By James Mottram
“I have no idea…no idea,” Mark Rylance laughs when asked to account for the extraordinary success that he’s enjoying at the moment. “It feels like I’m on a surfboard on a wave. I can see a little bit of sandy beach over there, but also a lot of rocks. How do you get down off the wave?” In short, the 57-year-old British actor better learn how to surf. Though a longtime titan of the theatre (he’s already the recipient of two Olivier Awards and three Tony Awards), Rylance has now gouged a large foothold in the more internationally popular performing art forms of film and television. His bravura performance as Thomas Cromwell in the acclaimed BBC drama, Wolf Hall, was quickly followed by another stunning turn, this time in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 espionage drama, Bridge Of Spies. His subtle, superbly nuanced turn as Russian spy, Rudolf Abel, saw the actor up on stage at this year’s Academy Awards to accept the Best Supporting Actor gong. It also quickly sent Rylance to the top of his superstar director’s list of favourite actors.
Steven Spielberg has since tapped Rylance to play Pope Pius IX in the historical drama, The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara (set for release in 2017); as well as for a major role in the tech thriller, Ready Player One (to release in 2018). Firstly, however, Rylance is playing the eponymous behemoth in Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much loved novel, The BFG, which received rave reviews at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “We were kind of friendly right from the start,” Rylance says of his new bond with Steven Spielberg. “He’s pretty friendly with everyone actually. When he first handed me the script for The BFG, I thought that he was just asking my opinion of it as a script. I had no idea that he was offering me the part! In that way, I was already assuming a friendship of us talking about films in general. You know, just chatting about scripts and things like that.” Spielberg, meanwhile, has been vocal about his admiration for Rylance, singing the actor’s praises at the film’s press conference at Cannes, and stating that he’d bonded with the veteran Brit more than any other actor in quite some time. “I don’t understand it any more than you do, which makes me a little worried,” Rylance laughs of their newfound connection.
From the writer of Matilda and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and adapted by the late Melissa Mathison, who collaborated with Spielberg on ET, The BFG plays out like a classic fairy tale, but with Roald Dahl’s characteristic sense of the macabre working its way deliciously through the narrative. “I remember being told by a psychiatrist that he had found a union,” Rylance replies when asked about the importance of myth and storytelling. “The patients who were read stories when they were little kids were much better at dealing with trauma and terrible situations than patients who had not read any stories. The thought was that because in the middle of a trauma, if you’re aware of stories, you’d naturally assume that there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that things are changing. But if you have no sense of how things change, then you must feel as if you’re in the middle of the ocean, wondering, ‘How the hell am I going to get out of here?’ The stories that we believe in are crucial. I’m sure that’s why Steven’s a filmmaker, and probably why we tell jokes and make films and sing songs and things like that.”
The storytelling in this case, while classical in tone, was hi-tech in its execution, with Rylance donning motion capture dots for his performance, and then created anew in the computer, with the result being a wonderfully gangly giant with warm, expressive eyes, and equally big, expressive, flappy ears. An outcast in the giant world for refusing to eat children, The BFG eventually befriends an equally lonely human in the form of Ruby Barnhill’s eleven-year-old Sophie. “I found it easier than seeing myself in a film normally, full of my own criticisms of my face and what I do,” the actor laughs of his CGI transformation. “It was quite nice to have all of that stuff removed and just to see it on screen. It was like a very good makeup job…a very expensive makeup job! At times I was very conscious of what my ears were doing. I’d talk with Steven and say, ‘Shall I, at times, de-focus my eyes and imagine that my ears are flapping?’ And there were certain clear moments when I’m cooking, and I hear Sophie at the window and Stephen said, ‘You hear her.’ So I would stand, and just for a moment, I knew that he was doing something there. They developed the ears in post-production. I can’t take credit for the ears, I’m sorry. But I’m thinking about ear enhancement now. It might be an improvement in my acting. I mean, what’s the difference between that and breast enhancement or buttock enhancement? Why are we not getting big ears?”
And speaking of making changes, how is life different now that Mark Rylance is more familiar to Hollywood’s power brokers? “It’s thrilling, but it just means a bit more work, and I’ve got more reading to do,” the actor replies. “I’ve got more things that people want me to consider. And I already had many things in the theatre that I wanted to do anyway, so now I have to make some hard decisions…”
The BFG is released in cinemas on June 30.
