‘Pride’ digs into an odd alliance
DominicWest — “The Wire’s” Detective Jimmy McNulty, “The Hour’s” anchor Hector Madden and “300’s” Theron — was a teenager in 1984 and well aware of the British coal miners strike that began in March that year. He was growing up in the comfort of suburbia in a family that supported the strikers’ nemesis, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but his Yorkshire hometown, Sheffield, was the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers.
“We believed the papers — or my mum did, anyway. She was firmly pro-Thatcher,” West says at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the lineup included “Pride,” his dramedy about an unusual bond that formed between aWelsh mining community and London gay activists during the strike.
“Then I went to a really posh school down south,” West continues. “There’s a sort of north-south divide in England. I certainly felt it, anyway. I felt very fish out of water and dislocated there. There was this debate about the miners’ strike, and so I took the side of the miners against this guy Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is really posh now, an MP, the most conservative conservative of all time, much more Thatcherite than Thatcher.”
Three decades later, West takes up the cause again in “Pride,” as Jonathan Blake, a member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Written by Stephen Beresford and directed by MatthewWarchus, the movie won the Cannes Film Festival’s Queer Palm prize and tells the true story of an extraordinary alliance.
The idea of the group, the brainchild of a young friend of Blake’s, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), was that one besieged community should support another. At the time, AIDS was taking a devastating toll on Britain’s gay population, and homophobia was prevalent. LGSM was formed and started collecting donations to support strikers in the Dulais Valley community in Wales. In the tradition of British films such as “The Full Monty” and “Brassed Off,” the characters in “Pride” rebel against the bleak circumstances that surround them.
Uplifting film
“It’s an uplifting film about strikers who were defeated,” says Andrew Scott. Known to U.S. audiences as “Sherlock” villain Moriarty, Scott plays Blake’sWelsh partner, Gethin. “They were defeated. So it’s effective, it’s very uplifting at the end. It’s also the way life is. It’s not always rosy.”
West adds that the film “is really about two disparate groups finding common ground, and, in a way, it’s sort of a romance. Those two groups, we have to be rooting for them. That’s what the film does instantly so well. You’re on their side, straight away. I suppose the easiest way of rooting for them is for them to be under assault or to be underdogs in some way.”
The real Blake, an actor turned costume designer, was one of the first people diagnosed with HIV in England. Now one of the country’s longest HIV survivors, he is still going strong at 65 and in attendance in Toronto. Blake does have a long-term partner who got him involved with LGSM, but Gethin is a fictional character. While Blake is brash — one of the script’s joys forWest is an exuberant scene in which Jonathan turns heads at a modestWelsh community center with his wild disco moves — Gethin is subdued.
“In relation to the part, in recent years I’ve played a lot of flamboyant characters, and I was looking to sort of play a different mood,” Scott says. “It struck me as quite cinematic that there was this guy who doesn’t actually say very much, but carries a big well of sadness with him.
“What I always think is interesting about Gethin is that he’s not someone who’s struggling with sexuality at all. He’s someone who’s struggling with his nationality, the sort of insidious nature of prejudice. ... It doesn’t just stop. It bleeds into other areas of people’s lives. He hasn’t been home in 15 years. I’m from Dublin. The idea of not having been back there in 15 years is just completely — I don’t know howI’d cope with that. I wouldn’t, I don’t think.”
SaysWest, “My character in real life had discovered only a few months before that he was HIV-positive and was therefore expecting to die at any moment, so he starts in despair, really. ... As Gethin says in the film, he needs something to fight for, something to make his life worthwhile, not just to cave in to the prospect of death. That’s as strong a motivation as an actor’s ever going to get for a character. It’s literally life and death, which is fantastic to play.”
Historical moment
For Scott andWest, “Pride” represents an opportunity to retrieve a historical moment lost in time. Memories and news cycles are short. People have forgotten about the decimated coal industry, that gays and lesbians were once pariahs, and that HIV was almost always a death sentence. The actors are happy to convey a history lesson, wrapped in a movie that is winsome, funny and moving.
“I think some of the really young members of the cast were really, really deeply shocked,” Scott says. “I can remember that sort of weird prejudice. In the regional tabloids, you just expect it, they’re just suspicious of everyone, but it was really interesting to see people going, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe that that was allowed.’ And so recently. It is shocking.”
West also has vivid memories of that time.
“I remember the false promises and the nonsense ... about how it was not the end of the mining industry,” he says. “I thought it was good to revisit that and say, ‘That was all nonsense. This was the end of these people’s communities or their livelihoods.’
“It’s been a very long time since a script left me in a flood of tears at the end of it,” he adds. “I have read it five times and been in floods of tears every time.”