‘IT’S A BUZZ BEING BAD’
Owen Teale on villainous roles – and a change of tack with his new film Dream Horse
I’VE had one question in my head for actor Owen Teale over the past few years and this week I was lucky enough to (a) finally ask him and (b) that he did not slam the phone down.
“Owen, you play a lot of b******s, don’t you?!
The Swansea-born star is known for his roles in, among others, Line of Duty, Game of Thrones, Stella and now the big-screen telling of the Dream Alliance story, Dream Horse, and is either a chill bloke – unlike his drama alter-egos – or too nice to put the phone down.
Luckily for me it’s kind of both, and his reposte is to laugh down the line saying, ‘I know!”
He’s currently on a break from filming a new Amazon series in Scotland, The Rig, that sees him reunited with Line of Duty co-star Martin Compston.
He admits that their new characters ‘ruffle each other’s feathers’ – not too far from their on-screen relationship as DI Steve Arnott and Chief Constable Philip Osborne.
The latter role, alongside the Jon Snow-hating Ser Alliser Thorne in Game of Thrones, has given Teale some of television’s best baddie moments of the past decade.
And he loves it.
“I do get a buzz from it,” he says. “If you’re a bad character, or you’re a b**tard, you’ll find you have a really big effect on the plot, the story will twist around something you’ve done or said or might do.
“You’re not as marginalised and, although there’s very little of me [in Line of Duty] they refer to me. He’s such a powerful character and when, at the end, they say that’s the end of AC-12, they’re disbanding, that’s my character who’s decided to do that. You think, ‘wow he’s actually sacking them’.”
With power comes great responsibility – does he get grannies hitting him with handbags or dirty looks from the TV-loving public?
“It’s powerful, you feel like you’re in the centre of something and I’m very fortunate,” says Teale, who is based in London. “Yeah, I take a bit of flak for it, but everyone knows it’s acting.”
With such a crucial character still on the loose, Teale’s convinced that Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio must return the series to deal with dodgy Osborne.
“They say the whole story is finished, I’m not sure if it is, you know,” says Teale, who was brought up in North Cornelly, near Porthcawl. “There’s a hell of a lot of people in shops and in the street, ‘no, no he’s (Ian Buckells) not H. There’s no way he had that power over AC-12 over six series, it’s because he’s the fall guy. Your character is number one!’. And I think they’re probably right,” he added, Mercurio has yet to confirm or otherwise a seventh run for the show, but talked about Philip Osborne still being top dog in the show last week.
Teale challenges the writer to give his character his comeuppance.
He says: “I agree with them and I want to know if Jed Mercurio is going to do something about it. Sort out Osborne!”
Teale’s latest role could not be more different – he’s taken on the larger-than-life Brian ‘Daisy’ Vokes, a former coal van driver/road worker from Cefn Fforest, near Blackwood, who, with wife Jan and a syndicate of locals, breed and trains a racehorse in the Hollywood film Dream Horse.
With a set of false teeth, to make him look toothless, scruffy beard and thick Valleys accent, Teale admits he was unsure at first if he could pull off the role.
“I had a look at the Dark Horse documentary [about Dream Alliance’s story] and I thought ‘I can’t do that!’” said the 60-year-old, who is married to actress Sylvestra Le Touzel, star of The Crown, Intelligence and 1990s police corruption drama and Line of Duty precursor, Between the Lines.
He continues: “Then of course, you go, ‘I love acting, what a challenge’ and then you think, as we all did, we want to do right by him. We wanted it to be as powerful as possible, but only on the terms he would feel comfortable with, you know?”
Teale drew on his family’s history of working as gamekeepers on the Margam Estate to channel the Vokes’ love of animals.
“You have to get the humour, all the other things, but you can’t make it cheap, you can’t comment on them, you can’t stand outside the people. You have to be honest and say this is me – at this moment I am Brian,” he says.
“I was able to look at my uncles and my grandfather, who was a gamekeeper on the Margam Estate back in the day and they lived on a smallholding with the chickens and the gun. It wasn’t my life, but it’s in my DNA a little bit, I think, and you draw on that.
“And there’s that wicked look in his eye, Brian, he’s a hell of a boy. As much as I was able to take Brian, I was thinking of people in my life.”
He and co-star Toni Collette, star of Muriel’s Wedding and About a Boy, didn’t meet the real Brian and Jan immediately, but remembers the day they came to location at Chepstow Racecourse.
“I think it was the same for Toni as well. We didn’t want to meet Brian and Jan too soon because you’ve got to build up something you believe in yourself.
“I had false teeth in to make me look like I had no teeth, that was bizarre in itself, it was a huge challenge. I think the first couple of scenes I shot I don’t think they could understand a word I was saying.
“Once we got comfortable, about halfway through, at Chepstow racecourse we got told, ‘they’re here, they’re upstairs in the lounge’ and that was weird because it was like a mini-me, we’ve got the same clothes, the cap, glasses, beard. Once you stuck us close together they were rolling about on set. We were like twins.”
Teale’s transformation was so far removed from his recent roles, that some were left wondering when he was going to turn up in the film.
“The amount of people I’ve spoken to [in the Press] today... they knew I was in it and that they were going to be speaking to me, and knew me from Game of Thrones, Line of Duty, and they were saying, ‘where is he? Oh my God it’s him!’” says Teale.
But cinematic transformations and bent coppers are a world away from Owen’s self-confessed ‘tearaway’ teenage years.
He admits he ‘messed up’ his A-levels and ended up playing ‘Barry the Bear’ at Barry Island back in 1979. It was there he was introduced to the idea that acting could be the path for him.
“My family are from Port Talbot and my father is from Aberavon – they moved to Cornelly for tax reasons,” he jokes. “My father, Roy, used to say jokes like that. He used to say ‘I’ll see you round, like an orange!’ What the hell, surreal?
“Then he’d say ones you could relate to a bit more... ‘If I don’t see you through the week I’ll see you through the window’. I’d be like ‘ahh shurrup dad, it’s embarrassing mun!’
Teale’s father, Roy, was a local councillor and also the mayor of the ancient borough of Kenfig, while his mother, Louise, worked at the garden centre in Pyle.
“I messed up my A-levels,” he says. “I was a bit of a tearaway and I ended up on Barry Island dressed as a bear in 1979 – it was also known as ‘Barry the Bear.
“It was there where people said, ‘you’ve got to go to drama school’. I was like ‘what’s that?’. I didn’t know there was a specialised training place, I was so naive and the guy who pointed me in the right direction was Roger Burnell.”
Drama teacher Burnell has been the spurring energy behind many Welsh actors’ careers, from Rob Brydon and Ruth Jones to The Pact’s Aneurin Barnard, in his roles as drama teacher and through Bridgend Youth Theatre.
A Tony Award winner for his appearance in A Doll’s House in 1997, Teale trained at Guildford School of Acting and got his first break on A Play for Today, the Mimosa Boys episode, which saw Welsh Guards sent on the ill-fated HMS Sir Galahad mission. He’s also had credits in Belonging, Dangerfield, Ballykissangel, Spooks, Midsomer Murders, as well as Tolkien, King Arthur and Robin Hood on the cinema screen. Most recently he starred as Gerard Elais QC in The Pembrokeshire Murders.
Back at Dream Horse, Teale hopes that he’s done the true story justice.
“To realise what it meant, what she did, by having the sheer tenacity, and then for the community to come around, it was almost like it brought the community back,” he says. “They’ve been tough times what people have had to live through in that part of the world. You just wanted to do it as well as you possibly could.
“To not comment on it from the outside or condescend down on it, but to feel what it felt walk in their shoes, to live and breathe it and that’s what it should be,
“Sometimes films like that can sentimentalise and I wanted it to be truthful because if it’s got honesty in it then it’s a winner.”
■ Dream Horse is in UK cinemas from June 4.