Tobias Menzies: ‘When I hear actors talking about range, it’s not something I necessarily relate to’
The star of ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Catastrophe’ and ‘The Crown’ is leading a new play inspired by ‘Antigone’. He tells Ellie Harrison about the importance of theatre in an increasingly digital world, wanting to have a tougher exterior, and filming with Brad Pitt.
In acting, sometimes less is more. Tobias Menzies is from the school that favours restraint. He won an Emmy for his understated portrayal of a weary and frustrated Prince Philip in The Crown, and managed to keep the straightest of faces as Sharon Horgan’s gynaecologist in her filthy sitcom Catastrophe. He’s a master at conveying emotion with barely a twitch, as a self-conscious therapist in the tender indie You Hurt My Feelings, or playing Aisling Bea’s awkward love interest in her comedy This Way Up. “I like roles where the inside is bigger than the outside,” he says. “I’m drawn to interiority.”
Menzies turned 50 earlier this year – “I don’t love the number, I’d rather it started with a four” – and he’s been on stage and screen for 26 of those years. His face feels very familiar when we meet in a back office in the labyrinthine corridors of the National Theatre: the square British jaw, the long vertical creases down each cheek – but up close you can see his brown eyes are marked by speckles. I’m trying to break through his restraint, and throughout our conversation, a couple of laughs do trickle out. At one point, he reminisces on having his Crown co-star Helena Bonham Carter for a housemate, after she took him under her wing while his place was being renovated – “Er yes, she does wash up!” he chuckles. But mostly he is measured, contemplative; a tough nut to crack.
It’s an unseasonably hot day in September, and Menzies is on a break from rehearsing his new play, The Other Place, inspired by Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old drama Antigone. This Ancient Greek tragedy, with its central moral dilemma of individual conscience versus power and authority, has exerted an incalculable influence on Western drama. Playwright after playwright has reimagined the tale of the uncompromising heroine who rebels against the wishes of new Theban king Creon, by seeking to honour her wronged brother – killed in a civil war while attempting to reassert his right to share the throne.
In this starry production, Menzies is Uncle Chris – whom one might equate to Sophocles’s cruel, unbending Creon – while House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy is his niece Annie (Antigone) and Saltburn’s Alison Oliver her sister Issy (based on Ismene). It’s not the only Greek tragedy being updated in the West End this autumn either. Robert Icke’s Oedipus, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, will be at the Old Vic. At the National, the modern setting is a suburban family home (with Foals’ Yannis Philippakis composing the music). Uncle Chris is getting on with remodelling the house, a year after the death of the sisters’ father. Annie’s sudden arrival, after years of absence, threatens to fracture everything.
The cast have been workshopping the play with writer Alexander Zeldin for almost a year, with the scripts ever-changing as rehearsals continue. “We do a lot of improvisation, and Alex will use that in his writing,” says Menzies. “So the style will be hyper-naturalistic, and there’s quite a bit of me in there, by nature of the way that we’re building it.”
We speak only a week before the play’s opening night, but he still can’t be certain what kind of performance he will give. “At the heart of it, Chris is a man who’s trying to outrun his fate,” he says. “There is a lot of suppression going on psychologically.”
Whether by accident or design, Menzies keeps landing parts in projects with huge, committed fandoms. He was Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones, the groom at the infamous “Red Wedding”. Then came historical fantasy Outlander; and finally The Crown. He played Philip in its middle seasons, set between the Sixties and Eighties, when the royal consort was suffering from midlife discontent. Menzies, who passed on the mantle to Jonathan Pryce, has empathy for the actors who starred in the later seasons and constantly had to defend the show from claims of historical inaccuracy. “We had the easier job of it,” he says. “It is an act of drama, you know, it’s not documentary, and I think for the first few seasons we had a helpful veil…[truncated]