When Tom Burke was working on Joanna Hogg’s film The memoryIt was growing increasingly irascible. He was playing Anthony, a charismatic official and educated in Oxbridge with a secret heroin habit that led him to steal and lie to his girlfriend. He is not still sure if his dark mood was the result that the character was leaked in his subconscious or if he was completely not related. “I could have been going through some kind of enormously dark and depressing patch anyway,” he says, “And thank God that the film was there to give me something to put it.” He has wondered in the past if Anthony was, for him, “what Jung calls the shadow, the unconscious personality.”
Anyone who has seen the Hogg movie will know that what was happening for Burke, produced one of the most sorceners of contemporary cinema. He held the horrible and love, destructiveness and creativity in an extremely seductive man. And although “The Shadow” seems to have some relevance for the intensity of what we saw on the screen, it was still an performance, one that launched Burke, then 38, in a new and ambitious phase of his career.
“I sent a text message to David Fincher as soon as The memory He finished and said: ‘I think I just saw your Orson Welles, “says director Steven Soderbergh (Burke was then released MangoA drama about him Kane citizen writer Herman J Mankiewicz). “It was unable to be uninteresting. There are some people who literally do nothing and maintain their attention. Tom seemed to have a kind of innate surveillance that was not aware of himself, in the sense of trying to win the scene. He seemed to be so completely immersed in the character he was playing. You felt you were listening. That is very convincing. ”
“I was hypnotized by him,” says Cate Blanchett, Burke’s co -star, both in the next spy thriller of Soderbergh Black bag and on stage in a production of The seagull That will Barbican This month. “I was desperate, yes, desperate, to work with him.”
Today, Burke is sitting in his publicist’s office in western London, overlooked by a large black and white photograph of Bill Night walking down the street (“Mr Night,” Burke calls him with a brightness in his eyes ). In person, he is very open in his own way, a close listener and eloquent speaker, literary in his references and dryly fun. “I’ve always thought about myself as an expressionist,” he says in a moment. Take your outfit: a white striped vest and unless you had made with punk style tailors Count of Bedlam of “a couple of gigantic pants that I saw in an extra Mosqueteros“, An Iron Maiden shirt and a false coat with leather cuts, also made by Earl of Bedlam. First it apologizes because his outfit is” quite strange “, then attributes it to his morning flight and finally supports him: “It’s not so strange. It is probably the kind of things I would use. “
In The seagullBurke will play novelist Moody Trigorin in a new production led by German director Thomas Ostermeier. Cate Blanchett will play her lover Arkadina and Emma Corrin is Nina, the young actress who falls in love. “I wanted to play Trigorin for a long time,” says Burke. “I think it has a quite busy head,” which “attracts me as an energy.” Enjoy the character’s complicated soul. Trigorin “is sometimes chosen as the villain of the piece,” says Burke with a long exhalation, before deciding: “I don’t feel you get villains in Chekhov. They are all so complex. However, it is good to commit to the dark side, also “.
There is a thread that goes through many of its characters. Burke is often chosen to interpret brain and charismatic men who occupy the doubtful outskirts of moral decency. In the same way, in Black bagIt will appear as a youth and philandering secret agent in a murky plot that involves the Russians and a nuclear hardware piece. The drama develops in a world of delicious houses attached with huge extensions with glass walls and Japanese restaurants without marked. Blanchett has a lot of sliding in silk pajamas. Burke has a strident monologue during a dinner scene where the guests, who work for the Secret Intelligence Service, have received a chana masala with a drug peak that unleashes their base wishes. It was a judicious casting piece. “[Tom] It radiates raw intelligence, “says Soderbergh,” and has a great voice. So I would say that it unfolds better when you play the characters that really know how to talk. “
Burke grew up in a cabin in the Kent field. He is what Soderbergh calls “a second -generation artist”, the only son of actors David Burke, who played Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes adventures In the 1980s, and Anna Calder-Marshall, who played Cordelia with King Lear of Laurence Olivier (both were also unconditional from RSC and Alan Rickman was Burke’s godfather). When I was a child, Burke fought with a severe dyslexia and stayed with a scar of reconstructive surgery for a cleft lip. He was “painfully shy,” he recalls, and it was not until his parents transferred him to a Steiner school, who uses the game as a teaching means, which grew in confidence.
What led him to act as a child is the same as attracts him now. “I think there is something to be seen … It is not being applauded. It’s not just attention. It’s more like being witnessed. It is fragility and going to a particular place and a feeling that is witnessed. I think I had An idea of that. “
After studying in the National Youth TheaterAnd a few months in Dance School studying contemporary and ballet (who have stayed with him: “When I really admire the performances they are very in his body,” he says), made some television roles and then went to the theater school. “I didn’t have the easiest time in Rada“, He recalls.” I felt very lost during most. I remember thinking: there must be some type of unified theory of how all this joins. And I think that is the madness. “
An encounter with the Jacobean theater a term launched it, with Webster’s The white devil. “It was like receiving a kind of delicious party after being on rice and brown water diet,” says Burke. He decided to “let me do what he wants to do”, which allowed him to “recover my imagination.”
After the drama school, a constant flow of television and theater work began, including the thriller series Game state and a production of Macbeth In La Almeida. But he felt a little in the sea in his career during the 20 years. Television work was collected: he played Philandering Dolokhov in the BBC’s War and peace And Princess Margaret lover in The crown – But the significant main roles evaded it. At one point he was rejected by a large part of television because they told him that his face was not right. Playing Cormoran Strike in the adaptation of the BBC of JK Rowling’s crime novels took him closer to being a family name. Was being released in The memoryIn his 30 years, that finally exposed the depth of his talent.
“Tom has a charisma that Anthony also had,” says Hogg in an email of what he saw in him. What she admired in her performance was “a lack of vanity, courage and also questioning, the type of questioning that arises from genuine curiosity instead of fear.”
Burke does not adhere to a particular technique when he approaches roles, but has an arsenal of methods. “I was doing a lot of meisner in Furious Of all things, “he says at a time, referring to the technique that encourages actors to focus on the bodies of the other people who surround them instead of thinking about their own thoughts and feelings. The memory It was very based on the method. In preparation for The seagullHe has been keeping images of the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, who believes he has “some trigorin” about him. “Each job feels very different,” he says about his approach. “I don’t think I decided on one thing or another.”
Burke has the “joy of acting that makes everything more fun,” says Soderbergh. “It makes no sense that it only makes a certain amount of gas in the tank. His attitude is: I love doing this. I will do it all day. I’m here to act. “
Their commitment and enthusiasm are evident in the photographs in these pages, for which it is designed as different stock characters. Despite running with two hours of sleep (he is filming the Amazon Prime series Blade Runner 2099on which he cannot share details and got up to take a flight of the 6 am), Burke launched the people and “really climbed on board,” says the photographer Toby Coulson. True to his attraction for the darkest characters, Burke had the idea of twisting the romantic appearance, so he had a lot of flowers, with the suggestion of bad behavior. “I had the idea that I would suspect,” says Coulson, “as if I had the flowers that had done something wrong” (Coulson encouraged him to take “the smiling route”).
Burke has described himself as “additional” trends in the past. But now he says that he tries to be “stubborn about things like sleep”, and take time to read and walk: around London (“I am a flâneur,” he says, mocking himself gently) and the field, where recently excited.
The theater for him is a space that “is different from everything else in the week.” Remember the first time he experienced a Catholic Mass at his aunt’s funeral, after his own education in the Church of England. “I thought, ‘I like this. This is different. I love that mixture of theater when it has a scale and then the vitality is happening within that. “He goes back to what he learned from the Jacobeans:“ Decadence! I think that decay is a vital ingredient in art, regardless of what That you are doing. ”
The seagull is in the barbican from February 26 to April 5, Barbican.org.uk; Black Bag is in the cinemas of the United Kingdom since March 14
Grooming, Ami Fujita using Nars. Set design, Clarisse d’Arcimoles. Photographer assistant, Ollo Weglin. Stylist Assistant, Susie Lethbridge