Alfred Molina: One director looked at me and said, ‘Nah, too foreign’

When Alfred Molina graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama at the age of 22, his dean had a couple of words of advice. “Now Alfredo, you must be prepared not to work until you are well into your 40s. You are a character actor, not a leading man. Oh, and do drop the O from your first name. Otherwise you’ll play nothing but Spanish waiters.” Molina pauses for effect. “That really pissed me off. I thought: hang on, my dad’s a Spanish waiter!”

That dean has been proven wrong on the first count: Molina, now 69, has working steadily since his early 20s, although as a “chubby gangly kid” the villainous Doc Ock star of two Spider-Man movies always knew he was unlikely to ever be cast as a “beefcake”. Who knows, though, whether the second prophecy would have born fruit since Molina, the London born son of two immigrants (his mother was Italian) did indeed immediately drop the O. “Can you imagine doing that now?” he says. “Telling Benicio del Toro he’d be better off known as Benjamin?” 

Ironically its loss meant an ethnic casting free for all for most of Molina’s career: he used to joke that thanks to his southern European features he always “gave good foreign” (his parts include Diego Rivera in Frida (2002), Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway (2004) and an Afghan warlord in 2016’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot). 

Thanks to today’s more enlightened approach to ethnic casting, he now jokes he can’t get cast as a Spanish waiter for love or money. “These days I’m just not quite Spanish enough. But I’m at a stage at my career where it doesn't matter any more: I’m part of the furniture. People ask me, ‘Are you still alive?’ not ‘Are you busy?’”

Molina, who has lived in Los Angeles since the mid 1990s, is indeed still very busy. His latest role is Inspector Gamache, the sensitive, ruminative moral compass of Louise Penny’s best-selling Three Pines detective novels, who finds his faith in human nature repeatedly tested by the behaviour of an extraordinary number of evil-minded people living in his Quebec home town. Adapted by Amazon Prime, it’s a Morse-meets-Twin Peaks style addition to the cosier end of the crime spectrum with a faint hint of the uncanny, and a series he hopes will run and run; he’s executive producer and, a new experience for him, has been involved in script development.  

“I really wanted a part I could get my teeth it and develop. As an actor you get used to being a gun for hire, without having any say in what you do. People didn’t ask me for my opinion in a professional context until I was well into my late 30s. It’s nice for once not to be merely a cog in a bigger wheel.”

Gun for hire? Alfred Molina? But this is indeed how this most beloved of actors has always viewed a “crazy quilt of a career” that has included Hollywood hits (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Chocolat), West End hits (Red, the Donmar smash hit about Rothko); and a vast amount of British film and screen work, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Prick Up Your Ears and Letter to Brezhnev – a period he notes as being a particularly golden age in British filmmaking. 

His natural insouciance and lack of LA affectation (he really is the friendliest A-lister I’ve ever met) belie an unexpected insecurity. “I was reading Alan Rickman’s diaries the other day,” he tells me. “It’s fabulously gossipy but there is also an amazing vulnerability there. He is constantly asking himself: ‘Did I make the right decision?’ And I've always quietly worried about that too. Because there was never any career plan. From the beginning my main objective was to stay employed. I’ve always had my dad's voice in my ears: ‘Real men don’t get into fights. Real men pay their bills.’ It’s only recently that I’ve had the luxury of being able to turn things down.”

He left for America in the mid 1990s, with his first wife the late English actress Jill Gascoine, because he was struggling to get work in England. “Because of the way I looked, I was never going to be cast in a James Ivory film,” he says. “There was one job I went up for in the late 1980s and I’d barely got through the door before the director said, ‘Nah, too foreign’. I wasn’t offended at the time. But those moments stay with you. It hurts at some level. It fuels a certain resentment.”

By contrast, America suited him straight away. “My ethnicity was part of a wider rainbow of possibility. And I don’t know if this is me being defensive or being accurate but for a long time in England, if you said to someone, ‘Look, I’ve got an idea’, the response would be ‘Goodness, is that the time?’ Whereas in America someone would say ‘Great - let’s hear it’.” 

How has Hollywood changed over the decades? “Well, obviously the whole ethnic casting thing has changed, for the better. For me to have been cast as an Afghan in [Whiskey Tango] when there would have been an Afghan actor perfectly capable of playing that role now feels very inappropriate. 

“But in other areas there hasn't been as much progress as you might think. I hear from female friends that in the wake of MeToo there have been some great catchphrases and some cool badges but at root very little has moved on. I heard of one actress recently turned down for a role who was told it was because she wasn’t f---able enough. So in that respect, not enough.”

He was set on becoming an actor after seeing Spartacus at the age of nine. He was lucky: he was of an English generation for whom grants for drama school were available; otherwise he’d never have made it. “Whereas I hear from friends in England now that the only actors coming out of Rada these days are the sons of Earls.” 

One of his first jobs on leaving Guildhall was becoming a spear carrier for the RSC, and he tells a very amusing story of the time Michael Pennington bet him a fiver to deliver his one solitary line in a production of Troilus and Cressida in the style of Tommy Cooper. “John Barton [the director] gave me a right bollocking. It had never occurred to me it was unprofessional. Clearly I was never going to be a classicist.” 

In fact Molina, who tells a joke with the sort of infectious wheeze of laughter you might expect to hear in an English boozer, is full of anecdotes: he talks too of auditioning with fake cocaine on set for Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), in which he played a “coked up drug dealer on a shot gun rampage”, and for which the props manager handed him a try out mixture that included baby laxative. “Within seconds all these bubbles were pouring out of my nose.”

Molina rarely talks about his private life, or about his first wife, Jill, who was ill with Alzheimer's for nearly 10 years and who died in 2020. But when I ask him how he coped with her condition he goes unusually quiet. “When she got sick, it was difficult for the whole family [he adopted Jill's two sons and has a daughter from a previous relationship]. But you learn to be more forgiving of situations, of other people, of yourself. That was the big thing. I learned in the end not to give myself too hard a time.”

He now lives just outside Los Angeles with his second wife, the head of Disney Animation (and director of Frozen) Jennifer Lee, whom he married in 2021. Can he ever see himself leaving? “I love living there. I feel right at home there. But maybe that's because I’m deeply superficial.”

He’s never lost his English accent, nor a salty, feet-firmly-on-the-ground way of looking at the world that feels much more English than American. “I was never one for going nutty when I got a good pay cheque. I’d never go out and get a car.” Nor does he differentiate between high and lowbrow roles. It’s all work. It’s a bit like being a plumber. The tools all come out of the same box.” 

It’s arguably helped him avoid becoming sucked into the crazier end of La La Land. “People assume that to be always recognised is what every actor wants. But I take my own shirts to the dry cleaners. No one bothers me. I have the level of fame that means I can get a decent table at a restaurant but that's about it. And that suits me fine.”

Three Pines is on Amazon Prime from December 2