Roth on his killer voice

Tim Roth has played all sort of villains, from gangsters and skinheads to the former Fifa boss Sepp Blatter. But none have been as monstrous as his latest character: the serial killer John Christie. A seemingly meek clerk, who spoke in a whisper, Christie strangled at least eight women and hid their corpses in his house in Notting Hill. Researching the part for the new BBC drama, Roth realised that Christie himself was an accomplished actor. “What’s interesting is that the neighbours liked him and the local kids liked him,” Roth told Rory Carroll in The Guardian. “He played a gentle, old, quite respectable fellow. That was the character.” To perfect Christie’s gentle Midlands voice, Roth imitated the tones of playwright Alan Bennett. “It was one of the voices we found that really helped,” he says, tilting his head and adopting the accent. “His very quiet voice, very comforting, very sweet, here, have a cup of tea.” Milo Yiannopoulos is, according to his own Instagram bio, “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. And he certainly does know how to raise hackles, says Ben Machell in The Times. The gay, Catholic former grammar-school boy turned himself into a hero of the “alt-right” by penning pieces for Breitbart with headlines such as “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?”. He has been permanently banned from Twitter, and was turned away from his old school in Canterbury last month, after having been booked to give a speech there. Yet he just gets more and more famous. This is partly because left-wingers, to his delight, find it impossible to ignore him. “They need to pathologise me. They need to give me a disease. They need to say I’m self-loathing. I’m gay. I dress and I look and I act like I ought to have politics X, and I have politics Y, and they can’t work it out. But it’s not difficult to work out. It’s easy. It’s that identity politics is bull****. The idea that gays all have to vote one way, women all have to vote one way, blacks all have to vote one way – it’s insane. And it runs contrary to reason. Gays are libertarians. Why would they be left-wing? Why would gays be feminists? That doesn’t make any sense,” he says, his voice rising to an incredulous squeak. “We don’t want to f*** women; we don’t even like them!”