Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he changed his name. This film directed by Marc Evans explains how it came about.
There isn’t a troupe officially called the Worshipful Company of British Character Actors, but there probably should be, given the sterling service it does for the nation, acting in prestige TV dramas based on real events. Toby Jones and Monica Dolan regularly top the bill in this genre, as they do in ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Bognor Regis was once renowned for its restorative climate and was much favoured by George V (he awarded the town the “Regis” tag), but times have changed if Toby Jones’s new series is anything to go by. The Bognor we see in BBC Two's Don't Forget the Driver is a crumbling ghost town, all run-down bungalows, pensioners and, it seems, an underclass of exploited immigrants.
There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play since it debuted on the London stage in 1928, but Saul Dibb’s new incarnation, shown at London Film Festival, is testament to the lingering potency of the piece.
Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having been perceived as too lenient. Described by Hitler as “the man with the iron heart”, he was also the principal planner of the Final Solution.
Anthropoid begins, literally, with a bump, as two agents parachuted in by the Czech government-in-exile based in London crash into a wintry forest outside Prague. They’re played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, and within minutes they’ve been found by a pair of informers, whose truck they steal and head to Prague. There they gingerly negotiate a locked down city before making contact with Toby Jones’ resistance leader and reveal their plans. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the pair have to stay inconspicuous while convincing others of the need to kill Heydrich, always aware that the consequences of doing so might be even more horrific. Which turns out to be the case: the assassination attempt, thrillingly staged, doesn’t quite go to plan, and the fugitives find themselves holed up in a cathedral crypt thanks to a sympathetic priest.
They’re soon aware that innocent civilians are already being shot in reprisals, and that an entire village has been razed based on misinformation. Naturally there’s a wretched Judas figure (a slippery Jiří Šimek) on hand to betray his associates. But faced with the chance to gain a hefty cash reward and save his family, his actions are wholly credible. The interrogation scenes are mercifully brief before the virtuosic final shoot out, in which the rebels ultimately drowned when the crypt is flooded with fire hoses. So far, so bad, and knowing that such events really happened is deeply affecting, as is the fact that a brave band of Czechs and Slovaks put their lives on the line for a country which no longer exists.
To say that this film is technically impressive isn’t to damn it with faint praise; Ellis’s sure-footed direction and spare screenplay take us through this series of unfortunate events at a breakneck pace. Convincing sets and location footage really do conjure up a grey, wartime Prague, and how refreshing to encounter such a spare, economical soundtrack. That the actors all speak accented English is a distraction at first, but the performances are strong enough to overcome any doubts. Especially good support comes from a luminous Anna Geislerová (pictured above right) as Murphy’s love interest. Ellis is notably absent from the disc's bonus features – there’s no director’s commentary, but a "Making Of" short suggests that cast and crew enjoyed working with him.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Anthropoid
A year ago to the day the BBC laid on a festive slaughter of Agatha Christie characters. And Then There Were None had the look of a well-dressed abattoir as her victims toppled like ninepins at the hands of an invisible slayer. The scriptwriter Sarah Phelps has returned to the queen of crime for this year’s two-part Christmas murder mystery. The source for The Witness for the Prosecution is a mere 23-page story in which there’s really only house room for one corpse.
Based on an abortive real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1894, Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent has sometimes been held up as a harbinger of the kind of terrorist attacks the world has been subjected to by the likes of Baader-Meinhof, Al Qaeda and Isis. Doubtless this was part of the BBC's motivation for making this new three-part dramatisation.
The earliest known versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella appeared in an Italian compendium of fairytales known as the Pentamerone. They were collated by Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile and published in the 1630s after his death. The 50-strong anthology also includes versions of Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. None of these familiar stories has made it into Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s cinematic sampler of Basile’s collection.
What is it about Toby Jones? A decade ago he had a stroke of luck when a film producer spotted his physical similarity to Truman Capote and cast him as the lead in Infamous. The luck wasn’t unadulterated. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the same role in a different film and won an Oscar. While Infamous was overshadowed, Jones wasn't. The latest advance in his career finds him playing a medieval king in a film from the director of Gomorrah, the ultra-violent portrait of organised crime in Naples.
Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales adapts three of the many fairy stories anthologised by 16th-century Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile. In a story known as "The Flea", Jones plays a king who promises to marry his daughter off to anyone who can identify the pelt of a mysterious creature. The clue is in the title, but this is no ordinary flea, which under the king’s care has grown to monstrous proportions before dying.
Jones has a face for make-believe and the role continues a fantastical thread in his CV which began when he was cast as the voice of Dobby the house elf in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. But more than any other screen actor of his generation he has also come to embody the ever-changing face of Englishness. Recent roles have included Neil Baldwin, the Stoke City fan with learning difficulties in Marvellous, Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl, Captain Mainwaring in the Dad’s Army remake, and the terminally single obsessive Lance in Detectorists. One day he'll make a wonderful Falstaff (he had a brief run-out in the role for the Globe's 400th anniversary celebrations). So how come he’s the king of a castle in the middle of southern Italy?
JASPER REES: Where was your section of Tale of Tales filmed?
TOBY JONES: The Castel del Monte in Puglia. You can look out from the roof and you might as well be in the Middle Ages. It’s absolutely amazing [see trailer overleaf]. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s intact and we just filmed there. There’s hardly any CGI in the film. The flea stuff is just puppets.
It’s very different from your last visit to Italy, Berberian Sound Studio.
Yes, very different, although the making of it was kind of similar. What’s refreshing about making an Italian film – even though it’s English-speaking – is there’s a certain chaos on the set which is all about the energy and the enthusiasm of making films. Sometimes in England and America the industrial process takes over to such an extent that it’s all a bit systematic and everything’s been thought to the nth degree and there doesn’t seem to be that same “we’ve got this and we can do that!” There’s people losing their tempers because it matters. It’s not all executives whispering to each other. It’s out there. Matteo – because he was producing the film as well – he’s passionate about this material. In a weird way I think it’s quite closer to Gomorrah. When he said, "I’d love you to be in my next film" I said, "Absolutely, loved Gomorrah, I loved Reality." And then this script comes. What the hell’s this? But when you look at what it’s about, it’s treating the same kind of humans in thrall to their own desires, in thrall to their own instincts, misbehaving adults. And here the root of all of that is these fables about people who can’t control themselves who succumb to their own weakness. And clearly there’s a strong moral dimension hidden behind this fantastic imagery. It’s not Gomorrah but there is a banality to the fantastic that’s a bit like the banality of the violence in that film.
Your section feels like the most rounded narrative. The king condemns his daughter Violet to a terrible ordeal. Is it a parable about the perils of paternal self-obsession? (Pictured below, Toby Jones with Bebe Cave).
That’s what I was thinking about when I was making it. Everyone goes on about the flea and you go, “the flea is a bit of a McGuffin.” When I think about my daughters growing up, one’s fear for the future means that I tend to become nostalgic about the past. "Don’t change, don’t change." The change that will happen is that your daughter will leave and you yourself will become a child again in old age. There is a reversal in the story. I think it is about paternity and about complacency and about not seeing what is in front of you.
Were you able to draw on your own relationship with your father [the actor Freddie Jones] in any way?
Not directly but when you say it like that I think there is a connection. I think that in his job and in my job you’re often disconnected from your family and you’re coming back in and having to retrieve time to become reconnected with your daughters. And they have their own lives. They’re not daughters, they’re people, and in a sense that’s what she’s fighting for in this film.
There’s been quite a lot of you in the fantasy genre - Captain America, The Hunger Games, Dobby. You were one of the seven dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman and had a role in the spoof Your Highness. Regardless of where you’re filming it, whenever the original material was written, are you occupying a different world and mental space, and are there different requirements to doing fantasy storytelling?
To a piece of naturalism or social realism? I think you spot actors who think there is. I don’t think there is a big difference. In a way your job as an actor is to know what your character wants from the scene, what are your character’s needs, short term and long term, why they’re there, what they desire. Even Dobby, there’s this tremendous heart and desire to serve and you cheapen that by going, “But he’s only a house elf!” The audience loves it if they feel it’s a truthful need that you have. I think there are technical differences. When you work on those big big films like Captain America or Harry Potter it’ll be a scene that you return to over several months, then you reshoot, then you return to it again, dub, redub, it gets re-cut, you do it again. Any initial thought you ever had about it has become compromised by the sheer macro-economics of those franchise. Whereas a film like this, it’s a big-budget film but it’s tiny compared to those films. It’s a hugely ambitious film for Italy. You get one go at it and there isn’t the money for loads of retakes and reshoots. But in both films it’s the same thing. If people like Dobby it’s because they think Dobby’s a person.
You attended the French clowning school, L'Ecole Jacques Lecoq. How much did it help you inhabit that world?
It’s counterintuitive but I think it helps me massively all the time. It’s such a practical concrete training about space, and about breathing and telling stories with breath, not just with words, it’s a visual training, it’s about economy of sign-making. And often in film, it’s understanding the space you’re in and how far away you are from the camera and what the nature of the space is which is effectively a proscenium arch anyway. The further away from the Lecoq I get the more I realise that training has had a profound effect on the way I work on a film set because it just gives you a very quick sense of what you’re doing. Other techniques you use on top of it but it’s just very very practical. It’s about what your body is saying whether you like it or not. Whatever you mouth is saying your body can be saying something totally different or it can be sympathetic or consonant with what you’re saying. There is a sentimental side of me as I get older that goes, "It really was the best decision I ever made," because it’s proved so useful in so many ways, just as an outlook, feeding your curiosity as an actor about what you can use and how you can use it. If you’ve done two years at that school you’re interested for the rest of your life in drama.
You just never know what you’re going to get with you next. Do you know what directors and casting directors are looking for when they want you to play a stressed banker in Capital or Neil Baldwin in Marvellous (pictured below, Jones with Baldwin).
The really honest answer is that if I was to try and answer that it would get me into an area which I really more than anything else try to avoid. As I get older the less clear I am about what I convey… that’s why it’s no use to me to go and look at a monitor after a scene. Because I just see what I always see which is me on a monitor. But they see the character. If I’m doing it properly they see the character. If I see me, I don’t want to see me, I want to see the characters and I won’t see the character, but they see the character.
Is it difficult to watch your work when completed then?
Yes I have to be careful about this because it’s really bordering on cliché, this, about not wanting to watch your work. I don’t get anything from it because I only see what I didn’t do and it never looks like it felt to do.
What didn’t you do in Marvellous? Or did you not watch it?
I did watch that because I was so intrigued to see what he [director Julian Farino] made of what we shot and how he cut it. And also because I’m interested to see the films. Whether I enjoy them or not is a different issue.
It's been announced you're to be chief villain in the new series of Sherlock. Can you say who you are playing?
Can’t say. Very short answer. Not allowed to say. Signed something.
Why was Detectorists (pictured below) so good?
Because Mackenzie Crook didn’t write comedy, he wrote characters. I was dead set against doing it. I was dead set against doing any kind of comedy show, and he said, “I’ve written it for you, but if you don’t like it just be clear.” But it was so clearly written for people like with their mates shooting the breeze, trying to cope with banter.
Is there another one coming?
Having spoken to him I think there might be another one but I don’t think it would be in the same format and I don’t think it would be a movie. But I think there might.
Are you over Capote (Jones pictured below with Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee)?
It was never a problem [giggles]. It was never a problem! It was a problem that was projected onto me by so many interviewers going, “Here’s a good spin.” As I always said, the idea of me playing an iconic American author surrounded by those actors in a lead part when I’d just been doing theatre for 10 years, it was so unlikely, how could I possibly feel disappointed? I think people projected stuff onto it.
You last acted in the theatre five years ago, playing Turner in The Painter. When is your next appearance in the theatre?
I hope it’s soon. I haven’t got anything planned. I’d love to do something in theatre, I really would. I’d love to do some Shakespeare.