The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I can’t fight but I know what a bully is’
A skinhead, an armed robber, and now a crazed cop – Tim Roth has a knack for portraying violence on screen. He tells Chris Harvey why
For the best part of three decades, Tim Roth has been an exile in Hollywood. He grew up in south London, punched his way into the public eye playing a swastika-tattooed skinhead in the BBC’s Made in Britain in 1982, then split for LA at the end of the Thatcher years, sick of the gaps between decent roles.
At first he was “very depressed” in America, but gradually made friends with “real human beings – rare in LA”, and met Quentin Tarantino, who had seen Roth in the film Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. Tarantino sent him the script to Reservoir Dogs, the 1992 film that made Roth a global star. They’ve stayed mates ever since, and Roth is still in LA, in the suburb of Pasadena.
In fact, the actor has been quite negative about Britain over the years. When we meet in a central London hotel, he singles out politicians and tabloid journalists as things that make him not want to come back. Lately, though, he’s been flirting with the old country. He played Reg Keys, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq who went on to stand against Tony Blair in his Sedgefield constituency, in Reg in 2015; and last year played serial killer John Christie in Rillington Place for the BBC. He even made it on to the recent controversysparking list of the corporation’s top earners.
“I know, I thought that was rather good!” he says.
In his latest television drama, Tin Star, Roth plays a London police officer who moves his family to a Canadian town to get away from his problems with alcohol. (He was able to use his own accent, which he says was “a release”.) As the new police chief, he soon runs into conflict with an oil company, which has plans to expand into the town.
Has he ever had a problem with booze himself? “Everybody has, everybody who drinks has got one, and you deal with it,” he says.
He has been playing violent men throughout his career, with a way of shifting gears suddenly into viciousness. “That came from being bullied,” he says. “I can’t fight to save my life, but I know what a bully is. I’ve been around heavy violence, when we were doing the punk thing back in the Seventies. I saw some very, very scary s---. There was a lot of knife violence, a lot of brawls, there were the skinheads versus the punks, and the teddy boys at that time, and we were getting the s--- kicked out of us. Mostly we would run. I got the smell of it. At school, when you walked into a classroom, you knew when you were gonna get done again, so you could spot ’em [the bullies]. When it came to [being violent on screen] I could get that across. It’s under the surface in Tin Star, but it manifests itself big time.”
Roth used to have a reputation for being difficult to interview – clippings from the Eighties and Nineties talk about him picking arguments and stonewalling. But today he is voluble, sweary and enthusiastic, with strong opinions. I ask him what he makes of the increasing levels of violence in films and television. “It was never really something that you saw on telly but now that television has almost more importance in people’s lives than cinema, the corporations that run those outfits are very aware of how they can get their hooks into people,” he says.
We chat about Game of Thrones – he’s never seen it, even though his eldest son, Jack, 33, once played a small role in it. Roth has two more sons, 22-year-old T Hunter (after Hunter S Thompson, the T is for Timothy) and M Cormac (after Cormac McCarthy, the M is for Michael), 20, with his wife Nikki Butler, a fashion designer, whom he married in 1993.
He says his family was bingeing on Mad Men while he was filming with Christina Hendricks in Tin Star. (She plays a corporate PR image maker for the oil company.) He hadn’t seen it. “So I finally watched it and she is extraordinary. I could see why people go f-----berserk for that woman.”
Hendricks has made a fair few duds since Mad Men, and Roth
‘When I was doing the punk thing in the Seventies, there were a lot of brawls’