Paul Rhys Interview About Saltburn Butler and Talleyrand in Napoleon – The Hollywood Reporter

There are many laugh out loud moments Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s darkly comic and voyeuristic exploration of British aristocracy will be released on Friday. Despite the admirable efforts of Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, most of them belong not to the main cast, but to Paul Rhys.

As Duncan, the domineering and terrifying butler, the Welsh actor silently steals scenes from under the candy noses of those he loyally serves at Saltburn Manor (including Pike, Grant, Jacob Elordi and Alison Oliver) and the lower-class interlopers he keeps. Beady eye on Barry Keoghan every time he makes a funny face.

And it’s the face that appears once again in a star-studded headline. In the long-awaited Ridley Scott biopic NapoleonOut November 22, Rhys plays Talleyrand, the wily diplomat who served as the French leader’s political right-hand man when he invaded Europe (and later betrayed him).

For Rhys, it’s a somewhat unusual experience to have such high-profile Hollywood films back to back, with much of his best-known work on stage (he received an Olivier nomination in 1997 for his performance in a production of V. King Lear). But it’s one he fully embraces.

“With Emerald, I would do almost anything, much less Duncan, to be in her movie. And with Ridley, who doesn’t want that experience, he’s one of the greats.” Hollywood Reporter. “Between those two, you have these two bookcases of British genius.”

It’s an experience that the 59-year-old admits could have come much sooner, had he followed the advice of his good friend Tim Roth after their hiatus on the big screen in 1990.

Roth used Robert Altman’s critically acclaimed biopic of Vincent van Gogh Vincent and Theo As a stepping stone to stardom, Reservoir dogs And Pulp Fiction Coming soon. But despite urging Ruth Rees, who played his brother Theo van Gogh on screen, to “never return” to the UK, Rees says he wasn’t particularly interested in all the attention they were getting in Hollywood (there was some early (hopeful Oscar talks) and opportunities suddenly lost at their feet.

“Tim would say, ‘Bridget Fonda’s going to have a pool party this afternoon and we should go,’ but I’d say, ‘I haven’t finished this book yet, I’m going to stay here,'” he recalls. Adding that he considered himself a “theatrical actor who filmed” and that he had to return home to continue working. “So, at the climax of the film, I returned to the National Theater for three years.”

Reese’s career flourished on stage (highlights, along with… King Learincluding toys village At the Old Vic and winning a Critics Circle Award for Standard for calibration) along with a growing body of television work (including parts in Luther, Victoria And recently, Discovery of witches). He continued to get film roles.

almost Vincent and Theo In another famous brother’s performance, he played Sidney Chaplin opposite Robert Downey Jr.’s Charlie in the 1992 Richard Attenborough biopic. Chaplinand later appeared in Alan Bennett 102 Boulevard Haussmann And vice versa Peter O’Toole in Rebecca’s daughters. “And every time there’s a new take, I go right back to the stage and mess it up,” he says. “If I could go back to all this opportunity, I don’t know if it would be wise to leave it and do theater all the time. But you live by your choices.”

But now, more than 30 years after his ill-advised split from Roth and Altman, Reese is back in Hollywood (literally — he flew to Los Angeles for the post-strike premiere). Saltburn). He says that the part almost came to him as if fate had willed it.

Having seen Fennell’s Oscar-winning debut Promising young woman While on the plane, he got off the plane wondering how he was going to be able to meet the up-and-coming director so quickly, let alone work with her. “And then a week later this offer came,” Reese recalls. However, the offer to play Duncan came with a warning from his agent that for actors, this was “the beginning of the end when you’re playing the old butler”.

It was not a deterrent. And Saltburn It proved to be one of the best experiences of his working life.

“I loved every second of shooting the movie,” he says, explaining that he actually lived in a spacious, luxurious house where a lot of people lived. Saltburn It is depicted as a form of method acting to truly embody the butler. “I had Duncan’s room in the actual house.”

Although he comes from a “very working-class background,” Rhys says he became well-equipped to play those from the upper echelons of society, including “Beethoven, Talleyrand, Hamlet or just some toff.” This put him in good stead to step into Duncan’s heavily polished oeuvre, which he says never fully arrived, with Fennell allowing character development and improvisation to build on her carefully crafted ideas for him.

“I asked her if she thought Duncan was the son of the former butler, and she said, ‘Oh no, he was riding his bike one day and I looked at the place and thought, I want a bit of that,'” he recalls. Rees also wrote a biography of Duncan, drawing on his own experiences In this role, he included the experiences of his mother, who he says went into domestic ministry in the Catholic Church when she was only 13. Since childhood, I have had some strange relationships with this world, and I think there was part of it in my understanding of it.

a lot of SaltburnThe Butler-based humor comes from the sudden and comically timed arrival of Duncan’s very stern – and somewhat ghostly – face. He says that when he first saw that face in the show, his immediate thought was: “Jesus Christ, when did this happen?”, and that he had to be reminded that he was playing a character. “You forget and it creeps up on you, slowly through the work you do, the improvisation you do, the homework you do… nothing quite arrives.”

But he credits Fennell’s sharp mind and “insight” for Saltburn’s biggest laugh, when Duncan appears in the middle of a huge party in a spacious estate, not in his usual funeral-like black clothes, but in a huge fancy dress. Harlequin-colored Swiss Guard uniform (definitely un-Duncan uniform).

“I said to Emerald, ‘Don’t you think he’ll dress hard, like Shakespeare, all black and white ruffles?’ And she said, ‘No, Paul, they’re rough.’ They’ll make him dress like that.”

Grant NapoleonSet in the setting of post-revolutionary France, there are a lot of white ruffles on display in this film. Napoleonwhich had already been shot before Saltburn (and almost all of the UK, rather than France), gave Rhys a chance to see master film director Scott in his element. “He’s kind of a phenomenon, in his 80s and running around like a kid. … He has more energy than me.

As it happens, his casting in the role of the conniving politician Talleyrand (who is seen playing diplomatic chess with several of his European counterparts and is never without a caliper on one leg) goes back to the beginning of Rhys’s career, with Rhys saying: “Ridley has known about me since Altman.” .

More than 30 years later, now determined to capitalize on his latest major cinematic moment, Rhys was asking himself what he really wanted to get out of it.

“And I thought, ‘All I want is to work with great filmmakers but the ones I love, that’s all I really want moving forward. So, if it leads to more opportunities like that, I’ll be a really happy person.'” I hope exciting filmmakers realize Interesting that I’m alive.”