This could easily be a sort of misery porn journey but it’s not
AS HE AGES UP TO PLAY AN ELDERLY WIDOWER IN HIS LATEST MOVIE, THE LAST BUS, TIMOTHY SPALL TALKS TO LAURA HARDING ABOUT FINDING OUT HOW IT FEELS TO BE OLD
TIMOTHY SPALL may declare that he is “not a spring chicken” but you wouldn’t know it judging by his enthusiasm for work.
The 64-year-old, who has been nominated for five Baftas over the years (three TV and two film), says he still feels “about 12”.
“My body does remind me that I’m not anymore,” he smiles
He has had to think a lot about ageing lately as he takes on the role of a 90-year-old in his new film. The Last Bus sees the veteran actor play an elderly widower who embarks on a nostalgic and emotional journey from John O’Groats to Land’s End, using only his free bus pass.
“Having to observe the way people are for a living, you often do understand how it feels to be old,” he reflects.
“I remember a long time ago, even when I wasn’t so close to being ancient myself, watching someone going up to a piece of paper, and kicking it out of the way. I was thinking ‘What are they doing?’ but to them that was like a bear trap. I remember watching people crossing the road and seeing an old lady looking at the kerb, which I didn’t even notice and just ran across, and she was looking at it, like it was the Eiger.
“There is that slow, creeping vulnerability that gets people. It must be so strange for lots of old people now to have gone through this year, and have not gone out.
“There are some people in my life who aren’t ancient, but they think the world’s completely changed, it’s all different out there. That physical vulnerability comes out. It’s feeling more vulnerable, more at the behest of gravity, and the consequences of getting gravity wrong.”
Timothy first appeared on screen in the 1970s, and became a household name in the 1980s when he played Barry Spencer Taylor in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
He is now one of the most acclaimed character actors of his generation, largely thanks to his lengthy and fruitful collaborations with director Mike Leigh, with whom he has made films including Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner, for which he won best actor at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Along the way there have also been turns in the Harry Potter films, as Peter Pettigrew, as well as in
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, The Last Samurai, The Damned United and The King’s Speech.
In The Last Bus, his character Tom embarks on an epic journey from the most northerly point of Scotland, where he has lived for 50 years, to England’s most southerly point and the place of his birth, to keep a promise to his late wife. Venturing out of his remote village and into the world, reckoning with his past and facing a diverse and modern landscape that has mainly passed him by, Tom becomes something of a celebrity as his journey goes viral.
“I found it very moving and I could see so many depths in it,” says Timothy. “There is this tragedy that has never been dealt with properly in their life, and this incredible love between these two people.
“This is a real swan song – a real odyssey for him, in more than one way.
“Even at his age, 90, he comes out of it changed, in a sense, because he’s had a taste of a world he’s not been aware of. He hasn’t really tasted the modern world.
“There are some really sweet, funny moments in it, like when he meets this immigrant family that takes him in.
“It could quite easily be a sort of misery porn journey, but it’s not.”
While there are flashbacks to Tom’s life with his wife Mary, played by Downton Abbey star Phyllis Logan, much of the film shows him right at the end of his life.
Timothy, who is father to three children, including the actor Rafe Spall, said he paused briefly at the idea of playing someone three decades older, until he had a conversation with director Gillies Mackinnon, whose previous films include Torvill & Dean, Whisky Galore and Castles In The Sky.
“When I read it, I thought, ‘Oh right, OK, I know I’m getting on...’ but Gilles said actually it’s not about that, it’s about the spirit and the soul and so on, that side of it, rather than the age.
“I’ve always taken a kind of kind of holistic view to performing anyway, that the person’s soul informs their physicality and vice versa.
“In a bizarre way, he’s dying, but his soul is getting younger and he is encountering younger people.
“There is a young girl who is saying goodbye to her lover and she just sits next to me, she cries... she puts her head on his shoulder.
“There’s a sort of ageless quality to his soul, which I think is very important for him on this journey, as he goes towards his death.”
The Last Bus is in UK cinemas from Friday
There is that slow, creeping vulnerability that gets people Timothy Spall on growing old
ONE of the era-perfect songs that accompany director Michael CatonJones’ raucous rites-of-passage comedy, Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter Edwyn Collins croons, “I’ve never known a girl like you before”.
We seldom meet girls like the brazen, potty-mouthed and authorityflouting lead characters in Our Ladies, a film version of Alan Warner’s awardwinning 1998 novel The Sopranos, which was previously adapted for the stage by Lee Hall as Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour.
Set in 1996 (“before social media and mobile phones changed everything”), Caton-Jones’ picture witnesses the emotional devastation wrought by Catholic schoolgirls as they unapologetically cross the rubicon to womanhood and interrogate their sexual identities with vigour.
A cast of relative unknowns, led by Tallulah Greive as teenage narrator Orla, embody the titular sisters of no mercy with vim and aching vulnerability, fostering winning screen chemistry that shows with an
end credits sing-along.
“It was springtime and we had one thing on our minds: boys,” coos hormonecrazed schoolgirl Orla in voiceover.
She is in recovery from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia after a “miracle” visit to Lourdes and yearns to savour her teenage years in Fort William.
Orla joins salty-mouthed classmates Chell (Rona Morison), Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie), Kylah (Marli Siu) and Manda (Sally Messham) at all-girls Catholic high school Our Lady Of Perpetual Succour ahead of an outing to Edinburgh for a choir competition.
Sister Condron (Kate Dickie) is determined to protect her wards’ virtues, assisted by head girl Kay (Eve Austin).
In the Scottish capital, Chell, Finnoula, Kylah, Manda and Orla down sambucas, flirt outrageously with Edinburgh lads and test the bonds of sisterly solidarity, occasionally blinkIN ered to the consequences of their actions.
Almost two years on from its world premiere at the 2019 London Film Festival, Our Ladies still fizzes with energy.
The girls’ willingness to trade on their nascent sexuality strikes a discomfiting chord in the MeToo era but the script, co-written by Caton-Jones and Alan Sharp, makes abundantly clear they are in control of their actions.
Male nudity is played for laughs and sex scenes are sensitively staged.
Kate Dickie’s wimpled supporting performance answers prayers for sobriety and offers a note of caution to counterbalance the youthful exuberance, unleashed on location in Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, which refuses to be tamed, rather like the characters themselves.