Mark Rylance brings artistry to ‘Spies’
With this thriller, the secret is out on versatile actor
Mark Rylance has played princes, kings and even Queen Cleopatra during his long and storied theater career.
All that experience couldn’t keep the nerves at bay on his first day filming Bridge of Spies with director Steven Spielberg looking down the lens at him and Tom Hanks on the other side of the room. And when you ask Rylance about it, he doesn’t know why you wouldn’t have the jitters, too.
“These fellas know what they’re doing!” the affable Rylance says, laughing. “It’s like being asked to play as the doubles partner of Roger Federer. You’re on your toes. You’re thinking, ‘You’ve got to be awake here.’ ”
Mainstream film audiences will get a proper introduction to Rylance through his widely praised Bridge of Spies performance as Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who’s arrested on American soil at the height of the Cold War and defended by insurance lawyer James B. Donovan (Hanks).
But his résumé as a stage actor, director and playwright is itself a work of supreme art. Rylance, 55, spent a decade as the first artistic director of Shakepeare’s Globe Theatre in London. He has three Tony Awards and played all the Bard’s big guys: Macbeth, Romeo, Henry V, Hamlet and Richard II. The actor has been Shakespearean women, too, playing the female half of Antony and Cleopa
tra and having a Tony-winning turn as the countess Olivia in
Twelfth Night on Broadway. For those who missed all that — or his Emmy-nominated turn as Thomas Cromwell on PBS Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall — Spielberg believes moviegoers will see what makes Rylance special in his quiet and subtle Spies performance.
“He’s just so open,” the director says. “For a spy, there’s something emotionally uncensored about his performance. And yet when he says, ‘They took me somewhere hot and tried to get me to be a double agent and I wouldn’t do it,’ you believe he gave nothing up. And you also believe that he never would.”
Rylance acknowledges that the challenge came in capturing Abel’s secrecy and “his relaxed attitude in a situation where most of us would be in a rather high state of anxiety.” He heard that about the real-life Abel, who died at age 68 in 1971, from the artists he lived among before he was arrested.
What also struck Rylance was Abel’s vigilance about his painting. He wasn’t very good, but he wanted to learn to be better and befriended a much younger Brooklyn man who gave him lessons.
“He took interest in this craft and this artwork,” Rylance says. “It was more than just a cover that he did in a cold, calculating way. Like all painters ... he was a natural observer.”
Surveillance is key to spycraft but also for actors, Rylance says. He has even engaged in some of his own subterfuge, of the most innocent kind: Rylance has interviewed people, even friends, and secretly recorded them to listen to the rhythm and dialect of their speech for roles.
“Almost like a scientist trying to study something without your presence changing the nature of the thing you’re studying, I want to present people as they are, not with them putting on their best face to me,” Rylance says.
“I never shared the recordings with anyone, and it’s probably illegal that I do this — maybe I shouldn’t be telling you — but it’s my way of taking notes.”
Just like Abel, Rylance won’t spill any details about his role as a Big Friendly Giant in The BFG, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s book and his next collaboration with Spielberg. It hits theaters July 1.
“I remember when I played Hamlet, I swore I would never do interviews about Hamlet,” Rylance says. “I was so fed up hearing other people’s opinions on who Hamlet was — people who weren’t playing him or who had never played him. It’s like being told who you are by a policeman or by your dad or by a shrink and saying, ‘ You have no idea who I am.’ ”
That’s code for he can’t really talk about his giant yet. “BFG is still too close to me, and I love him too deeply.”