Mark Rylance was the last big name to arrive on the set of The Trial of the Chicago 7. The star of Wolf Hall and Jerusalem, recognised by many as the finest actor of his generation, was playing the radical defence lawyer William Kunstler in Aaron Sorkin’s film, and turned up for a readthrough of the courtroom scenes after the 1968 riots in Chicago had already been shot. “I entered the room not really knowing what they’d been through,” he tells me. “Later on, I found that it had been quite intense. And they were a very strong cast with very different approaches to acting, you know – Eddie [Redmayne] and Sacha [Baron Cohen], John Carroll Lynch, Yahya [Abdul-Mateen II]. And Aaron, of course, wasn’t a director. He was a writer. So it was a potential minefield... There weren’t explosions. But we were all watching each other with curiosity.”
The cast of the 2020 Netflix drama also included Jeremy Strong (Succession’s Kendall Roy), whose immersive acting techniques seem to have triggered strong feelings judging by the reported comments of his co-star Brian Cox on his method acting – “Oh, it’s f***ing annoying. Don’t get me going on it.” (Strong calls his process “identity diffusion”.) Did Rylance have a similar reaction? “No, I didn’t find Jeremy annoying at all,” he says.
