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Douglas Henshall: Devil of a role Intense, confident, eloquent, passionate... Could there be a better person than Douglas Henshall to tackle the master of evil? Mark Kebble meets up with the Primeval star and discovers a man who won't pull any punches . “Let’s not do that.” An awkward silence descends around the Almeida Theatre’s rehearsal room. Douglas Henshall has just knocked down our plans for an exterior photo shoot, citing the fact that a couple of days before he did that with The Times. Spluttering, we slowly gather some composure and a compromise is suggested. Satan is proving as devilish as promised. However, we should be quick to point out that Douglas is anything but difficult. He is simply an actor who doesn’t beat around the bush. He doesn’t give us some prime quotes just for the sake of it, but does prove to be an intelligent, thought-provoking and thoroughly nice chap, clearly passionate about what he does. Currently on stage at the Almeida playing Satan, our ridiculous idea for “red eyes” on the cover is rightly pushed to one side (we all make mistakes) as Douglas explains what we will see in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. “Satan is quite world weary, someone who is just trying to do the best he can.” Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play is certainly an ambitious one. It plays out in an imagined world between Heaven and Hell, re-examining the plight and fate of The New Testament’s most infamous sinner. Throughout the play, figures ranging from Pontius Pilate and Sigmund Freud are called to testify in a trial of “God and the Kingdom of Heaven and Earth versus Judas Iscariot”. Seemingly serious stuff, but it’s actually a darkly humorous play. “I don’t think it’s necessarily controversial,” Douglas responds to our enquiry about upsetting religious types. “Controversy is always a word associated with religion in general. If you make anything that tackles ideas and notions that people have very strict opinions of, then somebody is going to be offended.” Douglas stops, grins and with a twinkle in his eye adds: “If this kind of thing offends people, then you are only offending the people that I like offending!” Douglas is full of praise for the script – “It has something about it that I hadn’t read for a while” – and the way his role was written. “He comes across with a pretty reasonable argument in the play,” he nods appreciatively. “The gates of Heaven are pretty much open and if you want to come and go from there you can, and the gates of Hell are open too, so you can choose to be there or not. I like that idea in the play – you can choose your own destiny depending on how you feel about your life. I like the notion that you have to take part in your own redemption. It has to come from you – it can’t all be up to somebody else.” The N1 resident is delighted to be working round the corner from home on the Almeida stage, but also simply to be a part of theatre in general. “On a personal level, that was where I started. I didn’t begin by going to watch movies – I started by going to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow,” he says in his Scottish drawl, clearly showing that London life hasn’t quite taken him over. “If you were unemployed, you could get in for nothing. I used to sit up with the Gods and watch everything that came on. I feel very at home in the theatre: it’s my house.” It’s also why he won’t hold back when talking about how it’s treated. “The government look at the theatre as a whim,” he states strongly. “They could do with funding us a bit more. Instead we have got an Olympic Games we don’t need and a war that we shouldn’t be in that takes more money than anything else. We have got an NHS that needs more money, plus God knows how many more things that need support. They think theatre will always be here and you don’t need to pay much attention to it. That’s nonsense because, unless it gets attention and is nurtured, it won’t always be here.” Douglas has done some wonderful theatre in his time – appearing in The Cryptogram at the Donmar Warehouse, Death of a Salesman at the Lyric Theatre, and in north London’s Hampstead Theatre for Darwin in Malibu to name a few – but it’s for an ITV Saturday primetime series that his is a recognisable face. We expect this to bother him, but once again we are thrown – he has nothing but great things to say about the dino-drama. “It presses different buttons and you use different muscles, but I enjoy doing both theatre and TV,” he grins broadly. “I really like something like Primeval because I like the diversity of professions that go into making it work. There’s a whole 30 per cent of the show done with CGI, so there’s a whole team of people working on that. Then you have carpenters, electricians and so many other people all working together to create this one thing. It’s a collective effort and I enjoy it because of that.” Sitting in the Almeida’s cold rehearsal space, is this a dose of reality from that fantastical world? “Primeval is not glamorous at all!” he counters with a hearty laugh. “We spend most of our time outside working in all weathers, or working in sewage pump houses because it looks good, but then walk out of it smelling of s**t! You are working long, long hours and I am there pretty much every day, so no it is not a reality check.” He has achieved sex symbol and action hero status in one go with Professor Nick Cutter, and two well-received series implies that the writers and crew have struck gold. “In some way, I am surprised that anything is successful because of the amount of things you have to get right for it to happen,” he considers. “Even if you have done everything you can and come out with a good job, you don’t know if the public is going to take to it or not. There’s always caution. Everyone else could be great, but I could be the one to screw up!” He didn’t and the show was gobbled up by the public, which potentially could kick start a part of Douglas’ life that has fallen by the wayside. “I did have a film career for a while,” he reflects. The late 1990s saw him star in some cracking films – most notably Orphans and This Year’s Love – and he hopes the forthcoming French Film will turn the tide once again. “It will get pegged as a romantic comedy, but it’s quite bitter sweet,” he informs Angel. “Again, I like the questions it asks. What’s your idea of love, what do you think it should be? If this is what you think it is, then have you got it with your partner? If you haven’t, then why have you settled for that?” Not quite the ideal date movie then. “I hope there will be couples sitting in the cinema quite crossed leg about it,” he nods. The film stars Hugh Bonneville, Victoria Hamilton and, er, Eric Cantona. “He plays a French filmmaker and he’s perfect for it,” Douglas says. Did our football loving interviewee get to play a few passes with the French genius? “I didn’t meet him. He was only in for a couple of days and it was probably just as well. I don’t think he particularly enjoys talking about football and I don’t think I could have met him without talking about football!” Douglas heads off for photographs and any initial fears are quickly dispersed. He is a great subject, not difficult at all and a natural in front of the camera. We admit to a strange feeling of disappointment – we wanted evil, a Prince of Darkness that his new role is imagined to be. “It would be a bit boring to do it that way,” he finishes. “If that was the way it had been written – the ultimate bad guy – then I don’t think I would have been that interested. What interests me is that it’s a bit more ambiguous than that, that the things we look to that are supposed to be bad aren’t necessarily all bad, and those who are supposed to be good are very far from that. I want this play to start a conversation when the audience leaves the theatre. If they leave this play and don’t spend the rest of the evening talking about it, then we have failed.” EXTRA, EXTRA… Douglas lets off more steam How would you sum the play up? “It’s quite a spiritual piece of work, and says more about the intrinsic nature of goodness and forgiveness if you like than most things that are said on a pulpit. Forgiveness and tolerance are big things today. If you are going to do a piece of work that in some way tackles the nature of people’s notions of good and bad, then you better be sure that you are saying something not necessarily new, but something interesting. I think this play does that – it tackles quite difficult questions and ideas. I like that a lot.” Who do you think the audience will be? “I don’t know. The play is quite a mixture, so it should appeal to an incredibly broad section of people. I do hope that a good deal of young people come and see it.” Have you done much preparation to take on Satan? “No, no. I started reading The Master and Margarita, the Bulgakov novel [where the Devil visits atheistic Soviet Union], but the idea of Satan in that is far away from how I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to confuse myself, so I put the book down. If you are going to play Jesus Christ, or Judas Iscariot, or Hamlet, I think you have to rely on your own sense of how you think those characters are. It’s up to your own personality.” Is this play perfect for the Almeida stage? “There are an awful lot of classic drama plays here, so I think it’s good to have something like this, which is very modern and up to the minute. I always wanted to work at the Almeida – always. Along with the Donmar Warehouse, they are the two best spaces in London. I much prefer studio spaces to big West End stages because you can see the audience. Working at the Almeida was a big pull, but also working with Rupert Goold [director]. I didn’t know him, but I met him for this and was incredibly intrigued by him.” We mentioned your film career – what do you make of the British industry? “There isn’t one. Everybody talks about the great British film industry, the government comes out with all this bo*****s about it, but there is no such thing. We don’t have the infrastructure to support them. You make these British films and no-one sees them. You can’t get them into the cinemas because they are all owned by American studios, who will tell them ‘you have to have one of our films’. In order to have an industry it has to be self-perpetuating, but ours isn’t. We rely completely on other people. We are a subsidiary of a small branch of the American film industry. That’s how it appears to me.” Angel magazine May 2008 |
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