A tall order
Spall chalks up another tough real-life role.
To play Reverend Ian Paisley, the firebrand Presbyterian minister and politician from Northern Ireland, Timothy Spall had to undergo something of a conversion. There were shoes to elevate the 1.73m actor to Paisley’s 1.93m altitude. There was some face-stretching too. “I had a prosthetic chin that made my head longer. I don’t have much of a chin myself.”
Spall’s portrayal of the 80-year-old in The Journey, a movie set during the 2006 peace talks, makes Paisley a mellower figure than the thunderand-lightning orator whose image is familiar from old television footage.
The vehemently anti-Catholic and loyalist (anti-republican) Paisley founded and led the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for 40 years, during which he thwarted many agreements to end the Troubles. He died in 2014. The DUP is now propping up Theresa May’s Conservative Government.
Spall had to think long and hard about playing the divisive figure in the film, which was shot in Northern Ireland. There, he says, friendly Belfast locals would stop him in the street and ask: “So you’re playing the big man, are ya?”
“It occurred to me that however appalling and tragic and disastrous and horrific the Troubles were, it was their troubles. It’s about them.”
The movie puts Paisley with Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness (played by Colm Meaney) on a joint trip back to Belfast from the talks in Scotland.
They bicker, but they lay the foundations of an unlikely friendship, which, when the real pair became First and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland in 2007, earned them the nickname “the Chuckle Brothers”.
“Obviously, it’s unashamedly a fictionalisation of something that could have happened,” says Spall. “It’s a vehicle to put these two characters with this massive impasse together. The film asks how do these people, who we perceive as arch-enemies and whose sides have been killing each other, put aside the passion of their feelings?”
After his portrayals of Paisley,
JMW Turner, David Irving and British hangman Albert Pierrepoint, Spall says real-life characters are his most demanding roles. He’s worked out his own way to go about it.
“Whether the character is a hero or a villain or someone else’s hero or someone else’s villain, I always park whatever my feelings are about them and concentrate on where they are coming from – not play the consequences of their actions from an objective point of view, but play what they are feeling and what they are going through at the time.
“It’s my job as an actor to try to make it not an impersonation but an embodiment.”
– Russell Baillie