Drunk and disorderly:
Tim Roth has fun playing a small-town police chief with a violent alter ego in Tin Star. Jim Maloney reports.
Tim Roth tells of confusion over Tin Star.
The Jekyll and Hyde nature of Tim Roth’s character in Tin Star makes playing him confusing for the actor. In the drama series, former London police detective Jim Worth relocates to the Canadian Rockies with his family where he is the police chief of the small town of Little Big Bear. But he has a violent alter ego in Jack Worth – the character he becomes when he turns to drink. But when he ‘reverts’ to Jim, he can’t remember the chaos he has caused. “It was confusing in season one because I was always wondering, ‘What does he know?’ and we had to abide by that. We couldn’t blur it,” says Roth. “So whenever and wherever he woke up sober we had to work out what he knew and could recall. “Now, in season two, we learn more about what has made him like he is. Basically, he has made the decision to be Jack and we explore what it’s like to cross that threshold and become a different person.” The nightmare scenario just seems to be getting crazier as both his frightened wife Angela and daughter Anna have tried to kill him and he is making more and more enemies with his erratic behaviour. “He’s creating problems as he is going along,” says Roth, who played undercover detective
Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs. “His vocabulary is mental. His attitude is, ‘You come near my family and I’m going to shoot you’.
“In a sense, he is his own worst nightmare, but that makes him very interesting to play.
“Right from the start I thought that the anarchy of this family was addictive. I mean, their young son was killed off in episode one. That immediately got me interested. Just when you thought the show was about this little family settling into the middle of nowhere, suddenly it isn’t and you are wondering what is going to happen next.”
This season is a lot to do with the Nickel family – Pastor Johan (John Lynch), his wife Sarah (Anamaria Marinca) and daughter Rosa (Jenessa Grant), who is befriended by Anna (Abigail Lawrie).
They are part of the Ammonites – a religious community close to Little Big Bear. Anna feels safe with them but discovers that they are harbouring secrets which compel Anna to seek her father’s help before an altogether more hellish threat emerges.
“It was good to go back to do a second season and we really hit the ground running, continuing the story where we left off,” says Roth, who is 57.
Working in often freezing-cold temperatures was a challenge for cast and film crew alike, particularly when they were shooting on a mountain where they ended up waist-deep in snow.
In one scene Genevieve O’Reilly, who plays Angela, was so cold that she struggled to get her words out.
“I’ve never been so cold,” she says. “We were on the mountain and my jaw kind of locked up and so when I said my lines to Christina Hendricks (oil executive Elizabeth Bradshaw) it just came out as a mumble. She said, ‘What?’ I was so relieved when they called ‘Cut’ and told us to get back to the hotel to warm up.”
This season, with the cast members now knowing each other so well, there has been an emphasis on improvisation.
“Actors are usually lying when they say they all get on so well together, but in this case we really do,” says Roth. “I’ve said before, that filming a drama is very intense and at the end of it I walk away and don’t keep in contact with any of the cast. But I want to be friends with the Tin Star cast and crew for ever.
“Our closeness has meant that we understand each other and our characters better and we improvise a lot more this season. Not all actors like doing that but I do. The story takes us into some very dark situations and it’s good to have the freedom to move around within that and maybe drop what was originally prescribed and deliver a scene in a different way.”
Despite a string of coveted roles that include criminal Ringo, aka ‘Pumpkin’, in Pulp Fiction, General Thade in Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes, and body language scientist Cal Lightman in the Fox TV series Lie To Me, Roth yearns to be in a Star Wars movie and admits to being jealous of Genevieve O’Reilly who played Mon Mothma, leader of the rebel alliance, in Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith and Rogue One.
“I am jealous,” he says. “I really want to be in a Star Wars movie. I think it would be brilliant. But I think I am too common for them.”
“I really want to be in a Star Wars movie. I think it would be brilliant. But I think I am too common for them.” – Tim Roth