Paddy Considine on Uma Thurman and My Zinc Bed
Paddy Considine excels as zealots and madmen. But getting drunk with Uma Thurman was tougher
Paddy Considine has channelled some of the most memorably troubled psyches in
recent British cinema: the naive, menacing stranger in
A Room for Romeo
Brass; the flame-eyed, born-again zealot in
My Summer of Love;
the soldier stalking the inhabitants of a Midlands town in
Dead Man’s Shoes.
This week he will add to that list on the small screen in the BBC Two
adaptation of David Hare’s My Zinc Bed, playing a down-at-heel
poet who interviews Pryce’s corporate titan and seduces the
latter’s trophy wife (Uma Thurman) after they bond over their shared
alcoholism.
It’s a performance whose inner turbulence and saturnine intensity will be
familiar to Considine fans. Not that he himself would agree: “To be
perfectly honest, I thought that I struggled to make it convincing.”
We are sitting outside a Sheffield café, around the corner from the studio
where Considine is recording an EP with his band, Riding the Low. At 34 he
looks more like a rock star than an actor, with his leather jacket and
ear-sweeping, Liam Gallagher haircut. And he is hugely affable company, even
on his dark conversational detours. He was miscast, he says, in My Zinc
Bed, whose sculpted dialogue jarred with his naturalistic instincts: “I
said to Jonathan Pryce, ‘It’s not my world. I can do the emotion, but I
can’t do the lines perfectly.’ ”
No such problems for Thurman, whose demeanor, he says, was anything but
starry: “Oh man, she works hard. She knew every line, she applied herself
and she was full of creative suggestions.” The film’s director, Anthony
Page, encouraged Considine to improvise, as he had so successfully in his
previous films. But, obsessed with mastering the language, he was unable to
experiment as freely as he once did.
One thing he did empathise with was the theme of addiction: “I know what it’s
like to have a little reckless gene inside you that makes you want to go off
the edge now and then. I know what it’s like to knock the booze on the head
and then all of a sudden Friday creeps around and you’re there again.”
Considine has never been an alcoholic, he insists, but “I used to think that I
drank a bit too much . . .” He stops. “This is going the wrong way. I don’t
have a problem, I just enjoy a brew like anyone else.” In preparation for
the role he went to a few AA meetings, where he was struck by “the
desperation of people who were drinking vodka the moment they woke up.”
He talks about the hypocrisy of middle-class drinkers, putting away a bottle
of pinot grigio every night after work. Perhaps class is the key with My
Zinc Bed, I suggest. He nods: “That’s where my Achilles’ heel was. The
dialogue is written in a very middle-class way. I do struggle with that.”
The film does feel stagy, perhaps inevitably considering its theatrical
origins. But Considine is far more fluent than he makes out, and there are
moments of real visceral power, such as when he urges Thurman to do away
with her glass and drink directly from the bottle. “I understand the bile in
that,” he says. “Don’t f*** about – get it down your
neck.”
Considine has talked about a “black hole” from which he draws. “I deal on a
daily basis with this thing called self-doubt,” he explains. “It’s what
propels me – but it’s also what tells me in the middle of a take, ‘You
are s***.’ I was going to give up acting a couple of years ago. I thought I
was incapable of doing it.”
Some of that insecurity undoubtedly comes from his childhood down the road in
Burton-on-Trent, where he was one of six children to unemployed parents: “I
don’t want to get out the little violin but there were times when we didn’t
even have wall-paper. At least my mates had bog roll to wipe their arses on.
We had to use – no, I don’t want to go there. I’d call it tribal at
times.”
But he never got grief at school – “Because I had an old man whose shadow
loomed large over the estate.” Considine Sr was “a very hard man,” he says.
Not gangster hard: “It wasn’t like, ‘Here comes Reggie Kray, he’s gonna blow
you legs off. It was just men and pubs and fists. He was like Lee Marvin
without the film career.” But he was never violent with his own family,
Considine insists, and could be “great fun”.
His father died in 2001, at the age of 59. “If I went the same time as him,
that gives me not very long,” he says casually. Is he genuinely worried
he’ll die before 60? “Yeah, I do have a feeling that’ll be the case. Men
don’t live long, man.” Most live past 59, though. “I don’t know, mate: my
father, his friends, they’re all going around 60.”
That sense of time running out has spurred him on. He is determined to be a
good husband to his childhood sweetheart Shelley, and a responsible dad to
his two children – a third is on the way. And last year, he directed
his first film, Dog Altogether, a short starring Peter Mullan as a
character based on Considine’s father: a middle-aged man plagued by violence
and anger. “I needed to make sense of it all,” he says. The film won a
Bafta, and he is currently developing it into a feature, again starring
Mullan, who reminds him of his dad. He gets out his wallet and produces a
photograph of a man in his fifties: bald, thickset, impassive. The
similarity with Mullan is striking.
Also on the slate are two acting projects to be directed by his close friend
Shane Meadows, including one about a bare-knuckle boxer, and a project for
Channel 4 adapted from David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet novels,
in which he will play a detective trailing the Yorkshire Ripper. Your
characters don’t exactly exude sweetness and light, I say. “Well,” he
smiles. “Who does?”
