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Hart To Heart
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Ian Hart's got a confession. He hates the stage. All that poncing about, projecting your voice so the folks in the back row can hear, and pretending you don't notice the fat bald guy in the second row rustling his bag of Taytos. Actually, when he comes to think of it -- and he thinks about it rather a lot -- he doesn't even like acting all that much. He never watches his own films. It makes him miserable. If he's honest -- he's rarely otherwise -- he'd much rather have been a carpenter.
So, erm, but what's he doing playing the part of Lenny in the Gate's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming?
"I don't know," he says ruefully, picking at invisible threads on his jeans. "There's Ian Holm (his co-star). He's just brilliant, he is. I saw him in The Homecoming on television in about 1981, and he was just brilliant. And the other reason is this big bag of fear I've got about the theatre. I thought, if I don't address it, I'll just have to go on living with that fear forever. Anyway it's a great play." He struggles momentarily.
"And," he adds, brightening, "it's a short run. It'll be over in three weeks. And then I'll never, never do it again."
Ian Hart is not your average thespian. He is acerbically witty, disarmingly frank, unfailingly true to his working-class roots. And -- whether he's coming over all Scouse as John Lennon (no less than three times), deadpanning it in a frankly awful romantic comedy, appearing as another craggy face against a bleak northern landscape or playing "manipulating bastard" Lenny in The Homecoming -- he is, almost without exception, brilliant.
He is, as the Guardian recently put it, probably the finest British actor not-quite-to-arrive in the last decade.
And that, folks, is the nub of the issue. Though his CV boasts parts in Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair, Michael Collins, and The Butcher Boy; a role he's justifiably proud of as the young communist David Carr in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom; parts in Wonderland, Liam and Backbeat (John Lennon -- who else?) Ian Hart remains firmly lodged in the wasn't-he-the-guy-who school of acting.
"People keep coming up and asking me for John Simm's autograph," he says cheerily.
The self-lacerating Hart wastes no time in expounding his theory on why he's never graduated to the realm of instantly recognisable. "Well, would you choose me as your romantic lead?" he demands, his idiosyncratic features contorting scarily.
But that's not the whole story. He'll be the first to admit that he's been prone to a few errors of judgement along the way. Like the deeply unfunny Ireland-set romantic comedy, The Closer You Get, which got him into a bit of hot water after he decided to slag it off in a national newspaper -- the weekend before release. "Ah yes, that," he says.
"You know how it is, my head just spills out all over the place. I've no control over what I say. They really should keep me away from the press." He grins wickedly.
Hart admits to suffering from a shoot-himself-in-the-foot habit of making statements to journalists that he then feels forced to undermine, with often frightening results. Like the time he said "I'll never do comedy" months before signing up to The Closer You Get. And, I wave the incriminating clippings under his nose: "I'll never do theatre again?" "Exactly," he grimaces.
But though his judgement has let him down from time to time, he is far from undiscriminating in his choice of roles. "I'll always do something that I think I can learn from, and the reason I'm doing this play is that I really think I can learn from Ian Holm.
"But it's true I haven't yet learned what makes a commercial movie -- then again, who has? You can put the ingredients together, but you won't know until you see it how it all comes together. And even then that's not an indication. I wanted to do that film because I believed in the director (Aileen Ritchie). I could see it had flaws, but I did believe in what she wanted to do. And, like I said, I never choose movies because I think they're going to be commercial. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't. Coca Cola's no better than Pepsi," he says, brandishing his Coke bottle to demonstrate, "yet Coca Cola's the commercial giant. They paid $110 million to put Harry Potter on their labels when the movie comes out. That's the price of the film. Most independent British films cost £4 million or £5 million. And that's just on one of their marketing strategies."
Which brings us to the film that may just turn everything around for Ian Hart.
He has just finished filming Harry Potter in which he plays the part of Professor Quirrell, a wizard ("Put it this way -- in this movie, if you're not a kid, you're a wizard.")
"Making it was just brilliant. Not acting-wise, to be honest, it's neither here nor there really. But just watching the whole thing come together, all the technicians creating this fantasy world. I don't know whether that will translate to the screen, but the sets are the best sets I've ever seen. I'm there watching them build these 30-foot high oak doors in half an hour -- doors that actually work and don't fall of their hinges -- and I'm thinking I can't get someone round to our house to repaint the woodwork."
If there's a lot riding on the success of the film for Ian Hart, he is encouragingly oblivious. "It is the first commercial film I've done, yeah for ages, but it didn't feel like that, to be honest. It just felt like a lot of British actors -- Alan Rickman and Richard Harris and Maggie Smith -- arsing round doing a bit of campery."
He demonstrates 'campery', which appears to involve a lot of deep growling, cape tossing and sword swishing.
"It's completely over the top," he says, settling himself on the sofa and rearranging a grubby runner under his knee.
"Mind you, they're probably going to cut me out. I'm probably talking about a film I'm not even in." (He's only half joking -- he once sat down in a hotel room in Los Angeles to watch a film he'd made two years previously and discovered he wasn't actually in it.)
"It's great fun to do this kind of part though -- I didn't go to drama school, so I never had a chance to do Horatio or Richard the Third or whatever."
Hart took what you might call the unconventional route into acting. Born into the exactly the kind of gritty working-class background he's so adept at recreating, he attended a Catholic school where he became, he says, "a discontented little bastard. I was shit at everything in school, I'd come third at races, but never first. I'd make it to the subs bench, but never onto the football team. The only thing I was ever any good at was arsing around, being a smartarse little bastard. I was one of those dreadful kinds of kids who was vaguely political, had a vague sense of right and wrong. You know what it's like -- you try and argue with the nuns, but you're always going to lose because they've got God on their side."
His first brush with acting came about after a teacher got so fed up with Hart goading the students who were auditioning for the school play that he forced him to get up and read the part himself. He was, predictably, brilliant.
He won a place in drama school at 18, but left after two weeks. He hadn't found anywhere to live and was sick of sleeping rough. After that, there was a variety of odd jobs -- working in a kitchen, on a farm, in a plastics factory, and for a production company making corporate films "about John West salmon and sewage treatments, that kind of thing".
He got odd parts in films and theatre, but the breakthrough really came playing John Lennon in Backbeat in 1993. Since then, though, Hart hasn't been able to shake off the perception that he is the next big thing but one.
The obvious answer is to get on a plane to Los Angeles, but Hart's not countenancing that.
"The problem with Hollywood is that it's just terrified of the uglier side of life. Look at it this way. America's got the largest obese population in the world. Fifty-one per cent of the country is obese. They're making a high school drama -- and in high schools the problem is really, really prevalent. So is the dork a fat kid? No, he's a really good looking kid, who looks just the same as everyone else except they've put a pair of glasses on him and made his hair stick up at the back. So I reckon I've got no place there."
The Harry Potter movie may just change all that for Hart, but in the meantime there's another project he's visibly more excited about. He is lined up to play Brian Keenan in the film of An Evil Cradling, the story of Keenan's four-year imprisonment in Beirut. It's not likely to be a commercial project -- it still hasn't even been financed -- but that's not why Hart's doing it.
'I think it's a remarkable story. He's given it to a first-time director as well. It'll be a big risk. It's a big risk from Brian. He could have gone and got it made in Hollywood with Brad Pitt or whatever, but they'd have changed the whole thing. They'd have to have them escape or something. Or the US turn up and kill them all. I can see the sense in what he's doing. He's entrusting it to someone who actually believes in it. I respect that."
So am I to gather we're not likely to open Hello and find Ian Hart and family welcoming us into their beautiful Beverly Hills home any time soon?
"God no. Though I'd love to work there -- there's some great films that come out of Hollywood. I mean, Ang Lee works there. And there are some great people over there. But if you're a character actor and you're British you're not going to get a look in. Tim Roth and Gary Oldman went over there to live and it was 12 months before anyone would even see them. I haven't got that in me. Anyway it's a shitty city. The architecture's awful, the weather's poor and it's too hot. I couldn't live there."
He sits back, triumphant for all of -- oh, three seconds.
"Oh shit," he says. "You know what's going to happen now, don't you? I'm going to have to go and undermine that too. Can't go around making bald statements like that. Honey," he says, pulling his shoulders up, "we're going to LA."
The Homecoming runs at the Gate until June 30, before it moves to New York where it will take part in the Pinter festival.
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As Unknown