Jim Broadbent, the new star of Game of Thrones
Jim Broadbent tells Robbie Collin about playing the lead in Julian Barnes’s ‘The Sense of an Ending’ Two English archetypes come as second nature to him – the curmudgeon and the crackpot
Jim Broadbent has spent the morning talking about dragons in a sandstone ziggurat, so coffee with a film critic should be a picnic. We’re in a quiet corner of a hotel bistro in London’s West End, close to a studio where the actor has been recording dialogue for the new series of Game of Thrones, in which he plays a beady and be-cloaked professor (Archmaester Marwyn) in a towering citadel.
The whole show is so knobbly and mad, and in such a peculiarly British way – so Broadbentian, if you like – it seems inexplicable that it took seven seasons for him to turn up in it. “Goodies and baddies!” he beams, when I ask him what finally lured him in – particularly as he describes himself as “faintly allergic to CGI”. “A misshapen Great Britain! History in miniature. And, just, narratives. People love narratives! Broad, but also subtle.”
His answer is notably more enthused than the one given by Ian McShane in an interview with the Telegraph a month before his own debut in the series. The Deadwood star shrugged it off as “only tits and dragons” before casually letting slip a major plot twist.
“Yes, he got hammered for saying that,” Broadbent muses, smiling. “I have to say I think it’s more complex. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t.”
Neither would Broadbent, perhaps. This is, after all, the 67-year-old whose career was made on the looniest fringes of the counterculture – a spell in a faux-inept double-act called the National Theatre of Brent with Patrick Barlow and 12 helter-skelter roles in Ken Campbell’s anarchic nine-hour play cycle Illuminatus. Since then, he has matured, like some venerable cave-aged cheese, into an Oscarwinning national treasure. Along the way have come films with Martin Scorsese ( Gangs of New York), Steven Spielberg ( Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and Woody Allen ( Bullets over Broadway), two Harry Potters (he was Professor Horace Slughorn), three Bridget Joneses, Paddington and its forthcoming sequel, as well as a long-standing slot on Mike Leigh’s roster of dependables.
Two great English archetypes seem to come as second nature to him – the curmudgeon and the crackpot – and much of his best work, not just with Leigh, comes from playing fond but flawed men stranded somewhere between those two extremes. Take Tony Webster from The Sense of an Ending, Broadbent’s latest film, an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Booker Prizewinning novel. Tony is retired and divorced, though not unhappily, and augments his pension with a little vintage camera shop.
When his customers get too familiar, he bristles, though he’s amicable with his ex-wife (Harriet Walter), accompanies his pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery) to her antenatal classes, and seems to think of himself, all in all, as an all right sort of bloke. Yet there are certain events in Tony’s past – a love affair from his student days, and its far-reaching fallout – that don’t reconcile easily with this story. Tony has done his best to forget them – but fate, in the person of that ex-lover, played by Charlotte Rampling – demands a fairer reckoning. “I just knew the man, really,” he says. “Not a struggle to work out a character when it’s…” The sentence fades away, unfinished. “You can see the flaws in the man,” he picks up. “Sensitive, clumsy, foolish, arrogant, pompous, everything. He’s kind as well. It all adds up to complexity. And he’s exactly my age, generation, or perhaps a fraction older. Just the arc of his life from school till now. Knew exactly where he was coming from.” This is how Broadbent talks – in interviews, at least. Every thought gets methodically sized up from all angles, like an apple he’s turning over in his hands, inspecting for bruises.
He dived into Barnes’s book only after being cast. Same went for Game of Thrones, all six previous seasons of which fell through his letterbox shortly before filming began in Belfast last year. (“Seventy hours of homework to do!” he chuckles. “I watched a bunch of the first series, which was about all I had time for, as it came quite late. And so I got the, umm, picture.”)
Barnes’s writing was vital when it came to finding Tony’s voice – which is, says Broadbent, “the most useful thing you can get” when creating a character. “Just how someone speaks reveals so much about them.” He also pored over recordings of the writer John Bayley before playing him in Iris, and the 7th Earl of Longford for Tom Hooper’s TV drama about the penal campaigner and Labour party peer.
It was his work in Iris that secured the Oscar in March 2002. (“Probably a lot of the Academy voters thought I was playing the young John Bayley as well, whereas it was Hugh Bonneville.”) A month earlier, he won a Bafta too, but for his role as the high-kicking impresario in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! –a deserved double win, though one that seems oddly topsy-turvy in retrospect. Three years before that, there was Topsy-Turvy itself – Mike Leigh’s punctilious historical drama about the writing and staging of The Mikado. Broadbent was WS Gilbert, grappling backstage at the Savoy Theatre with librettist’s block, and won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for it.
Looking back, he calls this fruitful period “utterly surprising and sort of meaningless”.
“It’s not measurable, acting – there have been some beautiful performances that are not eyecatching because they’re not meant to be. I had three sort of eye-catching performances in a row, so that’s the…” His train of thought jumps the track. “Oh! So then you get spotted. And then people think, ‘That must be acting’.” He was offered an OBE in 2002 as well, but turned it down, later saying that actors should be “vagabonds and rogues”, a bargepole’s distance from the establishment.
But those other trophies have been lined up ever since on a shelf in his office at the Lincolnshire home he shares with his wife of 29 years, the artist Anastasia Lewis. “There’s a bunch of them, all from that two- or three-year period,” he says. “Lots you’ve never heard of. Odd, spiky statuettes.”
He was born in that county in 1949, the second son and only surviving twin of Roy, an artist and furniture maker, and Dee, a sculptor and actress. (To unwind, Broadbent whittles figures from wood in his shed – his own personal troupe of grotesques.) During the war, his parents had been conscientious objectors, farming during the day and helping run a local theatre company in the evenings. In peacetime, they converted their village’s Nissen hut into a repertory theatre, and did the same to a Methodist chapel in 1970. It opened when Broadbent was 22 and had just graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His father died shortly after. It was named the Broadbent Theatre in his memory.
For actors, Lincolnshire roots could be an asset. “I had a convincing northern accent, which was very useful at that time,” he says. “The influence of northern and working class drama was much stronger than it is now. I was able to sort of cross the divide between middle class and working class.” He says directors were often surprised by his middleclass, public school background (he attended a Quaker boarding school). “When Mike Leigh employed me in [his 1979 stage play] Ecstasy, he was sort of breaking his rules.”
Leigh gave him his first lead role on screen, as a befuddled father of teenage twin girls and aspiring burger van proprietor, in his 1990 comedy Life is Sweet. Or Untitled 90, as it was known during filming: “That’s the thing with Mike Leigh. It’s always Untitled Whatever-Year-It-Is. He has a hell of a time getting his titles, thrashing them out. Topsy-Turvy was a huge effort to come up with. Lots of debates about whether to have ‘Savoy’ in there, or if it would upset the French.”
In the end, Topsy-Turvy came from a review: one written about Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida in 1884, in which a critic from The Times described Gilbert as “the legitimate monarch of the realm of Topsy-Turvydom”.
It’s a place you can imagine Broadbent might feel at home.