On the day that Mark Rylance video-calls from Pittsburgh, where his wife, Claire van Kampen, is directing an opera, the news is dominated by the death of Hilary Mantel. Rylance, now 62, played a furtive, whispering Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Mantel’s Wolf Hall in 2015. Prior to that, he was revered for stage roles such as Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the uncouth mystic layabout in Jerusalem, which brought him his third Tony award.
It was Wolf Hall, though, that made him a household name in households that never went to the theatre. He had dabbled in movies before, but now he embraced them: three for Steven Spielberg (the first, Bridge of Spies, won him an Oscar), Dunkirk, Don’t Look Up, the next Terrence Malick (in which he plays Satan) as well as Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming cannibal road movie, Bones and All, starring Timothée Chalamet. “Everyone’s got a hard-on for Timothée,” he grins.
