Interview with Bertie Carvel for Coalition

18 March 2015

What was it that attracted you to this project?

I’ve always been interested in politics. My father was a political journalist, as was his father, as was his father. And I really enjoyed the challenge of playing real people. I’d never done it with a living person before – actually, that’s not true, I played George Ellis, who’s a scientist who was at Cambridge with Stephen Hawking, in a film about Hawking. It was my first job, actually. I find it really exciting, the challenge and responsibility of playing somebody you’re not just making up.

Presumably that comes with its own associated problems?

Yeah, there’s a balancing act that you do, where you want to ensure that you’re credible and just to the person you’re acting as, but also to animate it on the artistic plane, to breathe life into it, to make an artistic impression rather than just make a dramatic reconstruction. This isn’t Crimewatch. So that’s where your imagination comes in. It’s quite a heady, vertiginous high wire act. I find that pretty thrilling. Plus I loved James’ script. I think he’s so talented. And I think, like me, he’s got politics in his blood. He writes with real enthusiasm and respect for the process. The political process comes in for a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of people hold politicians in very low esteem, and I don’t, actually. I think what they do is important and amazing, and I get that sense from James as well.

Just the character of Clegg – his is an incredibly dramatic story. So I dove in with both feet for the opportunity to take him on. He’s somebody who has been so massively influential in such a key political moment. It feels like a really important story to be telling. In some ways, Nick Clegg seems like a Greek tragic hero, with his precipitous rise and subsequent reversal of fortune. I found that dramatic structure quite appealing.

How much research did you do for the role, and what form did that research take?

I did a lot of what you might call academic research. So I read biographies and various accounts of what happened during those five days of negotiations. Obviously James [Graham, the writer] did that work most thoroughly, but it seemed important to me to get as balanced a view as possible of what the temperature of those days was. What did it feel like to be Nick Clegg in the midst of that. So I did that, and I also spent hours and hours watching and listening to him. One of the big decisions you have is where you pitch it, in terms of mimicry. It seemed pretty clear to me pretty quickly that it shouldn’t be about who’s doing the best impression of the person they’re playing. I'm not an impersonator. But you want to be recognisable, and most importantly you want to reveal something of internal character, through external mannerisms or patterns of speech.

There are two moments in the film where we recreate speeches that he made in public – his opening remarks in the TV debate, and his speech on the steps of the Lib Dem HQ in Cowley Street, when he arrives back in London from the count in Sheffield, when they’re all making overtures to each other in front of the TV camera. So those two moments I copied down to every breath and tic and physical gesture. I found that a really useful way of getting under his skin - I had to decide what I thought was motivating those rhythms, those cadences. Why does he breathe there and not there? Why does he hesitate here? What's going on under the surface? I felt like if I did that with a certain rigour, that gave me licence to let my instinct work in the scenes where James has imagined conversations that no-one has recorded verbatim, and gave me a bit more freedom to not have to think first and foremost “Do I sound like Nick Clegg,” but to concentrate more on “What might he have been feeling in these moments?” And that’s my job, not to put on a voice that sounds like him, but to make him a believable character, and to impart some sense of what the experience was like. I would love to find out, one day, what Clegg himself makes of it. I don’t know whether or not he’ll see it.

Of course he’ll see it. Politicians may pretend they don’t watch things like that, but they all do!

I can’t imagine what that experience would be like. I find just reading interviews that I’ve given a fairly queasy experience, so the idea of watching some idiot play you must be unbearable.

Did it change your opinion of him, or make you more sympathetic towards his plight?

I think with this project it’s really important that I leave my personal politics at the door, both in terms of going in to work, and in terms of talking about it, because I don’t think it’s useful to add that layer of editorial comment.  What I think about politicians in general is that, whether you agree or disagree with their political viewpoint, they’re generally doing what they believe to be right. You might think they’re making a disastrous mistake, you might even think what they're doing is evil, but they generally don’t. So your job, as an actor, is to ask “What did he think he was doing?” And I think I got a fairly rounded picture of what Clegg thought he was doing. So I must have empathy. Whether or not I have sympathy, I think I’ll plead the fifth on that. Dramatically, what's interesting is what a tricky position it was to be in, both in terms of the fault lines in his own party, and also on either side, to the left and right, in the wider political environment. To be put in the position of kingmaker, and to have real influence, that inevitably, that involves compromise. That is why his is such an epic, heroic, tragic story. The moral stakes are high – there’s a lot to be won and lost. It’s really exciting stuff.

Is there revelatory stuff in there that people won’t be aware of?

I think there are moments that feel that way – that were certainly revelations to me, though that’s probably more of a question for the writer. But I think the main thing, in terms of revelation, is that it gives a very balanced picture of what it felt like for all of those critical players behind closed doors. That’s something that I hadn’t had an accurate impression of. One was hearing the public statements they were making during that very exciting five days, but you didn’t really have a sense of what the undercurrents were. I think the film very accurately portrays what it’s like to be in that, what the undercurrents are. The forces that Clegg, for example, is having to marshal within his own party; the pressures on Cameron; the pressures on Brown; I think it tells that story quite clearly, and gives an impression of what it must have felt like. They were under enormous pressure to put together a stable, credible government that could actually govern, and that could reassure the money markets, at the same time as serving partisan political interests. The pressure must have been enormous, and you get a sense of that.   I think the way that Clegg’s been portrayed since then, and spun in the press, the fact that he has been painted by some as a pariah… I think there’s a counter-argument that might have been made much louder about what they were trying to achieve by making those concessions, and the context behind it.

 

Is there a danger, in showing such a political drama so close to an election that people might end up being influenced by one man’s version of events?

Well, there are rules about when you’re allowed to show things like this. Once the election campaign starts and parliament dissolves, there are very tight Ofcom regulations about what you can and can't do. I have to say; editorially I think the film is very, very fair. It goes to some difficult places, but I think the tone and the impression is very balanced. I’ve talked to people in the production team who are surprised where their sympathies land when they watch, given their politics. At the end of the day, we’re telling a human story about the people who found themselves in this extraordinary situation.