Matthew is all starry eyed for Downton’s Cora
The Broadway and film actor Matthew Broderick will make his West end stage debut alongside Downton Abbey star elizabeth McGovern this spring.
They will lead the UK premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2009 play The Starry Messenger, about an astronomy lecturer called Mark Williams at the hayden Planetarium in New York.
Broderick told me he and Lonergan, who have been friends since early school days, once took a class at the planetarium. ‘There was a teacher, and Kenny says the character was loosely based on that guy. We didn’t know anything about him, so it’s really a made-up person.’
he said the play’s ‘a study of a guy in middle age, in a mid-life crisis’.
McGovern, who told me that she’s ‘addicted to the stage’, will play Anne, Williams’s schoolteacher wife.
She said the couple have been married for a long time but the marriage ‘ has become about logistics . . . they’re stranded in a rut’.
Broderick made his name in the movies, with films such as WarGames and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But he has long been a force in New York theatre, starring in Torch Song Trilogy and The Producers.
he’s also had a long professional association with Lonergan, appearing in several of his films — including You Can Count On Me and Manchester By The Sea — and in the original Off-Broadway production of The Starry Messenger, which Lonergan directed himself. The London version, which will run at the jewel that’s Wyndham’s Theatre from May 16, will be directed by Sam Yates, although producer Simon Friend told me Lonergan would be in town to collaborate on the production.
Broderick said he’d had a couple of ‘ almost coming to London times’, particularly with The Producers. he said he’s excited to be making his London stage debut, but ‘if I thought about it, I’d be petrified’.
‘We did The Starry Messenger for a pretty short time and we always wanted to try it again,’ he said, adding that part of the run will coincide with school holidays for his three children, who will travel over with his actress and writer wife Sarah Jessica Parker.
When we spoke in New York, he admitted that he’d seen ‘every Downton Abbey show’ and wa s looking forward to discussing the big screen version with the Countess of Grantham, aka McGovern.
The actor was about to head to Mexico City to film Daybreak, a ten-part post-apocalyptic drama for Netflix.