To Russia with Love
Douglas Henshall brings his Celtic verve to a Tolstoy classic.
Douglas Henshall is the definitive Flying Scotsman. In the movie If Only he was a wild bachelor who was in such a hurry he dried his underpants in the microwave. In last year’s This Year’s Love the action opened with the dishevelled star being late or his own wedding. The frantic scene was a blatant rip-off of Four Weddings and a Funeral, but Henshall could not be more different to Hugh Grant – defiantly Scottish where Grant is quintessentially English, chunky where Grant is weedy. And Henshall is much sexier, the master of the windswept just-got-out-of-bed look.
Whereas some actors never play themselves, Henshall is happy to accept that his roles are an extension of his own personality:
“They are all me. I never believe that I’m one of those actors who becomes another person. It’s just different facets of me. I’m the frame of reference for everything I do. It’s the only reference I have.”
So there must be a bit of 19th century Russian lurking within the Glasgow-born-33-year-old too. His latest role is in channels 4’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s melodrama Anna Karenina. Henshall plays Levin, a dreamy, bearded idealist who pursues the aristocratic Kitty, played by the stunning Paloma Baeza.
“Princess Kitty is in love with Vronsky (Kevin McKidd), who dumps her for Anna Karenina (Helen McCrory). Paloma is great, she looks like Julia Roberts’ better looking twin sister.”
It is an unconventional adaptation that squeezes the epic novel into four episodes. The first thing you see his Henshall’s bottom, as the broody farmer Levin goes through his naked work-out. His bottom now tastefully covered, the charismatic star is drinking coffee in a swish London hotel bar. Henshall is open and opinionated on the production, which banished the cast to the snowy wastes of Poland for four winter months. Actually a lack of ice meant that the famous skating scene had to be filmed in Finland. It was an episode that particularly amused Henshall: “I can’t skate, so they stuck me on a little trolley and pulled me around while I made kind of whooshing movements, then they cut away to a stunt skater to make me look good.”
The production had a few problems when the original director was replaced, but the period of Polish exile was one of Henshall’s happier foreign assignments: “The Poles were very friendly, the locations were beautiful and I liked the food. I spent three months once in Bratislava and I used to run away to Vienna at weekends to get a steak that wasn’t boiled.”
Henshall is a man of contradictions. He is friendly and likeable, but also outspoken about his work, which is unusual for someone in such a precarious profession. This may be because in a world of Fiennes and Redgraves he does not come from a typical theatrical background. His father worked for a magazine company and his late mother was a nurse. At 18 he applied to study drama at Mountview Drama School in north London. A contemporary there was Nick Moran from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
He is eager to air his views when they are controversial. He was relieved that he did not have to put on a Russian accent or a posh English accent for Levin, who opts out of society and adopts a peasant lifestyle: “I kept my own accent because I thought it was more faithful to somebody of the land. Received English is one of the most banal noises in the universe.”
Levin is another edgy, intense character for Henshall. TV viewers may know him best from last year’s Kid in the Corner, in which he played a father struggling to cope with an autistic son, and Psychos, in which the line between doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital were blurred to the point of non-existence. Henshall seemed to be constantly racing around in these dramas. The Flying Scotsman strikes again Henshall was upset that a second run of Psychos wasn’t commissioned and further upset by press reports that said the drama was inaccurate: “Psychos was so well written, and I had never seen a study of mental illness in a positive light. One in five people suffer from some kind of mental illness, so there are a few people in this room who are either ill or will be. Most TV is formulaic boring nonsense but when I read the scripts for Psychos and Kid in the Corner I thought I had to do these. What binds the characters I play is they tend to be fallible and maybe that’s what I like about people in general. I don’t like perfect people. I just think everybody is flawed; it’s what makes you likeable.”
Henshall is certainly uncompromising, but this might be why he is so compelling on the screen. He does not choose roles lightly. He bridles at the suggestion that offers did not come after Lipstick on Your Collar: “I did a lot of theatre and turned down a lot of television roles playing nondescript nutters. I’ve always been selective, but once you’ve been on TV people think you’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.”
Occasionally a hint of aggression creeps into the interview, particularly when the conversation shifts from the professional to the personal. He does not seem to find my suggestion that he spent his time away growing his hair amusing. “My hair is neither here nor there”, he answers abruptly. Luckily the suggestion that he could turn his hand – or rather his head- to shampoo adds smoothes over his ruffled ego: “David Ginola beat me to it.”
Henshall is a perfectionist who loves to talk about his work, but he is less happy talking about his private life. I ask him how he relaxes. “I cook,” he smiles in a way that also says “that’s all you’re going to get about my private life.”
Abridged from an interview by Bruce Dessau - Daily Express magazine 4th May 2000