An enigma wrapped in a dark cape
By Mark Naglazas – The West Australian
There is a lot more to veteran stage and screen actor Alan Rickman than playing villains. He spoke to Mark Naglazas.
When I was told that my interview with Alan Rickman would take place only hours after the local critics preview of Die Hard 4.0, I let rip with a little “Yippy-ky-yay, mother”.
Rickman made his big-screen debut playing the hyper-articulate uber-villain Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard flick, giving a performance of such scene-sucking Shakespearean relish that it both made him a star and defined his entire career.
Indeed, Rickman was so good as the terrorist-turned-bank robber who taunted Bruce Willis blue-collar cop John McClane that it has been described as the first of his great movie-stealing turns (a couple of years later, in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, he wiped the Sherwood Forest floor with the hopelessly miscast Kevin Costner).
So, fresh from the successful reignition of the Die Hard franchise, I was excited to chat with Rickman about working with Willis and his characters ranking among movie history’s greatest villains (up there with Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader).
“I don’t want to talk about that, it’s ancient history,” Rickman tells me down the line from his home in London, cutting me down to size with that famously supercilious drawl. Plucking up my courage, like McClane after another bone-shattering beating, I have another shot at getting Rickman to talk about working with Willis on a film that has passed into legend (it was recently voted the greatest action movie of all time). “Just one question, Alan,” I plead. “Thats what they all say,” says Rickman with that signature world-weary sneering sigh. “Then before you know it the whole article is about Die Hard. It’s boring.”
Clearly, Rickman is tired of talking about movies from the last century and his reputation as a big-screen villain. “I’ve only ever played a villain a few times yet it’s all people want to talk about,” he says.
Indeed, the Rickman oeuvre does extend well beyond those villainous roles: winning a legion of female fans in the upscale weepie Truly, Madly, Deeply, bringing gravitas to the role of Eamon de Valera in Michael Collins and showing a real facility for droll comedy in the Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest. However, today Rickman is most keen to talk about Snow Cake, a critically acclaimed small-scale drama in which he plays a man with a dark past whose journey across Canada is interrupted by a car accident which lands him in the home of a high-functioning autistic (Sigourney Weaver).
Its the most ordinary-man role for an actor who, even when not playing villains, tends to get cast as an interesting eccentric – support characters who class up films that are often beneath him.
Rickman says he has never played a character so much like himself. “I enjoy playing someone who is just doing his best. That’s me.”
That downbeat quality, which was used to such glorious effect playing the depressive robot Marvin in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, also wraps around him like one of those dark capes he’s worn many times on stage and screen.
When I suggest to him that his elegant gloominess in films such as Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually has made him a thinking woman’s crumpet, he doesn’t even take it as a compliment. “Well, there you go,” he mutters, as if being lusted after by ladies of a certain age was another of life’s many burdens.
While Rickman’s heart is clearly in indie productions such as Snow Cake and in theatre – he’s constantly returned to the stage since his late blooming as a movie star – the 61-year-old RADA graduate is far from contemptuous of work in blockbusters, most notably as part of the all-class Harry Potter support cast.
“The big films allow you to do the smaller ones,” explains Rickman, who for many Potter fans is Severus Snape. “It is different playgrounds and one of them has more expensive equipment. Its great fun to work on films like Potter. It’s just a different use of your acting brain.”
For his next role Rickman will play a real-life English wine merchant in Paris who used the American bicentennial to hold a blind wine-tasting competition. To the horror of the French, the US wines were deemed superior.
“I get to do lots of research,” says Rickman. Lots of drinking, I suggest. “No, research,” insists Rickman, whose love of wine is so palpable that I’m sure I could hear a cork popping as I hung up the phone.
