FilmInterviewOne Day star Rafe Spall on Anne Hathaway, Ridley Scott and dad Tim
Francesca BabbThe Shadow Line actor plays a luckless loser in the adaptation of One Day but admits he's enjoying a 'golden period'"Someone asked me recently," says Rafe Spall, squinting into the August afternoon sunshine, brow furrowed in earnest, "if I had to 'ugly up' to play the part of Ian in One Day." He pauses, looks at me incredulously, and then guffaws with laughter. "That's just my face! Just me, a wig and a bit of corduroy." It is easy to be believe he had a little help though. As the hapless Ian, the one before The One for Emma Morley in director Lone Scherfig's adaptation of the David Nicholls novel, he is scene-stealingly brilliant. While Jim Sturgess makes a convincing Dexter, and Anne Hathaway – give or take the odd slaughtering of a northern vowel – is a pleasingly palatable Emma, it is Spall, coming up quietly on the outside, who seems like the part was written just for him.
"It's the tragedy of someone who thinks they're funny", Spall, 28, says, sitting on the sidelines of an Ealing sports field, where he is filming the second series of his Channel 4 comedy, Pete Versus Life. "I read the script before I read the book, and as soon as I read it I thought, I want to play that character. Sometimes you go, 'I wish I was playing the main part', but not at all in this case. I really wanted to play Ian. My American agent afterwards was like, 'You know Rafe? I'd love to see you play a winner.' But Ian's the kind of bloke I want to play; I think as English people, we like a loser."
It's also perhaps true that we don't much care for people messing with our favourite books. News of the film was met with predictable controversy, most notably in the casting of the American Hathaway as Emma. "Everyone was like, 'Why is an American girl playing a girl from Yorkshire?'" he says. "But I think Anne is a brilliant actress and Rachel Getting Married is genuinely one of my favourite films, so I was really excited to work with her. She plays against her beauty successfully; she has a vulnerability and it is believable that she's still insecure. That's a clever thing to do. Also, she's a movie star, and it's fun to work with movie stars."
Spall, of course, is not new to the acting game. He is the son of national treasure and Mike Leigh stalwart, Timothy, and his father's influence is ever-present in his conversation. It is not just the weight his name brings that Spall has to be thankful to his father for, but also for giving him his acting tutelage.
'I didn't get in to Rada, so I got my education from watching the TV with my dad, with him shouting at the telly and saying what's shit and what's good'
"I've had a weird confidence, based in nothing, since I was young," he says with the sort of huge, sprawling grin that has enabled him to play both comedy roles, and those of clinical psychopaths. "Maybe it's because my dad was so successful, I always just saw it as being there for the taking. I was crap at school because I knew I was going to leave and become an actor. I knew that I'd be all right. I didn't get in to Rada, so I got my education from watching the TV with my dad, with him shouting at the telly and saying what's shit and what's good."
Did his father ever critique his performances? "Never!" he laughs. "You know when you do a shit drawing of a car when you're a kid and your mum says it's brilliant? It was like that. He's lovely."
He is good company, Rafe Spall. honest and open, unguarded and easy. He's not movie-star handsome, yet believable as a leading man, and proving to be quite the hit with casting directors. "We all love an everyman," he grins. "But you've got to work hard and that's the thing that my father has always instilled in me. You can't get away with not doing it. And I work really, really, really hard. Every audition I get, I agonise over and I put everything I can into it. In this country it's a club, right? It's a small club of working actors. And I've found myself in that club, so that's good. But the thing with acting, and I'm not being fakely humble, but what I'm doing now, there are a hundred other people who could have done the part. The finger somehow landed on me."
Spall's success must also be partly due to his ability to straddle genres and avoid typecasting. He is as convincing as a policeman in He Kills Coppers as he is a violent killer in The Shadow Line, the TV series which seemingly put him on everybody's radar. "That is the thing I'm most proud of," he says. "I was playing a complete psychopath and I decided to really go for it. I know what I like watching in acting – and in no way am I comparing myself to these people – but I love Jack Nicholson and Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis – people who bring it, you know? I think the trend at the moment is very small, introverted acting, and that can be beautiful, but I like actors who stick their head above the water. If you do that, sometimes you can embarrass yourself, or sometimes it can go really well. I think I did both of those things in The Shadow Line, but I stand by it and I'm pleased I did it."
Since joining the National Youth Theatre aged 15, Spall has made his mark across television (The Shadow Line, Desperate Romantics), film (Hot Fuzz, The Scouting Book For Boys) and theatre (he has appeared at the National, the Royal Court and the Donmar). While he vehemently stresses that he will never turn his back on television or theatre, with roles in film coming in constantly, timing might prove to be an issue. Following the release of One Day, come two more mass-market movies. One is Prometheus, Ridley Scott's hugely anticipated prequel to his 1979 Alien, also starring Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba. It is an enormous production; the biggest of Spall's career to date. Then there is Bard conspiracy theory thriller, Anonymous, in which he plays Shakespeare alongside a cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave and David Thewlis. They are impressive parts in impressive movies, and, you sense, a small taster of things to come.
'Doing Prometheus was what you imagine being an actor is like when you're five … in a spacesuit, on another planet, getting killed by an alien'
"It does feel like there's a forward momentum," he says, in his wide south-east London accent. "Things in the last 18 months have picked up, and it's sort of inexplicable. Doing Prometheus was what you imagine being an actor is like when you're five. In a spacesuit, on another planet, getting killed by an alien. It was a real treat, it felt like being a part of movie history. As an actor, you try and be cool, but one of the reasons you become an actor is because you're a film fan. And then you're like, 'Oh my god, Ridley Scott just spoke to me!' I did this screen test for him once before, for a part I didn't get in the end, but I went to his office and it was the most nervous I've ever been. He's got every clapperboard of every film he's ever done, he's got the original Alien spacesuit, and he's got all these stills and photographs of his life, a photo of him and his brother, Tony. I was like, 'This is fucking mental!' And Anonymous was just brilliant, my first taste of doing something with a proper budget. 800 extras! I've been used to doing BBC4 stuff, where an extra will cross the camera, go behind, put a different hat on and walk back across the screen again."
To look at Spall now, on the crest of his wave, it is hard to imagine a time when things weren't quite so rosy. He is happily married to the actress Elize du Toit (most notable for playing Izzy in Hollyoaks – "I remember her being on the front cover of Loaded when I was 17 and being like, how will I ever end up with a woman like that?" he grins), they have a brand-new baby girl, Lena, and he is still extremely close to his parents and two sisters, one a textile designer and one a primary school teacher. But for all the glory that this current time of his life is affording him, he is candid about the way things might have been.
"I used to be about five-and-a-half stone heavier than I am now," he says. "I would play character roles, then I lost all the weight and did this thing called The Chatterley Affair, about the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover for BBC4. That was my first lead part and that was a big changing point for me. Eight sex scenes! My first lead role and I had to take my clothes off, all of my clothes, got my willy out and everything. And because I was scared, I could feel my willy getting smaller and smaller and smaller through the whole take, until by the end of it, there was just nothing left. I could visualise people behind the monitor going, 'It's physically getting smaller!' But [keeping the weight off is] not an easy thing and there's a social taboo about men watching what they eat; there's something distinctly emasculating about being in a restaurant and saying, 'Can I not have potatoes with that?' It gets on my wife's nerves, man. But it made a big difference to my life. I married a beautiful lady and I got a nice little career and I'm doing things that I perhaps wouldn't be doing if I was bigger so I have a fear of putting it back on again."
Nudity and potato-monitoring aside, this is, in essence, a good time for Rafe Spall. "It feels like a golden period," he agrees. "Whatever happens in the future, whether if I 'really make it' or I fail, I don't think anything will ever beat this time. I'll always look back at this time as a really happy time, through a sepia lens. I got married last August, then we got pregnant on our honeymoon, then we just bought this new house, and I'm doing all these exciting things. It's difficult when all these amazing things are going on to be present, but you just have to remind yourself, don't you?"
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