Jonathan Pryce has played Shakespearean heroes (Hamlet, Shylock, Macbeth), starred in musicals, is the winner of Tony awards (Comedians and Miss Saigon) and now, at 71, has been cast three times as a self-absorbed novelist. He played a loathsome author-mentor in the film Listen Up Philip, is currently rehearsing as another novelist in Florian Zeller’s new play The Height of the Storm, and plays curmudgeonly narcissist Joseph Castleman, winner of a Nobel prize for literature, in Björn Runge’s new film The Wife, opposite Glenn Close.
What are the challenges of performing an intensely self-absorbed, often childish writer like Joseph Castleman? And how often do you feel like a child yourself?
He is very well drawn, although I’ve not read Meg Wolitzer’s novel because reading [the original work] alongside a screenplay can confuse you and make you want things that are not there. Castleman’s self-absorption is outward, he is the public face in the relationship with his wife. How often do I feel like a child? I’ve thought about this but never talked about it. I’m still the person I was born as…. As a child, play, drawing and painting were important to me – they still are. When I look back at how I reacted in my 20s and 30s, I realise I don’t lose my temper as often now. I can tell stories to other actors about the level of aggression on stage in the 70s between actors – it was unbelievable.
That’s interesting, because there is a powerful scene in The Wife in which you are enraged. What are the technical challenges of acting anger?
I’m good at anger [laughs]. That scene came from me; nothing in the script said Castleman needed to shout but this was my interpretation of his frustrations. As an actor, you do not want to overindulge anger because it can become the easy way out or it can shut you down.
You have acted with your wife, Kate Fahy, and daughter, Phoebe – does anyone in your family not act?
My two sons don’t. One is a chef and runs a restaurant in London, which is quite well known: Rita’s.
How important are your Welsh roots to you?
I grew up in Holywell, north Wales. I spend less time there now, although I have two sisters who still live there. I used to go back more when my mother and Auntie Myra were alive. I’m going back at the end of this month to read war poetry at a concert with the Trelawnyd male voice choir, of which I’m a patron. It’ll be nice to go back. I’d rather be Welsh than English, that’s for sure.
Your father was a miner turned shopkeeper – what was your relationship with him like?
He died in 1976. I was 28. My father had been the victim of an attack. He had a series of strokes and never spoke again. I was never able to talk to him about it. I’d have one-sided telephone conversations from New York with him, answering all the questions I hoped he’d be asking, and then he died. It is terrible and I regret it. The what could have been.
You have been cast in many Jewish roles – how much do you identify with Jewishness?
Well, the Welsh are the lost tribe of Israel, as the saying goes. I had the seal of approval when I made a film for Mel Brooks. He took me to lunch at Joe Allen’s and said: “You’re Jewish, right?” I said, “No. My name is Jonathan and my father was Isaac but we’re not Jewish.”
Is creating intimacy harder in front of a camera than in the theatre?
In the theatre you have one ear constantly on how the audience is receiving it and shift things accordingly. With film, in the past, you’d be thinking about acting “for” the camera, but cameras are lighter and digital now. Our cameraman, Ulf Brantås, was like another actor, part of a quartet with our director Björn.
You are tackling marriage from every angle, with The Wife and now Florian Zeller’s The Height of the Storm…
The Florian Zeller is compelling and similar to The Wife in that it is about a secret – again – and a great love. We have not met Zeller yet, though he is coming to see us soon.
Could we talk about marriage – what makes a marriage last?
If you get to live with Kate Fahy, it will last. I claim nothing. She’s just an extraordinary person. Although thank God I’ve changed. I think so. She still laughs at my jokes, much to the children’s dismay. We married in 2015 but for legal reasons. We’d not married before because it was not deemed necessary. Everything we have had together is in our joint names. We had a ceremony with just family and enlarged the group for a very nice lunch afterwards. It’s been 48 years. The big 50 – now that will be a party.
The Wife could be seen as a feminist piece…
I cannot believe we are still having this same conversation in 2018. It’s doing women a disservice not to be able to say that in my life, women have never been subservient to men. Although… my mother regretted her life because it was very hard to deal with her three children. She told us if she had not married, she would have had another, better life. Coming from your mother, that’s a bit hard to take [laughs]. When I was little I’d say: “Yes, but Mum, you wouldn’t have had me.”
Does old age frighten you?
When I was young, I used to be very frightened of getting older, and of death. Now, I’m more resigned to the inevitability. You hear old people say there are good things about being old if you’ve got your faculties [long pause]... I don’t quite know what the good things are [laughs].
Any more writers in the pipeline?
No, a pope. I’m playing Pope Francis in a Netflix film directed by Fernando Morales. If you Google Jonathan Pryce and the pope, I look quite similar – even my kids were messaging me: “Dad, are you the pope?”
The Wife is released on 28 September