Peter Mullan: 'The Fear' reviews & interviews, 'Top of the Lake' premiere

The Fear
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Top of the Lake
Jane Campion’s alternative TV miniseries heads to Sundance
The main event at January’s Sundance Film Festival may turn out not to be a movie at all, but Jane Campion’s six-part miniseries, “Top of the Lake.” Starring Elisabeth Moss and the Scottish actor Peter Mullan, the layered drama will screen just once in Park City, on Sunday, January 20, prior to airing on the Sundance Channel, which co-produced it with the BBC.
Working on separate episodes, Campion shared the directing duties with Garth Davis. The series, co-written by Campion and Gerard Lee, has been blurbed as follows: “’Top of the Lake’ is a powerful and haunting mystery about the search for happiness in a paradise where honest work is hard to find. Set in the remote mountains of New Zealand, the story follows the disappearance of a twelve-year-old, five-months pregnant, who was last seen standing chest deep in a frozen lake.
“Robin Griffin [Moss] is a gutsy but inexperienced detective called in to investigate [the girl’s] case. During the investigation, she collides with Matt Mitcham [Mullan], the missing girl’s father and local drug lord. Robin will find this the case that tests her limits and sends her on a journey of self-discovery.”
Holly Hunter (Campion’s “The Piano”), David Wenham (“The Lord of the Rings”) co-star. Lucy Lawless (“Xena,” “Spartacus”) appears in the first episode. It was photographed by Adam Arkapaw (the upcoming “Lore”).
What sounds on the surface a less perverse “Twin Peaks,” or a mystical “CSI,” is likely to require trenchant feminist analysis given the involvement of Campion, director of “An Angel at My Table,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” and “In the Cut,” as well as “The Piano.”
During an onstage interview at the Cannes TV market Mipcom in October, the Australian auteur noted that the series is thematically interested in “post-menopausal” over-40 women. As the Hollywood Reporter recorded it, “they are a ‘fascinating’ subset that no one is typically interested in dwelling on, she explained. The women are a self-contained counterpoint to the patriarchal structure surrounding them, and Holly Hunter is the central figure in their encampment.”
“We’re trying to go against the police procedural aesthetic,” co-writer Lee added. Campion said she was inspired to choose the long-form TV format after watching “Deadwood,” “Mad Men” (in which Moss plays Peggy Olson), and “The Killing.” She and Lee “determined there was ‘more freedom’ and ‘fewer restraints’ imposed upon creators nowadays in TV than in film.” The chorus agreeing with her on this — and television drama’s current supremacy over film drama — has grown exponentially in 2012.
Source: Blouin Artinfo

Peter Mullan - Preview: The Fear

Gabriel Tate watches Peter Mullan lose his mind in Brighton in a new Channel 4 drama


★ ★ ★ ★

‘Empathy? Yes. Sympathy? Couldn’t give a fuck.’

Peter Mullan’s disinclination to curry favour on behalf of the people he portrays has paid rich dividends in a career studded with troubled, troubling character roles, from ‘My Name is Joe’ to ‘Red Riding’. Which is just as well in the case of four-part drama ‘The Fear’, in which Mullan takes on self-professed ‘evil bastard’ Richie Beckett. A Brighton gangster gone straight over a decade ago, Richie is cultivating respectability by fronting the latest redevelopment bid for the city’s derelict West Pier. But this fresh start comes under siege from three directions: drug-dealing, people-traficking Albanians moving in on his hard-won turf; his bickering sons, coke-addled liability Cal (Paul Nicholls) and level-headed pragmatist Matty (Harry Lloyd); and – the most inexorable threat of all – the aggressive onset of Alzheimer’s.

As a noirish thriller, ‘The Fear’ delivers. There’s mystery: why the opening flashforward to a beachfront attempt on a befuddled Richie’s life? And violence: lots of it, both physical and emotional. And a truly seedy environment which wrenches the sordid side of Brighton from the clutches of Graham Greene and casts it towards Dante. This is hell-on-sea – even a unicyclist gets a kicking – and it’s made all the worse by viewing it through the eyes of a man slowly losing his sense of self. Indeed, it’s Mullan’s electrifying performance that really makes it work as a character piece.

‘Richie’s a nasty son of a bitch who has made a living out of people’s poverty and addictions,’ says Mullan. ‘What intrigued us was bringing together a highly unsympathetic character with a disease that… well, obviously one does feel for the sufferers.’ As a scrapper, Richie’s instinctive response to his depening confusion is to lash out – but his internal conflicts are no less striking.

Michael Samuels’s direction makes the most of this, subjecting Mullan to some pretty unforgiving close-ups throughout. If an actor could be Bafta-nominated for his eyes alone, Mullan would be booking his seat for the ceremony next year. And his brand of seething restraint (albeit punctuated by explosive violence) brings similarly cagey and impressive performances from Nicholls, Lloyd and a man usually more prone to arch over-elaboration, Richard E Grant (as a face from Richie’s past). Like the city in which it’s set, ‘The Fear’ is a drama with plenty of front. But it’s the action behind the scenes that could make this unmissable.

‘'The Fear' airs nightly from Monday December 3 to Thursday December 6, 10pm, Channel 4.

Source (including video): Time Out

Peter Mullan: 'The Joy of Six' trailer and review, new project, 'The Fear' trailer

The Joy of Six
A mixed selection of short films, featuring Judi Dench, Peter Mullan and direction from Romola Garai
Read a review by The List here 


Swedish Sunset Song production
A new film based on one of Scotland’s classic novels will soon be in production – in Sweden. An adaptation of Sunset Song, the book by Mearns novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon, will be filmed next year. Stars will include Peter Mullan, Agyness Deyn and Stuart Martin. Location scenes will be shot in the Mearns but most of the technical work on the movie will be done in Sweden.
Read more at Kincardineshire Observer

Another trailer for 'The Fear'
Channel 4's new 4-part drama series The Fear, starring Peter Mullan as a Brighton crime boss turned entrepreneur. A promising chronicle of the the disintegration of a criminal mind... Don't miss The Fear Première on Monday, December 3rd | 10pm | on Channel 4
Source: YouTube

PETER MULLAN: PLAYING RICHIE BECKETT

Glaswegian actor and director Peter Mullan is known for his hard man roles in shows such as Red Riding and The Fixer. However there was a much more personal reason for taking on his latest gangster persona for Channel 4’s The Fear.

He says: “What grabbed me about it was that someone with a very dark past and a very shady present should have to come to terms with a disease that has claimed the lives of millions and caused so many families to suffer.

“I have lost a lot of my family to Alzheimer’s. Ritchie is a guy who quite rightly you should not, nor ever should, sympathise with but who will nevertheless demand a certain degree of empathy from the audience. To understand that even bad people get diseases.

“As far as I’m concerned he’s been a pretty bad boy to say the least. Based on his previous actions, you would be more than justified in saying he’s not a pleasant human being. So now he’s been diagnosed, his false persona unravels and you get to see who he is and what is at the heart of him.”

A word of warning. This drama is not for everyone, with violence, gore and bad language. If you don’t flinch from any of those, The Fear is a thought-provoking idea that none of us is immune to Alzheimer’s, not even hard-men gangsters. The challenge for actor Peter Mullan has been to make his character sympathetic. Or has it?

One of our best character actors, Mullan is far from bothered about whether we like Richie Beckett or not.

He says: “I don’t like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them. With Richie there is nothing. Nothing at all redeeming.

“I don’t think you would pity him. He’s just too unpleasant to pity. But yeah, there are certain moments when I guess you may not dislike him as much.

“I mean, you’re looking at a guy who has been running a drug empire for years, he has killed people to get to where he is and he wouldn’t think twice, in the past, about the number of lives he has destroyed through the so-called illegal product that he sells. No, I hope the audience wouldn’t pity him because that would lead to sympathy and let him off the hook.”

In the four-part drama stripped across the week, Mullan plays crime boss turned “entrepreneur” Richie, trying to fight off both an attack on his commercial interests and a mind that seems to be disintegrating.

Unbeknown to him, he has a very aggressive form of Alzheimer’s. As Beckett’s dark past becomes apparent, unresolved traumas echo the medical chaos that engulfs him. Says Mullan: “Well, Richie sees himself as a businessman, so called, but he is a gangster in reality, which I suppose some businessmen are, at least in my book anyway!

“He’s recently realised that his behaviour is quite aberrant and through the course of the series he discovers he has Alzheimer’s, which takes hold in a concentrated period of time. It’s extreme.”

“Aberrant” is not the word. In the first five minutes, he vents his anger on a passing cyclist. Mullan shares some of his character’s feelings towards the pedaling fraternity: “I have to say I really don’t like Brighton [where it’s set] cyclists. They cycle too worthily.”

His character though has more of a problem with foreign upstarts. “There is a group of gangsters,” he says, “who have come over from Albania to try to take over his patch.

“His family have, on the one hand, to cope with his increasingly erratic behaviour, but also disguise it at the same time because they don’t want it known to the wider gangster community that he’s no longer in charge of his faculties.”

All of this troubling behaviour puts pressure on his relationship with his wife and two sons. Says Mullan: “He becomes more aggressive, more emotional and in a weird way, paradoxically, more open, more vulnerable than he’s ever been before.

“So in some respects it brings the family closer together but obviously in other respects it rips them apart because his nature is to fight things.

“Instead of coping and finding the support he needs to get through these things, his behaviour becomes more and more violent and unpredictable. That obviously pushes the family away.

“He’s fighting, in this case, the unfightable.”

The Fear, Channel 4, December 3, 9pm.

Source: Express

Peter Mullan

The Fear starring Peter Mullan Ch4 PREVIEW

Red alert for Richie Beckett (Peter Mullan) in The Fear. Pics: C4

Rating: ★★★★ 

Channel 4: starts Monday, 3 December, 10pm  

Eyeball to eyeball with the Albanians

Story: Richie Beckett, former gang boss turned respected Brighton businessman, pledges money to help rebuild a pier. But Richie's mind is in turmoil and the empire he runs with his sons is endangered by a vicious Albanian gang.

Tony Soprano famously suffered panic attacks and had to see a shrink. In C4’s new hard-knuckle crime drama The Fear we have another gang boss whose mind is under assault.

But Richie Beckett’s turmoil is more serious and urgent, because just when his Brighton-based empire is under siege from a gang of Albanian psychos, Richie is starting to lose his identity.

He is suffering from some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s. This would be alarming enough in the new role he has taken on as respectable local businessman, but when his family and interests are suddenly under threat from the vicious newcomers in town, this is calamitous.

Richie with sons Cal and Matty

Grisly killing
Peter Mullan is excellent as the fearsome family head, veering alarmingly between menace and bewilderment. Harry Lloyd and Paul Nicholls are his sons, Matty and Cal, who, along with their mother (Anastasia Hille) think their father is on the booze again.

Cal, the eldest and a creep who revels in his dad’s notoriety, wants to broker some deal with the family of Vajkal, the Albanian guvnor. But the Albanians implicate him in the grisly murder of a prostitute he has used, keeping her beheaded corpse as evidence to incriminate Cal if the Becketts don’t fall into line.

Richie is therefore dragged into a meeting at the Albanians’ farmhouse retreat. Irritable, sleepless, forgetful – Richie can’t even remember battering a young man on the front in broad daylight – his presence at the farmhouse is as sensible as juggling gelignite.

Cal (Paul Nicholls)

Peter Mullan is terrific as a gangster in decline
The Fear is being shown over four consecutive nights and is a bruising but riveting portrait of a criminal in decline, haunted by his past and out of touch with the present. And it's a story with emotion, as in the scene where Richie enters his wife's bedroom and asks if he can lie with her. Amid his confusion and increasing aggression, he seeks some feeling of closeness with his estranged wife.

Brighton is evocatively photographed as a lurid but at the same time genteel backdrop, regency buildings juxtaposed with drag entertainers and night-time revellers.

Writer Richard Cottan has created a rich thriller, though having Richie’s wife buying a couple of paintings called Confusion 1 & 2 was not the most ingenious bit of symbolism.

Still, the opener sets up a drama full of tension and dread, setting in motion what can only be a fearsome, tragic train of events.

Cast:  
Peter Mullan Richie Bennett
Anastasia Hille Jo Beckett
Harry Lloyd Matty Beckett
Paul Nicholls Cal Beckett
Demosthenes Chrysan Vajkal
Dragos Bucur Marin
Shaban Arifi Davit
Julia Ragnarsson Zana
Danny Sapani Wes
Source (including photos): Crime Time Preview



Peter Mullan discussed 'The Fear'

In Channel 4's new four-part drama series The Fear, Peter Mullan stars as crime boss turned entrepreneur Richie Beckett, trying to fight off both an attack on his commercial interests and a mind that seems to be disintegrating. Unbeknown to him, he has a very aggressive form of Alzheimer's. As Richie's dark past bleeds into the present, unresolved traumas that echo the chaos threaten to engulf him.

Here, Mullan reveals a little more about the drama.

Tell us about Richie...
Well, Richie sees himself as a business man, so called, but he is a gangster in reality, which I suppose some business men are, at least in my book anyway.
He's recently realised that his behaviour is quite aberrant and through the course of the series he discovers he has Alzheimer's - a very aggressive form of it which takes hold in a concentrated period of time. It's extreme.
In the meantime, there is another group of gangsters who have come over from Albania to try and take over his patch. And his family have to, on the one hand cope with his increasingly erratic behaviour, but also disguise it at the same time because they don't want it known to the wider gangster community that he's no longer in charge of his faculties.

Describe the effects on his relationship with his wife and sons?
He becomes more aggressive, more emotional and in a weird way, paradoxically, more open, more vulnerable than he's ever been before. And so in some respects it brings the family closer together - but obviously in other respects it rips them apart because his nature is to fight things. So he's fighting - in this case - the unfightable. So instead of coping and finding the support he needs to get through these things, his behaviour becomes more and more violent and unpredictable. That obviously pushes the family away.

How does The Fear differ from other gangster dramas?
The thing that attracted me to it was the combination of the two aspects - a gangster with Alzheimer's is interesting, to me. A gangster TV series, I'm not interested in.
What grabbed me about it was that someone with a very dark past and a very shady present should have to come to terms with a disease that has claimed the lives of millions and caused so many families to suffer. I have lost a lot of my family to Alzheimer's. So the idea that he is a guy that quite rightly you should not - nor ever should - sympathise with, but the nature of the illness demands a certain degree of empathy - not sympathy - empathy, to understand that even bad people get diseases. And as far as I'm concerned he's been a pretty bad boy to say the least. His previous actions, well you would be more than justified in saying he's not a pleasant human being. So now he's been diagnosed, his false persona becomes unravelled and you get to see who he is and what is at the heart of him.

Will audiences pity Richie?
I would hope empathise - I don't think you would pity him. He's just too unpleasant to pity, but yeah there are certain moments when I guess you may not dislike him as much. But I certainly wouldn't sympathise with him. I mean, you're looking at a guy who has been running a drug empire for years, he has killed people to get to where he is and he wouldn't think twice - in the past - about the number of lives he has destroyed through the so-called illegal product that he sells. But no I hope they wouldn't pity him because that would lead to sympathy and let him off the hook.

Source (including photo): Channel 4


Channel4 trailer for The Fear starring Peter Mullan
Published on Nov 15, 2012 by James Brown
Channel4 cinema trailer for The Fear starring Peter Mullan.
Music is Colliders by Raffertie
Voice Over is Hermione Norris
Source: YouTube