High-flying star who’d prefer to shun the limelight
Actor Richard Armitage gained a global following from The Hobbit. And more recently he wowed fans in the Netflix hit Fool Me Once. Yet, he tells JAMES RAMPTON, he has no interest in being famous.
WHEN I meet the 52-year-old actor at a smart central London hotel, he reveals he is not driven by the glamorous trappings of the celebrity world.
“Fame was never something that attracted me to being an actor,” he said. “I quite like to slop around looking a complete mess without having to do a selfie with somebody.”
Richard, who has come a long way since his first uncredited TV appearance as “Man in Pub” in Boon in 1992, admits that it can be hard if you are stopped by a fan for a photo.
He explains: “By nature I’m a bit anti-social. So for me, being on show is not that comfortable.”
But he acknowledges it could be a lot worse: “I’m quite lucky. It doesn’t happen that much to me. I’m not Leonardo Dicaprio.
“It’s a gilded cage for people like him. They can’t go anywhere without pre-arranged security. I just can’t imagine what that would be like.”
The former Vicar of Dibley star hit the big time as dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit film trilogy of 2012-14.
Spooks, Obsession, Hannibal and Strike Back would provide more starring roles, and appearing alongside Michelle Keegan in the Netflix adaptation of Harlan Coben thriller Fool Me Once has boosted his profile yet further.
On the back of this success, online fan sites such as “All Things Richard” have sprung up, with his admirers swooning over his chiselled looks and undoubted charisma.yet he is actually rather shy when the cameras are switched off.
Born in Leicester to John, an engineer, and Margaret, a secretary, Richard has played a raft of brooding, troubled characters. So it may surprise people to read that in real life he has a twinkle in his eye and an infectious sense of humour. The actor jokes, for instance, that he loves nothing better than going to the garden centre in his slippers. “Daniel Craig is so jealous of my life.
“He wants to be me. He says, ‘you can go to Ikea.you can get thetube’!”
Richard also sees the value in periodically disappearing from public view: “It’s good to let people forget about you and then come back with something new and fresh.”
As good as his word, after a spell out of the spotlight, Richard is now back with something new and fresh: a major drama entitled Red Eye.
This gripping six-part thriller has been written by Peter A Dowling, who also wrote the screenplay for the film Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster.
Starting on ITV next Sunday, Red Eye sees Richard play Dr Matthew Nolan who is arrested at Heathrow after arriving from China. It appears he had fled that country after killing a young woman.
Escorted by a no-nonsense Chinese-british detective, DC Hana Li (Jing Lusi), Dr Nolan is put straight on to the “red eye” overnight flight back to China in handcuffs. But before long passengers and crew start dropping like flies.
Richard, who appeared naked in dramas such as Obsession and Between the Sheets, recalls the moment he read a scene in Red Eye where Nolan has to be strip-searched. “I rolled my eyes and went, ‘oh, no, not again’. Then I started eating loads of pies because I wanted him to look like a doctor, not an actor.that’s my excuse, anyway.”
Richard reveals he was drawn to the ambiguity of the character of Dr Nolan: “Throughout the course of the story, we ebb and flow between
‘It’s good to let people forget about you’
being convinced of his innocence, and then really doubting who he is – whether he’s a spy or some kind of mule. It was really interesting to play around with that.”
He had to film a particularly challenging scene among real-life passengers in the departure lounge of Stansted, which doubles for Heathrow in the TV drama.
He says: “There were a lot of real passengers who ended up in the scene. It was like live theatre, but for people who hadn’t bought a ticket. It’s
quite delicate filming a scene with actors dressed as armed police, and I knew we only really had one chance to get it right.
“When I watched it back weeks later, my heart was still thumping because I just remembered that feeling beforehand, knowing that I couldn’t screw this up. It was nail-biting.”
While social media plays a key role part in the plot, it is something Richard has little time for.
He says: “It’s all to do with what gets people’s attention, and that is negativity. I’m grateful I
was born when I was, because I’ve lived half my life without even the internet. I don’t know how I would survive if I was a teenager trying to live my life on social media now.”
He has also developed a successful second career as a novelist. His first book, Geneva, a thriller about big pharma, was a bestseller he is adapting into a TV drama.
Later this year he will publish his second novel, The Cut: “It’s about childhood trauma. Many years ago, a murder took place among a group of school kids. The book follows what happens to those teenagers as they come back to the village as adults to discover what really occurred.
“The main character is a filmmaker who returns ostensibly to make a horror film. But actually, what he’s doing is re-examining what happened on that night in order to out the killer.”
Richard says writing “is my favourite thing now. I know writing seems solitary, but I always feel like I’m in a room full of my characters and they never leave you. They invade your dreams.
“Acting actually feels like my day job. I love acting, but writing is the thing I now do on a Sunday morning or on a long-haul flight.
“I open the computer and go, ‘right, where was I?’. Then I just get lost in the story.”
He routinely makes shortlists to be the next James Bond. “That speculation has been going on for decades,” he laughs.
But how would he react if Bond producer Barbara Broccoli called today with an offer to play the role? “Of course, you’d say yes.you’d say, ‘I’ll take that pay cheque’.
“But you’d have to go and live on the Moon because you just couldn’t live on planet Earth.
“You couldn’t go to a garden centre in your slippers anymore, could you?”