MISSED YOU
Veteran rocker Mick Jagger is a movie star again — and it’s about time
A funny thing happens when you interview Mick Jagger. He’ll be talking about all manner of subjects — the vagaries of art collecting, the similarities between live performance and screen acting, the ambiguities embedded in the latest film he’s in — and he could be any cultured, well-educated 76-yearold Brit who knows his way around the world. Then, he’ll say something — something brief, inconsequential, offhanded — that reminds you that the man on the other end of the line is Mick Freakin’ Jagger.
That moment occurred during a brief conversation recently, when Jagger phoned from Paris to talk about the role he plays in The Burnt Orange Heresy, a twisty little thriller — part Hitchcock, part Highsmith — set amid the art world at its most scheming and hyper-commodified. Jagger plays Joseph Cassidy, a collector living in palatial isolation on the shores of Lake Como, who invites a cynical art critic (Claes Bang) to visit for a weekend; Cassidy, it turns out, harbours a hidden agenda, which becomes all the more treacherous when it affects the young woman (Elizabeth Debicki) who comes along as the writer’s last-minute date. The plot thickens when Donald Sutherland shows up as a famous, and famously reclusive, painter.
Like most of the dramatis personae in The Burnt Orange Heresy, Cassidy is prone to deception, dissembling and perhaps something even more dangerous;
Jagger leans into his part with the relaxed, playful relish that suggests a man having the time of his life.
“One of my character’s roles is to kick off the action,” Jagger explains, noting that until he shows up, the audience might think they’re in for a steamy romance set against a fabulously romantic backdrop.
“I was very aware that I had to do that properly, to put the game in play,” he says. “Up to that point, you’re following these two people having an affair, you know, and you’re thinking ‘That’s kind of hot.’ They’re kind of hot, and they’re having this wild affair in Europe, you know, and then what? You don’t know what they’re doing, really. They’re not doing anything. They just seem to be hanging out in Italy. And then (Cassidy) puts them into the narrative, which carries on for the rest of the film and makes her life rather difficult.”
It’s those kind-of-hots, uttered in Jagger’s distinctive, Cockney-adjacent cadence, that make one snap to and remember that, oh yeah, the actor on the line promoting his latest project also happens to be one of rock ’n’ roll’s most enduring and iconic figures.
The kind of projection and outsized physicality it takes to be a rock star might seem to be diametrically opposed to the kind of restraint and transparency that define a great screen performance. But Jagger sees more similarities than differences.
“If the part requires it, which they quite often do, you have to exude a certain amount of energy and life,” he explains. “If you’re watching a movie and in the scene one of the actors seems a bit dead ... the scene becomes a bit lifeless. So without overdoing it, you’ve got to be vital, so to speak, on the screen to make the scene keep the audience’s attention.”
It’s been almost 20 years since Jagger had a major role in a movie (“Ages,” he says). Giuseppe Capotondi, who directed The Burnt Orange Heresy, says he hadn’t considered Jagger for the role of Cassidy until he got word that the musician was interested in doing a film. Capotondi sent Jagger the script, “and obviously he must have liked it, because he said, ‘Come and meet me.’ We went to see him in his office and he said yes. It was very straightforward.”
At first, the film — an adaptation of a novel by Charles Willeford — was set in Florida during the 1970s; Capotondi and screenwriter Scott B. Smith changed the time frame and the setting, which was all to the good, as far as Jagger was concerned. He’ll consider anything that “piques my interest, especially if it’s not six months of my life that I have to spend in the Canadian Rockies in the winter or something.” In the case of The Burnt Orange Heresy, he notes, his role entailed only four or five days of shooting in mid-autumn at Lake Como.
The role of Cassidy is one of just a handful of movie roles Jagger has done since 1970, when he made his feature debut in the Australian outlaw drama Ned Kelly and Performance, in which he played a darker, more louche version of himself.
Jagger admits wishing he could have done more. “It’s hard to remember what it was like in the old days, because there was so much prejudice against people who were from, say, the rock world — people who did casting wouldn’t even consider that you could do that,” he says. “As far as Hollywood was concerned, it was a bit of a no-no.”
And of course, he had to battle a formidable competitor that has dogged him throughout his movie career, the character he spent years creating and refining that we now know as the Dionysian, alluringly androgynous, sexily strutting persona Mick Jagger. He concedes that his larger-than-life stage presence has sometimes proved an obstacle. “You have to overcome that and make people believe you’re not that character,” he says. “But that’s acting.”
Jagger is pleased that the character of Cassidy in The Burnt Orange Heresy doesn’t resemble offscreen Mick Jagger in the slightest (he doesn’t collect art, which is “rather disappointing,” he says. “I could have had a wonderful art collection for relatively little investment, back in the day”). In fact, he observes, the role of Cassidy was originally written for a woman. “I think it was going to be played by Judi Dench,” he says, and suddenly he’s sent into a fit of giggles at the mental image he just conjured. “Maybe she’ll get one of my parts,” Jagger says, still laughing. “Who knows? Who knows?”