Quick-Change Artist
By Karen Moline – Elle (July 1988)
“It was my first day and my first scene in any movie, ever, in Hollywood, at night, and I was also having to produce an American accent in front of an American crew,” explains the English actor Alan Rickman, who has gone from mesmerizing Broadway audiences with his devastating portrayal of the sinisterly seductive Vicomte de Valmont in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to starring as a terrorist opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard (due to be released this month). “So maybe I was a little…tense! There was steam blowing in my face and boiling hot water dripping on my ankle and I had to jump down from a ledge to uneven paving stones. Well, on about take 10 or 11 I heard something rip, but it wasn’t my clothes – it was the inside of my knee. This torn cartilage is my souvenir of Hollywood.”
Another souvenir is his new California driver’s license despite the fact that he failed his first test for driving too carefully through a green light. (“I think maybe that is a metaphor,” Rickman says with a laugh.)
Sixteen years ago, at the age of 26, he chucked his work as a graphic artist and summoned the courage to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “I was at that age when you just can’t get past the next bit of your life, so you take an action of some kind,” he says. “Actually all it involved was writing a note, requesting a date for an audition. I still remember the act of putting that envelope in the postbox, thinking, ‘That’s my life; it will change now.’ And it did,”
He hasn’t stopped since. Rickman has appeared in many Shakespearean stage roles, as well as in Thérèse Raquin, Romeo and Juliet, and The Barchester Chronicles on English television. “I think I was in the last generation that realized that when you left drama school, you would go off to repertory for two years and then you get work,” he explains. “That’s all changed. People don’t think they need to do rep; they think you can come out and be a star overnight, like the Brit pack.”
Disqualified by age from packer status, Rickman nonetheless did make the leap from stage to the Twentieth Century Fox lot within 48 hours of his arrival in Los Angeles, when Die Hard producer Joel Silver, who’d seen him in Les Liaisons, and director John McTiernan immediately offered him the part. He is as bemused by this sudden shift in his career as he is about the Hollywood lifestyle: the rented house with the pool and hot tub, and the serious work on the set of a $25 million film.
“Sometimes you have to wait for your face to settle,” Rickman says. “They seem to think that now my face is not going to get any better and that it’s probably not going to get any worse. And since I’d been doing a play for two years, I didn’t want to get on a stage again; I needed some kind of explosion to take it away. Hans, my Die Hard character, is a really good part; bad guys are fun to play, although I don’t want to make a habit of it.”
The greatest challenge he’s faced (aside from fanatics on the Los Angeles freeways) has been to scale down his technique for the intimacy of the lens. “That’s something I was worried about, and John has to remind me, ‘You’re in close-up, Alan, don’t move your head around so much.’ Yet I’m always aware of the camera and it feels like that’s the audience. When I’ve had scenes with Bruce, it’s quite clear that I’m working with somebody who has a great deal of experience with the camera; it’s a great censoring device at work. It’s a question of watch and learn – fast.”
Unlike many actors, Rickman has found that he doesn’t mind the waiting around on set, “because it gives me a chance to keep hold of what I’m doing. I’ve always enjoyed rehearsals more than performances, because you don’t have that huge moment of pressure when you’ve got to commit yourself. Rehearsing is playing; performing is being a grown-up.”
