Tom’s a star to the Cor
TOM BATEMAN, the classically trained actor with matinee idol good looks, will flex his stage muscle as Coriolanus, the great Roman general who didn’t know how to hold on to power.
‘I see him as a caged lion,’ said the star, who played the tragic warrior when he was studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
Coriolanus excels in battle but out of uniform he’s thwarted by politics. ‘He doesn’t unbend, he sticks to his values,’ Bateman said, ‘so he’s ill equipped to meet those wicked senators.’
He noted that the play has great relevance now. But he said director Robert Hastie didn’t want his actors ‘walking around doing impressions of certain political figures’.
However, Hastie does want the play to be bloody. ‘Rob wants the battles to be visceral,’ the actor said. ‘We talk, through the entire play, about how brilliant a fighter and combatant he [Coriolanus] is. So if you shy away from that, because you’re afraid of shocking people, then I think you’re doing the play a disservice.’
The play will run at the Crucible in Sheffield from March 6 next year.
Bateman has starred in several TV dramas — he’s just completed Behind Her Eyes for Netflix and Left Bank, the companies behind The Crown.
He was in the Branagh Company’s The Winter’s Tale and last year’s Murder On The Orient Express.
He started filming Kenneth’s Branagh’s version of Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile on Tuesday, at a location in the Cotswolds. ‘I can see the Nile from here!’ he joked.