he laughs. ‘But then, part of me always felt: “Well, isn’t that why we’re actors?”

These days, to his relief, he is ‘way past having to take my shirt off – I’ve never relished that.’ He pauses, thoughtfully. ‘In something like The Crucible [he played John Proctor in an acclaimed 2014 production at The Old Vic] where he had to wash onstage and get the grime from under his armpits, that’s different – it was part of his raw animalness. And in Strike Back, Sky One’s macho military drama, which critics praised for its smart storylines and high production values in a genre not necessarily known for either, ‘it was important to see that this guy had a body that has been honed by his military action. But I never got anywhere close to the physique that I was hoping for,’ he admits. ‘And I definitely couldn’t do it now – this dad bod is not going away.’

Happily, he’s able to lean into the dad bod (of which, for the record, I see no evidence beneath his white T-shirt) in his new Netflix miniseries, The Stranger. ‘I’m playing the dad of two teenagers; if I come out of the shower with a six-pack, the audience is going to say: “Sorry, no. That guy does not have time for the gym.” You have to look like a normal person,’ he insists.

The show is based on the bestselling book of the same name by US thriller author Harlan Coben, with the action transplanted from wealthy suburban New Jersey to Manchester. Armitage plays Adam, apparently happily married until a stranger divulges a devastating secret regarding his wife, Corrine, played by Dervla Kirwan. When confronted, Corrine doesn’t deny it, but promises to explain – then promptly disappears.

‘He’s desperately trying to get answers from her, but he can’t find her, and slowly, over the course of the story, starts to forgive what she’s done,’ says Armitage. ‘He just wants her back.’ Meanwhile, as plot twists abound, Adam finds himself increasingly caught up in a dark conspiracy, thanks to his own digital footprint.

‘Adam believes he’s squeaky clean, but Corinne has found a path to something he did that wasn’t necessarily whiter than white,’ says Armitage. Nobody is whiter than white, I venture; once you start picking at somebody’s private correspondence, you’ll inevitably find something untoward. Armitage doesn’t agree. ‘I do think people are inherently honest. I feel like I’m inherently honest. But things can be misinterpreted.’
Richard Armitage (right) with Martin Freeman in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Armitage started his performing career focused on dance rather than drama, training in classical ballet from the ages of 14 to 19. ‘I wasn’t quite good enough to go into a classical company, so I ended up going into musical theatre.’ He spent several years in shows such as 42nd Street and Cats before he was accepted to LAMDA, then the RSC. But the physical aspects of ballet have served him well, including in some of those incongruously macho roles.

‘I understood physical discipline and pain, and I understood how to push through. I do have the ability to zone out pain, which was helpful in Strike Back and The Hobbit.’ He laughs and rolls his very blue eyes again. ‘I mean, being in prosthetics is not like having your arm chopped off, but it’s stamina and heat exhaustion. On The Hobbit, stunt guys were vomiting in buckets and collapsing.’

His father, John, was a nuclear engineer (‘on holiday, we would go sightseeing to all the British nuclear power stations,’ he deadpans) while his mother, Margaret, who died last year, worked as a school secretary purely to fund his education at Pattinson College, a boarding school for the performing arts in Coventry. ‘Every penny of her wages went to my education – they were amazingly supportive.’

Speculation has swirled for years about Armitage’s sexuality, so I approach the question cautiously, but… would he like to have a family of his own? ‘I would need to do it in a way which was either through adoption or surrogacy, because of the nature of my relationship,’ he says, with remarkable candour. ‘I’d have to sit down very pragmatically and work it out.’ He is in a relationship, he confirms, ‘a good one’, though he isn’t keen to say more about it. And though I have no wish to press him further on the subject, he returns to it himself, later.

‘I think the turning point was losing my mum,’ he says. ‘Up until that point, I felt like I mustn’t put a foot wrong, that if I said the wrong thing or revealed too much about my personal life, it could all come crashing down, and it would come down on my parents, and they wouldn’t be proud of me anymore.’ He shrugs. ‘Now that I’m past that I’m actually much more carefree about the choices I make.’

In the past few years, alongside the screen and stage, he has increasingly been working in audiobooks, narrating stories such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Hamlet; his reading of David Copperfield is perennially high on the bestseller lists on Audible. ‘It used to be considered a sideline that you’d only do when you’re not working on other stuff, but,now it’s a big bulk of my work and I’ve found titles through Audible that I’ve purchased the rights to and I’m developing as a producer for screen,’ he tells me.

After narrating The Lost Daughters by Joy Ellis, he optioned the whole series of crime novels to which the story belongs, and is working on a pilot for an adaptation of The Taking of Annie Thorne by CJ Tudor. ‘Eventually I’d like to step away from front of camera and operate from behind, but I don’t know in what capacity,’ he admits. ‘I think I might need to dip my toe into directing, just to make sure it’s either for me or not. Because I do think, when 50 happens, is the phone going to stop ringing?’

‘The Chekhov came along at exactly the right moment,’ he continues. ‘I read Astrov and thought: I feel like I’m at exactly that point in his life, where he’s looking back over his shoulder going: ‘I’m sort of past the midpoint now. I’m pushing 50. Have I done enough? What’s my legacy?’

‘As an actor you’re always looking forward – what’s next?’ he says. ‘Then there’s a point at which you think, ‘Well, maybe I’ve achieved everything I should have done.’

None of this is delivered with the slightest gloom or self-pity, rather, with equitable acceptance self-awareness. ‘Maybe there’s a tiny little bit more – I’m not banking on it,’ he smiles. ‘But I can put all my crystals in the window and hope.’

Richard Armitage stars in Uncle Vanya at the Gielgud Theatre, London WC2, from Jan 14. Tickets: 0844 871 7622 or via Telegraph Tickets. The Stranger is on Netflix from January 30

Wenn dieses Interview vor dem 'Times'-Interview entstanden ist, wofür der örtliche Hinweis (Manhattan) spricht, dann bin ich hinsichtlich der gestern formulierten Beobachtung der aufgekommenen grauen Gedanken und auch anderer Aussagen darin ganz und gar nicht beruhigt.

Ich wüßte noch so einige Rollen für sein derzeitiges Alter und auch für die zukunft!

Die beiden Interviews gestern und heute haben für mich einen recht unterschiedlichen "Ton", oder Klang. Wie man es auch nennen mag.