Sir Jonathan Pryce: Playing Animal
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All right, here we go. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally. The great actor, Jonathan Pryce, is with us today. He has one Academy Award nomination, three BAFTA Award nominations, four Emmy nominations, three SAG nominations, six Olivier's, two Wynn's, and has won two Tony's.

Um, you've seen him in Pirates of the Caribbean, Glengarry Glen Ross, Game of Thrones. The crowd and his theater work is, is next level. And I'm going to talk to him a lot about his amazing work in the theater. Miss Saigon, in fact, is one of my favorite favorites of his. Um, so, uh, Jonathan Bryce, here we go. Welcome. I'm so glad that you're, you're here with me. Um, I, I've been doing this show, Jonathan, now for about

Well, since right before COVID, so it's been a while, I've had a lot of people on who you would know. But I'm so excited to have you because you are one of my favorite actors. Oh, great. And I just want to say thank you for all of the amazing work that you have done. And just going over your career and all the things I want to ask you about, we may be here for six hours. I don't know how much time you have, but...

buckle up. I see you're at the Sirius XM studio in New York. Is this the big press tour for Slow Horses release? Is that what you're on at the moment? It's a small press tour. I'm mostly doing SAG Q&As, which I did two in Los Angeles last weekend, and I've done one here. And today was...

The Today Show with Al Roker, which I did this morning, which was fun. Amazing. Amazing. You, I'm assuming, are living full-time in London? I do, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you have spent so much of your time in New York. I mean, I...

We missed each other on Glengarry Glen Ross. My wife was the head makeup artist on Glengarry. All right, right. And did Al. She was Al's personal makeup artist. Right. And my recollection is you were still doing Miss Saigon during the shoot. Is that correct? Glengarry by day, Miss Saigon by night. Yeah.

That's kind of as good as it gets as an actor, I would think. It's like to have those two things going in the same day all the time. Yeah, well, it was a great time for me. Great time to be in New York with a hit show. As you know, it's the only way to be. Makes life a lot easier. And to get to do Glengarry Glen Ross with that cast was a bonus. I mean, I was on it for, I think, two weeks. And most of the time I was...

sitting between takes, sitting, talking to Al, who I'd known since I met him first in 1976 when I came here to do Comedians on Broadway. And I went to, I was invited to the

to the studio to watch Lee Strasberg, um, teach and, um, do those open crit sessions. Did you ever go to them? What? No, you too. I was aware of the, but I never got to go to any of them. Friday mornings. And then if you were honored guest, you got to have lunch with him and his wife and a few others at Joe Allen's at a round table that he took every Friday morning. And Al was, um, uh, at the lunch table. And, um,

I was talking to Lee Strasberg's wife, and I think I can tell this story. I've told it before. Please, please. And she said, gesturing towards Strasberg, don't you just love this man? This man is a genius. Don't you love him? And she said, you know Al's film, Dog Day Afternoon, when he's outside the bank and everyone's shouting, Attica, Attica? Yeah. That's one of Lee's exercises. That's the caged animal exercise.

And I said, why couldn't he imagine he was outside of a bank with a lot of people shouting at him? Anyway, she turned, she didn't speak to me for the rest of the meal. But then I got, I asked Al what he took from Strasberg's teachings. And he said, he said,

He was a devotee, but he took what he needed for each role. And at times it was a great help, and at times I don't think he needed it. But he came to see me do Hamlet in London in 1980. And Pacino was downstairs and Dustin Hoffman was upstairs. And I didn't know, thankfully, as I was doing the show. Wow.

But it's very gratifying that any time I see Al, whoever he's with, he wants to talk about Hamlet and he'll tell them about Hamlet. And it's just great. It's just great. Well, no one is more passionate, other than maybe you, about the theater than Al. And I've seen him in so many. I'm in American Buffalo. I've seen him in Julius Caesar. I've seen him in...

God, there was a really bizarre ensemble piece he did. I wish I could think of the name of it downtown. Everybody was in it. I mean, John Goodman was in it. Billy Crudup was in it. I mean... Is it Salome? No, it wasn't Salome, which he'd been doing forever as well. It was like Uy Ugli. Arturo Uy. Yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Bertolt Brecht. Bertolt Brecht, yes. And Al...

was literally talking, what made me think of it as the caged animal exercise. It was patently obvious that Al was playing an animal. Yeah. Yeah. It was just, he was absolutely playing like a, like, I think a rat. Yeah. And,

he's, he's an, he's a, he's amazing on, on, uh, who's your, who is, I mean, it's hard to say, but first of all, what's your favorite theater to play? I always like asking, ask, asking theater actors what their favorite theater, because there are some that are more welcoming that you just feel better in. Um, well, I like, um, in London, um,

It's just because it feeds my ego to play the Drury Lane, which is like two and a half thousand seater, an enormous theater. And where I started Miss Saigon and then 20 years ago or more did My Fair Lady.

And it's just a wonderful experience. But on the other hand, I liked, I did Lear in a small theater, the Almeida Theater, about maybe 500 seats. I did The Goat there, Edward Albee's play. Oh, that's an amazing play. Did you do The Goat in New York as well? No, just London. Yeah. Was that the original? It was the first production outside of America. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, I forget the name of the actor who'd done it before me. Sorry. What an amazing. Yeah. And it was, it was a great experience because Albie was around because he has to approve everything about a production before you get to do it. And my wife, Kate played my wife in the goat and she had to,

come to New York to meet Edward and be approved. And that went rather well. What's that process like? You walk in, you have a cup of tea, you talk about the character, you talk about how does he vet you? Well, I don't think he didn't vet me for some reason. Yeah, he's seen your read. I'd met him before because a few years prior to it,

I'd done a staged reading of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Uta Hagen. I played George and Uta Hagen was Martha. And it was to celebrate Uta's 80th birthday. And we did it at the Majestic, I think, for a kind of black tie audience. It was to raise funds for her theater.

And then we took it to Los Angeles and did it at the Amundsen. Still read around a table. And obviously I met Albie then. So he carried it in his head that I was okay. I wish there were more of those. I wish there were more of those staged readings because I find them so interesting. And...

Because it really is just the acting and the text. Well, it was great to do it with Uta Hagen because, you know, the character is 50 and she was famously the first to play it. And, you know, she could only do it in a rehearsed reading now. And Mia Farrow was Honey. Matthew Broderick was Nick. And Peter Gallagher did Nick in L.A. It was a great time. A great time.

That's amazing. You must have worked with Richard Eyre. Oh, yeah, yeah. From way back. What was the first one? When I was at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, my first job in 1972, and Richard came to direct a play. Wow. And then I followed him. I did almost two years at Liverpool, and then I followed him to Nottingham Playhouse when he took over there.

Where we did comedians, which I eventually did on Broadway. I had no idea you went that far back with him. He's one of my favorite people in the world. And one of the most interesting days in my life was when I got a phone call from Richard, who I did not know. And this shows you how you never know what role...

is going to lead to what role? He had gone to see a big stupid comedy I had done called Wayne's World and somehow got it in his head that I should...

play the doctor in Suddenly Last Summer with Maggie Smith. So I did. It was Natasha Richardson, Maggie, and Richard E. Grant, and Richard was directing us. And it just goes to show you, a big stupid movie with comedians and wigs, and the next thing you know, you're working with Richard Eyre of The National. Yeah, well, that's the joy of the job. Right? It's the joy of the job, as it were. ♪

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Richard directed Hamlet that I did. What is it about Hamlet that

in your mind, that makes it the ultimate role for an actor? At the time, I was... Richard had asked me to do it on occasion before we actually ended up doing it. And I said no to him originally because I didn't think I had anything to say with it at the time. I was still in my late 20s. And then...

He said he could do... He'd been asked to do a play at the Royal Court Theatre in London and that he could do any play of his choice. It didn't because Royal Court essentially focuses on new writing. And he told them he wanted to do Hamlet and he wanted to do it with me. And they said yes. So then he came to me and said, okay, I've said yes to Hamlet. Do you want to do it? And by...

By then, I did have something to say because my father had died as a result of violence. He was a shopkeeper, a small grocery shop. And he'd been hit over the head by a young lad who was trying to steal cigarettes. And he had a stroke that night. He seemed to recover quickly.

But he didn't ever really recover. And he was like two years in the dying. But the incident of his being attacked, they found the boy quite easily. He was 16. And I remember my sisters, I have two older sisters, and they were quite vengeful. They wanted some kind of retribution. And I remember being...

quite calm about it. You know, there was nothing, it wasn't going to bring my father back. And anyway, when Richard said about doing Hamlet, I thought of my father and thought of Hamlet's father who died as a result of violence and that Hamlet regretted never having done anything about it.

And I put those two things together. I also put together the idea that Richard wanted to find a way of portraying the ghost in a way that would have been as frightening for the Elizabethan audience. He wanted it to be as frightening for a contemporary audience. Or as disturbing, anyway. And we...

began talking about the exorcist and all that kind of weird stuff that was happening. And I thought of a time when I, after my father died, I thought I'd seen him. And he was standing in the garden looking at me. I was thinking about it and talking about it. It was that I'd so wanted to see my father because I was here doing comedians when he died. So I didn't even get home for his funeral. And

I so wanted to see him that I thought I must have conjured him up. And then we studied talking about Hamlet and the ghost and that maybe no one else saw the ghost. Maybe Hamlet so wanted to see his father, as I did mine, that he conjured him. And he knew he'd had all the suspicions about the death, how his uncle had poisoned his father, maybe. And anyway, so

I looked at a video of women, essentially, in fits of possession, speaking in tongues, voices coming out of them that had nothing to do with them. And we worked on the idea that he conjured up the ghost,

Everything the ghost, his father, the ghost said to him, he knew he wanted to hear. So I said it. I said the lines as if they were coming from inside me in a fit of possession. And I developed this belly speaking voice that I like to tell people was very difficult to do, but it does come very easily, actually.

And I didn't, I remember I worked on it at home and didn't, we didn't show it to the rest of the cast until really quite late on in rehearsals because we wanted to see what that immediate effect would have on them.

And it was a voice, it was a growling voice. It was very tortured and twisted. And I remember when we do it in performance, and you can always hear the audience, however deep you're going into whatever you're doing. And I could hear after a while, a few titters, a few people going, oh, it's very funny.

But this speech goes on and on, and there's sort of the angst and the pain that it looks as if the actor's going through. It silences them. And it's a very powerful piece of theatre, and it validated my doing Hamlet.

at all because the downside of it was there you it was a an arts program television arts program called the south bank show with melvin bragg and richard and i were invited onto this arts program and they said um we did richard and i did an interview and then would i do a bit of the ghost scene in the studio oh boy sure of course not uh

thinking too much about it. I put my Hamlet costume on and I'm in this empty studio surrounded by technicians, you know, world-weary technicians who've seen it all. You know, been there, done that. And I started doing it. Oh, Hamlet. And all I could think about was these guys going, what the fuck? You know, nothing.

And I was really embarrassed doing it. You can see it on YouTube. It gives you a hint of what it was like, but I just couldn't wait for it to be over out of there. I just had an overwhelming memory of Richard and his direction and his exploration of text. And I think that's the most fulfilling moment

Hamlet's been done ad nauseum. We did, suddenly last summer, Tennessee Williams has been done ad nauseum. And when you can find a director who has the ability and the willingness to try to find something new in it in a way that doesn't feel showy or arbitrary. And still remain truthful to the text. Yes, yeah. It's unbelievably exciting. So you're telling me that you would hear...

an audience that has seen it done traditionally, and you're doing it in this new authentic take, it takes a moment for them to get with the program, right? Hence the, the titters. Do you knew you were going to get that every night and you just would plow through it and eventually bludgeon them into coming along? It was, it was just a few and it was something that, um,

I sensed, even if I didn't hear it, you just knew when you've been an audience member, if I'd seen this, that it's going to take people by surprise. And usually when people are shocked, they often laugh. I found that with the goat. Initially, when he reveals that he's having a love affair with a goat,

And then at the end of the play, his wife dragged... Spoiler alert. His wife dragged on a dead goat. And, you know, the sight of this... And we had a full-sized dead goat. I think it was a model. It wasn't real, I don't think. It looked real. And Kate would drag it on. And the audience naturally would... Out of shock and whatever, start to laugh at the absurdity of it as well. But...

He, the man who has this devotion to the goat, starts to keen over the body and to cry. And again, you just know that they're starting off on a bit of a high. But you also know that what I'm about to do is going to go on for so long and be so shocking, you will not be laughing by the end of it. And they weren't.

And that's what I love about theatre, I mean, that you can

when it's good and going, well, you can conduct the audience. You can pull back when they're laughing too much or whatever. Do things faster, slower. Anyway, I did a lot with Richard at Nottingham Playhouse. I did a whole season with him where I played most of the duv roles and there was another older character actor

who played all the senior roles. He didn't do My Fair Lady, did he? Or did he? No, Trevor Nunn did My Fair Lady. Trevor Nunn, of course. Yes, yes, yes, of course. Do you prefer straight theater or musicals? Thankfully, I don't have to choose. Miss Saigon was my first musical age, 42, I think I was. I'd always known I could sing.

And, um, I came to it by the back door route. Um, I was performing Macbeth at Stratford and the first night, um, we had a party across the road in the famous dirty duck pub. And, um, I organized a cabaret and I had, uh, my three witches backing me on as I sang witchcraft. Amazing. Witchcraft. And, um,

And my then agent, Jimmy Sharkey, said, you know, I've forgotten you could sing. And yeah, yeah. And he said, you should do a musical. Yeah, okay. And he said, he represented Michael Crawford. And he knew Michael was leaving the show of Phantom of the Opera. And how did I feel about taking over from Michael Crawford? I said,

uh, well, let's see. So I went and worked with the musical director who reported back that I could actually sing the role. Um, and I met Hal Prince and Lloyd Webber and Cameron McIntosh. And, um, they said they were keen on my doing Phantom. And I said, oh, that's great. And they said, have you seen the show? And I said, no, no. Do you want to see it? Well, I think, I think I should. So the next night, Kate and I went to see Phantom and, um,

As people, I didn't enjoy the experience. Can you give me a little, give me an example of something that maybe... Well, what I told Hal Prince was, it's such a complete production that I didn't know what I could bring to it.

So I got out of it that way. But a little while later, they're casting Miss Saigon. And Nick Heitner, who I didn't know then, said, what we need for this role is Jonathan Pryce. If only he could sing. No way. Cameron McIntosh said, well, he can. So they got me in again. And I sang from Cabaret, the MC, you know, Willkommen, Bienvenue, on the stage of the London Palladium.

And I thought, well, if they don't offer me the role, at least I've sung on this hallowed London Palladium stage. And I finished singing the song and they all came up to me, Claude, Michelle and everyone, Cameron, and said, wonderful, we'd like you to do it. And I remembered my agent said, don't say anything. Otherwise he's negotiating the hours gone.

So I said, I'll think about it. Thank you. That's the best acting he's ever done. So at least Jimmy had some where, you know, you'll have to persuade him with the money. But it was, God, I loved doing that show. Absolutely loved it. And it was, you know, it's completely sung through. So there was no...

People say it's like you get on the bus and you're on it until the end. And it never lets up. And I did it for a year in London and almost a year in New York. And I could have carried on doing it. It was great to do. And since then, I've done other musicals. And I did Oliver.

which Cameron had asked me to do. As soon as we opened Miss Saigon in London, he said, I've got your next role. And he said, Fagin. And to be honest, I was like, that has been done a million times, and very famously by Ron Moody. And I said, oh, okay, okay. I didn't think any more about it, did Miss Saigon for a couple of years. And then I went and made a film

um in in utah with river phoenix and it was the film that river ended up uh we we never finished it he od'd on sunset boulevard and um we were having such i say we because river and i shared the experience uh a terrible and the director shared the experience a terrible terrible time and um

It was horrible. And I phoned my agent and I said, you know, Cameron said he wanted to do Oliver with me. And I said, well, tell him I'll do it. Tell him I'll do it. I don't ever want to make another film. This is a nightmare. And so he went ahead and he talked to Cameron and they set the production up to do it at the London Palladium.

And it was a year, 18 months before it came to go into production, by which time I was completely over the film experience. The last thing I wanted to do was to do a musical. And I'm glad I did. I ultimately had a very good time. Sam Mendes directed it. But it was a very different experience to Miss Saigon because Miss Saigon being

completely sung through and oliver you go from you know the dialogue's good it's based on dickens but it's light-hearted and stuff um and you go from dialogue to song and then i it i was it i wasn't so comfortable with it um and every night where i'd uh start off you see oliver

In this life, one thing counts in the bank, large amounts. And I had this, and then I go running around the stage with the kids dancing. I had this little man on my shoulder going, I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're doing this. And I had... It's almost like a panto, almost. A little bit. Yeah, but it was, the production was great. The other actors were fantastic. And the main characters, Nancy and Bill Sykes,

a bit like me, were actors who could sing. They didn't come from musical theater. And so there was a great truth in their performance. Sally Dexter as Nancy was wonderful. And the kids were great. And I still meet, well, I meet these kids now and they're grownups. And they remind me, I was in your gang. I was one of Fagin's gang.

some well-known actors. Eddie Redmayne. Oh, no way. Eddie Redmayne played my son in The Goat. And first day of rehearsal, he said to me, actually, John, we worked together before. And I said, really? What was that? He said, Oliver. Oliver, who were you? He said, I was the book boy. The book boy? Who's the book boy? He said, you know, I come running on with the book saying, your books, Mr. Brownlee, your books. And I said,

I wasn't in that fucking scene. How am I supposed to know who you are? I was having tea in my dressing room. And Ashley Walters, who's very well known now, was one of the very little kids. You talk about actors...

who can sing and that you didn't cover the musical theater world. It really is a delineation, isn't it? You go to a musical and you see people with these amazing pipes. Yeah. And then you see an actor inhabit a song, which is a little bit different than singing it, I think. And it is very much a different skill set. Mandy Patinkin does both.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Rob to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash Rob. I was first made aware of it. And it's funny because when I finally got the chance to work with Richard, at the same time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, I have a very similar story. I was doing a Fado podcast.

Do you remember when Tony Randall tried to do a national actors theater in New York city? Right. So he roped me into doing a, a Fado. And I was, and so I was doing, and then they, the stage manager says in intermission, Andrew Lloyd Webber's on the, this is when they had pay phones. How long ago it was. Andrew Lloyd Webber's on the pay phone. I was like, yeah, sure. He is. It was intermission of the performance. I get on and, and the, you know, you just immediately go, Oh no, this really is Andrew Lloyd Webber. And he wanted me to do,

Joseph, Technicolor Dreamcoat. And I had the exact same experience that you did going, I don't want to do Phantom of the Opera. I didn't want to do Joseph. And I had to figure out a way to politely tell him that, but I knew that he was developing Sunset Boulevard. Right. And I was like, I would love to play Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. So that's a year goes by. I don't think anything of it. I get to do, I get to come over to work with

dame maggie and everyone and at that moment andrew calls and says we're doing the uh the workshop i've remembered and it starts at this date and i couldn't do it oh no um but then that was for london i said well if it goes to new york call me calls me for new york i work study study sing sing study and i got to i i went to the it was i think the the majestic in new york is that possible yes

And Trevor Nunn and everybody, I got to, did my singing audition and I thought it went really well. Everybody was very happy. But in the end, they were like, we're going with a singer. We're going with this part. We're going with a proper singer. Yeah. So that was, that was my, my brush with, with that world. But it's, it is an actor who sings is different than a singer. Yeah. A hundred percent different. Yeah. Have you seen this latest production?

I haven't. Obviously, she won the Tony last week, and I hear great things about it. I saw it in London. Yeah. My wife, Kate, ironically doesn't like musicals, but she went with a friend whose daughter-in-law was in the orchestra, so they had free tickets.

And she came away raving about it. And I thought, well, if she's raving about it, and I went to see it, and it just blew my mind. It was just wonderful, wonderful. Did you see Sarah Snook in the picture of Dorian Gray? No, I didn't get to see it. It was away. Oh. Yeah. I mean, it reminds, the nearest I can remind is when I saw

Ian doing Richard, doing Richard Ayers, Richard the third, that first, that first iteration of it. Yeah. Yeah. When it, when it was, everybody has tried to do their vert, like they've, they've tried to put that sort of vision through different things. But when you remember how groundbreaking that was, um, it is her performances. It's, it's, it instantly goes down in theater history. It's unbelievable. If you get a moment,

You're there in New York. Do whatever you have to do. It'll blow your mind. I'll be back. I leave in the morning. So tell me about, okay, I just want to circle back quickly to Glengarry. Your and Al's relationship, your character's relationship was so interesting and interesting.

And it's so what the journey your character goes is, is so you feel such sympathy for your guy. What were the conversations like about the subtext of that? Because there was so much of it. I mean, and Al loves that stuff. I mean, he lives for that and all good actors do. But there was so much going on. I'm curious to know how much of it was ever.

verbalized between you two actors as you were doing it or rehearsing it or breaking it down? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing. Nothing. I don't remember. It's a similar experience I had to doing The Two Popes with Tony Hopkins in that I'd grown up as an actor and Tony was like the next generation and I had

always admired him and I became to be in awe of him so that when we got to do the two popes together, the first scenes we had together were the first scenes where we met when I went to the Vatican. And no acting required. I was Francis the priest meeting the pope, Francis in awe of the pope, me in awe of Tony,

And we didn't need to talk about it. I didn't tell him I was in awe of him, obviously. I hope he doesn't hear this. And it's the same. I put myself in that position with that cast. I mean, phenomenal cast. Not just Pacino, but Jack Lemmon and Alan Arkin, and...

You name them, you name them. I've forgotten. Yeah. Ed Harris. Ed Harris, yes. And I was the kid, yeah, I was 40-something, but who was coming into that company of American actors, renowned film actors. I didn't have to do anything. I just sort of gave myself to that experience that he'd been taken for a ride

buy them, obviously, and he was going to lose all his money. And my own backstory was that I had this very fierce wife who'd said, you fucking go back there now and you get your money back, you know, but I can't, you, you know, otherwise. So it was, it was, it was being in the company of very, very powerful people. So I translated that power into their power of they'd sold me a pup.

Mostly what I remember is between takes, sitting with Alan, talking to him about all kinds of things. But mostly it was in the papers that his then-girlfriend had a baby and nobody knew who she was. And he was telling me. And I was sitting there thinking, no, don't tell me anymore. They'll capture me. They'll torture me. They'll get the information out of me. But it's...

And everyone of that cast was at the top of their game at the time. And to meet Jack Lemmon was just bliss. It really was. And James Foley, who recently died.

Oh, really? I didn't know. Yeah. I had no idea. He made some really... At Close Range with Chris Walken. Great movie. Yeah. Sean Penn. He was a great director. Well, he was... I think... Yeah, he had the kind of strength of character to know that he just let these people go. You know, these actors. And a great script. Wonderful script. You know, people are showing up to the...

The current version, very disappointed that Alec Baldwin's character doesn't have that great speech. Well, I've done it on stage since. And I played Jack Lemmon's character. It was in the West End in London. And it was a time when, I think it was the late 90s, whatever. Maybe not. A lot of city boys would come.

And they would be drinking champagne in the stalls. And far from being a critique of people like them, to them it was a celebration. And they were shouting out, where's Golden Balls or whatever. They didn't think they wouldn't see Alec's character. And then there was nights when some of them would...

the actor, really good actor playing Ricky and they'd, they'd be shouting out, you're no owl, all that kind of stuff going on. Um, but it's great. It was great to do on stage. Really was. Do you, um, what's the strangest thing you've ever seen? I just want to preface this with, um, I was at the Haymarket for like, I wanted four or five months doing a few good men. And they warned me that there was a, an infamous couple, uh,

that would find their way somehow into the Queen's box. And they were notorious in the theater that they would have sex. And one night, I saw it with my own eyes, and she was very clearly giving a blowjob to this guy. And during the performance in the Queen's box, and the stage manager said, you cannot do that. You must stop. And so after intermission, they just fucked.

And you didn't recognize me at all?

If you were like Judi Dench, who likes to play the supporting roles in all the other shows, she gets to run around while she's there. That's your thing. Your thing is you get in the box and you like to... Yeah, that was, for me, such an eye-opener. In your career, you must have seen everything. I've never seen anything quite like that. No. The strangest thing I've had recently, I went to a play...

First night of a play, an actor who I'd never seen before, and I thought he's rather good, the opening few lines of the play, and an actress who's very good. And then he started behaving a bit strangely, and I thought it's an interesting way to... It's a man who'd picked up a woman in a bar, and they're kind of sniffing around each other, getting to know each other back in his apartment. And then he started moving suddenly, strangely, strangely.

and just making noises. And then the stage manager walks on and said, ladies and gentlemen, we've got a technical problem. We're going to stop the play for a bit. And he led the two actors off. And the audience were like, oh, God, I wonder what it is. It must be something really weird on a first night to stop the show because of a technical problem. And then we sat there for 20 minutes waiting, waiting, waiting.

And then he reappeared. The actor came up by himself this time. And he was like looking off to see whether the actress was coming. And then he sat down in a chair, looked at the audience and was going, hi, hi. And the stage manager came on and said, we're going to have to stop again. I'm sorry. And then the company manager came on and they tried to get the actor off stage.

And he was kept escaping from them. And then he started shouting things out to his wife, who was in the circle. And the poor guy was having a nervous breakdown. And I don't know whether you have on stage. I'd often thought, if I just did this now, what would happen? And then he was shouting things out. It's over. It's over. Thank God it's over.

And then I began to think, maybe he just didn't like the play and he was doing this to get out of it. But no, he was. And it was the most dramatic thing I've ever seen happen on that stage anyway. This poor guy. Anyway, it wasn't funny. Natasha Richardson told me a story that Ralph Fiennes was doing Hamlet and saw his father and

quit act like walked off the stage and quit acting for like a year. Damn day Lewis, wasn't it? Oh, maybe it was Daniel. It was Daniel. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then in 1977, I, no, this is, I w I mean, we haven't even gotten to, you know, I wanted to talk to you about, um, um,

Game of Thrones. And I love, I love the notion I read in my notes that somewhere you said they get, when they gave me Game of Thrones, I looked at all the crazy names and was like, this isn't for me. I don't understand this at all. I kind of, I kind of get that. Did you ever end up understanding Game of Thrones?

I don't know why. They'd sent me the pilot, and I literally just flipped through the pages, and I turned it down on that, looking at the crazy names. And then I knew I didn't want to be in it. It wasn't a genre that I liked, really. And then after four seasons, and it becoming this

global worldwide hit i thought yeah maybe i could do it um but they also they sent me this character high sparrow was um uh it's such a wonderful character and i remember my agent when i was a young actor uh about choosing roles he said can the play exist without him

Can the scene exist without this character? If it can, don't do it. And High Sparrow was a standalone character and he created his own world. And I find it fascinating to do with and played it ironically well.

uh, based on the newly elected Pope Francis, who was doing the same things as High Sparrow was doing, which was, uh, washing the feet of the poor, feeding the poor, speaking up on behalf of, of the people. Um,

and successfully got to the end of season five. And then they sent me the scripts for season six, where he's a completely different character. He's an absolute monster. And he's homophobic, and he's despotic, and he's killing people left, right, and center. And I remember saying, if I'd seen the two, I might not have done this part if I'd seen six. But having not seen six,

And it played into it very well because, you know, the monsters, the despots, they don't necessarily let you know that they're monsters. I mean, he was behaving completely reasonably. And once he got the trust of the people, then he could be

Isn't this funny? This kind of thing can happen, that somebody who is seemingly normal can get the trust of the people and then turn completely authoritarian and despotic. That's never happened in history. Hmm.

Hmm. That never happens. No. This is great. Thank you so much for doing this. I hope to see you on the boards, on the screen, or just at Joe Allen's at some point in our futures. Yeah. For sure. Great. Well, thanks, Rob. And thanks for everything you've said. It's great. Thank you. Thank you. What a career.

What a career and still going strong. So inspiring. I love that. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being here with me. And thank you to Jonathan Price. What an amazing, amazing conversation. And I will see you fellow listeners slash watchers slash YouTubers, however you're finding this podcast. I'm appreciative of it. And I will see you next time right here on Literally.

You've been listening to Literally with Rob Lowe, produced by me, Sean Doherty, with help from associate producer Sarah Begar and research by Alyssa Growl. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel. Our executive producers are Rob Lowe for Low Profile, Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross for Team Coco, and Colin Anderson for Stitcher. Booking by Deirdre Dodd. Music by Devin Bryant. Special thanks to Hidden City Studios. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

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