Matthew Goode
‘I thought I was one of the top actors of my generation’
‘I once thought I was in maybe the top 40 actors in my generation in Britain’
On a sticky afternoon in central London, Matthew Goode is in repose: lolling on a hotel sofa, sipping a latte, and happily ruminating on the contours of the anatomy of the Bodyguard’s Richard Madden. Honestly – I didn’t even ask.
“He’s dealing with that thing,” Goode says, airily referring to the fate that has befallen several male stars of Sunday-night dramas, from Poldark’s Aidan Turner to Tom Hiddleston in
The Night Manager, in which a glimpse of naked flesh makes more headlines than their performance. “He doesn’t want to be objectified. And I know that’s been happening to women for centuries, but I think he feels pretty uncomfortable that his bottom is now all over the internet…” He shrugs. “But then it is a greatlooking bottom…”
Goode, perhaps, has a vested interest: he and Madden have been friends since they worked together on the television adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong in 2012. A few days prior to our meeting, he was one of 6.7m people who saw more of Madden than they’d expected during the year’s most-watched sex scene.
Madden may be uncomfortable with the attention, but Goode is delighted to stitch him up further. “Did you know, in Cinderella
[Madden was Prince Charming in the 2015 Disney version], I think Rich may have… now, how does one put this… I think his ‘proportions’ in the nether regions were such that they had to be covered up, CGI-D out, because it was Disney and he had tights on.” A wicked grin flashes across Goode’s face. “Let’s put that out there.”
Goode has been in his fair share of big-budget TV dramas over the years – from Downton Abbey to playing Lord Snowdon in The Crown – but he’s glad to have turned 40 this year without ever becoming the national lust object some of his industry friends have. Especially as a married father of three.
“I’m old and settled and it’s not great for my wife [interior designer Sophie Dymoke] to see sex scenes,” he says. “I’ve always got the old sock on, but they’re still awkward, and you just want them to be over as quickly as possible, especially if you’ve only just met the other person. Honestly, I could do with no more sex scenes for the rest of my life.”
It’s not that Goode has no female fans. An American woman recently wished to show her appreciation for his career by offering to purchase his shopping at the supermarket checkout (“Utterly weird. I had to fight her off, she was going for the card reader”), but there are degrees of hassle.
“My mate Jamie Dornan [Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey series] doesn’t even like going out shopping. Now there’s a man who has a problem with female attention. It must be harrowing,” he says. “No one pays attention to me, I can just put on a silly hat and be gone.”
Goode has, to put it mildly, an unpredictable way with words. Every 45 seconds or so he’ll say something that makes his publicist wince – he once declared his 2010 romcom Leap
Year “turgid” – but I suspect he has enough charm to get away with mass murder. Casting agents appear to agree: over the years he’s come to specialise in playing charming rogues. Ideally in period costume.
“Or maybe just b-------? I think there’s just me and Dominic West who specialise in those parts,” he laughs. “I don’t think anyone goes, ‘hang on, I want to do another period drama!’, but it’s just how it happened for me. I don’t know, I’ve stopped watching them now. What a release.” His newest part, at least, has been a departure. In Sky’s A
Discovery of Witches, an adaptation of the first book in Deborah Harkness’s bestselling All Souls Trilogy, he plays his first vampire. It’s set at Oxford University, and tells the story of a historian and witch, Diana, who requires the help of an enigmatic but brilliant vampire academic (Goode) to unlock fantastical mysteries. Consider it a kind of Gothic Inspector Morse.
“I’d never really done much in a fantasy world before. It’s easy to write,” he says, but “if you don’t have the cash it can get a bit hammy. Luckily they’ve done a really good job.”
A few years ago, Goode had the option to move to America and try his luck in Hollywood. Instead, he chose to stay in Surrey and see his children – Matilda, nine, Teddy, five, and threeyear-old Ralph – grow up.
“I once thought I was in maybe the top 40 actors in my generation in Britain, and I thought, ‘why don’t I be the one guy who doesn’t go to LA?’”
So he didn’t. Yet he’s still managed to appear in several Oscar-nominated films, from The Imitation Game to Tom Ford’s A Single Man – both, incidentally, Weinstein films. “I never had much to do with [Harvey Weinstein], not being the star of those films, but then I was also not a woman. I suppose there’s no smoke without fire, and 100 women is a
lot of people,” he says of the allegations that have abounded since the #Metoo movement began last year. “I heard the rumours when I was sitting there in drama school in the Nineties. For it to come all the way across the Atlantic at that time, that’s weird.”
Goode’s agent in Hollywood called recently to inform him that “people think you’re dead out here”, but he remains perfectly happy with his lot – which involves a lot of staying in. “The kids aren’t really mad about us going out, and besides, it’s better to have friends round, isn’t it?”
A few roles have fallen through lately – he and Rosamund Pike were due to play Prince Charles and Princess Diana in a US series, Feud, but that’s been canned – yet a Jacqueline Wilson adaptation, a drama with Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and of course, the new Downton Abbey film, reuniting him with Michelle Dockery, are all in the works. “That was so nice, I hadn’t seen her since she lost her fella [Dockery’s fiancé, John Dineen, died from cancer in 2015], and I’m so happy to see she’s doing well,” he says. “I can’t say a thing, but there’s some amazing new faces [in the film].”
It’s all going well, then. And he looks in fine fettle for 40; on the morning we meet, Mark Wahlberg – his senior by seven years – released details of a preposterously gruelling daily routine, involving two gym sessions beginning at 2.30am.
“At what f------ time?” Goode shrieks. “I think I might go to bed occasionally at 2.30am after putting the wine away and scooping my wife off the sofa… Good on him, I say. Although he did [attack] someone when he was younger, so maybe he’s making up for it…” He glances at a publicist. “Say no more about that.”
No, it’s swimming 50 lengths every morning, playing golf and not working too hard that give him all this energy – though he says he is sent a suspicious number of father roles these days. Leave the sex symbols for Madden; Goode can do the dads. As long as they’re charming rogues.
A Discovery of Witches continues on Sky One tomorrow at 9pm