‘I played Christie’s Poirot just as she wrote it’

As he prepares to tread the boards again in London’s West End, David Suchet tells Dominic Cavendish why a writer’s words are (almost) sacrosanct.

Next month, David Suchet will celebrate 50 years in the acting profession. However, he very nearly didn’t make it past the first year. As a struggling actor, he was working at formal menswear specialists Moss Bros in Covent Garden and was on the cusp of applying for a fulltime position as a junior manager when he received a call that changed everything.

‘‘It turned out to be my agent who told me he had a job, a non-speaking role in a TV series [The Protectors] – ‘a terrorist who gets blown up’,’’ Suchet explains. ‘‘He said, ‘It’s a day’s filming and you go to Venice’. I said ‘Yes’ at once and never went to that interview.’’

Had that call not come through, we might have been robbed of one of our leading actors, who has made his mark in Shakespeare at the RSC and in London’s West End in everything from the embittered Salieri in Amadeus to the acidic academic George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He’s the king of high-definition character acting, subsuming himself in roles, displaying a knack for drawing you in without quite yielding up a character’s central enigma.

On television, his glories include awardwinning turns as the financier Augustus Melmotte in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and as Robert Maxwell in a stand-alone drama that earned him an Emmy. Then there is his performance as Poirot, which it’s no hyperbole to describe as a global phenomenon. It ran for 70 episodes and attracted 700 million viewers between 1989 and 2013.

We meet at Wilton’s Music Hall in East London, a venue he adores. Suchet cuts an imposing but approachable figure. He says he makes it a point of order never to appear too daunting or dismissive. And I wonder whether he expects to encounter Poirot devotees once he opens Arthur Miller’s The Price in the West End this month.

‘‘It still goes on,’’ he says. ‘‘Every day someone will come up and talk to me about Poirot, and I’m sure that will be the case during The Price. People adore Poirot. He fascinates and inspires them – I think because he’s on the good side.

‘‘The letters I get are extraordinary – people say they watched it in hospital and it made them feel better. People who have got divorced said it got them through dark times. I feel very grateful. Poirot will be there until I die.’’

We’re meeting just weeks after John Malkovich garnered praise – to some surprise – for bringing an unusual grizzled, haunted quality to the sleuth in Sarah Phelps’s dark, liberty-taking BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders. And in 2017, Kenneth Branagh donned a magnificent ’tache for a big-screen Murder on the Orient Express –to mixed reviews.

Has he seen these upstarts? Suchet’s reply is diplomatic. ‘‘I knew people would want to know what I thought so I decided not to watch them, so I can’t comment,’’ he says. Did it pain him to read rave reviews for Malkovich? ‘‘No, I don’t feel any rivalry. If there’s a pang, it’s that I miss Poirot personally.’’

He’s sanguine about the push into terrain many regard as ‘‘his’’. ‘‘Interpretations need to change according to taste. Characters must develop and there will be new ideas. But my brief was to be Agatha Christie’s Poirot – that was the title. You got from me the canon as she wrote it. I was asked to continue with stories she didn’t write. I said no.’’

Suchet said ‘‘no’’ a lot – and right from the start. He adheres to a credo of trying to serve the authorial intention insofar as he can fathom it – a self-effacing approach he developed at the RSC in 1982, aware that he was falling into what he calls the ‘‘me-meme trap of acting’’.

So he resigned from Poirot before the filming of the first series even started because he wasn’t given a character-faithful morning suit to wear – the director (Edward Bennett) had to back down.

‘‘I wasn’t easy to work with,’’ he concedes. ‘‘Every time I was asked to do something I knew wouldn’t fit with Agatha Christie’s Poirot, I refused.’’

In The Price, Suchet, now 72, does something completely different – and yet in some ways it’s in keeping not only with Poirot but with much else in his career: he plays an outsider.

You can trace a line through his CV to Gregory Solomon, Miller’s wisecracking 89-year-old New York Jewish furniture dealer. This eccentric character, drawn from a world that Miller (himself Jewish) saw first hand, is brought in to appraise a job lot of antique heirlooms stashed in a Manhattan attic.

He ends up becoming a quasi arbiter between the estranged brothers, a downbeat cop and a successful (but haunted) surgeon, who have a claim on the windfall.

‘‘So many of my roles have been misfits, the outsiders – in Shakespeare alone Shylock, Iago, Caliban,’’ he explains. ‘‘That’s partly my appearance – I don’t have a typical Brit look. And it goes with my disposition. I understand people who feel on the edge of things.’’

He describes himself as ‘‘a hotchpotch of

‘‘I wasn’t easy to work with. Every time I was asked to do something I knew wouldn’t fit with Agatha Christie’s Poirot, I refused.’’ David Suchet, right

identities. I’m British. I was brought up in Christian schools – the son of a Harley Street surgeon – and I’m a Christian with Jewish ancestry on both sides of the family.’’

Raised without religion, he became a Christian in 1986 while filming Harry and the Hendersons in the United States. He turned to the Bible and found St Paul’s Epistles to the Romans.

‘‘It’s too huge a subject to discuss in brief,’’ he says. ‘‘We live in a supermarket society where people want to box you in, but I can’t easily be boxed in. I’m part of the Establishment yet also an enigma. I find the mix enriching.’’

The Jewish ancestry has directly informed his portrayal of Solomon. The character has a Russian-Yiddish accent and migrated to the States in a way that mirrors the upheavals experienced on the paternal side of Suchet’s family, albeit that his grandfather – Isidor Suchedowitz – left what is today Lithuania for South Africa (his son, Jack, emigrated to England in 1932).

His stirringly authentic-feeling performance – a triumph when it was first seen at the Theatre Royal Bath last year – arrives amid a heated debate about authenticity in acting, and calls to ensure that minority groups are faithfully represented.

Simon Callow waded into the controversy around Bryan Cranston’s casting as a billionaire quadriplegic in the film The Upside, facetiously suggesting that he should withdraw from his solo version of A Christmas Carol, ‘‘making way for the 37 actors who are actually the characters Dickens described’’.

Suchet concurs with Callow’s alarm at the potential direction of travel. ‘‘I’m worried about it,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve seen a lot of change in 50 years. Multicultural casting took time to adapt to. I had to work on myself to become more open-minded and stop hanging on to fuddy-duddy traditions.

‘‘Theatre has to evolve. It’s never going to be the same again, but there’s a danger we’re actually becoming narrower.

‘‘I’ve just been in a Pinter play [The Collection] where I played a gay character. I’m not gay but it crossed my mind, ‘Will there be objections?’ I asked [gay co-star] Russell Tovey if he minded, he said ‘Absolutely not’, but it’s up for debate.

‘‘I’m very passionate that performers should have the opportunity for their talent to emerge,’’ he adds, ‘‘but to say actors should only play themselves would render character-actors redundant. If you take this to an extreme conclusion, I couldn’t have played Poirot because I’m not Belgian. If this is the way it’s going, I’ll be out of a job.’’

As it is, after The Price, he doesn’t know what awaits. And he likes it that way. ‘‘I’ve never been the sort of actor who knows what they want to do next. You come to me with an idea and I’ll say yes or no.’’

Fifty years on, he’s still waiting for that phone to ring. – Daily Telegraph