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With London’s stages closed for much of the pandemic, Mark Rylance, one of the most poignant stage actors and one of Shakespeare’s leading performers, has directed six films.
They have a wide range. A tech billionaire in Adam McKay’s apocalypse satire “Don’t Look Up. “Satan in the upcoming “The Way of the Wind” via Terrence Malick. “Bones”
Rylance also starred in an original and captivating sports film: “The Phantom of the Open” through Craig Roberts, which Sony Pictures Classics opens Friday in theaters. with modest golf skills whose patience at the British Open has earned him the reputation of being the worst golfer in the world. For Rylance, Flitcroft, a kind of folk hero with imperfections, represented irrational dreams and amateur courage.
Rylance has long noticed acting in sporting terms. He compares his own instincts to how a professional football player is attracted to kicking a ball. But golf is not their sport. According to him, grasslands located in densely populated urban spaces deserve to be remodeled into parks. Rylance prefers volleyball, which she plays as a warm-up before the exhibition with her peers to prepare for the improvisations of a play.
“Every performance is about conveying a ball of power between people,” Rylance said in a recent Zoom interview.
And for Rylance, the hustle and bustle of the theater, “a dance with the audience,” he says, has pushed him to the max as an actor. Lately, Rylance finds himself in the midst of a 16-week revival of “Jerusalem,” a pivotal role as Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning play about a standoff between strangers and the government and a excavator that will soon be camping.
On her day off from stage, Rylance in “The Ghost of the Open,” “Jerusalem” and her constantly evolving dates with film.
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AP: You starred in videos before Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” this 2015 film opened a new bankruptcy in cinema for you and raised your profile in Hollywood. How has your relationship with cinema evolved since then?
RYLANCE: For someone who likes to perform in a play where I play for 3 hours and with the actors for five and a half hours, six hours, because there’s a two-hour vocal warm-up, there are some great volleyball games. , there is all the laughter of a social locker room, because I don’t cut myself. It’s such a fun company. While in the cinema, now even more so with COVID, you are locked in a trailer. The better known you become, at least in America, the less confident team members are to talk to you, or even look you in the eye. It’s strange. And you might get a catch, two if you’re lucky. I love watching movies. I love watching movies. Most nights I spend watching something. I’m still finding stuff. Joel Coen just took me to the De Sica movies and this led me to rediscover Sophia Loren, who I had only noticed in English movies. Of course, it’s not her local language, so you have a buffered edition of her. But when you see her in De Sica movies like “Two Women” or “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” she’s still no diamond.
AP: You’ve made six films about the pandemic. Was it so you could keep acting while theaters were closed?
Rylance: Yes, in part. I guess it was available. Plus, it was just a series of scripts I really liked, adding academics looking to make a £15,000 film in Gloucester. I thought, “What is this? Sounds fun. Don’t do anything. ” I think I’m getting better. I still need to do less. I look at (Robert) Mitchum and Steve McQueen and many, many others, many women as well, and I appreciate how little they do, how much they accept as truth with the story. Maybe in Mitchum’s case, he can’t actually give a (rude word) and that can be very useful, actually. This makes you quite magnetic. I can’t do that. I care about the videos I’m in. When I see “The Outfit” or the little pieces I’ve noticed from “Bones,” I need it to do less. I need to have more cards opposite my chest, so as not to play as expressively as I do.
AP: What attracted you to “The Ghost of the Open”?
RYLANCE: Oh, the script. History. The fact that it is a true story. It reminded me a bit of Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who had done a lot to inspire and help others. And there was also a bit of Don Quixote. in it. The way he never accepted other people’s criticism of himself. I would listen to their opinion and then think, “Well, they’ll have to be crazy. I know who I am and I know what I did today. I found it very captivating and idea if I can have a little. I mean, I have some. I am not defeated for seeking to please others, however, I care about criticism, especially if it is correct.
AP: Some may have played Flitcroft as a scoundrel or a scoundrel, but you describe him sincerely.
RYLANCE: Well, go to YouTube and watch it. There’s a glorious morning interview he did and I had to watch it 150 times looking for that: “You can’t be serious. You have to urinate on it. But I can’t find a flaw in his sincerity and self-confidence. “I can’t see a wink or blink to suggest he’s urinating. All actors have their own idiot or indigenous clown. My clown is an honest idiot. It’s anything I have access to that I’ve used. That’s part of what I bring to the team.
AP: Why is he your clown?
RYLANCE: I’m honest and I’m a fool. (Laughter) It’s as undeniable as that. My circle of relatives mocks my stupidity, my honest stupidity. And of my foolish sincerity yet that is the ultimate tragic aspect of my character.
AP: You’ve said that maybe you’d like to go back to Rooster in “Jerusalem” each and every decade. For what?
RYLANCE: I’ve been lucky enough to go back to Hamlet many times in my life. At 16, at 28, at 29, at 30, at 31—it was fast flashbacks—and then back at 40. Gradually, my understanding of Act I decreased and Act V increased. I read about older actors and actresses before there was any filmed acting work. If they attended a function, a work that came naturally to them or touched the pulse of the nation, they relived it. I figured a movie star, like Jimmy Stewart in “A Wonderful Life,” would bring this to life every few years the way we do when we see it at Christmas. I was interested in doing it with “Jerusalem”. There was a small threat that he was tied to his own time. But the state and corporate control of humanity has only gotten worse in the last 10 years, and the public’s thirst for its indigenous soul in its wilderness and its connection to animals and plants and all the things we are undeniably connected to Less than the corporate global and the global a state would like us to depend on proprietary answers to our desires; this scenario is even more powerful now. I’m probably afraid that in 10 years it will be the same, it will be even worse.
AP: Was betting The Rooster back like putting on an old sweater or do you go through your total process?
Rylance: We had five weeks of rehearsal. We had 8 or nine new cast members, and the other people who came back are all different. We are all different. It’s not like a reprint of the movie. This is a live event. It’s like preparing an English football team for a season. You’re not just looking for a plug that can then be used. You have to create it live every night, like Miles Davis and the wonderful jazz artists never played what they played last night. I mean, I’m aware of everything I’ve learned in the last 10 years. In fact, I feel more powerful vocally, physically and psychologically than I did 10 years ago.
AP: Why is that?
RYLANCE: Sadness. Loss. A lot of work, a lot of life. I am now 62 years old. You get older and see more patterns spread and difference between what is and what is not.
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Follow AP film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter. com/jakecoyleAP
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