Robert Carlyle on California Solo, American vs. British TV, and the appeal of fairy tales
by Sam Adams
December 20, 2012
Apart from a Scottish burr, there’s not much connecting the roles that made
Robert Carlyle’s career.
Trainspotting’s Begbie is a psychotic;
The Full Monty’s
Gaz is a genial, unemployed steelworker. Finding a common thread in
Carlyle’s filmography—a thread that links a bus driver drawn into the
Nicaraguan revolution with a James Bond villain—is no easy task, but
that’s how he likes it. Along with his gig on
Once Upon A Time,
where he plays a modern spin on Rumpelstiltskin, Carlyle recently took
on his first character-driven lead role in years, playing a onetime
British rocker who’s found a new life as the manager of a California
organic farm in
California Solo. The drug-related death of his
brother, who fronted a band briefly touted as the British Nirvana, is
decades past, but he dwells on the subject indirectly by recording a
podcast devoted to famous rock-’n’-roll flameouts, although it’s never
clear who (if anyone) is listening. When a DUI puts his immigration
status in jeopardy, Carlyle’s character is faced with the possibility
he’ll be sent back to confront ghosts he thought he’d left behind for
good, and guilt he can no longer escape. TV duties kept Carlyle from
making the film’s Sundance première, but he talked to
The A.V. Club in Park City the day before.
The A.V. Club: Music played a big role in your life early on. Was that part of the attraction to California Solo?
Robert Carlyle: Very much so. One of the things that attracted
me to this script was that I came from that world, that whole Britpop
time. It was my time as well. I know the Gallagher brothers very well. I
know Damon Albarn very well. They’re good friends, and right in the eye
of the storm as well. I kissed my wife for the first time at the
Hacienda in Manchester. So I’m very in touch with all of that. That was
the first thing that struck me.
AVC: Because you played music yourself?
RC: I was 16 when I was in a band, for about 10 minutes. I
went off and did acting after that. So it was a wee moment for me when I
sang.
AVC: So this was an opportunity to be part of that world on film.
RC: Yeah, and to understand it. The film’s not, to me, just a
rock ’n’ roll story. It’s kind of a Hollywood story as well. So many of
my friends, old friends I haven’t seen in years, made their way out
there and got lost, then found their way back. That seems believable to
me.
AVC: The cast includes several actors with musical
backgrounds, including Kathleen Wilhoite and Danny Masterson. Was that
intentional?
RC: I guess. I didn’t know any of these people were going to
be in it. They just turned up, and I thought, “Ah, this makes sense.”
Especially Michael Des Barres. Because looking at Michael, it’s a very
nice Hollywood moment. It could easily have been him in real life. I
really enjoyed that scene.
AVC: How much of a chance did you get to work with Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin, who wrote the songs your character sings?
RC: Only very briefly. We spoke on the set, I think, once, and
then he spoke to me on the day when I was actually going to be doing
the singing. He was very encouraging.
AVC: You’d already had a leading role in Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff by the time Trainspotting came around, but the part of Begbie really put you on the map. Did you have a sense that was really clicking at the time?
RC: That’s never happened to me. I don’t know anyone that ever
has. You can’t tell like that. Any part I’ve played, I think back on
the journey I had to take to play that part. So there wasn’t any,
“Hallelujah, I’m playing Begbie.” It was like, “Fuck’s sake, I’m playing
Begbie. This is going to be tough.”
AVC: Irvine Welsh was already a prominent author in your native Scotland. How well did you know his novel at the time?
RC: I knew it very well. I had a theater company at the time,
and we’d taken quite a lot of the piece—stole it, basically—and did a
few improvised pieces in and around the subject of
Trainspotting. So I knew it pretty well.
AVC: How different from your unofficial Trainspotting was being a part of Danny Boyle’s version?
RC: The great thing about Danny is he makes sure everyone’s
involved. That sounds obvious, but it’s not always the case. He gets
everyone around a table, and he says, “Right, this is what we are all
going to try and do.” So it was an entirely different thing. It took me
away from my theater company to suddenly seeing it as Danny’s vision,
his eye.
AVC: You’ve moved between theater and film and television
regularly throughout your career. Have you developed different
strategies for working in each medium?
RC: Earlier on in my career, I would have thought that, but
the last five, 10 years, I haven’t thought about it as much. It’s more
about the journey, to be honest with you. I started this journey 30
years ago, and each part I take is like a step on that path. I try not
to waste anything, any films, any project. I try to do something that’s
going to forward—not my career—but something that’s going to forward me
as an actor. It’s only now, in the past few years, that I think I’ve
reached that place that I used to admire in older actors, which is that
thing, I guess you’d call it gravitas. I’m just beginning to dip my toe
in the pond of gravitas. I have to do less. It’s already there.
AVC: It seems like that’s a quality that’s missing in most actors
these days, a sense that they’ve really lived life. You don’t feel the
weight of experience.
RC: That’s what you try and do. You try and feel that
character’s pain. The way I was trained is that if you’re going to do
something heavily emotional, you go to the well and try and find
something in your life that reacts to that. But I stopped it. Nowadays, I
think, you have to try and find the pain of
that person. If you
can get inside there, then it’s going to speak to you. If I’m trying to
disguise the pain of character A by Bobby Carlyle’s pain, it doesn’t
work as well. So the past 10 years or so, I’ve got away from all of
that, and I feel more comfortable in the skin of these characters.
AVC: Does that make it easier to leave the character on the set when you go home at the end of the day?
RC: A wee bit, a wee bit. Early days, I was a bit racked by that, particularly when I did Hitler, for CBS [in 2003’s
Hitler: The Rise Of Evil].
That was hellish. That stayed with me for quite a long time. I was 40,
41, and that was the last of that kind. It was really after that—maybe
that was the film that did it—that I decided, “It’s okay to be you when
you go home.” Children arriving as well: That changes everything.
AVC: Stepping away from a Method approach must make it easier to play a character like The World Is Not Enough’s Renard, since Bond villains aren’t known for their elaborate backstory.
RC: It’s [a] comic book, really. You try to make it as
believable a comic character as you can. Bond, for me, that was my past.
That was my childhood, going to see Bond films with my father in the
’60s. With Sean [Connery]. That was the only guy that fuckin’ sounded
like me. So there was always that connection. And then to get an
opportunity to be in Bond, that was special. My father was still alive,
too.
AVC: Did acting even seem like a viable option for you growing up?
RC: Never at all. When I look back at it now, my past and the
way I grew up, I grew up on communes. That was meant to be. It never
occurred to me when I was younger.
AVC: So what was the appeal?
RC: To be honest, at the time, it was a social thing. A friend
of mine had joined this community-theater group in Glasgow, and he said
to me, “You can come and join in.” These were his exact words: He said,
“There’s a lot of good-looking women.” I’m there. And he was right. It
was the very first time I came across—and this is maybe more a U.K.
thing than a U.S. thing—that thing of working-class actor/middle-class
chick. That’s good. [Laughs.] And there was a lot of that. So that drew
me toward it. And very quickly, I realized this was a world I belonged
in. It didn’t feel strange to me to be acting and pretending to be
somebody else.
AVC: Riff-Raff must have been an interesting introduction to the world of film. Ken Loach isn’t a typical movie director.
RC: Absolutely. Ken’s unique. There’s only one Ken, and will
only ever be one Ken. You literally don’t get the script at all. There’s
no script. It’s, “Okay, you’re a journalist.” A lot of fucking pressure
on that. I loved working with Ken on
Carla’s Song as well. That
was a big thing for me at the time. I’d never worked with anyone twice
before. He came and worked with me again, and I heard him say a lovely
thing when he was interviewed about it. He said, “You can always cut to
Bobby anytime, because the reaction’s always real.” That’s what you want
to be.
AVC: You’ve worked with Danny Boyle twice as well, and Antonia Bird, on Priest and Ravenous.
RC: Sadly, we haven’t done it in a long time because she’s
been working on other things. As with any director-actor relationship,
you understand the way that they work. Like Scorsese with De Niro, he
obviously has a working relationship that’s easy shorthand. That was the
thing with Antonia. We could get things done quickly.
AVC: Do you get better at establishing that kind of shorthand with a director more quickly as you have more experience?
RC: That’s the thing I’ve missed the most in television. I’ve
really enjoyed my work in television, but the problem for me is the
turnover of directors every week. Sometimes that’s great. I’ve worked
with some really terrific people; I’ve worked with some wankers as
well.
AVC: How much can a TV director change the tone on the set?
RC: It depends who you’re working with. For me, nothing at
all. There’s a kind of unwritten rule: Don’t say anything at all, and
everything will be fine. It’s a producer’s medium. The directors aren’t
there to make any decisions. They’re not going to change anything.
AVC: Once Upon A Time has been an interesting change of
pace. You haven’t had much of a chance to act in this kind of mythic or
fantastic register—maybe on Stargate Universe.
RC: Stargate was something else. [
Once Upon A Time]
is something I’m really, really enjoying. Rumpelstiltskin himself—after
the second episode, that was the No. 2 most Googled thing on the
planet. Fucking hell. That was interesting. I started to think more
about that name. Who is Rumpelstiltskin to people? This gave me the
opportunity to define the part for a younger generation, so that any
time youngsters who are watching hear “Rumpelstiltskin,” they’re going
to see that face. That was important to me, because I’ve got a few young
kids now—5, 7, and 9; and my 7- and my 9-year-old, they love it.
AVC: You’ve done television projects in the U.K., but the American model is very different.
RC: It is. I don’t understand it, to be honest with you. You
get something potentially really interesting and really good, and you
go, “Let’s have 20 of them!” You can’t do 22. Let’s just do six or
seven, or let’s do 10. Let’s stop there. If you keep going on and on and
on, you’re going to stretch it very, very thin. Something that starts
off with a very good, very interesting idea, 55 episodes later, it’s not
so much. Then again, in the U.K., we do six episodes, and that’s it.
AVC: How far ahead do you know what’s going to happen on the show?
Can you plan for what your character is doing 10 episodes from now?
RC: You don’t know at all. You make the pilot, and then you
wait to get the pick-up. You can’t write anything until you get the
pick-up, so then suddenly, you’ve got those front 11 episodes of
something. And then they’ve got to do another 11 or 12. It’s not like a
film script where you can do draft after draft. They don’t have time to
go back and rethink it.
It’s an interesting thing. The U.K. and the U.S. are very different
countries, and it really shows in the television. Having said that, the
quality of American television the last 12 years or so has been fucking
outstanding. Beyond belief. To me, that’s the advent of cable. All this
idea of the difference between film and television, you can’t pass a
slip of paper between them anymore. It’s so similar. I walk on the
green-screen set in Vancouver and there’s all these big fucking cranes
and stuff flying about—this is as big as anything I’ve ever worked on.
This hybrid has now become the real deal. I tell you what did it for me.
I thought
Deadwood was really pushing the envelope. I thought
that was a really excellent show. I was stunned when it was cut.
Critically great, but audience didn’t really watch it so much. I think
the beginning of the change, and I had a good buddy involved in it,
Kiefer [Sutherland], was
24.
24
kind of raised the bar with episodic television and made people want to
follow it again, rather than going, “Fuck, 20 episodes of this?” People
wanted to see what happened with
24.
AVC: There’s been a sea change in that most dramas are
continuity-driven, or at least make a pretense of it, although people
still watch Law & Order, which isn’t.
RC: It’s just story of the week, isn’t it? Jeopardy of the week. But
24
took that much further. Jeopardy of the whole 24 hours. You follow it
all the way through. And hopefully we’re going to do the same thing with
Once Upon A Time. They’re almost little films, in a way. And to
go back and re-examine these fairy-tale myths, these stories, I think is
a wonderful thing. It’s definitely working. The audience really loves
this tuff. You never forget your childhood, and that’s where that stuff
comes from.
AVC: Did you read fairy tales to your children?
RC: Aye, absolutely. When they were young, of course. Still do. They love it. They understand
Hansel And Gretel. They understand
Cinderella
and stuff like that. These stories were originally there as cautionary
tales, you know? Be careful: This fucking world is a dangerous place.
Don’t go into strange women’s houses. Don’t take candy from strangers.
That’s what these stories were telling you. They really dig deep into
your psyche as a child, and I don’t think they ever quite leave you. So
when you go back to these stories again, you look at them with adult
eyes, but there’s something in your mind that’s still a child.
Source (including photo):
AV Club
