Jonathan Pryce is not a fan of penguins. Steve Coogan tells me this with a sort of “eh, can you believe it?” arch to his eyebrows. Pryce confirms as much. “I’m not an animal person,” says the 77-year-old with an air of grave seriousness. So when everyone else on the set of The Penguin Lessons was all too happy to be acting opposite a real-life seabird instead of some inanimate object, Pryce was holding out for CGI. “I’d have preferred a tennis ball screen partner… Penguins, they tend to poop. Projectile poop.”
The penguin is only half the story, though. Set in 1976, the duo’s new film follows a school teacher from Cornwall who is newly arrived in Argentina when he happens across a penguin stuck in an oil slick and saves it from death. At the same time as this unlikely friendship between man and bird is growing, a military coup has gripped the country, launching a brutal dictatorship defined by rampant human rights abuses; dissidents are abducted, never heard from again, and babies are stolen from captured parents.
