Actor Jim Broadbent: ‘I like being a little provocative with the work’

Just once, several years ago, a stranger was rude to Jim Broadbent. Walking down a London street, the British actor became aware of a nearby car window rolling down. From within, a voice mockingly asked for an autograph. “There was a tone,” Broadbent says. “I thought: bit unnecessary.”

In a long career, this is as confrontational as passers-by have ever been. Not one person otherwise, he says, has been less than pleasant. Just as pleasant for Broadbent, you suspect, have been the many times he has simply gone unrecognised. Put the first down to his status as a much-loved character actor; the second to a practised gift for public anonymity, despite the fame accrued in everything from Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge to a pair of Paddingtons to Iris, the 2001 biopic of novelist Iris Murdoch. (Cast as her steadfast husband John Bayley, Broadbent won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.)

“Usually, I’m in motion,” he says. “That helps.” 

Broadbent, 73, is now stationary, a gently hesitant man folded into an armchair at London’s Soho Hotel. A smoky “Makin’ Whoopee” plays over the speakers. If it seems an odd fit, his new film, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, is closer to the Broadbent brand. Indeed, at the prompting of director Hettie Macdonald, he forgoes an accent in the film to use his own voice in the title role, a retiree who learns that a former colleague is dying and sets off on foot to visit them. The walk extends from Devon on the south-west coast of England to Berwick-upon-Tweed in the north-east: roughly 500 miles.

For Broadbent, the unadorned sound of his voice on screen took some getting used to. “Usually, it would have annoyed me to notice a familiar intonation and realise: ‘Oh. It’s me.’” He is keen to distance his own personality from that of the emotionally stifled Harold. “Though,” he admits, “I do like to walk.” And preferably alone. He once travelled to northern India to visit his stepson and two friends trekking through Himalayan glaciers. He found it uplifting. “But part of me was always thinking, ‘Actually, I’d really like to be doing this absolutely on my own.’”

Solitude is rarer still on film sets. “They’re very social places,” he notes, sounding ambivalent. He has worked on every kind there is, from pokily low-budget to Hollywood juggernaut, his presence sought by the biggest filmmakers. In Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese made him Tammany Hall scoundrel William “Boss” Tweed. For Luhrmann, he was svengali Harold Zidler, owner of the Moulin Rouge. “They’re quite bizarre, those huge productions. A whole world sprung up in a car park. I still mostly end up just talking to the runner.”

Directors see multitudes in Broadbent: timid wallflowers or madcap ringmasters but, either way, his performances are lovingly drawn and pinpoint-precise. As Harold Fry, there are even moments of tearful anguish. Actors sometimes speak of the psychological toll such scenes can carry. “I never get that involved,” he says.

But onscreen Sturm und Drang still troubles him. “When you’re acting those very emotional scenes, crying and raging, it’s hard to know if you’re getting it right. Because it’s not often something we actually see other people doing.” Friends going through periods of turmoil have, he says, sometimes provided source material.

So be aware that if you do see Broadbent in the street, he is likely to have seen you too. He has always been a people-watcher, he says. His low-key manner helps with that, but his own life is also grist to the mill. He was 22 when his father died suddenly. In the earliest days of his acting career, he drove back from a theatre in Birmingham to the family home in Lincolnshire. “I was in the car, weeping. And at the same time, part of me was observing my own reaction — thinking, ‘God, isn’t this interesting?’” He gives a baffled smile. “The actor’s curse. Weird.”

“Weird” is too crude a word for Broadbent. “Singular”, though, might do for a man who has for many years spent his free time carving roughly finished human figures from wood, sometimes referred to as The People. (In 2015, he exhibited them at London’s Royal Festival Hall.) He grew up in Lincolnshire as the son of Quaker parents, both amateur actors; until recently, he kept a house in the area in addition to the north-west London home he shares with his wife, painter Anastasia Lewis.

His career has been individual too. As a young actor, he turned down the lead role of Del Boy in landmark 1980s British sitcom Only Fools and Horses. (Instead, he took a small recurring part as a villainous police officer.) Fame would only find him later. He was in his fifties by the time of Moulin Rouge and Iris.

And his own humour can skew a little dark. Anyone hoping to understand Broadbent should watch the 1992 Mike Leigh-directed short film A Sense of History, which Broadbent wrote as well as starred in. He plays his own creation, the 23rd Earl of Leete, recounting his life between “ciggies”. What follows is a deadpan masterclass of coal-black comedy. He beams when I mention the film. It all came from the voice, he says. The earl simply popped into his head while, yes, walking alone. “I thought, ‘Ah, now he’s good.’ So I kept him talking.”

The aristocratic theme came full circle last year with The Duke, the story of Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle bus driver tried in 1965 for stealing Goya’s “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington”. Broadbent has played plenty of real-life characters, among them Boss Tweed, comic opera librettist WS Gilbert in Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and Denis Thatcher, opposite Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. But he felt a particular kinship with the rebellious Bunton, whose unlikely heist came while campaigning for the poor to receive free BBC television licences.

Now Harold Fry makes another fine English eccentric. Adapted from Rachel Joyce’s 2012 novel, the film finds an innocent becoming a folk hero in a fundamentally sweet-natured country: a view some might take as rose-tinted after years of acrid division. But Broadbent is still optimistic about human nature and the English. “I do think there’s more kindness and less xenophobia in England than might be suggested from reading sections of the press.”

In 2002, after his Oscar, it emerged he had also been offered an OBE — and that he’d rejected it. “There just didn’t seem any point accepting, and a dozen reasons not to. My line was that my father would have appreciated me turning it down, and he’d have loved it even more that it got out.” At the time, the decision drew limited attention. Now, it comes up in every interview you read with him. “Curious, isn’t it? I might have been ahead of my time.”

Actors, he says, should be anti-establishment. “And I like being a little provocative with the work,” he says. Although, of course, the catch is that having not created a role for himself since A Sense of History, he depends on how others — writers and directors — see him. “Oh, but I enjoy that. Other people come up with roles for me I’d never have the imagination to dream up myself. Being tossed around by fate — that’s the excitement.”

‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ is in UK cinemas from April 28