Whether on stage or screen, the actor’s versatility has served him well in a successful and varied career. He tells Emily Jupp about not taking the path of easiest resistance into acting, why he likes to collaborate with a team to create a character from the ground up, and his latest role playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird – a story he says is as relevant today as it was in 1960
If you want to know anything about Richard Coyle, don’t read his Wikipedia page. “It’s just wrong,” he says, as we begin to speak about his role as Atticus Finch, which he took over from Rafe Spall in the West End production of To Kill a Mockingbird this month. “There’s nothing I’ve been able to do about it. I didn’t start acting because I was working on a ferry. I’ve never worked on a ferry. I’ve no idea where that came from, I have no clue. The only reason I mind,” he continues, “is it upsets my mum. They’ve taken a few things off that really upset her, about my dad, but it still niggles at her that it’s not correct.”
Coyle, 48, comes from a large working-class family in Sheffield, though his voice sounds closer to Tom Jones than Jarvis Cocker, leading to the common misconception that he is Welsh. His mum worked as a midwife and then as a social worker – “she worked very hard, my mum” – and his dad was a builder (Wikipedia has now got this fact correct).
It was a difficult decision to make the leap to study acting, coming from a family that just didn’t understand what the life of an actor might be like, other than expensive.
“Knowing myself at that age and how difficult I found being a teenager and how difficult I found my life, I could easily have taken an easier path,” he reflects.
Coyle shared bedrooms with his four brothers until the age of 16, which made them “like best friends – we still gather regularly and all those traits from childhood come back, it’s hilarious”, he says affectionately. But it wasn’t always easy – and he didn’t always get on at school, seeking escape in sci-fi, space and fantasy books.
Escaping through books
“Books were really important to me as a teenager and they still are. I devoured them, they were my refuge. I was escaping from things in my life I found difficult and I wanted to escape to the places in the books I read. I liked to get into strange and surreal landscapes. Space was a complete disconnect for me and I wanted that complete break sometimes – and sometimes I wanted places that were painful.”
At 15, he read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time: “It was both joyous and painful. It shocked me. It’s bucolic the way you go with Scout on a journey. Then suddenly the trial happens in the second half – and it really shocked me.” “Harper Lee had this lovely line about how she was expected to follow her father into the law and she did, at first, and she said: ‘I pursued the line of easiest resistance.’ That wasn’t the case for me: I chose a difficult line, from my background, we didn’t have any money and it wasn’t straightforward, it wasn’t laid out. So I am grateful now to myself at 19, 20 that I had the steel inside me. That’s something I’m starting to realise more and more, that I’m really glad.”
It’s brave, I say. “I guess it is and I think we forget, it’s kind of a national tic that we forget to recognise the things about ourselves that should be celebrated,” Coyle responds. “We’re nothing to do with the arts, my family. So it was a bit odd to go: ‘I want to be an actor.’ They were like: ‘You what?’ It wasn’t considered a proper job – and I’ve spent many years tackling that prejudice in my own head.”
After training at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, with his mum’s blessing, Coyle’s acting career took off in 2000 when he landed the role of Jeff in Coupling, written by Steven Moffat, about a group of young friends and lovers, until Coyle left the show three years on. He controversially refused to return for a final episode.
“I was fresh out of drama school and it was a character I loved and the decision to leave was a difficult one.” But the point of being an actor is to keep acting and keep learning, and he didn’t want to be typecast: “I didn’t want to be playing the same role for years. I feel now that I could have left better and done it in a different way. I should have done a goodbye episode at least, but, for whatever reason, at the time, I couldn’t do it.”
If they asked him now to join a reunion episode, would he do it? “If they could get everyone together and make Jeff ageing work, then I wouldn’t say no. But the question is, how do you keep the character of Jeff functioning into his 30s and 40s?”
‘There are problems in the narrative of the book now but, shockingly, 60 years after it was published, it’s still relevant’
But almost two decades on, the decision to leave the show has played out well. Over the years, he’s taken on intriguing, charismatic and misunderstood characters on stage: Hal in the Donmar Warehouse production of Proof, alongside Gwyneth Paltrow, and John in Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears at the same venue. More recently, in 2017, Coyle played Larry Lamb, editor of the Sun and a soclialist from a mining town, in James Graham’s Ink at the Almeida and in the West End, which he workshopped with Graham from its inception, collaborating on developing the character.
“I loved Ink. The group ethic we had was really thrilling and I felt honoured to be able to have a light shone on Larry for a little time. The world of Fleet Street is interesting and I felt attached to him and still do. We like to reduce people to a footnote in history – and it’s not as simple as ‘the guy who gave us Page Three’.”
Whether it’s TV, film or stage, Coyle gravitates towards environments where he gets to collaborate with a team and create a character from the ground up.
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Related to this article
“With screen work, the joy is it’s a common endeavour – they are great at it in the US and you all have different roles, but you are working on something extraordinary and that’s very rewarding. I thrive in those roles where I am responsible for something – as with Larry Lamb – and I am required to lead by example, which is something I take incredibly seriously. That appeals to who I am; I like taking responsibility for others.”
Now, Coyle takes on the role of Atticus Finch, in an adaptation by Aaron Sorkin that updates and modernises Lee’s text. The narrative of the book shows the bucolic life of Scout and her father as seen through the eyes of this tomboy child; an infallible force for good, incorruptible and a pioneer of social justice. He can do no wrong.
“There are problems in the narrative of the book now, but shockingly, 60 years after it was published, it’s still relevant. That’s why it’s important that it’s alive on stage, so I’m trying to absorb what I need.”
Is he trying to say the book isn’t very woke? “I’m not trying to say it’s not woke or it is woke. What I’m saying is the problem that Mockingbird has always had, and it’s the same with Go Set a Watchman [Lee’s other novel], is that one of the issues it’s important to try to negotiate is its context.”
Coyle mostly conducted research into the role by reading around the context of America’s Deep South at the time, when cotton and tobacco plantations were dependent on slavery and racism, perpetuated by segregation until the 1960s.
‘[Reading to Kill a Mockingbird for the first time] was both joyous and painful – it shocked me’
“I’m trying to shock myself,” he says, as a way to understand how a white lawyer in 1930s Alabama might come to defend a wrongly accused black man charged with raping a white woman.
“It’s incredibly difficult for a British audience to appreciate how peculiar these circumstances were in Alabama in the South in the 1930s and the decades since the civil war and reconstruction and their peculiar brew of racial tensions. We just have nothing to compare it to. So the problems are for me to try to understand it and somehow bring it into what I’m doing.
“I’m from the north of England, with Irish parents and,” he adds, cautiously, “I guess I’m hardwired to understand something of social and economic divisions and I’m leaning on that as much as I can… but I don’t have all the answers, I’m still figuring it out.”
The big change in Sorkin’s stage adaptation is that it begins with the action of the trial and courtroom drama, whereas in Lee’s novel the trial begins only halfway through. It is no longer Scout’s story, it’s Atticus’, and the first rule of drama is the protagonist needs to change. This led to a dramatic reimagining of who Atticus might be.
Sorkin’s adaptation was the subject of a lawsuit from Lee’s Estate in March 2018, due to the Atticus character being, in the view of the Estate, altered. Sorkin’s version was a more modern interpretation that fell below the heroic perfection of the original novel. It appeared to draw from the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, which indicted Atticus as a racist – though Sorkin claims never to have read it.
“One of the most gnarly things in Go Set a Watchman is the contextualisation of Atticus Finch as seen through the mature Scout’s eyes, who has been living in New York and then returns home. It’s looking back towards the South from the North and I’m trying to get my head into this idea.”
Alluding to Donald Trump’s comments on a white supremacist rally that took place in Virginia in 2017, Sorkin writes in the Vulture section of New York magazine that Atticus’ flaw is that “he believes in the fundamental goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists. He believes… that there are fine people on both sides.”
In order to settle the dispute, the show’s original producer Scott Rudin countersued and offered to stage his play in front of the judge to prove his case.
In Vulture, Sorkin wrote that he eventually relented and said: “Atticus won’t have a rifle in his closet, and he won’t drink a glass of whiskey after the trial.”
Q&A
What was your first non-theatre job?
Builder’s labourer.
What was your first professional theatre job?
A View from the Bridge – playing Rodolpho – directed by Linda Marlowe. I was and have been so influenced by her, although, of course, I didn’t realise it at the time.
What is your next job?
No clue.
What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Don’t be in a hurry to ‘make it’.
Who or what is your biggest influence?
Ever changing.
What is your advice for auditions?
Prep, prep, prep.
If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been?
A gardener or an architect, most probably.
Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
Arrive early, take your time, breathe and relax. Relaxation is key.
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Broadway hit
The dispute was settled, and the show remained unharmed and went on to become a commercial and critical hit on Broadway before touring the states and moving to the Gielgud in London, first with Spall in the role of Atticus.
Now, Coyle has the challenge of making a modern Atticus within the confines of the text as it stands – with some moral inconsistencies, but still a champion for justice, without being problematic.
When Coyle first read the novel as a child, it was by choice – it wasn’t on his school syllabus. “I’ve read it over the years, I sometimes revisit books and I think you understand it in a different way as an adult. You can’t really grasp the complexities of the issues when you’re 15. I think I’ve grasped the more troubling aspects of the book as I’ve got older.”
What does he make of the Gregory Peck version? “I’ve not seen it and I don’t think I will, I don’t think it’s relevant. It’s very much of its time and in 2022 the Gregory Peck Atticus doesn’t work. This sort of white saviour – there are too many problems with it.”
He’s particularly excited to be working with West Wing writer Sorkin, after failing a screen test to work with him in LA about 15 years ago.
“For one of his shows in America, they wanted me to screen-test for the central character and I spent a wonderful evening with Aaron and the director workshopping scenes. It was some of the best work I’ve done on a camera script and probably the most in-depth and probing work, to try to get to the nub of this character.”
The next morning was the screen test and he was faced with 60 executives, all scrutinising his performance for an hour. “And, of course, I couldn’t do it. I was terrified! I looked at Aaron’s face at the end of the test and he looked at my face and we both were like: ‘That didn’t go very well.’ So it’s really nice to reconnect and collaborate on something that doesn’t depend on a studio audition in front of 60 executives.”
‘Acting wasn’t considered a proper job – and I’ve spent many years tackling that prejudice in my own head’
Is he happy that self-taping came to the fore during lockdown – and seems to be sticking around?
“That [old] model perpetuated a system where once you’re in, you’re in and you have to have a lot of bravado. It’s a different ball game now and much fairer.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his childhood interests, one of the genres that Coyle has specialised on screen is fantasy – he starred as Moist von Lipwig in Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal and Father Faustus Blackwood in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina – and he recently took on the role of Albus Dumbledore’s brother, Aberforth Dumbledore, in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Being part of the Harry Potter universe garnered him a whole new fanbase. Earlier this year, he travelled to his first ever Comic Con convention in Prague to meet the fans.
“It’s really lovely to meet someone who says thank you and feel like you have affected their life. That’s incredible. When people are queuing up to tell you how much they love the show, it makes you realise – this stuff I’ve been doing really does mean something to people. How brilliant! Normally you go home and you don’t really think about it, but this was a lovely surprise.”
His other project at the moment is TV show Six Four, a four-parter coming to ITV based on a Japanese crime novel by Hideo Yokoyama, in which he plays an up-and-coming politician calling for Scottish independence, and which he started filming in between rehearsals for Mockingbird.
Will he return to the stage again after this run of To Kill a Mockingbird wraps up?
“I don’t have anything else lined up, but I’ve always got my eyes and ears open for theatre work. I love my theatre, it’s what it’s all about.”
CV Richard Coyle
Born: Sheffield
Training: Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
Landmark productions:
Theatre:
• Polar Bears, Donmar Warehouse (2010)
• Ink, Almeida (2017)
TV:
• Coupling, BBC (2000)
• Lorna Doone, BBC (2000)
• Going Postal, Sky One (2010)
Film:
• Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Warner Bros (2022)
Agent: The Artists Partnership
To Kill a Mockingbird runs at the Gielgud Theatre, London, until December 17. More details at: gielgudtheatre.co.uk
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