Sir Jonathan Pryce: Playing Animal

0:00flip through the pages and i turned it down on that looking at the crazy names and then

0:18All right, here we go. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally the Great Actor. Jonathan Price is with us today. he has one Academy Award nomination three BAFTA award nominations four Emmy nominations three SAG nominations six Olivier's two wins and has won two Tonys you've seen him in Pirates of the Caribbean Glengarry Glen Ross Game of Thrones the crowd and his theater work is next level and I want to talk to him a lot about his amazing work in the theater Miss Saigon, in fact, is one of my favorites of his. So Jonathan Price, here we go.

1:13Welcome. I'm so glad that you're here with me. I've been doing this show, Jonathan, now for about, well, since right before COVID. So it's been a while. I've had a lot of people on who you would know. but I'm so excited to have you because you are one of my favorite actors. And I just want to say thank you for all of the amazing work that you have done. And just going over your career and all the things I want to ask you about, we may be here for six hours. I don't know how much time you have, but buckle up. I see you're at the SiriusXM studio in New York. Is this the big press tour for Slow Horses release?

2:00Is that what you're on at the moment? It's a small press tour. I'm mostly doing SAG Q &As, which I did two in Los Angeles last weekend, and I've done one here. And today was the Today Show with Al Roca, which I did this morning, which was fun. Amazing, amazing. you I'm assuming are living full time in London I do yeah yeah yeah but you you have spent so much of your time in New York I mean I we we missed each other in on Glen Gary Glen Ross my wife was the head makeup artist on Glen Gary alright right and did Al she was Al's personal makeup artist right so and I I my recollection is you were still doing Miss Saigon during the shooting.

2:53Is that correct? Yeah, Glengarry by day, Miss Saigon by night. Yeah. That's kind of as good as it gets as an actor, I would think. It's like to have those two things going in the same day all the time. Yeah, well, it was a great time for me. Great time to be in New York with a hit show. As you know, it's the only way to be. Makes life a lot easier. And to get to do Glengarry Glen Ross with that cast was a bonus. I mean, I was on it for, I think, two weeks. And most of the time I was sitting between takes, sitting, talking to Al, who I'd known since I met him first in 1976 when I came here to do Comedians on Broadway.

3:41Really? And I was invited to the studio to watch Lee Strasberg teach. And do those open crit sessions. Did you ever go to them? I was aware of them, but I never got to go to any of them. Friday mornings. And then if you were honored guests, you got to have lunch with him and his wife and a few others at Joe Allen's at a round table that he took every Friday morning. And Al was at the lunch table. And I was talking to Lee Strasberg's wife. And I think I can tell this story. I've told you before. Please, please. She said, gesturing towards Strasburg, don't you just love this man? This man is a genius.

4:29Don't you love him? And she said, you know Al's film, Dog Day Afternoon, when he's outside the bank and everyone's shouting, Attica, Attica? Yeah. That's one of Lee's exercises. That's the caged animal exercise. And I said, why couldn't he imagine he was outside of a bank with a lot of people shouting, Attica, Attica, at him. Anyway, she turned, she didn't speak to me for the rest of the meal. Amazing. Then I got, I asked Al what he took from Strasbourg's teachings. And he said he was a devotee, but not, he took what he needed for each role. And at times it was a great help, and at times I don't think he needed it.

5:15But it, he came to see me do Hamlet in London in 1980. And Pacino was downstairs and Dustin Hoffman was upstairs. And I didn't know, thankfully, as I was doing the show. But it's very gratifying that any time I see Al, whoever he's with, he wants to talk about Hamlet and he'll tell them about Hamlet. And it's it's just great. It's just great. Well, he's, no one is more passionate other than maybe you about, about the theater than Al. He, and I've seen him in so many times I'm an American Buffalo. I've seen him in Julius Caesar. I've, I've seen him in, um, God, there was a really bizarre ensemble piece he did.

6:05I wish I could think of the name of it downtown. Everybody was in it. I mean, John Goodman was in it. Billy Crudup was in it. I mean. Is it Salome? No, it wasn't Salome, which he'd been doing forever as well. It was like, Ui Uiguli. It was like. Arturo Ui. Yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Bertolt Brecht. Yeah. Bertolt Brecht, yes. And Al was literally talking, what made me think of it as the caged animal exercise. It was patently obvious that Al was playing an animal. Yeah, yeah. He was just, he was absolutely playing like a, like, I think a rat. And he's, he's, he's, he's amazing on, on, uh, who's your, who is, I mean, it's hard to say, but first of all, what's your favorite theater to play?

6:54I always like asking, asking, asking theater actors what their favorite theater, because there are some that are more welcoming that you just feel better in. Do you have a favorite? In London, it's just because it feeds my ego to play the Drury Lane, which is like 2 ,500 seater, an enormous theater, where I started Miss Saigon, and then 20 years ago or more, did My Fair Lady. And it's just a wonderful experience. But on the other hand, I did Lear in a small theater, the Almeida Theater, about maybe 500 seats. I did The Goat there, Edward Albee's play. Oh, that's an amazing play. Did you do The Goat in New York as well?

7:49No, just London. Was that the original? It was the first production outside of America. Yeah. I forget the name of the actor who had done it before me. Sorry. What an amazing client that is. It was a great experience because Albie was around because he has to approve everything about a production before you get to do it. And my wife, Kate, played my wife in The Goat and she had to come to New York to meet Edward and be approved. and that went rather well. What's that process like? You walk in, you have a cup of tea, you talk about the character, you talk about how does he vet you? Well, I don't think he didn't vet me for some reason.

8:43Yeah, you've seen your reading. I'd met him before because a few years prior to it, I'd done a staged reading of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Uta Hagen I played George and Uta Hagen was Martha and it was to celebrate Uta's 80th birthday and we did it at the Majestic I think for a kind of black tie audience it was to raise funds for her theatre and then we took it to Los Angeles and did it at the Armandson still read around a table

9:24and obviously I met Albie then so he carried it in his head that I was okay I wish there were more of those I wish there were more of those staged readings because I find them so interesting and because it really is just the acting and the text well it was great to do it with Uthagin because the character is 50 and she was famously the first to play it. And, you know, she could only do it in a rehearsed reading now. And Mia Farrow was Honey, Matthew Broderick was Nick, and Peter Gallagher did Nick in L.A. It was a great time, a great time. That's amazing. You must have worked with Richard Ayer.

10:14Oh, yeah, yeah. Many, yeah. From way back. I first worked with Richard. What was the first one? When I was at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, my first job in 1972. And Richard came to direct a play. Wow. And then I followed him. I did almost two years at Liverpool. And then I followed him to Nottingham Playhouse when he took over there. Where we did Comedians, which I eventually did on Broadway. I had no idea you went that far back with him. He's one of my favorite people in the world. And one of the most interesting days in my life was when I got a phone call from Richard, who I did not know.

10:59and this shows you how you never know what role is going to lead to what role he had gone to see a big stupid comedy I had done called Wayne's World and somehow got it in his head that I should play the doctor in Suddenly Last Summer with Maggie Smith so I did it was Natasha Richardson Maggie and Richard E. Grant and Richard was directing us and it just goes to show you, a big stupid movie with comedians in wigs and the next thing you know, you're working with Richard Ayer of The National. Yeah, well, it's the joy of the job. Right? It's the joy of the job, as it were.

11:56Richard directed Hamlet that I did. What is it about Hamlet that, in your mind, that makes it the ultimate role for an actor? At the time, Richard had asked me to do an occasion before we actually ended up doing it. And I said no to him originally because I didn't think I had anything to say with it at the time. I was still in my late 20s. and then he said he could do he'd been asked to do a play at the royal court theater in london and that he could do any play of his choice it didn't because royal court essentially focuses on new writing and he told them he wanted to do hamlet and he wanted to do it with me and they said yes so then he came to me and said okay i've said yes to hamlet do you want to do it and by then I did have something to say because my father had died as a result of violence he was a shopkeeper a small grocery shop and he'd been hit over the head by a young lad who was trying to steal cigarettes and he had a stroke that night.

13:26He seemed to recover, but he didn't ever really recover and he was like two years in the dying. But the incident of his being attacked, they found the boy quite easily. He was 16. And I remember my sisters, I have two older sisters, and they were quite vengeful. They wanted some kind of retribution and I remember being quite calm about it. You know, there was nothing, it wasn't going to bring my father back. And anyway, when Richard said about doing Hamlet, I thought of my father and thought of Hamlet's father who died as a result of violence and that Hamlet regretted never having done anything about it.

14:24and I put those two things together. I also put together the idea that Richard wanted to find a way of portraying the ghost in a way that would have been as frightening for the Elizabethan audience. He wanted it to be as frightening for a contemporary audience or as disturbing anyway. And we began talking about the exorcist and all that kind of weird stuff that was happening. And I thought of a time when I, after my father died, I thought I'd seen him. And he was standing in the garden looking at me. I was thinking about it and talking about it. It was that I'd so wanted to see my father because I was here doing comedians when he died, so I didn't even get home for his funeral.

15:21I so wanted to see him that I thought I must have conjured him up. And then we started talking about Hamlet and the ghost and that maybe no one else saw the ghost. Maybe Hamlet so wanted to see his father, as I did mine, that he conjured him. and he knew, he had all the suspicions about the death, how his uncle had poisoned his father maybe. And anyway, so I looked at video of women, essentially, in fits of possession, speaking in tongues, voices coming out of them that had nothing to do with them. and we work on the idea that he conjured up the ghost everything the ghost his father the ghost said to him he knew he wanted to hear so I said it I said the lines as if they were coming from inside me in a fit of possession and I developed this diet belly speaking voice that I like to tell people was very difficult to do, but it does come very easily, actually.

16:38And I didn't, I remember I worked on it at home and didn't, we didn't show it to the rest of the cast until really quite late on in rehearsals, because we wanted to see what that immediate effect would have on them. And it was a voice, it was a growling voice, and it was very tortured and twisted. And I remember when we do it in performance, and you can always hear the audience, however deep you're going into whatever you're doing. And I could hear, after a while, a few titters, a few people going, oh, it's very funny. But this speech goes on and on, and there's sort of the angst and the pain that it looks as if the actor's going through.

17:28it silences them and it's a very powerful piece of theatre and it validated my doing Hamlet at all because the downside of it was it was an arts program television arts program called the South Bank Show with Melvin Bragg and Richard and I were invited onto this arts program and they said um we did richard and i did an interview and then would i do a bit of the ghost scene in the studio oh sure not uh thinking uh too much about it and i put i put my hamlet costume on and i i'm in this empty studio surrounded by technicians you know world weary technicians who've seen it all smoking You know, I've been there, done that.

18:23And I started doing it.

18:28And all I could think about was these guys going, what the fuck? And I was really embarrassed doing it. You can see it on YouTube. It gives you a hint of what it was like, but I just couldn't wait for it to be over out of there. Oh, that. Yeah. I just had an overwhelming memory of Richard and his direction and his exploration of text. And I think that's the most fulfilling to, you know, Hamlet's been done ad nauseum. We did suddenly last summer, you know, Tennessee Williams has been done ad nauseum. And when you can find a director who has the ability and the willingness to try to find something new in it in a way that doesn't feel showy or arbitrary.

19:20And still remain truthful to the text. Yes. Yeah. It's unbelievably exciting. So you're telling me that you would hear an audience that has seen it done traditionally, and you're doing it in this new, authentic take. It takes a moment for them to get with the program, right? Hence the titters. Do you knew you were going to get that every night and you just would plow through it and eventually bludgeon them into coming along? It was just a few. And it was something that I sensed. Even if I didn't hear it, you just knew when you've been an audience member, if I'd seen this, that it's going to take people by surprise.

20:11and usually when people are shocked, they often laugh. I found that with the goat, that initially when he reveals that he's having a love affair with the goat, and then at the end of the play, his wife drags, spoiler alert, his wife drags on a dead goat. And the sight of this, and we had a full-size dead goat, I think it was a model. It wasn't real, I don't think. It looked real. And Kate would drag it on, and the audience naturally would, out of shock and whatever, start to laugh at the absurdity of it as well. But he, the man who has this devotion to the goat, starts to keen over the body and to cry.

21:08And again, you just know that they're starting off on a bit of a high. But you also know that what I'm about to do is going to go on for so long and be so shocking, you will not be laughing by the end of it. And they won't. And that's what I love about the theater. I mean, when it's good and going, well, you can conduct the audience. You can pull back when they're laughing too much or, you know, whatever. Do things faster, slower. Anyway, I did a lot with Richard at Nottingham Playhouse. I did a whole season with him where I played most of the Jew roles. And there was another older character actor who played all the senior roles.

21:59He didn't do My Fair Lady, did he? Or did he? No, Trevor Nunn did My Fair Lady. Of course. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Of course. Do you prefer straight theater or musicals? Thankfully, I don't have to choose. I mean, Miss Saigon was my first musical, age 42, I think I was. I'd always known I could sing. And I came to it by the backdoor route. I was performing Macbeth at Stratford. and the first night we had a party across the road in the famous Dirty Duck pub and I organized a cabaret and I had my three witches backing me as I sang witchcraft Amazing Witchcraft and my then agent Jimmy Sharkey said to you I've forgotten you could sing and yeah yeah And he said, you should do a musical.

23:04Yeah, okay. And he said he represented Michael Crawford, and he knew Michael was leaving the show of Phantom of the Opera. And how did I feel about taking over from Michael Crawford? I said, well, let's see. So I went and worked with the musical director, who reported back that I could actually sing the role. and I met Hal Prince and Lloyd Webber and Cameron McIntosh and they said they were keen on my doing Phantom and I said, oh, that's great and they said, have you seen the show? and I said, no, no, do you want to see it? well, I think I should so the next night, Kate and I went to see Phantom

23:53and as people, I didn't enjoy the experience

23:59Can you give me a little Give me an example Of something that maybe Well, what I told Howl Prince was It was such a complete production That I didn't know what I could bring to it So I got out of it that way But a little while later They're casting Miss Saigon And Nick Heitner Who I didn't know then said, what we need for this role is Jonathan Price, if only he could sing. No way. Cameron Macintosh said, well, he can. So they got me in again, and I sang from Cabaret, the MC, you know, Willkommen Bienvenue, on the stage of the London Palladium. And I thought, well, if they don't offer me the role, at least I've sung on this hallowed London Palladium stage.

24:53And I finished singing the song, And they all came up to me, Claude Michel and everyone, Cameron, and said, wonderful, we'd like you to do it. And I remembered my agent said, don't say anything. Otherwise, he's negotiating. How has it gone? So I said, I'll think about it. Thank you. That's the best acting anything he's ever done. so at least Jimmy had somewhere you'll have to persuade him with the money but it was I loved doing that show absolutely loved it it's completely sung through so there was no people say you get on the bus and you're on it until the end and it never lets up. And I did it for a year in London and almost a year in New York and I could have carried on doing it.

26:06It was great to do. And since then, I've done other musicals and I did Oliver, which Cameron had asked me to do. as soon as we opened Miss Saigon in London, he said, I've got your next role. And he said, Fagan. And to be honest, I was like, now that has been done a million times, and very famously by Ron Moody. And I didn't, I said, oh, okay, okay. I didn't think any more about it, did Miss Saigon for a couple of years. And then I went and made a film in Utah with River Phoenix. And it was the film that River ended up, we never finished it. He OD'd on Sunset Boulevard. And we were having such, I say we because River and I shared the experience, a terrible, and the director shared the experience, a terrible, terrible time.

27:14and it was horrible and I phoned my agent and I said, you know, Cameron said he wanted to do Oliver with me and I said, well, tell him I'll do it I don't ever want to make another film this is a nightmare and so he went ahead and he talked to Cameron and they set the production up to do at the London Palladium and it was a year, 18 months before it came to go into production, by which time I was completely over the film experience. The last thing I wanted to do was to do a musical. And I'm glad I did. I ultimately had a very good time. Sam Mendes directed it. But it was a very different experience to Miss Saigon because Miss Saigon being completely sung through and Oliver you go from you know the dialogue's good it's based on Dickens but it's light hearted and stuff and you go from dialogue to song and then I wasn't so comfortable with it and every night I'd start off you see Oliver in this life one thing counts in the bank large amounts And then I go running around the stage with the kids dancing.

28:44I had this little man on my shoulder going, I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're doing this. And I had... It's almost like a panto, almost. A little bit. Yeah, but the production was great. The other actors were fantastic. And the main characters, Nancy and Bill Sykes, a bit like me, were actors who could sing. they didn't come from musical theater and so there was a great truth in their performance Sally Dexter as Nancy was wonderful and the kids were great and I still meet well I meet these kids now and they're grown ups and they remind me I was in your gang I was one of Fagin's gang some well known actors Eddie Redmayne oh no way Eddie Redmayne played my son in The Goat and first day of rehearsal, he said to me, actually, John, we worked together before.

29:46And I said, really? What was that? He said, Oliver. Oliver, who were you? He said, I was the book boy. The book boy? Who's the book boy? He said, you know, I come running on with the book saying your books, Mr. Brown, are your books. And I said, I wasn't in that fucking scene. How am I supposed to know who you are? I was having tea in my dressing room. And Ashley Walters, who's very well-known now, was one of the very little kids. It's funny, you talk about actors who can sing and that you didn't come from the musical theater world. It really is a delineation, isn't it? You go to a musical and you see people with these amazing pipes.

30:32Yeah. And then you see an actor inhabit a song, which is a little bit different than singing it, I think. And it is very much a different skill set. Mundy Patinkin does both. I'm a huge fan of Mundy's. Yes, he's amazing. He's absolutely amazing.

31:09I was first made aware of it. And it's funny because when I finally got the chance to work with Richard, at the same time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, I have a very similar story. I was doing a Fado. Do you remember when Tony Randall tried to do a national actors theater in New York City? right so he roped me into doing a a fade oh and i was and so i was doing and then they the stage manager says in intermission andrew lloyd weber's on the this one they had pay phones how long ago it was andrew lloyd weber's on the pay phone i was like yeah sure he is it was intermission of the performance i get on and you know you just immediately go oh no this really is andrew lloyd Weber.

31:52And he wanted me to do Joseph, Technicolor Dreamcoat. And I had the exact same experience that you did going, I don't want to do Phantom of the Opera. I didn't want to do Joseph. And I had to figure out a way to politely tell him that. But I knew that he was developing Sunset Boulevard. And I was like, I would love to play Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. so that's a year goes by i don't think anything of it i get to do i get to come over to work with dame maggie and everyone and at that moment andrew calls and says we're doing the uh the workshop i've remembered and it starts at this date and i couldn't do it oh no um but then that was for london i said well if it goes to new york call me calls me for new york i work study study sing sing study and I got to I went to the it was I think the majestic in New York is that possible yes and Trevor Nunn and everybody I got to did my singing audition and I thought it went really well everybody was very happy but in the end they were like we're going with a singer we're going with this part we're going with a proper singer so that was my brush with that world but it is an actor who sings is different than a singer 100 % different have you seen this latest production I haven't.

33:16Obviously, she won the Tony last week, and I hear great things about it. I saw it in London, yeah. My wife, Kate, ironically, doesn't like musicals. But she went with a friend whose daughter-in-law was in the orchestra, so they had free tickets. And she came away raving about it. And I thought, well, if she's raving about it, and I went to see it, and it just blew my mind. It was just wonderful, wonderful. Did you see Sarah Snook in a picture of Dorian Gray? No, I didn't get to see it. I was away. Oh? Yeah. I mean, it reminds, the nearest I can remind is when I saw Ian doing Richard Ayers' Richard III, that first iteration of it.

34:06Yeah, yeah. When it was, everybody has tried to do their, like they've tried to put that sort of vision through different things. But when you remember how groundbreaking that was, her performances, it instantly goes down in theater history. It's unbelievable. If you get a moment, you're there in New York, do whatever you have to do. It'll blow your mind. I'll be back. I leave in the morning. So tell me about, okay, I just want to circle back quickly to Glenn Gary. Your and Al's relation, your character's relationship was so interesting and nuanced. And it's so what the journey your character goes is, is so you feel such sympathy for your guy.