By Harry Haun
26 Nov 2011
The last time I saw you was at a Roundabout opening. I'd just come from a screening of "Sweeney Todd," where I'd left you gushing a torrent of blood as Judge Turpin. I told you I didn't know you had that much blood in you, and you said, "It's called acting."
Rickman in Seminar. photo by Jeremy Daniel
AR: Well, it wasn't called acting — it was called fake blood, being pumped by three guys off screen. It was in tubes. That movie was a privilege to make, but I associate it with the scariest sentence I've ever heard in my life. We were in a room. There was a piano, a pianist, me — and the door opened, and Stephen Sondheim walked in and said, "O.K., let's hear it."
Your first musical?
AR: No, but the first one with such a kind of spotlight put on it, I suppose. I had to get some training. I had to work with a voice teacher. There were some notes in there that were not in my range so, thank God, a voice teacher was there to get me up there.
Did they have someone dub your voice sometimes, for certain notes? In the movie of Gypsy, Rosalind Russell got a lot of help from Lisa Kirk.
AR: No, no, I'm afraid that was all me in "Sweeney Todd."
It must be wonderful to go into a musical role like that and know "I can do that."
AR: Well, I didn't know. This career is an adventure as much as anything else. There's not anything planned about it — or it seems that way to me — so I had no expectation of suddenly being asked by Tim Burton. Whoever knew that Tim Burton was going to direct a film of Sweeney Todd?
AR: Well, it's a great story, and I have a really complicated and interesting character. Of course, by the time I got to play the last scenes, I had spent ten years watching Daniel Radcliffe grow from 12 to 22. I only shot seven weeks a year, so every year I'd come back, and he had grown a bit, his voice had changed, and he was becoming more and more the young man and not a little boy. In many ways, No Acting Required. At the end, when I'm looking him in the eyes, I have that relationship to play out — in fiction and in reality.
Snape's a great double agent, although you don't get to see that side of him until late. That's as much as I can say, without spoiling anything for some little kid who reads this article and he's on Book Three. You don't want to spoil anything for anyone when they haven't got to the end yet.
I trust it's not giving anything away if I congratulate you on Snape winning the MTV News' "Harry Potter" World Cup as the greatest character in J.K. Rowling's series.
AR: It was a big cup — it was too big to be able to take home — but it was incredibly gratifying to have the young people's approval like that.
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| Rickman and Daniel Radcliffe in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." |
| 2005 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. - Harry Potter Publishing Rights |
Daniel is also your Oscar campaign manager. Did you know he's talking you up for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for your work in the final installment?
AR: Oh, is he? That's very nice. I gotta pay him.
Have you seen him in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying?
AR: I saw him in the first preview. Yeah, I was there cheering him on. He was brilliant.
I didn't know he could do all that musical comedy stuff.
AR: I think he can do almost anything. He's literally one of those people who, if he puts his mind to it, he'll do it. He put his mind to 'O.K., I have to dance' and became as good a dancer as anybody in the chorus. He was with them, completely. Fantastic!
I'm sure you've had more than three Broadway offers in your career.
AR: Yeah, but often you're not free. Having a commitment — even though it was seven weeks a year to "Harry Potter" — is a difficult thing to slide around, especially if you're doing other projects. I was doing Borkman in Dublin before it came to New York and directing the Creditors in England before it came here, so to commit to a potential six-month run in New York is quite hard. We were able to do it with Private Lives because I had just finished 'Harry Potter.' In fact, I was shooting a 'Harry Potter' while I was on stage in the West End with Private Lives. And then, when that finished, I knew I had six months off to come to New York to do it, but it's not easy to organize, that. Now I have finished with the 'Harry Potter' series, and here I am.
Are you doing mostly movies now or stage work in London these days?
AR: I have something to direct next year, I hope, which is a new film. I directed one before — "The Winter Guest" with Emma Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law. And I just finished acting in a film called "Gambit," in London, with Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz. That, I think, comes out next summer. It's a remake [of a Shirley MacLaine-Michael Caine-Herbert Lom thriller of 1966], but the script is by the Coen Brothers so, as you can imagine, "remake" doesn't really describe it. They weren't directing it, so I never saw them on the set. Michael Hoffman directed it. He did the movie that was out recently with Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, "The Last Station." That was his. He did the movie of Midsummer Night's Dream with Kevin Kline. We had a really good time on it.
Do you like going from one medium to another?
AR: Yeah, it makes me feel really lucky. Again, it's an adventure…
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