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Ian Hart: Lightning Conductor
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Our finest film star who never quite was, swaps Lennon for Beethoven in the BBC’s Eroica. Stephen Dalton met him.
Ian Hart’s internal motor is running at full speed.Buzz buzz, zoom zoom, his hyperactive brain overflowing with words and ideas, careening across conversational topics like an ice skater. Politics, rock’n’roll, Harry Potter, goat farming, Noam Chomsky, sociology, Paul Weller — zoom zoom, buzz buzz. As he pinballs between fragmented sentences and fast-forward punchlines, it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
We’re in a North London café, around the corner from the suburban home Hart shares with his long-term girlfriend and two young children. A brisk stroll from here is the Highgate mansion where he filmed his latest prestige TV role, as Beethoven in Simon Cellam Jones’s BBC production of Eroica, an innovative blend of period docudrama and real-time orchestral performance. Highgate? Not Vienna, then? “It’s the house they use in Fame Academy,” Hart grins. “Ten minutes to work in the morning.” We make a deal. The first person to mention John Lennon during the conversation picks up the drinks tab at the end. Hart agrees readily, with an eagerness that suggests he might equally have accepted a wager to run through traffic blindfolded, or pin a tail on an angry pig. Buzz buzz, zoom zoom.
Lennon may be banished from our interview, but Eroica viewers are bound to draw comparisons between Beethoven and the late Beatle. Two maverick musical icons, separated by centuries, but united in the pantheon of prickly genius. Hart draws a different parallel, with the Beach Boy Brian Wilson in his most inventively demented period, recording the groundbreaking 1966 album Pet Sounds. “My pitch when I went to the meeting was Brian Wilson,” Hart nods. “Going mad, going deaf, losing the plot in an attempt to try and change something. Because the Eroica symphony was a huge project that had never been done before, putting sounds together that weren’t meant to be together. Loads of things that are very similar to Brian Wilson. I thought it all tied in nicely.”
Hart’s physical transformation into Beethoven involved more than simply donning a wildly dishevelled hairpiece. Although a slight figure in real life, the actor lowered his centre of gravity and slumped forward to suggest the composer’s imposing bulk, and honed that famously thundery scowl to perfection. He also took rudimentary lessons in conducting, but admits that even learning the basics would have required years, not weeks.
“I was a phoney, man! A complete fake,” he laughs. “I could have killed myself about it and been upset — why can’t I conduct in a week? But there’s no point in that, so I just got a lot of help from people.”
Eroica may be light years removed from most of Hart’s previous roles, but simmering intensity is the common link. His savagely sarcastic Lennon in The Hours and Times (1991), his sociopathic loner in David Kane’s bittersweet romantic comedy This Year’s Love (1999), his deadbeat Scouse dad in Michael Winterbottom’s sublime ensemble piece Wonderland (1999), even his taciturn Doctor Watson in last year’s serious-minded BBC adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles — all share an edgy, volatile, wounded quality. All are outsiders. Hart works well with such extremes. He played a fiery communist volunteer in Ken Loach’s Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom (1995), and an embittered fascist for the Jimmy McGovern-penned Liam in 2000.
The Loach role remains a personal favourite, perhaps because Hart grew up in a heavily politicised working-class household with a communist car worker for a father. Did some of that fighting spirit rub off on him? “I don’t remember any kind of conversation about it,” he shrugs. “But there was just a general feeling during the 1970s, with three-day weeks and blackouts and all of that, an understanding of the inequality in society. It wasn’t expressed or defined, but I remember people being on strike, and getting a general idea of what unionisation was about, and why it was right.”
Despite attending CND marches and Troops Out marches in his youth, Hart never joined any political movement. A working-class hero is something to be, as somebody once sang. But unlike some actors, the 39-year-old Liverpool native does not wear his council estate roots as a badge of pride. “I can’t, can I? Not by my sociology lecturer’s definition of a class system. One of the parents of my kids went to university — no, I’ve got no chance of getting back in there. But I don’t think it’s a necessity to define yourself. I haven’t got any parameters about how the working class should be.There are always people who are going to assume things about you. Leave that to them.”
Many of Hart’s recent roles have been character parts, not leading men. He does not make this distinction himself, merely between satisfying and unsatisfying work. But it still seems an absurd waste, all that screen-scorching intensity relegated to the sidelines. There are no good scripts around,” he protests. “And when there are no scripts around, Brad Pitt does things that you would have done. You’re miles away, career wise. When there are only four good scripts, guess who gets to do them? And if they’re set in f****** Ipswich, they just adapt them.”
Hart is the first to admit that he is no Brad Pitt, but in reality he is more a victim of economics than looks, caught between Britain’s underfunded film industry and Hollywood’s understandable obsession with an actor’s box office track record. All the same, he has carried charismatic leading roles in the past. “That requires directors who can see me for something else,” he says. “If they wish to make you handsome, you can be handsome. It depends what light you’re in, and make-up, and a lovely wig. Anyone can be handsome — it’s an attitude, a style of representation. But it’s up to other people to make that decision.”
Hart speaks frankly about feeling disappointed with his recent career path. With unusual candour, he admits that the most he has ever earned for a part was £85,000, for his six-month stint on the Harry Potter films. Hardly a fortune by blockbuster standards, but still a staggering six times his one-off payment for Backbeat (as Lennon again) a decade ago. He still has an American agent and has dabbled in Hollywood, but made the decision not to relocate to Los Angeles and audition for endless mediocre roles. “I had the balls to do it, but not to stay in town long enough until something decent came along,” he says. “I missed home.”
He still regularly turns down weak scripts, and even declined a potential star-making role in The Full Monty. No regrets, he insists. “I'd have made it a different film, it wouldn’t have been a success,” Hart shrugs, half joking. “I'd have taken out the comedy.” Despite his self-deprecating pessimism, interesting offers still come Hart’s way. Besides Eroica he recently shot roles in Cheeky, the directing debut of the actor David Thewlis, and in Ripley Under Ground, a new Patricia Highsmith adaptation from the director Roger Spottiswoode. But if acting dried up completely, Hart insists he would still work on films.
“If I couldn’t act tomorrow, I'd go back and get a traineeship in the sound department,” he nods, sinking the last of his beer. “I wouldn’t stop working in the film industry — I mean, it’s all I know. I'm unemployable!” Underemployed, perhaps. But unemployable? Not if Britain had a film industry worthy of the name. We could argue this all afternoon, but Hart’s already on his feet, motor revving. He marches me to the bus stop, leaves me with a vigorous handshake and bounds off back into suburbia. Buzz buzz, zoom zoom, and he’s gone. Neither of us mentioned John Lennon all afternoon. But Hart still insisted on paying the bill.
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As Unknown