The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Touching road movie is just the ticket for Spall
Timothy Spall claims he is “not a spring chicken” but you wouldn’t know it judging by his enthusiasm for work.
The 64-year-old, who has been nominated for five Baftas over the years (three TV and two film), says he still feels “about 12”.
“My body does remind me that I’m not that anymore,” he adds wryly.
He has had to think a lot about ageing lately as he plays a 90-year-old in his new film. The Last Bus sees him cast as an elderly widower who embarks on a nostalgic and emotional journey from John o’ Groats to Land’s End, using only his free bus pass.
“Having to observe the way people are for a living, you often do understand how it feels to be old.
“I remember a long time ago, even when I wasn’t so close to being ancient myself, watching someone going up to a piece of paper, and kicking it out of the way into the kerb.
“I was thinking ‘What are they doing?’ But to them that was like a bear trap. I remember watching people crossing the road and seeing an old lady looking at the kerb, which I didn’t even notice and just ran across it, and she was looking at it, like it was the Eiger.
“There is that slow, creeping vulnerability that gets people. It must be so strange for lots of old people now to have gone through this year, and who have not gone out.
“There are some people in my life who aren’t ancient, but they think the world has completely changed, it’s all different out there.
“That physical vulnerability comes out. It’s feeling more vulnerable, more at the behest of gravity, and the consequences of getting gravity wrong.”
Spall first appeared on screen in the 1970s, and became a household name in the 1980s when he played Barry in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
He is now one of the most acclaimed character actors of his generation, largely thanks to his lengthy and fruitful collaboration with director Mike Leigh, with whom he has made films including Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Mr Turner, for which he won best actor at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
In The Last Bus, his character Tom embarks on an epic journey from the most northerly point of Scotland, where he has lived for 50 years, to England’s most southerly point and the place of his birth, in a bid to keep a promise to his late wife.
Venturing out of his remote village and into the world, reckoning with his past and facing a diverse and modern landscape that has mainly passed him by, Tom becomes something of a celebrity as his journey goes viral.
“I found it very moving and I could see so many depths in it. There is this tragedy that has never been dealt with properly in their life, and this incredible love between these two people. This is a real swansong and a real odyssey for him, in more than one way, and a surprising odyssey for him.
“Even at his age, 90, he comes out of it changed, in a sense, because he’s had a taste of a world he’s not been aware of. He hasn’t really tasted the modern world. There are some really sweet, funny moments in it and you know, like when he meets this immigrant family that take him in, there are real vignette stories.”
While there are flashbacks to Tom’s life with his wife Mary, played by Downton Abbey star Phyllis Logan, much of the film shows him right at the end of his life.
Spall, who is father to three children, including the actor Rafe Spall, said he paused briefly at the idea of playing someone three decades older, until he had a conversation with director Gillies MacKinnon, whose previous films include Torvill & Dean and Castles In The Sky.
“When I read it, I thought, ‘Oh right, OK, I know I’m getting on...’ but Gilles said actually it’s not about that, it’s about the spirit and the soul and so on, that side of it, rather than the age.
“I’ve always taken a kind of holistic view to performing anyway, that the person’s soul informs their physicality and vice versa.
“In a bizarre way, he’s dying, but his soul is getting younger and he’s encountering younger people.
“There is a young girl who is saying goodbye to her lover and she just sits next to me, she cries, she just puts her head on his shoulder. There’s a sort of ageless quality to his soul, which I think is very important for him on this journey, as he goes towards his death. It’s a real odyssey.”
■ The Last Bus is released in UK cinemas on August 27.