No./19 Meet the BFG (the Bad Fumbly Golfer)
Mark Rylance on playing the world’s worst club-swinger in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN
BY HIS OWN admission, Mark Rylance isn’t much of a golfer. His swing, he says, is “bad”. Then, with a chuckle: “Bad enough to be the world’s worst golfer.”
That’s handy, given that in Craig Roberts’ new ’70s-set comedy-drama The Phantom Of The Open, he is playing Maurice Flitcroft — the worst golfer ever to play in the Open Championship. What Rylance is good at, of course, is acting: bringing the extraordinary nuance, humanity and twinkly-eyed warmth that won him an Oscar for Bridge Of Spies, and won the hearts of many in The BFG. He brings that same everyman humanity to the real-life Flitcroft in his quixotic attempts to become a pro; despite the film being a comedy, he took the role as seriously as any other.
“I like the sense of responsibility,” Rylance says. “To his family and his grandkids. I find it really interesting and satisfying. I have to serve the narrative as well. But I try to hew as closely to real life as I can.” Part of his process involved spending time in the industrial, then Lancashire (now Cumbria) town of Barrow-in-furness, where Flitcroft worked as a crane driver before conjuring up his golfing dream. “I’d never been to Barrow. It was really beautiful. An extraordinary little place. There was at one time eight miles of steel mills there — before the Americans took over.”
It’s that post-industrial decline, in fact, that first inspired the then 47-year-old Flitcroft to seek greater fortunes, despite no discernible golfing talent. It set up a David and Goliath fight with golfing elites who thought this chainsmoking, flat-capped Lancashireman degraded a gentleman’s sport. “They were so foolish not to take it humorously,” Rylance says. “The Golf Association were so worried about being embarrassed. But he never gave up.”
Rylance isn’t sure if Flitcroft’s tactics —
which later included donning fake moustaches and outrageous pseudonyms like ‘Gene Paycheky’ to avoid his ban — is an especially British kind of eccentricity. “I don’t know — that would be the American attitude,” he says. But what appealed to Rylance — himself a sometime activist with organisations such as the Stop The War coalition — was Flitcroft’s rebelliousness. “That’s a characteristic
I certainly like about being English — a defiance of authority.”
Whether Flitcroft was just joking around, or whether he truly hoped to be a golfing great one day, remains something of a mystery, however. “I had the same question about him,” Rylance says. “Did he have a wicked, very dry sense of humour or was he being sincere? I couldn’t really tell.” The actor spoke with Flitcroft’s surviving family, had careful discussions with Roberts, and read the book that the script is based on (both co-written by Paddington’s Simon Farnaby) for clues on the best tone. What they settled on was that the wannabe golfer genuinely thought he could scale the sport’s heights.
“It seemed the best thing to do was to play it sincerely,” Rylance explains. “That might come across as a very dry sense of humour. But I got the impression that he believed what he was saying.” In the end, the actor took the character as seriously as any other role, be it a Soviet spy or a wise old giant.
The easy part, he says, was teeing off. “The golfing, I didn’t have to worry about,” he smiles. “I was able to hit enough duff shots.”