Rickman has plenty of bottle
12th March 2009
Shereen Low talks to Alan Rickman about his corking new role in Bottle Shock
ALAN Rickman may have more than two decades’ worth of acting experience, but his latest film role took him on a real learning curve.
The London-born actor admits he had to brush up on his shaky wine knowledge to play British sommelier Steven Spurrier in new movie Bottle Shock.
“I didn’t know a lot. I’m just like anyone else who goes out to the wine store to get a bottle of wine for dinner,” he says. “I don’t sit around comparing wines with no relationship to eating, or friends, or functions.
“And it’s taken a while but if I know anything at all, I realise now I do have the guts to send a bottle of wine back, which of course, in teenage years, would never have happened. You would drink this stuff, go ‘cor’, and then carry on drinking it. But if it’s corked, I know what that smells and tastes like and I send it back. That’s about as far as I can go, to be honest.”
It might sound like nice work if you can get it, but Rickman confesses he didn’t get the chance to do any drinking on the job. “It was grape juice on the set,”
he adds.
Bottle Shock, which also stars Bill Pullman as an American vintner, tells the story of events leading up to the 1976 Paris blind wine tasting competition, when Californian wine beat out the French offerings. The event sent shockwaves around the wine world and came to be known as the Judgement of Paris.
The 63-year-old – who has worked on blockbusters like the Harry Potter films, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street – relished working on a smaller-budget, independent movie.
“I read it and kept turning the pages. That’s what it gets down to a lot of the time. Sometimes you have to take a shovel to get the page over. It’s a great story,” he says.
“I had no clue about it (the Judgement Of Paris) actually happening. That was news to me. It was full of rich, diverse characters that you can’t pin down, any of them, and complex relationships in a beautiful place. I was apprehensive at first, but then I knew it was based on somebody else’s script. You just trust sometimes.”
Rickman recalls contacting the real Steven Spurrier when he agreed to the part.
“I spoke to him on the phone, and got his blessing to steal his name. In a way, I’ve just borrowed the name and the circumstance. In no way, I am no impersonation of Steven Spurrier because it wouldn’t really be appropriate.”
The actor is no stranger to playing real life characters – he’s won awards for his portrayals of russian mystic Grigori Rasputin and Irish politician Eamon de Valera.
Rickman says filming Bottle Shock made him more aware of the differences between the English and Americans.
“If Bill were to say to me, ‘you’re quite good’, I would be so insulted by that. But that’s a compliment for an American. To an English person, it’s like saying ‘it’s ok’. There’s a moment in the movie when Bill calls me a snob, and hopefully I sound surprised.
“As an English person, to be called a snob is much, much worse than it is perhaps for an American to use that word. We had a lot of discussion about that line, because I wasn’t sure about it as a piece of writing. But that’s to do with my reaction as an Englishman – that word.
It’s very emotional. That’s a lot to do with being from the upper classes and you don’t get criticised. I tell people I’m a minion, that’s who I am.
“You’re playing something with a class system still, and you’re walking into a country that doesn’t really have one, or at least not in the same way. But it’s something that England still has to deal with.”
One of Rickman’s memorable roles is Severus Snape in Harry Potter, the one topic he won’t speak about.
He says: “Roles kind of pick you in a way. It’s a weird tyranny out there.
And you have to keep looking in the mirror because the roles that picked you five years ago will be discarding you now.
It’s shifting sand.”
