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Liar, Liar, your career’s on fire!
Ioan Gruffudd tells how playing TV’s dastardly rapist doctor has revived his fame and fortune
There was a time when Ioan Gruffudd was cast in frilly shirts and breeches and set pulses racing in the same way Aidan Turner does as Ross Poldark today. As one of Britain’s sexiest stars, the man who appeared as 18thcentury Naval officer Horatio Hornblower to such acclaim in the late 90s never imagined that playing the most hated man on British TV would help revive his flagging career.
His brilliantly convincing portrayal of despicable Doctor Andrew Earlham in ITV’s psychological thriller Liar – the first villainous role Ioan’s ever taken on – has been compulsive viewing for the past six weeks, and if you did miss it the box set is out on Monday. Written by Jack and Harry Williams, the team behind The Missing, it explores the aftermath when brilliant surgeon Andrew’s first date with teacher Laura Neilson, played by Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt, takes a sinister turn. She claims she’s been raped, he says she consented and through some truly heart-stopping scenes it is eventually revealed that far from being a respectable doctor saving lives, he’s a predatory rapist who drugs his victims and films the attacks.
The role has helped breathe new life into a career that had hit such a low he was engulfed by depression. Too old for the pin- up roles he used to be offered, and with a few flops and nonstarters under his belt, Welshman Ioan, 43, sank into the depths of despair as he waited for the phone to ring. Now he’s the most talked about actor of the moment, and says he’d jump at the chance to reprise the role in the followup to Liar that the Williams brothers are currently writing, focusing on Andrew and Laura’s pasts. ‘It would be magnificent,’ Ioan says. ‘There’s no baddie like a British baddie.’
He’s now in Australia, where he’s filming a new crime drama called Harrow, and says he can’t quite believe how Liar has been received. ‘We’re all overwhelmed by the response to the show, so we’ve done our job,’ he says. ‘It’s turned out even better than I could have imagined. The response has been amazing. My parents have been watching and I’ve been getting some lovely messages. But it’s one of the hardest parts I’ve ever had to play – to represent somebody like this. When
I was offered the role they gave us the first three scripts, and there was this ambiguity about Andrew so I knew there would be a twist coming. But I didn’t know how dark it would get. It was a shock to me when I read the remaining scripts. They went a lot further than I’d imagined and I went to some dark places.’
In fact he was so concerned about the rape scene with Joanne, a personal f r iend, that he ‘bonded’ with her husband James Cannon over a football match to check he was OK with the material. The show’s content is ‘controversial yet relevant’, says Ioan, and to make sure the issue of rape was sensitively explored he did some research. ‘I spoke at length with a forensic psychologist who works with both victims and perpetrators. It was a shocking eye-opener. She helped me understand that these people walk among us, and that you wouldn’t know it – that’s the terrifying thing. It’s all about control with these guys, and Andrew represents that very well. For the first three episodes I presented him as a pillar of the community, a fantastic dad – the perfect partner for Laura. It was the biggest challenge to get viewers to trust him, so it’s not like playing the usual baddie. I was playing a normal person who believes that this is a normal way of behaving.’
In the earlier part of the series, while Laura insists she’s been raped, Andrew convinces the police the two simply had a nice evening together, leaving the viewer in the dark about what really did happen. When the truth was revealed halfway through the series viewers were lef t st il l wanting to believe that Andrew was not the liar.
So much so in fact that Ioan’s British Ioan with his wife Alice actress wife Alice Evans, who he met on the set of 102 Dalmatians 17 years ago, shared a snap of the couple together after Andrew was unmasked, captioning it, ‘Aw... look at his creepy little smile. Wait, did I say creepy? I meant cute!’ Ioan laughs now at the thought of it. ‘I saw it at first and I thought what a lovely picture. Then I read her caption! But it was good as it humanises me as well and makes people realise I’m an actor after all,’ he says. ‘Alice did it because viewers felt betrayed by Andrew.’ Ioan and Alice have lived in Los Angeles since 2003, where his garage doubles as a ‘man cave’ for the LA ‘ Taffia’, a group of Welsh actors including Michael Sheen and Ioan’s best friend Matthew Rhys who like to hang out together.
He’s due to return to the big screen later this year with a part opposite Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in The Professor And The Madman, and he’s hoping the lead role in Harrow (‘he’s a forensic pathologist with a dark past so he’s a bit like Hugh Laurie’s Doctor House in House,’ says Ioan), will cement his TV popularity. He’s craved more sinister roles for some time, but his chiselled good looks have always seen him cast in gentler parts. ‘It’s not the sort of role I’ve ever had the chance to play before. It was exciting because I’ve played a lot of heroic guys like Hornblower, but I’ve been wanting to play these flawed characters for about ten years,’ he admits. ‘But because of the way I look and the way I started out as a young leading man it’s been hard to shake off. I’m only now growing into these roles, and they’re starting to be offered to me. I’ve got a bit more physical weight, more lines, more jowls, more furrowed brows. And I’m happy to not want to be loved as a character.’
It’s all a far cry from ten years ago, when Ioan’s career seemed to fall off a cliff. His parents Peter and Gillian were teachers, but his grandparents ran an amateur dramatics group in Cardiff, where Ioan grew up. At 13, he
landed a part in Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm, and then got a place at RADA. After Hornblower (a role, incidentally, he says he’d love to play again) made him a star in 1998, critically acclaimed movie roles followed, including Black Hawk Down and Amazing Grace with a young Benedict Cumberbatch. Ioan was named one of the 30 most interesting people in the world by Time magazine, and even touted as the next James Bond. Then came Mr Fantastic in Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie which established him in Hollywood in 2005, but the sequel two years later turned out to be his last big hit. While Cumberbatch was thriving, and Matthew Rhys was turning heads in two hit TV series, Brothers & Sisters and The Americans, Ioan’s career nosedived for two years. ‘I sat on the couch and waited for work to come in,’ he says. ‘I got depressed, I went into the abyss.’ At the time he wrote on Instagram, ‘Showbusiness is like that. Hell, life is like that. You ride to the top of the wave, then you come crashing down again.’ Today he’s more sanguine about the experience. ‘That’s what happens when your confidence goes,’ he says. ‘My confidence had really taken a knock. It happens to sportsmen and women, it happens to teachers, nurses, doctors. Luckily I’ve survived.’ Although he’s been seeing a therapist to boost his confidence, he credits Alice with getting him through it. ‘ She’s incredibly bright, intelligent, articulate, and I’ve never met anyone braver. She’s a massive backbone to our family, and everything that goes on.’ And there was a lot going on, because at the time he and Alice were struggling to conceive. She has since said she regrets delaying trying for a family until she was 37. She spent the whole of her 38th year reading studies about fertility, taking her morning temperature and planning ovulation graphs to encourage a pregnancy. The couple then opted for IVF, and happily the first cycle resulted in daughter Ella Betsi in 2009. But it took eight more rounds before their second daughter, Elsie Marigold, was born four years ago. During that time, Ioan’s latest TV venture Ringer, in which he was cast alongside Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, was axed after just one series. ‘Alice was extraordinary,’ he says. ‘She’d just had a baby, she was having another baby, and she sort of stepped into the fray and helped me get my confidence back and make the right decisions in my career. She was the catalyst to it all really.’
Meanwhi le, Ioan drast ical ly changed his life. Out went his former management team and in came new mentors, yoga and meditation. He also became virtually teetotal. ‘There was never any doubt that I would quit acting but I had the reality of not working yet wanting to work. I had the responsibilities of being married and having kids and the cost of living. That affects you.’
Quitting drinking has helped, he says, especially while filming Liar. ‘Some of the scenes were so harrowing and made me feel so tainted that I’d have to go for a run. You have to change your mental state, and I find running and lifting weights helps change your brain chemistry, because it’s easy to turn to drink to get over these things. But I was lucky. I started to see that alcohol was making things a bit dark. So I put it in check.’
His new agent helped introduce him to a younger audience by getting him roles on the musical TV show Glee and films such as the blockbuster San Andreas, and Ioan believed his much- needed comeback had arrived three years ago with the lead in US medical drama Forever, but that too was dropped after just one series. ‘ By that stage the low period had passed though,’ he says. ‘My confidence had come back. I had new representatives and things were back on track.’
So much so that it seems a long way from his role in Titanic in 1997, playing Fifth Officer Harold Lowe. The part was easy, but the experience on set was dreadful and Ioan would cry in the make-up chair each day. ‘It was a baptism of fire,’ he says. ‘The atmosphere on set was intense and everybody was feeling it. I did get quite emotional.’
Twenty years on, after fearing his career was sinking, he can safely say he’s got the wind in his sails again – and this time he wouldn’t be lying.
The Liar DVD box set is out on Monday. Catch up on the final episode on ITV Hub – visit itv.com.
‘There’s no baddie like a British baddie!’