Jason Clarke, the star of Everest, is a mountain of a man: six foot two with square shoulders and a vast sheer cliff of a forehead. When Christian Bale dropped out of this adventure story, based on real events, it was Clarke who stepped into his climbing boots to play Rob Hall, leader of a commercial expedition to the summit in May 1996 that went horribly wrong. Clarke, blokey and dependable, has the look of someone you would follow confidently into a fight, whereas Bale comes across as the sort of man who would start one. What makes the 46-year-old Australian more intriguing than a standard tough nut is the wounded quality in his eyes. Easygoing in nature, he always seems to have something on his mind. Even smiling, he looks serious.
Today he has the whiff of the dandy about him. It’s the vanilla-yellow hair, which jars with his black stubble and dark eyebrows. The dye job is for HHHH, the film of Laurent Binet’s postmodern novel, in which he will play Reinhard Heydrich, one of the engineers of the Final Solution, and the man who may very well have succeeded Hitler had he not been assassinated in 1942. Heydrich won’t be Clarke’s first Nazi. For Texas Killing Fields, he played a pimp, plastered in Aryan Brotherhood tattoos. “They were all over my neck,” he says between swigs of water in his hotel room. “I had a run-in with a dude in a bar who was offended by them. I’d honestly forgotten I was wearing them.” He gives a mortified grimace.
No such problems while filming Everest, where the worst Clarke could have done would have been to neglect to remove his crampons. Rob Hall has no apparent dark side or demons. Nice guys don’t necessarily make for interesting movie characters, though, so it’s a testament to the actor’s skill that he conveys the yearning of a man devoted not only to climbing, but to helping others realise their own high-altitude dreams. Parts of the film were shot in gruelling conditions in Nepal. Why not simply fake it with CGI? “Well, then I’d be deprived of one of the joys of what I do,” he says. “I’m an actor doing a job but I’m also living a life. It’s four or five months of prep and I see that as a continuation of university. I get to live these different lives, learn all these skills.” To play Heydrich, he tells me, he’s currently learning to fence and play the violin, though presumably not at the same time.
Clarke has a nice phrase for accumulating research: he calls it stocking the cupboard. “You’ve got to fill it up. All the books you’ve read, the climbing you’ve done, things like entering the chamber where they remove all the oxygen so you know what it’s like to be exhausted just tying your shoelaces. Once you’ve put as much as you can in the cupboard, you hope that, when Balt [the director Baltasar Kormákur] calls ‘Action!’, some sense of it will be transmitted. Hopefully you don’t see Jason the actor. I just wanted to be Rob, and for the audience to feel they’re up there with us.”
Though the 1996 Everest disaster was reported worldwide, even making the cover of Time magazine, there will be many viewers going into the film without any foreknowledge of what happened, or which of the climbers made it back alive.
Anyone wishing to prolong that ignorance should skip the next three paragraphs, since there is one troublesome scene in the movie that demands commentary from Clarke himself. It occurs halfway through, when one of Rob’s clients, a postal worker named Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), insists on pushing ahead to the summit even though setbacks have already placed him and Rob almost two hours behind their safe turnaround deadline. Doug had failed to reach Everest the previous year under Rob’s tutelage and is determined not to have to make a third attempt. Rob tells him it’s too dangerous. The enigmatic look that passes between them is the basis for most of what happens in the rest of the movie.
It’s an undeniably charged moment. But it can only be fabulation. Neither of the men concerned is around now to tell the film-makers what happened up there, and what persuaded an otherwise pragmatic expert to betray his better judgment. “It does all rest on that,” Clarke concedes. “We’re taking a stab at a moment that actually happened, except nobody can confirm what really went on. I did what I could. I listened to the tape of Rob’s distress call. I disappeared down that rabbit hole of working out exactly where everyone would have been at each specific moment. You put all those things in there because you know Doug’s kids are alive and that Rob has a daughter. Between me and John and Balt there has to be some kind of consensus about what we think this moment is. Then you hope it comes out right with all the work and thoughts and dreaming you’ve been doing. I believe Rob thought he could get him to the top and back again.”
He puts his face in his hands, apparently exhausted by turning that decision over and over in his mind. “I’ve watched it in the cinema and thought: ‘That’s what caused me so many sleepless nights?’ It’s funny how much it matters and also at the same time how little.” Even if you feel the story told in Everest would have been better left to documentary makers, rather than stitched together using comforting speculation, it’s instructive to see an actor as conscientious as Clarke trying to make sense of it so long after shooting ended.
Most of his performances display this grounded emotional intelligence. One of the reasons he considered quitting acting around 15 years ago was that he wasn’t being nourished by the bits and bobs of TV work he was getting back home (Blue Heelers, Home and Away – the usual). He was just about ready to jack it in and go back to university when Phillip Noyce cast him as a policeman in the powerful 2002 drama Rabbit-Proof Fence. Suddenly, he found the inspiration he’d been looking for. Since then, he has worked with Michael Mann (Public Enemies), John Hillcoat (Lawless) and Oliver Stone (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps).
Though he failed an audition for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line in the late 1990s, he was cast in the director’s recent Knight of Cups. “I haven’t seen it so I don’t even know if I’m in it,” he says. It is with some embarrassment that I confess I have seen it, but that I can’t recall whether or not he made the final cut. “Nah, mate, don’t be embarrassed. That’s what Terry’s stuff’s like. You do a week on it, he asks you to come in, he gives you 20 pages of dialogue and then it doesn’t matter anyway. He’s a freewheeler.”
Even the blockbusters that Clarke has made have been of a distinctly contemplative stripe. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Matt Reeves, was as thoughtful as an action movie could get without coming to a standstill. “I think you’ll see a lot of big blockbusters taking a leaf out of Matt’s book,” Clarke says proudly. “The dude took apes – apes on horseback! – and we cared.”
For Terminator: Genisys, where Clarke again followed in Christian Bale’s footsteps, this time as John Connor, he steeped himself in scientific research, even though none of it would ever be visible on screen. “Artificial intelligence. The singularity. That’s the road I was going down.’” Heavy. No wonder that among the garish phantasmagoria of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, it was the down-to-earth Clarke who got cast as poor, disconsolate George Wilson. No highballs for Georgie Boy.
As a CIA agent in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, Clarke was the focus of the most contentious sequence: the torture of a suspect whose confession proves instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden. “The two days we spent shooting the interrogation stuff, yeah, they were upsetting. But it would have been upsetting not to have done it – to say we’re gonna do it in a clean way, or not quite show it properly. It’s the same with Heydrich. I believe it’s worth observing terrible things people have done as clearly and rationally as we can to show that our monsters are not caricatures. The things they did are not that far from the surface.”
Everest is in UK cinemas from Friday.
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