By James Mottram & Jeremy Nigro
Jonathan Pryce has established a reputation as something of an everyman over his 44-year career. From starring in indie movies like Listen Up Phillip and the upcoming The White King to mainstream roles in Game Of Thrones and Tomorrow Never Dies, Pryce is also a multi-award winning stage actor, for both plays and musicals. In 2014, Pryce reprised his Tony and Olivier award winning role as The Engineer in the 25th Anniversary Gala Performance of Miss Saigon at The Globe in London. That performance has been captured on film, with limited screenings this week. Pryce opens up about catching up with the original cast 25 years later, what it was like working on a number of his projects, and his first job as an actor.
You said when you came on stage at the end of the 25th anniversary special that this was your first ever musical, which must’ve been a bizarre thing after having done Shakespeare for so long? “I don’t know if it was bizarre, but it was very different. When I was playing Macbeth at Stratford, I went to see Les Miserables, hardly ever having been to a musical in the past. So I went to see Les Miserables purely because Patti LuPone was in it, and we’d done a play together in New York and she was a friend. So I went with a fairly open mind and was completely blown away. I felt the contrast with what I was doing with Macbeth: beating my head against the wall, trying to generate the emotion of the character and the danger and all this stuff. So there I was watching all of these people having an effect on me, and it didn’t seem to be costing them quite so much. I thought that it was something that I’d really like to do. When they were casting Miss Saigon, [director] Nick Hytner said that what they needed for the role of The Engineer was Jonathan Pryce, if only he could sing. [Producer] Cameron Mackintosh said, ‘Well, he can apparently.’ So I met with them, and they sent me the demo tape for Miss Saigon. I recognised immediately from listening to the tape that it was something special and something different and I was very excited by it. It was a huge change for me, an exciting one, from doing straight theatre. It opened up a whole new world for me, and a whole new way of working which I found very valuable, even when I went back to doing Shakespeare.”
What was it like coming back for this 25th anniversary? Was that an incredibly special night? “I wish that they’d given me a bit more notice and I’d have gone on a diet! I was disappointed when I saw myself have to haul out of that Tuk-Tuk. It was great though. I’ve seen Lea Salonga only once or twice in the intervening years, but to see her on stage again and to sing as wonderfully as she sang was wonderful. It was a slightly more mature approach to how she sang when she was 17 when she started, and I still got emotionally involved. It really was great. I watched a bit of the DVD of the performance last night, and I got a lump in my throat. I was glad to get the chance to do it again.”
Do you have strong memories of doing the Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies? “I have strong memories of my disappointments. When I got the role of the villain, I thought that it was going to be fantastic, and that we’d go to some very exotic locations and it’ll all be very glamorous. They all went off to film in Thailand and other places and I, for the entire film, stayed at St. Albans.”
You did get to bring us a very Rupert Murdoch-esque villain. “That’s what really attracted me to the role. It was a villain based in reality. It was about a media mogul who was trying to control the world and especially trying to take over China because he realised that’s where a power base lay. So that was fun, bringing that sort of political reality to Bond.”
How has your time on Game Of Thrones been? “I’ve loved it. I’ve had one of the best times working with some really great directors, and the production of that piece is phenomenal. They do it with three crews all filming at the same time all over the place…it’s incredible.”
Were you a fan before coming onto the show? “Never watched it. I dipped into it before I started it. The beauty of it is that there are so many different storylines, and I came into it creating my own storyline. So if you’re not in a particular world, and not in a particular house, you don’t have to worry so much, and you don’t meet each other. I only meet and work with the people who are in my story. So it never overlaps into Jon Snow or any of those other people. We all met up at the premiere of Season 6 in LA which was great.”
Are you amazed with the phenomenon that it’s become? “It’s ruined my life in that everyone wants to take my photograph now! When I leave the house, I have to think about, ‘Well, do I look like an alcoholic tramp?’ Anyway, it’s great. The fans, because of the nature of who they are, are very happy to see you, and it’s great.”
Is it now the thing that you get recognised for the most? “It’s always been a little game that I play with myself when I get approached by someone on the street. I go, ‘Well, what’s it going to be?’ A lot of it is Bond, and things that have huge followings. But then you’ll get a surprise when someone likes a low budget, small film that you’ve done.”
The White King is another interesting, politically relevant story. Even though it’s set in a future universe, it’s a future that we can all recognise; it’s not so different it seems from what we’re in at the moment. “Of course. You look at this dystopian society that has built barriers and walls and they are kept in, led by this seemingly benign dictatorship of this huge statue where no one knows if he really exists or if he’s a myth generated by the military. They’re fed lies and distortions. I’m not saying that Britain will end up with cities torn down and we’ll become an agrarian society, but it’s an example of how a society is sublimated. At the Q&A in Edinburgh, as a warning, I said, ‘Imagine the statue replaced by Nigel Farage holding aloft a pint of beer.’”
One of your best recent roles was in Listen Up Phillip, where you play a Jewish author called Ike Zimmerman… “I had a great time on that. I really liked the film, and I loved working with Jason Schwartzman. [Writer/director] Alex Ross Perry and I talked over Skype about it and I wanted to do it very much, and I was convinced that he wanted me to do it very much. So we finished the conversation and a couple of days later, he didn’t ask me to do it. I was furious. He’d offered it to another actor, a Jewish actor, and he eventually came back and said, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve rescinded the offer. I’ve always wanted you to play it, but I got waylaid by the thought that it had to be a Jewish actor.’ I said to him, ‘Thirty years ago, I worked with Mel Brooks, who thought I was Jewish. If Mel Brooks thinks I’m Jewish, then it should be good enough for you!’ Anyway, we had a great time. The irony is that he wanted a Jewish actor, but I tend to play a lot of Jewish roles. We tend to play people who aren’t ourselves.”
I didn’t realise that you were in the TV show, Doom Watch. It was your first ever job… do you remember anything about it? “I remember everything about it! It was 1972, and I’d just left RADA. I’d been offered a job in The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, and it was a time of equity quotas. You had to have a job to get a union card and you had to have a union card to get a job. Everyman had dished out their quota of new cards, and Terence Dudley, who produced Doom Watch, had a relationship with RADA, where if there was a young actor who needed a card, the BBC had the wherewithal to give that actor a job and then he could get his card. So that’s why I did Doom Watch, so I could get my card and go to The Everyman to work. I played a policeman on the platform of Ealing Broadway Tube Station. I had to wait while one of the leading actors on Doom Watch got off the tube. I had to approach her and ask if she had come from Hoban, and did she have a deodorant stick in her bag, because there was some kind of trigger device or something in this deodorant stick which had been planted on her and that was it. Because we were filming at the tube, with real people mixed in, the people were like, ‘Oh, they’re filming…who’s here?’ Having just left drama school, I had a sense of self-importance. This is quite glamourous, with people looking. Then we wrapped, and I had to go home on the tube. They couldn’t take me back in the car. I got on the tube, and it was just the contrast that half an hour ago, I was somebody, and now I’m nobody. And you know what? It’s been like that for the last 45 years.”
Miss Saigon: The 25th Anniversary Performance will be in cinemas for a limited time from October 15.
