IOAN GRUFFUDD: the handsome actor on his new show, family and second chances
He wooed the world as TV’s dashing Horatio Hornblower, made it to Hollywood with everything fame could offer - money, success, acclaim - and then, suddenly, it crumbled to dust. Susan Chenery talks to Ioan about his new TV series, family and a second chan
The last jacaranda flowers are falling in a purple cascade. The summer heat rises in central Brisbane, glancing off cars idling at the lights. Pedestrians barely notice the handsome man being arrested in a narrow lane at the old dental hospital. He backs away as the police and detectives approach with handcuffs.
Then someone yells “cut” and the scene dissolves into the tropical day. These are the last days of filming Harrow, a 10-part TV series. The extraordinarily attractive man in trouble with the law is the actor Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Dr Daniel Harrow, a forensic pathologist who bends the rules to get the truth of what happened to the body on his slab. He delves into the lives of the dead people. But being the leading man on a long shoot for a huge international production is exhausting.
“It is just the concentration that drains you,” explains Ioan. “It is being ready for your moment, but you don’t know when that moment is going to be. You were feeling it at 6.30 that morning when you were ready to deliver your big monologue and you’ve been in your trailer until 4pm and you have just had a big lunch. Now I have to cry in a big emotional scene?”
Ioan Gruffudd speaks in a disarming, soft Welsh burr. On the surface he would seem to be the golden boy. One of those people who are given everything. The perfectly symmetrical male beauty, charm, talent, all the guarantees of a smooth passage through life. But he is a man who has traversed the extremes of Hollywood, who knows the wide divide between success
and failure, of the staggering wealth or poverty that can be conferred. He knows the arbitrary nature of the industry and how much chance has got to do with it, that it is always all a gamble.
A child star, Ioan became world famous as the dashing, seafaring Captain Horatio Hornblower.
He was Lancelot in King Arthur, a rubber-limbed superhero in the blockbuster The Fantastic Four.
He played slavery abolitionist
William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace, appeared in the stunning, numbing Black Hawk Down; he was a movie star and he was rising.
“Had you met me after Hornblower, I thought this was it for the rest of my life. I was 23, I was leading my own show. I had money, I was in the papers every week. You get this sensation that this is how it is going to be now. You get a little bit of confidence. The realities of a career and decisions and opportunities, they came into play later.”
Then it all fell away, and it was humbling. “Five years ago I was sitting outside rooms vying for a guest spot on a show like this. That is where I was. I know how hard it is to get here. I have been here and I have lost it and I am back again.”
Ioan (pronounced Yo-ann), 44, is a naturally affable man, sociable, chatty. Sitting in his trailer he is expansive, holding nothing back. “He is just super-lovely,” says Peter Salmon, one of the directors of Harrow. “Everyone gets along with him, there is no ego, no bad energies coming from him. He is a force of nature, very professional. He always knew where the camera was and what it was doing, he has done it all before and knew exactly what to do to make the scene work.”
But he is slightly off balance, a big part of him – his family – is missing and it is a palpable ache. He loves his family; wife, actress Alice Evans, and their two daughters, Ella, eight, and Elsie, four, but they are in Los Angeles, where the girls are at school, and he is here. He is homesick and incomplete without them, and he doesn’t quite know what to do about it. “We’re going to have to fix it in the future,” he says. “It is not working. I am breaking down and so are they.”
He met the beautiful Alice on the set of 101 Dalmatians. In a 2016 article, Alice wrote she had met her “decent man” and that “unbelievably – he loved me as much as I loved him”.
She detailed their struggles to have children, intensifying when she was 38. They looked into adoption. They really couldn’t afford IVF and she had only a 20 per cent chance of success. But they took the chance and Ella arrived, “a 6lb 2oz lobsterred baby-alien. Instantly none of my other plans mattered. This was the thing I should have done years ago. The only thing”.
It took eight rounds of “physically, mentally, financially depleting” IVF to bring Elsie into the world, and Alice implored women not to leave it too late.
Last year Alice wrote about her experience with Harvey Weinstein. In 2002, while Ioan was screen testing for a Weinstein film in New York, she had met Harvey at a party at the Cannes film festival. Harvey told her that in his audition Ioan had done “an incredible job, he is a talented guy”. Then he asked her to go to the hotel bathroom with him, saying, “I want to touch your tits.
Kiss you a little”. It was “sinister” she wrote. When she started moving backwards, murmuring excuses, “Harvey utters a phrase that has stayed with me forever, ‘Let’s hope it all works out for your boyfriend’.” Even though he had repeatedly propositioned Alice and turned nasty when she said no, “I can’t help feeling that I am the one who has behaved badly here – and that somehow I will be made to pay.”
The next night at another party she had tapped Harvey on the shoulder, when he turned around he said coldly, “Do I know you?”.
Ioan didn’t get the role and neither of them was ever considered for another Weinstein film again. “It shocked me to the core and affected me for years,” she wrote.
Now Ioan says he is “very proud of her” for speaking out. “Alice’s motivation for writing the piece was
that women who had been physically abused had not been believed. So she wanted to corroborate their story by saying this is how he operates. It is a very delicate conversation we are all having as human beings. What I love about the movement is that we are finally possibly bringing women to level status as men in society. Women know where the line is between clumsy flirtation and sinister dangerous abuse of power.
It is very clearly defined, I think.”
A successful actor is, by definition, always working far from home, away on film locations. “It was the best thing about our job until the kids arrived, it really was. It is exciting, you feel very lucky and appreciative of getting to travel the world but now it is not,” says Ioan. Now he is torn. “I do love it, I love the job. I’ve just got to try to find the balance with my family. I have to figure that out.
But had my family been here the whole time I don’t think I could have done the job to the level of concentration and dedication you need.”
But the long periods of being absent are not getting easier. “Alice has experienced an entire year with the kids without me,” he says. When he goes home, he says it is ‘re-entry’. “You’ve got the shuttle coming in and you have to get the right angle otherwise you’ll crash and burn on re-entry. When I go back it’s ‘right, you [Alice] just relax, you do your thing, I’ve got this, I’ll do as much as I can’.”
Ioan grew up in Llwydcoed in Wales, the eldest of three siblings. Welsh is his first language. Ioan’s father was deputy head of his school before he moved to another school. This was not as awkward as it might seem.
“He was so revered and loved and respected by my friends that it elevated my status rather than diminished it,” says Ioan. His mother and her parents had performed in the amateur dramatic society. “Performing is part of our culture,” he says. “Singing is in our heritage, it is a big part of our school curriculum.” He was an oboist in the South Glamorgan Youth Orchestra and won prizes for singing. When he was 11 he won a part in the Welsh language soap opera, Pobol y Cwm, in a school audition, a job he did on and off for the next eight years. “I was getting paid. I was missing mornings of school, it was incredible. My parents couldn’t get me out of bed to go to school, which starts at nine. I could get to the BBC by walking there by 6.30 in the morning.” It taught him discipline and what a brutal profession it can be. “I saw friends with families coming down from the executive floor crying, having been told they’re not in the storyline next season. They have just bought a new car or something.”
The money he earned paid for him to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London at 18. His parents were committed Christians and he was so guilty about his new world of drinking and sex that he fell into a religious group, the London Church of Christ, which forbade him from being in a play that had drinking and prostitution. His flatmate, actor Matthew Rhys, was so concerned he phoned Ioan’s mother, who drove to London and took him back to Wales to sort his head out. His first trip to America was to play the Fifth Officer Harold Lowe in Titanic. “I played a character that existed in life. The ship was three-quarters to scale, we were all aghast at how brilliant it all was.”
Early success, all that attention, can be intoxicating, banks of cameras flashing at you on the red carpet. “There was a time when I first started out when it was all fun and games. You get flown first class here, you stay in this hotel, you can order anything you want. It’s exciting and infectious. But it’s work. And I found out the hard way by enjoying myself too much at the Dorchester in London or the Four Seasons in New York and then realising ‘oh no, I have got to do 12 hours of work tomorrow, speaking to journalists on camera all day’.”
It wasn’t long before Ioan realised it wasn’t particularly fulfilling either. “I think the idea of being famous and what it might give you is an intangible thing. I learned very quickly that it’s not real, you can’t grasp it, it doesn’t give you anything. What does fulfil me is the work itself and people responding to the work.”
The more than two years he spent benched, the phone not ringing,
the work dried up, changed him. “There was no back-up plan,” he says. “I should have cashed in at certain times and I didn’t.” During that time he slid into depression and was plagued by self-doubt; with a baby and a mortgage with no money coming in, he was sinking.
“I know the depths of despair.
I went into the abyss. I wondered if I had enough of what one really needs to get there. There was an element of not thinking I deserved it enough. When the phone doesn’t ring it is the loneliest feeling in the world.”
When Forever, a 2015 series about an immortal New York City Medical Examiner, was cancelled after one season in spite of strong lobbying from fans, Ioan was devastated.
“You ride to the top of the wave and then you come crashing down,” he wrote on Instagram.
He saw a therapist to improve his shattered confidence. He sacked his management team, cut back on drinking and took up yoga. “And it turned around within five months,” Ioan says. It’s given him the gravitas, depth, the life experience to take on roles he might have been deemed too pretty for before. Now the face is lived in, he has suffered.
“I’m kind of meeting these characters that I’ve always wanted to play, I’ve been looking at them over there somewhere for about 10 years and now suddenly my age is right. I’ve been itching to play three-dimensional anti-hero characters for a long time. I just don’t think I’ve looked like
I’ve lived a life to play those parts. I’ve been very aware of that.”
Last year it brought him to the hit television thriller Liar. It was a finely nuanced series about a teacher (Joanne Froggatt) who goes on a date with a charismatic heart surgeon (Ioan). The next morning, she discovers she’s been drugged and raped. For the first three episodes it’s impossible to tell if he’s been falsely accused and she’s just neurotic, who is telling the truth. But then it begins to turn, and he’s revealed as a predator.
“Every aspect of this guy’s life is seemingly perfect,” Ioan explains. “Except for this one sliver which is evil or wrong. It’s very deliberate, very planned. It is not about sex or love, it is about control, dominance and putting someone in their place.”
If it echoes Harvey Weinstein, it was sheer coincidence that Alice’s article was published just as Liar was going to air, but a measure of how prescient the program was.
Ioan is approaching his second act with humility, taking nothing for granted. “I just feel so lucky, rejuvenated and grateful,” he says.
“When the phone doesn’t ring it is the loneliest feeling in the world.”