The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I learnt to shut my cake hole’
Grief, anxiety, imposter syndrome, divorce – Rufus Sewell on the ‘rocky road’ to happiness, and his most horrifying screen role yet
At the stroke of midnight on his 53rd birthday, Rufus Sewell swam out to sea and “felt 25 years of wrinkles slip away” from his skin. A nightly soak in saltwater had proved the best method for removing the layers of ageing prosthetics needed for his latest role – in Old, the new mystery thriller from The Sixth Sense director M Night Shyamalan.
“There is something very interesting about having 20 years added to you over the course of five or six hours each morning,” Sewell tells me, via video link from his home in Los Angeles. “By the end of the day I was at ease with ‘old me’. I’d begun to accept it. Then I’d be so grateful when my lovely, cherubic 53-year-old face was restored to me in the waves.”
Old tells the story of a small group of tourists on a tropical beach who discover that something about this apparent idyll is causing them to age so rapidly that it threatens to reduce the rest of their lives to a single day. Sewell plays an arrogant surgeon, married to an Instagramaddicted glamour-puss (played by Australian model Abbey Lee Kershaw), who struggles to cope as their six-year-old daughter matures at terrifying speed.
The film is based on Sandcastle, a 2011 graphic novel written by French Jewish author Pierre Oscar Levy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters. In the book’s introduction, Levy says he felt compelled to write about how families respond under pressure after learning about his own ancestors’ experiences during the Second World War. While fleeing France to join the French Liberation Army in 1943, his father was imprisoned in Spain instead of being handed over to the Nazis and so “curiously concluded that Franco had saved his life”.
The rest of the family – arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 – were not so lucky. “My grandparents and one of my aunts were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz,” writes Levy. “As one of the sisters who survived the camps later recounted, every person in that train car spent the duration of the journey arguing with each other. I often feel we do not pay enough attention to what is truly important in our lives.”
It’s a sentiment that resonates with Sewell, who rolls his crocodile eyes behind a pair of professorial specs when he thinks about the amount of time he’s “wasted” fretting over his career choices. “I took six months off just before the pandemic,” he says, “I thought I had the luxury of time. Then I didn’t work for a year before shooting Old.
On the one hand, he says, “as an actor, the idea of what jobs might be out there can be a distraction and having that evaporate was quite freeing, kind of blissful for a while, living without the tyranny of the future”. On the other, “during lockdown I shaved my head four times, measuring the days by the growth of my hair, using my scalp as a clock. I became so het up that it did occur to me that if those were my last months on earth then I’d have blown it.”
Then again, there has always been a somewhat syncopated rhythm to Sewell’s career, which has yet to resolve the question of whether he’s a character actor with leading-man looks, or a leading man for whom the Hollywood chips never fell quite right. Back in the mid-1990s, he made a simultaneous splash on stage, TV and the big screen: impressing critics in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the National Theatre (1994); smouldering through BBC period dramas Middlemarch (1994) and Cold Comfort Farm (1995); and taking supporting roles in films such as Carrington (1995) and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) before landing his first Hollywood lead in 1998 in the sci-fi thriller Dark City.
He then went through a phase of playing posh English baddies, curling his lip at heroic Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale (2001), locking swords with Antonio Banderas in The Legend of Zorro (2005) and sleazing through his scenes as the caddish Daily Telegraph journalist who breaks Kate Winslet’s heart in 2006 romcom The Holiday. That same year, he returned to Stoppard on stage, starring in the playwright’s Rock ’n’ Roll in both the West End (where he won the Olivier Award) and Broadway.
Then, in 2011, Sewell finally got a screen role to sink his teeth into, as the stylish-but-quirky Italian detective star of BBC drama Zen. But although the series pulled in a very respectable 5.7million viewers per episode, it was axed after just one series, when BBC One controller Danny Cohen argued that with the channel also airing Sherlock, Luther, Wallander and Inspector George Gently, it “risked having too many male detectives and arguably too much crime”. Despite the rave reviews, Sewell says he didn’t work again for seven months.
In recent years, however, his star has been in the ascendant. He was restored to period drama heartthrob status as Lord Melbourne in
ITV’s Victoria (2016) and was a compellingly nuanced Nazi in all four series of Amazon’s alternate history drama The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019). In fact, Sewell tells me, he feels he “only really landed in myself in my 40s… I gave myself a head start by being less sorted when I was younger”.
Born in London in 1967, Sewell sees his childhood as the crucible of “the imposter syndrome that has become my calling card”. His father, William, was an Australian animator (who worked on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine); his mother, Jo, a classically trained pianist. They split up when Sewell was five.
For the next five years he and his older brother divided their time between their mother’s house in suburban Twickenham and their father’s studio in “seedy but not dangerous” Soho, feeling slightly out of place in both. In Soho, Sewell would stay up late and watch Hammer Horror movies, starring Charles Laughton and Anthony Hopkins, noting the “spatial difference” between what happened on the surface of an actor’s face and what seemed to be going on behind his eyes.
Then, when Sewell was just 10, his father died – and the grief sent him off the rails, leaving him “undisciplined” and truanting from school. Today he plays this down: “School is an awkward thing for so many kids,” he says. “You’re questioning your family. You’re asking if you’re normal…”
It didn’t help that he was, as he puts it, a “round, pop-eyed child” with a David Bowie obsession. He dyed his hair orange and his older brother nicknamed him the Fat White Duke. In a recent episode of the industry podcast An Actor Despairs, he told the host, Ryan Perez that, at school: “I wasn’t a guy girls were into and I had made my peace with that. That changed in my teens and people changed towards me. I found myself accepted by the group I had decided I despised.” The experience left him with a complicated attitude to his own appearance: a sense he was wearing a mask that might slip at any moment.”
Holidays brought a much needed respite from the social pressure – “always in Wales”, where his parents had bought a house without electricity. He recalls beetling down A roads “in the back of a Morris Minor with a duvet and the cats. Half-way through the 10-hour journey we’d have to play ‘Hunt the Turd’. We’d suck boiled sweets and the sacrifice you had to make for those was the roof of your mouth. You’d arrive with a bleeding palate, stinking of cat p---. We’d have two weeks suffering withdrawal symptoms from our favourite TV shows: The Six Million Dollar Man and Top of the Pops. Then we’d go kind of wild. As did the cats.”
Even now, fresh from filming on a tropical paradise, he says that “Welsh beaches, the Welsh countryside is still my favourite place to go. I return to the same, secret places. In LA, I miss Wales more than anywhere else.”
Sewell’s passion for theatre was nurtured away from school – where drama felt to him like “a popularity contest” – when a girlfriend took him along to Youth Action Theatre. He went on to train at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where visiting director Judi Dench took a shine to him and sent her agent to meet him. Success followed quickly. He was named Most Promising Newcomer by the Critics’ Circle for his London stage debut Making It Better a year after scoring his first film role, as a Glaswegian drug addict, opposite Patsy Kensit in Twenty-One (1991). But, it was around this time that Sewell’s anxiety started to get the better of him.
“Being naturally far more loquacious than some of my acting might make people think,” he says, “I would babble myself out of jobs by filling silence in auditions. I had to learn to shut my cake hole.”
In those early years, he also partied hard, smoking himself into a husky voice and dating fellow actors Helen McCrory, Kate Winslet and Helena Bonham Carter. His personal life, he concedes, has always been something of a “rocky road”. He married Australian fashion journalist Yasmin Abdallah in 1999, but the couple divorced less than a year later. From 2004 to 2006 he was married to producer and scriptwriter Amy Gardner (with whom he has a son, Billy) and later had a daughter, Lola, now eight, with Ami Komai, the founder of the girls’ magazine Bright Lite. Lola splits her time between her parents’ homes so, Sewell tells me, during lockdown he was “either looking forward to having a day off or looking forward to having her back”.
Giving up alcohol after moving to Los Angeles in the mid-2000s made him realise just how much anxiety he’d been suppressing. “I had passed off so much of it as different things,” he says, “because the tendency to have a picture of your
self which isn’t accurate can last a very long time.” Now he feels that anxiety is “a friend and a foe. All the things that complicate what I do also give me something… the way I tackle a part is based around the very reactive way my mind is.”
While filming The Father – alongside his hero, Anthony Hopkins, who won the Oscar for his performance – Sewell also realised just how soothed he is by routine, which is not always easy to come by in his line of work. “There’s something of the office worker in me that isn’t nearly as rock ’n’ roll as I wanted to be. We filmed The Father in the same studio. Everybody had
breakfast and lunch together at the same table: telling stories, telling jokes, shooting the scenes.”
From there it was quite a leap to filming Old in the Dominican Republic during the pandemic. The crew and cast – which also includes Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps and Eliza Scanlen – were all in a bubble together, and would rehearse in Shyamalan’s hotel suite.
“It was paradise, to a certain extent,” says Sewell, who was “careful not to post too much about it online” out of respect for those experiencing harder lockdowns. “But working on a beach is very strange. I’ve done it three times
over my career. It’s the “there” people talk about when they say: “I’ll be happy when I’m ‘there’. But, of course, you bring whatever stuff you’ve got going on with you…”
Sewell’s character in Old similarly struggles to live in the
moment. He scrutinises his gorgeous wife with icy contempt as she ages before him. Sewell himself says he “quite likes getting older. I’m not anxious about it in terms of appearance and fitness. I just want to look good for my age.” He seems relieved that the “very tedious” pressure to maintain matinée idol status is fading with time – he’s sick of having been asked about “that bulls---” in interviews for years.
“It’s happening less and less, though,” he grins, a twinkle in those crocodile eyes. “And when it stops completely, I’ll resent it.”
‘I became so het up during lockdown. If those were my final days, I’d have blown it’
Old is in cinemas now