If you ask actor Toby Jones what he did all day, the answer will often be a whole load of nothing. “You spend a lot of time waiting in my job. A lot of time hanging around,” he says, before detailing the previous day’s 11-hour schedule of kicking about on a Budapest industrial estate, punctuated by two brief stints shooting “quite a casual scene – me and the lead actor, in a car”.
It sounds like nothing much and yet clearly it’s something. At 56, Jones is widely considered to rank among Britain’s finest actors. Ever since his screen debut as “second valet” in Sally Potter’s Orlando 30 years ago, he has been in continuous demand: for spectacular Hollywood blockbusters, tiny independent art films and everything in between. As he summarises with characteristic humility: “On the whole, I get to do stuff that is really good and I don’t have to do a lot of stuff that isn’t very good.”
