Tolstoy story: An interview with Douglas Henshall
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Douglas Henshall's self-confidence is like a good set of teeth - flashy, unbending and in your face. If there is even a dod of doubt in his mind it is probably cowering behind a frontal lobe lest the rest of his brash brain beat it up for letting the side down. Right now, he is sitting in a hotel in Warsaw ordering vodka and apple juice in Polish, charming the waitress with a foxy smile, gathering an aura of invulnerability around himself in preparation for the ordeal ahead: our interview.
I had read that Henshall hated interviews, but I'd hoped that he just hated the journalists he had met so far. That might be true, but I get the feeling he has added me to his list. He doesn't actually say anything explicit (although there are plenty of expletives) but there is certainly something combative in his manner and in the invective-soaked tone he uses to voice a general desire for privacy. "I can't understand people who pour their heart out to the papers," he grumbles in the super-expressive tonsil-torqueing Glaswegian accent he shares with Billy Connolly. "To me, it's none of your business. If you went up and asked a guy on the street the questions that I get asked, you'd get told to f*ck off. I know I've got to play the game to a degree because it's part and parcel of what I do. But to me it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no that's mine. It's got nothing to do with you. That's mine. I don't know you."
The 32-year-old Scottish actor is in Poland filming a four-part adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for Channel 4. He plays Levin, the troubled noble whose story runs parallel to the adulteress of the title. His co-stars are Kevin McKidd (Trainspotting, Topsy-Turvy) and Helen McCrory (Split Second, Dad Savage), and the director, Harry Bradbeers, is another Scot. Henshall has been here since October, with only two trips back to Britain. Throughout the cold, dark winter months he has been cooped up in the soulless Marriott, where he has been suffering from whatever version of cabin fever you develop in a 42 floor luxury hotel.
We meet in the lobby and take the lift together to a quiet bar with a panoramic view of the city. The skyline is dominated by the nearby Palace of Culture, a monolith which Stalin constructed as a symbol of his power and as an answer to the skyscrapers of capitalism. It's difficult not to be impressed by this outrageous concrete hyperbole, but Henshall is as right-on as they come and says he despises it as a symbol of tyranny.
He's looking bleary-eyed and tense as he settles into his chair, wearing an orange zip-up cardigan over a white V-neck T-shirt with chest hair poking over the top, light blue jeans and black shoes. His hair, as ever, is long and leonine. The beard, which he has had to grow for Anna Karenina, has been trimmed and is much less Rasputin-like. He's been up since five this morning in order to travel an hour and a half into the Polish countryside and be on set in time. In the end, much to his annoyance, the weather meant they were unable to film his scene (in which Levin goes ice skating with Kitty, the girl he has fallen in love with), so he returned to Warsaw where he consoled himself with a munchathon in Pizza Express. "Today was the nadir of bad days," he growls through gritted teeth. "They were going to cut the scene after we couldn't shoot it, so then you say 'No you can't do that because it's one of the most important scenes in the piece'. So there was loads of rowing and all that stuff, but thankfully it's back in there."
Earlier that day, while Henshall disappeared back to Warsaw and the comforts of quattro formaggi, I stayed on set. They shifted locations from an abandoned mansion, where even the stone lions look forlorn, to The Water Palace, a decaying pile perched on a wintery lake and besieged by bedraggled peacocks. It was well below zero and most of the cast and crew were standing around shivering, although McKidd and McCrory were snug in warm Winnebagos. Henshall's stunt double looks as bored as only a small Polish man in a ginger wig and beard can. By tea-time they had only filmed 20 seconds of footage. As Henshall eloquently puts it, back at the hotel: "Filming for four months during the winter in Poland is very f*cking far from glamorous."
Henshall has been learning a thing or two about glamour of late. A string of successful film and television projects - Orphans, This Year's Love, If Only, Psychos, Kid In The Corner - have made him an ubiquitous star. "Someone said that I was in danger of becoming Channel 4's answer to Nick Berry," he harumphs. "That frightened the life out of me." Certainly, he has become the face of sensitive yet tough masculinity and has built up a solid base of female fans attracted to his rugged, sort-of-handsome looks. He even acquired a celebrity girlfriend in the model Sophie Dahl although they have now split up. They met during a Radio 3 production of Romeo And Juliet and went public at the premier of Peter Mullan's Orphans in Glasgow - "I wanted Sophie to see Orphans, even though we knew that people would see us and put two and two together. But if I had worried about the press, if I had denied my emotions, I would have deserved a slap."
He is, however, extremely fame-phobic. He likes living in London because of the anonymity it affords him, and is not at all comfortable with the idea of a ballooning celebrity which means you can download pictures of his penis from the internet for only $12. "I try not to think about it too much because there's no books you can read or lessons to take. It just happens and you have to deal with it as it goes on. I don't want to tempt fate because I know the way it goes: the only reason you get built up is to get knocked down. But I don't think it's nice to be worrying about where you go or what you do, about everything you say and how it's construed, to go for a pee and somebody takes a photo of you."
One interesting thing about fame, I tell him, is the way that certain adjectives attach themselves to the celebrity and can never be shaken off. He agrees, cautiously, to respond to some of the terms which he is now stuck with.
Okay, first off, intense.
"I suppose I can be. That's okay," he blurts, intensely. "But not every day. You can't be intense 24 hours a day. You'd blow up."
Moody?
"Yeah, I am. But when you use the word moody towards actors it usually means smouldering or something. I'm just a moody ****er."
Private?
"Yeah."
Sarcastic?
"It has been known."
Sexy? He likes this one. "Well that's not really for me to comment on," he purrs. "It makes me giggle. I don't get up in the morning and think [camp voice] 'Hi sexy'. Most of the time I just walk into the make-up truck and go 'Oh, help me'. But, no, it's flattering if people think of you that way. You'd be daft not to be flattered."
Sensitive?
"I'm so sensitive," he says in a lisping comedy accent. "I like dogs. I've never hurt a puppy in my life."
Honest?
"To a degree. When I want to be. Selective honesty, shall we say."
Passionate?
"Yeah, I am that," he nods furiously. "I don't mind being associated with that. I think passion's a good thing."
What are you passionate about?
"The things that I love," he says. "I'm passionate about my work. I'm passionate about daft things. I'm passionate about tennis. I could talk about that all day."
Let's not. What is it you love about acting so much?
"The fulfilment that I get out of it. And the feeling of being expressed."
Acting was not always a passion for Henshall, who has never had any screen idols. Born in Barrhead, the son of a nurse and a publishing executive, he originally considered going to art school or becoming a sports journalist but, instead, became involved in a local youth theatre where the acting bug bit - "Initially, I did just sort of fall into acting, but when I fell I fell very far".
He realised he was good at it the first time he made an audience laugh. By 18 he was in London - he still lives in Brixton - and attending Mountview Drama College. In the late Eighties he served time with the Scottish touring company 7:84 and, in 1990, performed a piece adapted from the Ted Hughes poem Crow with Peter Mullan at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. The two became firm friends and, eight years later, Henshall would star in Mullan's directorial debut Orphans. Mullan has described Henshall as the finest actor of his generation.
Henshall followed Crow with a stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company and made the break into TV and film. He was in Angels And Insects with Patsy Kensit ("one of the nicest and most down to earth people I've ever met, but no journalist ever wants to write that") and the 1993 television adaptation of Dennis Potter's Lipstick On Your Collar. This saw him teamed with Ewan McGregor, to whom Henshall is now constantly compared. "Ach, that really p*sses me off," he spits. "Especially as I'm older than him. I try to ignore that because it's a pain."
His breakthrough came in 1997 while he was rehearsing a stage version of David Mamet's American Buffalo. In preparation for the part, which required him to play poker, he nonchalantly went to the casino and won £1200. He blew the lot on a Nicole Farhi coat from Harvey Nicks (he is wearing this draped over his head against the cold when I first meet him on the set in Poland), which impressed the director of If Only so much she gave him the starring role in the film.
His gambling skills came in handy again while filming, of all things, a fantasy flick called Krull The Conqueror in Bratislava. He won £7000 worth of Slovakian money and the local mafia made it clear they were about to kill him. Using the one word of Slovakian at his command - "taxi" - he sped off into the night. Realising that he would be unable to exchange the currency back in Britain, Henshall set himself up as an alternative to the local money-changers. He made enough profit to fly his girlfriend over from Britain and take a trip to Vienna.
The days when Henshall has to supplement his income with gambling and films like Krull The Conqueror are gone. Psychos and Kid In The Corner have made him a staple of television drama, while Orphans established him as an excellent actor. He's extremely proud of Orphans and understandably annoyed at FilmFour, who burned 30 minutes of unseen footage which Mullan had intended to use in a director's cut. "I just find it extraordinary that you can make a mistake and burn 730 reels of film," he says. "To me it's like burning books. You just don't do that."
We finish and he chats candidly once the tape recorder has been switched off, then refuses to let me pay for our drinks. We shake hands and I skip off, feeling quite energised by the encounter. But, on the long ride down in the lift, I begin to suspect that the preceding hour has been just another performance, a charm offensive with one single goal: to get the guy with the intrusive questions out of his face as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Fiery, cold, friendly, rude, open, suspicious, cynical, romantic - this is one actor who will play whatever part he has to in order to prevent anyone really getting their teeth into him. Douglas Henshall puts the act into extraction.
Sunday Herald - 05 March 2000