David Thewlis
The Northern mainstay dips into his memories.
Blackpool-born Thewlis made a name for himself in 1993 with a bruising performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked and has been essaying complex characters since in projects as diverse as Gangster No. 1, Kingdom Of Heaven, The New World and Wonder Woman. An alumni of Hogwarts (Professor Lupin 2004–2010), the 57-year-old is now playing a food inspector with hidden depths in Atom Egoyan’s twisty-turny Guest Of Honour.
Guest Of Honour? Firstly Atom, because I adore his films. But also this thing about memory and how accurately we remember things – that has some resonances with my own life and my own growing up. Things that are remembered in different ways by my parents, and by my brother and sister. So there was just something about the whole project that was meaningful to me.
What attracted you to Making an intimate film like this is very different from making something like or
Wonder Woman Harry Potter... Well, this feels much more real. With Harry Potter and Wonder Woman, you’re playing almost impossible characters. Not ‘almost impossible’ – totally impossible [laughs]! There are no
werewolves, and there are no gods of war. So you approach that totally differently and that’s great fun in different ways. The scale is different, so you feel like you’re being controlled by people much higher up… if they’re happy with this and that.
How did that control affect those films?
We had to do quite a lot of reshooting on Wonder Woman for the end scenes, because they did tests and teenagers wanted more battles and fighting – and could he have more armour on? But on
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