For an Oscar-winner routinely described as the greatest actor of his generation, Mark Rylance is very unstarry. Wearing shorts, a frayed T-shirt, a baseball cap and an earring, plus only the lightest of tans, he could hardly be more low-key. He threads his way through the bar and slips apologetically into the seat opposite me, murmuring: “So sorry to be late”.
We’re in Peckham, south London, on the rooftop of a drama school where Rylance has just started rehearsals for the West End opening of Dr Semmelweis. It’s a play he created with the director Tom Morris, of War Horse fame, which premiered at the Bristol Old Vic last year. The drama explores the life of a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, who worked in the maternity wards of 19th-century Vienna. Semmelweis realised that better hygiene and antiseptic could save thousands of women’s lives by reducing postpartum infection. He was disbelieved and shunned by the medical establishment and ended his days in an asylum, dying – with horrible irony – of sepsis.
The play was glowingly reviewed and proved to be a big hit for the Old Vic. How does it feel to be revisiting it now for a West End transfer? “Wonderful,” says Rylance. “Being able to leave the play and come back to it after a year means you get this fresh insight, in the sense that, these things you create, they keep cooking in the back kitchen in a strange way. It doesn’t seem like the same play we left in Bristol. It’s evolved. So, it’s very nice to revive it. Especially since the first time around it was made under such intense circumstances, the first piece of theatre after a two-year break because of the pandemic.”
Rylance discovered the story of Semmelweis when he came across a biography by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. “It’s one of the most eloquent and angry books,” he says. “It places Semmelweis in a very Christ-like position, the underdog misunderstood by the stupid authorities.” Intrigued, he took the book to Morris, who brought in the writer Stephen Brown to help develop it into a play. As they workshopped it, they found a more complex, nuanced story: “Semmelweis wasn’t just a victim. He was difficult and unbending, and angry that people didn’t understand him. Eventually, he became his own worst enemy.”
The idea of the outsider holds immense appeal for Rylance. He is often portrayed as slightly eccentric because of his interest in crop circles, shared with King Charles (they have corresponded), and is known to make key decisions based on a throw of the I Ching. This strikes me as unfair: maybe he is merely open to ideas outside the mainstream (aren’t all the best people?).
In any case, he has built his stellar career by brilliantly playing loners and mavericks: Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall; Hamlet; Iago; Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies; and the charismatic lord of misrule Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, the role of a lifetime, which he reprised last year in the West End to superlative-laden acclaim. The playwright’s own verdict was that Rylance’s performance was “the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen”.
These days, Rylance seems ubiquitous on stage and screen (while theatres were dark during lockdown, he made six films in two years, including Don’t Look Up, with its ridiculously starry cast, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio). So, it’s easy to forget that he only became a household name relatively recently.
His career began – after Rada, where he was in a small class that included Kenneth Branagh – at the Glasgow Citizens theatre and then the Royal Shakespeare Company. His progress was dizzying. Lead role followed lead role, his much-acclaimed Peter Pan preceding his definitive Hamlet, whom he played as a psychiatric patient in pyjamas. Steven Spielberg offered him Empire of the Sun but Rylance turned him down (after throwing the I Ching), instead opting for a triumphant season at the National, where he met his wife, the composer and director Claire van Kampen. He went on to become founding artistic director at the Globe, with van Kampen working alongside him – they shared an office – as musical director and director. A decade of considerable success at Shakespeare’s “wooden O” burnished his reputation as a consummate stage actor but shielded him from the brighter limelight of the screen.
Once he quit the Globe, that changed, especially after he captivated upmarket TV audiences around the world as Hilary Mantel’s scheming minister in Wolf Hall. Hollywood beckoned with roles in The BFG, Dunkirk, Ready Player One, Don’t Look Up and Bones and All, to name just a few. And it was when he finally said yes to Spielberg that he netted his Oscar for best supporting actor in Bridge of Spies.
Yet it’s still the stage that excites Rylance the most. “It’s a thousand times more enjoyable [than film],” he said recently. So, he is “really so happy” to be back in the West End, about to practise his unique brand of alchemy portraying Semmelweis.
But first he has some questions to answer, from Observer readers as well as a host of fellow actors, directors and one very special activist.
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Greta Thunberg
What role does culture play in embracing the climate emergency?
I think our big problem is that we are not living as if we are part of nature – we think of ourselves as separate from it. And we think the climate emergency is something we can dominate and control and vaccinate and genetically engineer our way out of – or, failing that, we can escape to other planets, as in Don’t Look Up. We must get humble; we have to get our hands in the earth and our feet on the ground. Charles Eisenstein, the American commentator who wrote The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, has this concept of “interbeing” that I find inspiring. We must move – we are inevitably moving – towards a state of interbeing with nature. We’ll either do it wisely and well or it will be forced upon us. I think the arts have an enormous role to play here because we must draw people towards an understanding of interbeing with the stories we tell in our culture, in our plays and films and books, and those stories must be told with imagination, beauty and joy. Beauty inspires. And this is just one reason why the decimation of the arts and the imagination in our schools is disastrous.
I loved your terrifying and funny performance as Peter Isherwell, the tech billionaire with the power to end the world, in Don’t Look Up. I saw in it a mix of Elon Musk, Jimmy Stewart and Andy Warhol. Was I even close to right?
Pamela Thurschwell, professor of modern and contemporary literature, University of Sussex
Wow. I’m not going to say you’re wrong when you’ve been so nice. And Elon Musk was obviously one of the tech escapologists Adam [McKay, the director] was talking about in the film. But while I listened to the voices of Jeff Bezos and people like that, I was actually more drawn to Jordan Peterson. Not that Jordan Peterson had a lot to do with that character, but I found the way he expressed himself compelling. But no, I didn’t think of Jimmy Stewart, although I am very glad Jimmy came and rode along with me and was present.
Sam Mendes
Do you miss running a theatre?
No, I don’t. That’s not to say I didn’t love all the people I was working with at the Globe, but it was too much for me. If you’re not going to get exhausted, which I did, you need to be able to delegate. I took on a lot. I tended to want to solve everyone’s problems and I’m not a very good time-manager. I was coming off stage as Hamlet and half an hour later chairing an executive admin meeting. Eventually, I was leaving meetings only 20 minutes before going on stage. So, no, I think that’s my time running a theatre. Now, at 63, I know I am not a director. I’m an actor.
Sally Hawkins
Who is your favourite author or playwright?
My favourite author changes. But at the moment, I’ve really fallen in love with Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who wrote with 75 different heteronyms – not pseudonyms, heteronyms. Like an actor, he would take a side of his psyche and make a character out of it, give that character a different name, and then publish books and poetry under that character’s name. And it was only after his death that people realised a whole bunch of very successful authors were actually all him. As someone who has many sides and who has the ability to connect with and isolate and project different sides of myself, I feel as if I found a long-lost brother, finding Pessoa.
Do you plan to appear on northern stages more often? And do you have any ideas on how headline theatre can be decentralised from London?
Patrick, librarian in a state school, Manchester
By touring. I want to tour Jerusalem. I want to take it out to Scotland, Ireland and Wales. There are some beautiful theatres in Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff, Dublin, and I’d like to see if we can tour Jerusalem around them. But that suggests that everyone and everything worth anything is in London and that’s rather patronising. So, as well as touring I am absolutely in favour of levelling up. But levelling up can’t happen when arts funding is being cut. Cutting arts funding sabotages levelling up, because when someone from a disenfranchised or poor background gains power or authority in society through the arts or sport, someone like Marcus Rashford, who doesn’t forget where they came from, you then see them becoming a model and a great mercurial agent of change. So cutting arts funding is completely counterproductive.
Eddie Redmayne
Could you tell me about your creative relationship with your wife, Claire?
Claire completely changed my life. We met at the National Theatre when she was musical director of a play I was in. She introduced me to that world of classical and modern music, and it was very much around music that we fell in love. We’ve always loved working together, from Phoebus Cart, our own theatre company in the 90s, to our years at the Globe, to Farinelli and the King. From the beginning, we were always imagining stories that we could tell together. I’ve lost count of how many projects we’ve imagined, sitting there at our kitchen table. Claire came to me with two children whom I raised with her and Chris [her first husband], but we never had children of our own so, to some degree, our projects have been our children. They are an incredible, creative joy to us and Claire is the rock of my life. I won’t last long if she goes first.
Are there any Shakespeare characters or plays that you deliberately refrained from playing as you didn’t feel ready at the time and, if so, are there any that you are looking forward to performing in future?
Harry Egerton, arts student, Birmingham
I deliberately refrained from playing King Lear, and I still don’t feel ready. I don’t know if I ever will. I kind of love Gloucester, to be honest. If you told me I could do anyone in that play, I’d want to play Gloucester.
Eva Green
I heard you have a friendship with Rowan Williams, the priest and philosopher, and I like the idea of the two of you walking across the hills together. Please may I ask to what extent religious or spiritual experience influences your work as an actor?
I like that image, too. As well as being a deeply spiritual man, a poet and author, Rowan is a creative person who loves the theatre, so we are good friends. As for me, my spiritual experience is very much part of my work. I was raised both Catholic and Protestant, but then fell out with the established church in my teens. I couldn’t really connect with a God who rejected homosexuals or told women they couldn’t do certain things. And so I got very interested in American Indian spirituality and pagan spirituality, and I still am. In essence, I take the worldview that the divine is in everything. That’s a belief that is with me all the time, in what I do and how I live.
Did you ever face any self-doubt as an actor and if you did, how did you deal with it?
Kyle Hixon
Always, always. In my early career, I had to stop myself stepping forward and apologising to the audience, I felt so awful about the way I was acting. I’d really struggle with it. Later, it was my mother who pointed out to me, you know, your self-criticism has been helpful to you. It’s made you better at what you do. But self-doubt is a constant challenge as an actor. I deal with it by telling myself: “Come to your senses, Mark.” By that I mean, what does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? The body knows.
Nikki Amuka-Bird
I wish I could have seen you play Olivia in Twelfth Night. How did you prepare for that and what was your favourite thing about playing her?
My favourite thing was listening to Judi Dench on my little tape recorder reading an Alan Bennett story about going round to the dressing room after a performance and what you do and don’t say to actors. I would listen to this backstage and try to get into Judi Dench mode. She was my oral model. I like to have a voice. It’s always my key, because it’s the thing I’m most insecure about.
Who was the most challenging character you have ever played on stage or screen and why?
Rosamund Goodey Horley, Surrey
Romeo is a very challenging part to play. He’s so impetuous. Maybe it was partly because I was playing Hamlet at the same time and Hamlet would have little time for Romeo. He’d say: why are we wasting time on this kid’s problems? I want to talk about serious stuff. It’s funny because I’m quite an impulsive person but, overwhelming love like that – I’ve experienced it, of course – is a very naked thing to play and it’s such a diamond of a play. I’ve great respect for people who play Romeo.
Mackenzie Crook
Who is your favourite member of One Direction and why?
Mackenzie is very witty – there may be a joke going on here – but I am going to embarrass myself because I don’t know any of the members of One Direction. Oh – hold on, it’s Harry Styles’s band, of course. I worked with Harry Styles on Dunkirk and he stayed a friend. I thought he was very good and I was really charmed by him. He and Timothée Chalamet are the two most famous young actors I’ve worked with and I’ve really been struck by their consciousness, their work ethic and their nice sense of humour.
So many of your recent cinema, stage and television roles have been about tragedy. Plus, you have experienced terrible personal tragedy in your own life, including the death of your stepdaughter and, more recently, your brother. How do you recharge your batteries – physical, emotional and spiritual?
Amy Hersh, New York
It’s interesting the way this question is phrased, as if those events drain one’s life batteries. I feel hollowed out by loss but I don’t feel the need to refill that hollow place. Initially, there’s a temptation to drink too much or smoke too much or work too much to try to fill the space with something else. But then you realise that empty spaces can be good. Miles Davis’s trumpet, Jacqueline du Pré’s cello would be nothing without the emptiness inside, carefully carved out by someone. And eventually you realise that emptiness is something you feel comfortable with. This person I adored is gone and now there’s a space there – but in a way they also live alongside me in spirit. And if you try to fill that space they left, it won’t work and the effort will wear you out. Better to think of it as a beautiful thing. Again, I think of artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, how the air moves through those hollow spaces and makes beautiful music.
Johnny Flynn
You inhabit your roles with such depth and humanity. When you’re playing someone with darkness in their soul, how do you protect yourself going into that or coming out of it?
With care. Going into it is a matter of a couple of hours of physical warmup and conscious opening-up. But the more difficult part is after the show. No matter if you’re Jeremy Strong in Succession, an immersive actor, or someone who does it more lightly, you’re going to have a thousand people projecting darkness on to you. Whether I took Rooster into my soul or not, people projected on to me that I was Rooster. So, you’re receiving a lot of imaginative energy and you need to not just take your costume off and have a shower. You need to psychologically, socially, spiritually come back into yourself and be mindful.
In your film career, you’ve worked with so many major directors – Steven Spielberg, Terrence Malick, Christopher Nolan, Peter Greenaway – which of them did you learn the most from? And is there another director you’d really like to work with that you haven’t yet?
Ian Cook, head chef in a school, Liverpool
Well, Peter Kosminsky is the film director I’ve worked with the most. Even more than with Steven Spielberg. And those two, I’ve learned just a ton from. But Terrence Malick is a real gamechanger. He’s a very spiritual man and has a real aversion to any form of presentation. Actually, he has an aversion to plans, not just for the actors, but for everyone. He seems to really feel it’s only through accidents in our busy lives that the divine comes in. So he’s constantly trying to let accidents happen, just belly-flopping into the mystery of things. He has this ability, like my friend Simon McBurney, to actively bring chaos into the work. And as soon as things are ordered, they stir it up. So, there’s a great unconscious or conscious faith in divine creation. That was very inspiring to me. And that’s another good thing for young actors to remember: don’t be frightened of chaos.
Harriet Walter
When you were 25 years old where did you think you would be when you were 50? Have you fulfilled or exceeded your dreams?
I thought I would die before I was 40. I didn’t live particularly dangerously. I misbehaved and was off my head sometimes, nothing too extreme, but for some reason I just had an impression that I wasn’t going get beyond 40. So, anything that happens now is a bonus.
Whenever I ask my brother if he’s worried, he replies: “Would it help?” – a line and outlook he adopted after seeing your character Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies. At first, it’s annoying but then it helps me be more mindful and calm as well. Has the mindset of any of your characters or a particular line of dialogue ever changed your attitude?
James Clayton, Bolton
That’s one that changed me. And I am pretty sure that was a line the Coen brothers added to the screenplay, which was already very good. What the Coen brothers did was like a great massage, where the blood just went into every finger in every part of the screenplay, and their wicked sense of humour was what added that line to it. It took a bit of practice to say it that innocently and sincerely. It’s the line that people always quote at me. And it’s a part of me, that character. I am not always as careful or as calm as him. I would be a happier man if I checked before I acted sometimes in that same way: “Would it help?” I think I do some things that are not so helpful.
Mark Kermode
What’s the best film that you have ever seen and why?
I want to say Terence Malick’s A Hidden Life because it was such a wonderful film but the one that keeps coming into my mind is Dersu Uzala, the Kurosawa film. I love all his films but Dersu Uzala has really stayed with me.
Caroline Lucas MP
In Jerusalem, your character Rooster challenged us to think deeply about what makes up our identity as English – I wonder what it means to you and what Rooster taught you about Englishness?
For some reason, we’re very good in England at telling stories, aren’t we? I think even the empire was something we imposed on people partly because we were able to convince them that this was a story that they’d enjoy being part of – having Victoria as their queen. And that’s a trick of Rooster Byron’s, isn’t it? He knows how to use storytelling to unite or to reveal, and he has this ability to believe, or to appear to believe, wholly in the stories he is telling. That’s one of the difficulties for us all now, both in England and the wider world, isn’t it? What’s the story? What is an appropriate myth for these times? How are we going to get through this? Is this the final chapter?
Taylor Russell
I’ve been touched by the luckiest of stars to watch your magic up close [in Bones and All]. I’m wondering, how do you keep an intimate and lasting connection to your source of inspiration?
I don’t feel I own my ideas. I feel they come to me and pass through me on their way somewhere else. I am lucky to be curious. I certainly appreciate an intimacy with nature and a lasting connection with the mysterious present moment. I try to welcome strangers.
Having played Rooster Byron for the second time, do you still feel the same connection with the character and would you like to play him again in another 10 years?
Chris, Bristol
Oh yes. As an actor, to land in a play that is resonant with the time and resonant with the particular gifts you have – that’s a very lucky thing to happen. And it happened to me with Jerusalem. So coming back to it 10 years later was deeply enriching and wonderful, particularly coming back with five or six of the actors who were in the original. It was thrilling onstage for me to be with Mackenzie and the others and think: “Wow, look at how we’ve grown.” And on top of that to be with an audience that was made up of people who had been there too and also new people, just like on stage. And to feel the nation changing and the play still reflecting different things, especially the great hunger for wildness, that is such a beautiful part of the play and a part of the people who live on these islands. So yes, I’d like to keep playing it as long as I can. I recommend coming back to parts. It’s a good creative exercise. You can never do it in films, can you? So it’s one of the special things about theatre.
Anne-Marie Duff
You have played both Cleopatra and Twelfth Night’s Olivia. What corners or cells did you have to access in order to find your female soul?
My mother, obviously. My mother, who would be very quiet when she came and saw me play Cleopatra, particularly, because Cleopatra had a lot of my mother’s changeability, my mother’s wit, her sharpness, my mother’s need for love. Also, there was something in Cleopatra, with the Roman world around her, of my mother’s encounter in the 70s with feminism, waking up to the realisation that things didn’t have to be this way.
If you could prevent any Shakespeare character from doing something specific, who and what would it be?
Jules, artist and illustrator, Germany
Oh, my god, Othello. Othello. Oh, god. Even now to think of it is hard. It’s just, having lost people that I love very dearly, like my daughter Nataasha, if it had been then revealed to me that I had caused her death… I mean, in the rehearsal room [for the Globe theatre’s 2018 production] I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t listen. Even though I was playing Iago and had done it. I think it’s even more painful than Lear finding and then losing his daughter. The human story of the soldier, brilliant in the archetype of Mars and so vulnerable in the archetype of Venus, is the incredible thing about that play. So that’s the one I’d stop.
Emmanuel Akwafo
What advice would you give your younger self or an aspiring actor who is just starting out in the industry?
First of all, I want to say that this play Emmanuel was in [For Black Boys Who Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy] was one of the best experiences I have had this year so far in the theatre – a wonderful evening – and I think what they are doing there, trusting in their own experience, is the best advice I could give any young actor: trust what you experience and live, that is where you will find your unique voice.
