The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘One director looked at me and said: “Nah, too foreign”’
From supervillains to Afghan warlords, actor Alfred Molina tells Claire Allfree about his ‘crazy quilt’ of a career
When Alfred Molina graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama at the age of 22, his dean had a couple of words of advice. “Alfredo, you must be prepared not to work until you are well into your forties. You are a character actor, not a leading man. Oh, and do drop the ‘o’ from your first name. Otherwise you’ll play nothing but Spanish waiters.” Molina pauses for effect. “That really pissed me off. I thought: hang on, my dad’s a Spanish waiter!”
That dean has been proven wrong on the first count. Molina, now 69, has been working steadily since his early twenties, although as a “chubby gangly kid”, the man who would play villainous Doctor Octopus in two Spider-Man films knew that he was unlikely ever to be cast as a “beefcake”.
Who knows, though, whether the second prophecy would have come true? Molina, the Londonborn son of two immigrants (his mother was Italian) did indeed immediately drop the “o”. “Can you imagine doing that now?” he says. “Telling Benicio del Toro he’d be better off known as Benjamin?”
Ironically, its loss meant an ethnic casting free-for-all for most of Molina’s career: he used to joke that thanks to his southern European features, he always “gave good foreign”. His parts include Diego Rivera in Frida (2002), Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway (2004) and an Afghan warlord in 2016’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Thanks to today’s more enlightened approach to casting, he now jokes that he can’t get cast as a Spanish waiter for love nor money. “These days I’m just not quite Spanish enough. But I’m at a stage in my career where it doesn’t matter any more. I’m part of the furniture.”
Molina, who has lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1990s, is indeed still very busy. His latest role is Inspector Gamache, the sensitive, ruminative moral compass of Louise Penny’s best-selling Three Pines detective novels, who finds his faith in human nature repeatedly tested by the behaviour of an extraordinary number of evil-minded people living in his Quebec home town. Adapted by Amazon Prime, it’s a Morse-meets-Twin Peaks-style addition to the cosier end of the crime spectrum, with a faint hint of the uncanny, and Molina hopes the series will run and run; he’s executive producer and, a new experience for him, has been involved in script development.
“I really wanted a part I could get my teeth into and develop. As an actor you get used to being a gun-for-hire, without having any say in what you do. People didn’t ask me for my opinion in a professional context until I was well into my late thirties. It’s nice, for once, not to be merely a cog in a bigger wheel.”
Gun for hire? Alfred Molina? But yes, this is how this most beloved of actors has always viewed a “crazy quilt of a career” that has included Hollywood hits (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Chocolat), West End plays (Red, the Donmar Warehouse show about Rothko); and a vast
amount of British film and screen work, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Prick Up Your Ears and Letter to Brezhnev
– a period he notes as being a particularly golden age for British filmmaking.
Molina’s natural insouciance and lack of LA affectation (he really is the friendliest A-lister I’ve ever met) belie an unexpected insecurity. “I was reading Alan Rickman’s diaries the other day,” he says. “It’s fabulously gossipy but there is also an amazing vulnerability there.
“He is constantly asking himself: Did I make the right decision? And I’ve always quietly worried about that too. Because there was never any career plan. From the beginning, my main objective was to stay employed. I’ve always had my dad’s voice in my ears: ‘Real men don’t get into fights. Real men pay their bills.’ It’s only recently that I’ve had the luxury of being able to turn things down.”
He left for America in the mid-1990s, with his first wife, the late English actress Jill Gascoine, because he was struggling to get work in England. “Because of the way I looked, I was never going to be cast in a James Ivory film,” he says. “There was one job I went up for in the late 1980s and I’d barely got through the door before the director said: ‘Nah, too foreign.’” By contrast, America suited him straight away: “My ethnicity was part of a wider rainbow of possibility.”
How has Hollywood changed over the decades? “Well, obviously the whole ethnic casting thing has changed, for the better. For me to have been cast as an Afghan in [Whiskey Tango] when there would have been an Afghan actor perfectly capable of playing that role now feels very inappropriate. But in other areas there hasn’t been as much progress as you might think.
“I hear from female friends that in the wake of MeToo there have been some great catchphrases and some cool badges, but at root very little has moved on. I heard of one actress recently turned down for a role who was told it was because she wasn’t f---able enough. So in that respect, not enough.”
One of Molina’s first jobs was as a spear carrier for the RSC, and he tells a very amusing story of the time Michael Pennington bet him a fiver to deliver his one solitary line in a production of Troilus and Cressida in the style of Tommy
Cooper. “[Director] John Barton gave me a right bollocking. It had never occurred to me it was unprofessional. Clearly I was never going to be a classicist.”
Molina rarely talks about his private life, or about his first wife, Gascoine, who was ill with Alzheimer’s for nearly 10 years and died in 2020. But when I ask him how he coped with her condition, he goes unusually quiet. “When she got sick, it was difficult for the whole family [he adopted Jill’s two sons and has a daughter from a previous relationship]. But you learn to be more forgiving of situations, of other people, of yourself. That was the big thing. I learned in the end not to give myself too hard a time.”
He now lives just outside Los Angeles with his second wife, the head of Disney Animation (and director of Frozen) Jennifer Lee, whom he married in 2021. Can he ever see himself leaving? “I love living there. I feel right at home there. But maybe that’s because I’m deeply superficial.”
He’s never lost his English accent, nor a salty, feet-firmly-onthe-ground way of looking at the world that feels much more English than American. “I was never one for going nutty when I got a good pay cheque. I’d never go out and get a car.” Nor does he differentiate between highbrow and lowbrow roles. “It’s all work. It’s a bit like being a plumber. The tools all come out of the same box.”
It’s an attitude that has arguably helped him avoid becoming sucked into the crazier end of La La Land. “People assume that to be always recognised is what every actor wants. But I take my own shirts to the dry-cleaners. No one bothers me. I have the level of fame that means I can get a decent table at a restaurant but that’s about it. And that suits me fine.”
‘Three Pines’ is on Amazon Prime from December 2
‘Since MeToo, little has changed. I recently heard of an actress being told she wasn’t f---able enough for a role’