INTERVIEW: Renowned actor - and Mad Men star - Jared Harris on his return to Stratford to play Claudius in Hamlet
Consummate actor Jared Harris has returned to the RSC, where he started 36 years ago, to play Claudius in Rupert Goold’s epic ocean-bound thriller Hamlet. He talks to Gill Sutherland about his return, his amazing parents and career to date.
Born in London to actor parents Richard Harris and Elizabeth Rees-Williams, Jared Harris, 63, is known for his TV roles in Mad Men, The Crown, The Terror and Chernobyl, which won him a Bafta in 2020. He's also appeared in films I Shot Andy Warhol, Two of Us, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Lincoln, Reawakening, and Dead Man. He’s returned to the RSC after 36 years to play Claudius in Rupert Goold’s production of Hamlet which runs until 29th March. One of three brothers, Jared lives with his wife Allegra in the States.
When Herald Arts meets with the actor, just ahead of Hamlet’s press night, he proves a charming and open conversationalist. No subject is off the table – except the Titanic theme of the production – he’s generous with his time, witty, sharp and happy to continue our chat over a drink at the Dirty Duck at some point in the future. Readers, you’d all really like him.
You were first at the RSC in 1989, what are your memories of that time?
Kind of idyllic, I used to describe it afterwards to people as Disneyland for actors. You get to rehearse a great play during the day and then do a different one in the evening. And you have this camaraderie and drink wine by the banks of the river Avon into the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes you'd run into people who’d seen the show and chat to them about it. There was a guy called Rob Heyland who lived nearby, he was playing the Prince in Romeo and Juliet. So he used to pile into the back of his station wagon and go and play pool and ping pong and dance until the sun came up. It was great fun.
You played Fortinbras in Hamlet that season, tell us about that.
It was Mark Rylance's Hamlet and Romeo. After those first two plays I did Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman, which is not often done but was a success. Then A Clockwork Orange, with Phil Daniels, he was crazy wild.Mark was incredibly dedicated. It was an intentionally alternative Hamlet – and was literally off kilter, with the set skewed.It was the famous ‘pyjama Hamlet’, with Mark wearing bedclothes. The critics got upset about the pyjamas, and we didn't get good reviews from the broadsheets. Word had gone around the company and there was a sort of slightly despondent feeling because it was a fantastic production. Mark called a company meeting, and we all piled up outside his dressing room, he stood on a chair and he said, “I know a lot of you don't read reviews but you would have heard by now from other people that they weren't good but we're doing this play anyway – there are a thousand people who are coming here tonight, and our job is to convince those thousand people never to bother to read a review again.”And he was right, by the time we got to London, it was sold out, the audiences loved it. They were standing on their feet at the end of it, they adored him.
That's interesting,that the opinion of the critics being wrong and it was the people's votes that mattered ultimately.
That said, the younger generation of critics, Time Out and stuff like that, got it and immediately said, this is the Hamlet of decade without question. It was 1990. They understood it immediately.
Do you pay any heed of critics?
I don't read them until I've finished. And then I'll have a look at some of them. The good ones are never good enough, and the bad ones you never forget. So what's the point?
Looking back at that era, you weren’t long out of drama school, do you think you've changed as an actor or person?
I hope so. It's a pretty stupid life if you haven't. It's very hard to put your finger on that because it's such a weird, mysterious thing, putting on a play.We were talking just the other day about trying to find the show. You really nail it one night, you’ve found something. Then the next night it sort of slips through your fingers, and it's not because you're not trying or doing anything massively different. It's such an ethereal thing. It's like alchemy – something happens when the show meets the audience, who are the last member of the company.
You’ve been mainly on screen for a while, what brought you back to the stage?
This is my second play in 15 years. I wanted to do another play, and I like the idea of doing Shakespeare. I haven't done it in a long time. And I liked the idea of coming back here to the RSC.I'll tell you what it was that very specifically that made me want to come back to the stage. I signed up to do this television show and then discovered that I'd not been told the truth about the role. Then you're in a bit of a pickle at that point. And I just wanted to know what my story was. So with a play, you read it, you have the whole story, you know what your part is. You're not going to be some nasty surprise where you're dead in episode two or something. I liked the idea of being in control of my own edit as well. So I'm telling the version of the story that I believe in.And no the TV show was not Mad Men, which was an incredible experience, with a great company of actors.
You yourself played Hamlet (at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in 2001). Did you come to this with a preconceived idea or do you come fully open to embracing a new vision?
I asked Rupert [Goold] what the vision was, and of course directors will never tell you the answer to that question, even though they have to know because the design's been in process for months and months.So he didn’t tell me anything at all, really, but he had an edit and once I’d read that then of course I had an idea of where he was headed. Then I just tried to decide whether or not I thought there was anything interesting in me in playing Claudius.I sort of found a hook and then talked to Rupert about it. And he was curious enough about my thoughts that we both went, yeah, OK, let's do it.
Why Claudius? What’s he about?
The terrible thing to do is to start talking about it… It's interesting if you look at the dumb show and then there's the actual play itself. The dumb show doesn't end with the poisoning, it ends with the wooing of the queen after the poisoning. For him, it's all about her.[Quoting Claudius] “Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition and my Queen” – I think of those three the Queen was most important.
That’s interesting because he’s often described as a manipulative psychopath, but here he’s ruled by love.
I think it's kind of boring to paint a psychopath. There was a period of time when everything was about serial killers and psychopaths.
Can you speak about the setting of Hamlet, which has been much commented on?
Rupert wants people to discover it themselves. Even though after press night, it will be out there.
Is it the Titanic?
I can neither confirm nor deny [laughs].
Rupert’s renowned for his interesting settings – The Tempest in the Arctic, for example. What does those choices lend productions?
Directors will have a frame that they want to tell the story through, sometimes a bold frame. Like I went to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Sienna Miller and the whole thing is set in their bedroom; or [Goold’s] Macbeth in the morgue, with the three witches as corpses that were inside body bags and they suddenly popped up. It was really shocking.It’s a frame for it to be seen through, rather than just provide settings for each scene.
There’s much power play in the world of politics at the moment – Putin and Trump, etc. Is that reflected in this Hamlet at all?
It's funny because I've never really thought of this play as being particularly political, it's more of a domestic family story. I think the reason why it endures so much is because it's a main character essentially meditating beautifully on something that we all have in common, isn't it? Like our mortality, and coming face to face with it. There's a reason why he’s famously pictured staring at a skull, that's essentially the theme of the whole piece.
I wanted to ask you about the influence of your actorly parents – theatre must have featured prominently growing up?
Theatre was much more of a passion for my mother. It wasn’t until my father took over Camelot from Richard Burton that he got his theatre muscle back. After that the Pirandello Henry IV came up [in 1990], and he had the confidence to do that. They were talking about him doing Lear, Julius Caesar and a whole bunch of stuff. But after he didn’t win the Oscar [he was nominated for The Field in 1990], he'd lost his confidence again to do it. Which was a great pity. I think he would have been magnificent. His personality was such that he always had to temper it down for the camera He could walk out into a room, which is essentially what a theatre is, and he'd just occupy the entire space. And it was sort of better suited for him in a way, not that he wasn’t a brilliant screen actor, but he was having to sort of pull back on the reins, whereas he could let loose when he was on stage. He would talk about performances a lot and act them out – moments in Paul Schofield's Hamlet or Olivier's Titus Andronicus.
Did you and your brothers get masterclasses in the living room at home?
Mostly at dinner tables. Sometimes in the middle of restaurants, with everyone watching. It used to really annoy my older brother, but I loved it. But really it was my mother who took us to the theatre.
What can you remember seeing with her?
The very first thing that she took us to, other than pantomime, was a play called Give A Dog A Bone or something. The main character was an actor dressed up as a dog with a waggy tail, and there was something that he had to find in the locker at Victoria Station, and I just kept on leaping up and going, it's in the locker! And eventually the poor actor said, “I know, but I'm not supposed to find it until act three.” The first proper play we saw was The Comedians.
How amazing to have such incredible parents, has there been a weight of expectation with that lineage?
From them, it was almost the opposite. I was very shy. My younger brother was much more gregarious, and he's a wonderful actor. My older brother's always wanted to be a director.I was the middle child, so I was always fighting my corner. They thought, well he's always arguing he could be a lawyer. I didn't want to be. I left and fled to America to try and figure out what I wanted to do. The first play my mother saw me in was playing the father in Equus, and she was really shocked, and said to my father, “Go see him, go see him.”He said, “No, he's going to be embarrassing.” And so he wouldn’t come.
Gosh, that's harsh.
I graduated [from Central School of Drama], and I stayed behind to do a play, Entertaining Mr Sloane. He came and saw the play in the evening, and he was going to tell me to go to film school and be a director. I remember five minutes in I heard his first laugh. Afterwards, he was so excited that I had a grip on what I was doing. That completely changed our relationship – he had a passion that he could share with me.
You live in New York and LA, how has it been with the fires?
We were lucky. I have friends who lost everything. A wonderful writer and playwright called Davey Holmes, and his wife Sonia and their two kids. They had a beautiful house – one of the few houses I envied, it was beautiful in Malibu, and it’s all gone.
What have been the standouts in your career so far and who you've enjoyed working with?
We could do another hour on that. Going way back, I Shot Andy Warhol [the 1996 film which saw Jared play Warhol. Director Mary Harron took a chance on me with that – it was great fun.Working with William Hurt and Harvey Keitel on Smoke [1995], the Wayne Wang movie. Watching Harvey work was an education.Obviously, working with [director] David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [2008]. Brad Pitt was in eight hours of makeup every day for that, then he would work for 12 hours, and then two hours to get the makeup off. And he wouldn't waste any time in the makeup trailer – he'd be working on other projects, watching stuff or researching.Spielberg was amazing [Jared was in 2012’s Lincoln]. He was really generous and funny. Daniel Day-Lewis played Lincoln and stayed in character. I only shot one day with him, and you go, holy sh*t, Lincoln's coming towards me. He had that sort of strange, heavy walk that Lincoln had.Robert Downey Jr – what a gentleman [Jared Harris played Moriarty in 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows]. Guy Ritchie [director] goes by his own tune and handles all the studio politics brilliantly.
One of my favourites is Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man.
That was hilarious, because there was no script. Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and myself, turn up for a night shoot. We're in costume, and we say to Jim [director], what are we doing in this scene? He says, I'm not sure. You guys are going to have an argument over baked beans or something. So Iggy Pop goes, I'll wear the dress, and I'll be the mom, Billy Bob's was the dad, and I'm the recalcitrant teenager, and we’re this sort of this weird family of psychopath fur trappers who kill people for fun.
Would you consider coming back to the RSC in the future?
Yeah, I definitely would. I mean, you know, there are still some parts I want to play, but of course it all depends on the director.Because I haven't lived in this country for such a long time, I'm soaking up information from all the cast members – people they've worked with, this person's wonderful, that person's really good with acting, but not so big on vision...
Are there specific roles that you think, oh, that's interesting, I'd like to do that?
At some point I'd like to have a go at Lear. I think I'd like to do Iago. And Toby Belch appeals, but not as a Falstaff figure.There's a bunch of them. I didn't think I'd play Claudius, to tell you the truth. Hamlet runs until 29th March.
Click here to read the Herald’s five-star review of Hamlet.
