By Harry Haun
26 Oct 2011

	Vanessa Redgrave and Rhys Ifans in "Anonymous."
	photo by Reiner Bajo – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

Was the controversy what drew them into the project? Ifans has a fast "no" to that, then teasingly reconsiders. "Well, I guess there was a kind of tinge of subversive pleasure, but no. It was just a great story. It's a political thriller. It's a mystery. It's just a great story in the same way that Shakespeare, whoever he may be, toyed and twisted history to reveal the truth. This does, as well. It's a kind of theatrical device."

Richardson seconds that, pointing out that the film "Shakespeare in Love" also "caused a controversy, and there are all sorts of fudging of historical details in that, but no one got upset. Now, they're picking on every single detail [in "Anonymous"]. It's a story about that time, as 'Shakespeare in Love' was a story about that time."

Fact and fiction often blur, they mutually concur, with Ifans adding the corker: "The glorious threesome — fact, fiction and truth — sleep and roll around in the same bed."

Regardless of who wrote Shakespeare, the two actors have made a pretty decent living performing him, and some plays resonate more with them than others do.

"I haven't played Hamlet, but I have studied it and worked on it in various shapes and forms, and I think Hamlet, in particular, isn't a character," proffers Ifans. "That's why he's so appealing to play. It's a state of mind, and the way Shakespeare speaks of loss and grief 500 years before Freud personified it is extraordinary. That's why that role is revisited so often. With Hamlet, you can only apply all of you to make it work. With other characters, there are signals or messages in the play that might form who that character is, but Hamlet is very much a state of mind.

"I think the play that intrigues me most now, as a youngish man, is the part that I couldn't possibly play right now, which is King Lear, but I hope I will grow old and graceful and strong and brave enough to get my teeth into it one day."

	Joely Richardson in "Anonymous."
	photo by Reiner Bajo – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

Richardson has her favorite Shakespeares as well, starting with A Midsummer Night's Dream, "just because it was the first one I ever did — I've done it a few times, doing all sorts of parts — and it's a coincidence that's what starts our film. For any of us who have been in love, the idea that someone sprinkles some weird potion on your eyes and you see everything differently, then they take the potion away and you're, like, 'What was I thinking?' It feels like life, right? I love it for that.

"For some reason, I love Twelfth Night — the idea of mixed identities, a theme throughout all of his plays. The whole merging of the sexes I find really interesting. And last night I was reading The Tempest and thinking about Prospero. They say whoever Shakespeare was, that was him saying goodbye to the world and moving on, and I find that profoundly moving. So maybe those are my top three."

As stage-trained actors, Ifans and Richardson were surprised, if not unnerved, by Emmerich's method of throwing them into scenes without rehearsal. "It was like jumping out of an airplane and landing in Elizabethan England," Ifans admits. "I'll be honest: there was zero rehearsal time. I think that's a testament to Roland's casting. In saying that, though, the live theatre pieces you see in the film were assembled several weeks before we started shooting so the theatre stuff was well rehearsed."

Punctuating the story proper are sequences in which Shakespeare is performed for the first time. "Because Roland was going to be busy placing cameras and directing the bigger picture, he hired Tamara Harvey to kinda cast this acting troupe and then put together these stage plays," recalls screenwriter Orloff. "She came to me once and said, 'Oh, John, I can't believe I have to stage Macbeth with the three witches. It's been seen a million times before.' I said, 'But, Tamara, not to this audience. This is where the cliché is made. It is not a cliché yet, and the excitement is in this audience — the fear of the witches or playing Julius Caesar not in fascist costumes as Orson Welles did — but to have that immediate first-time experience of never seeing it before.' And it did liberate her. I could see her eyes get excited."

	Vanessa Redgrave in "Anonymous."
	photo by Reiner Bajo – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

Her work carried Emmerich to another level. "I was inspired about what Tamara did, then I put up my camera," the director said. "I always had run-throughs before. The first time I saw it, I was like a little kid. I thought, 'I'll shoot theatre like it was never been shot before — from all angles — because it was a very immersive way to shoot theatre. It's not like 'there's the audience' and 'there's the stage.' You can go above, you can go behind. These theatre scenes lend themselves to doing all these different angles."

Orloff was likewise impressed with these scenes. "One of the things I really loved about the movie was seeing how Shakespearean drama was presented in the 16th century, how the actors would leave the stage and go into the audience," he says. "The audience was part of the performance, literally. There's that moment in the movie when Henry V is doing the St. Crispin's Day speech — y'know, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers' — and he kneels down, and everybody in the audience reach out to him. That was undirected and unscripted. They just did it."

It helped that some of these sequences were performed by Mark Rylance, who has already accumulated a couple of Tonys without ever showing Broadway his classical side. (It leans toward legendary in England.) "I'm a great, great admirer of him anyway, and it was such a thrill to meet him," admits Emmerich. "I just have never met a friendlier, nicer, more soft-spoken, intelligent man as Mark Rylance. We went two or three times for dinner, just to chat about things. He wanted to tell me a couple of things he found. I also asked him at one point, 'Can you help us?' — and he said 'Anytime.' And he helped us quite a lot — for example, finding Tamara."

Which leaves Orloff with one last nail to drive in: "Mark was the artistic director of The Globe for ten years and doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote the plays. The guy who ran The Globe theatre for a decade doesn't think Shakespeare wrote the plays."

The defense rests, for now . . .

Harry Haun is a longtime staff writer for Playbill magazine. He pens Playbill.com's popular Playbill On Opening Night column.