I won’t Dust off Hoffman for Rain Man!
BOTH Mat Horne and Ed Speleers, above, were in agreement about the cultural and social importance of the Oscar-winning film Rain Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise as estranged brothers who reunite after their father dies.
Speleers’ mother is a big Cruise fan, and he remembers watching the movie on TV with her. Horne, meanwhile, knows it frame by frame, having studied it for a degree.
They’re both about to become even better acquainted with Rain Man, because they’re starring in a stage version produced by Bill Kenwright that will embark on a 13-date UK tour, beginning at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, on August 21 and winding up at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton in November.
Horne will play Raymond Babbitt, the institutionalised sibling played by Hoffman in the 1988 picture.
Speleers will play younger brother Charlie (Cruise’s role).
Horne acknowledged that Charlie, ‘ the narcissistic brother’, is the ‘very heart’ of the story. He explained that while Raymond doesn’t change, Charlie is on a journey.
He stressed, however, that it’s not just a straight transfer of the film onto the stage.
‘I’m excited to tackle it live, without the luxury of editing,’ he told me, adding that he and director Jonathan O’Boyle ‘will be discussing how much we want to remove my performance from Hoffman’s’.
When the film came out 30 years ago, ‘autism was relatively underground, we might say’. Not any more. Horne cited the success of Marianne Elliott’s National Theatre production of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time as just one example of how things have changed.
His older brother has also struggled with the challenges of autism. ‘This is a role I simply couldn’t turn down,’ said the actor, who starred in Gavin & Stacey and Bad Education on television, and The Pride and Entertaining Mr Sloane on stage.
Speleers, meanwhile — who has been filming the new series of Outlander, in which he plays an Irish pirate — said he’d been waiting years to tread the boards, even though the prospect also filled him with dread.
He said he’d been thrown by the flop of his first film Eragon, which he made when he was just 17.
‘At one point I wasn’t sure if I’d still be working. It wasn’t the film it could have been, and that was a bitter pill to swallow when you’re a young lad.’
But he was soon on his feet again and hasn’t stopped working since, having found success with Downton Abbey, the BBC’s Wolf Hall and Beowulf.
He’s also a daddy, with a second child due to arrive before rehearsals begin for Rain Man.
Speleers has certainly shaken up his career. He has one of the best scenes in Lars Von Trier’s divisive film The House That Jack Built, which I sat through at the Cannes Film Festival.
He plays a police officer who confronts Matt Dillon’s serial killer.