No ‘Exception’ to actor’s gift

CHRISTOPHER Plum

mer, so wonderful, so many awards. His new riveting WWII espionage thriller film “The Exception” opens June 2.

“I play German Monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II. Haughty, snobbish, very Germanic, flashy personality. Queen Victoria died in his arms. I know about him because when I was little, my mother talked of him. And I’ve read about him. There exists only one recording, but so faint you can’t really tell his speech.

“I was dying to play the Kaiser — maybe because I actually have a roster of playing dead people.

“I loved parading about in those mementoes. In this I didn’t steal a single prop. Just one painting of him that was part of the scenery. We filmed in Belgium, where I lived for a month, but I left before all that horror.

“Through his wife’s love, my imagination and the writer’s ability, we worked to humanize him. He loses his temper, handles guilt plaguing him for starting the Great War and mellows in later life. He knew he was not accepted. He knew he was the poster child for the Nazis. He knew he was the cause of all that was ghastly and happened afterward.

“I watched myself onscreen so that I could see I gave him enough fierceness, but I had to make sure I wasn’t boring and wasn’t overdoing it. The rest of that overdone kind of action I turned down. There’s a bit of King Lear in him. I’ve played King Lear so I used that in those parts where you see the Kaiser fly off the handle.”