Mark Rylance on royalty, method acting and the Iraq war: ‘I’ve talked with the King about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays’

The generational stage actor speaks to Chris Harvey about Timothée Chalamet, his ‘failure’ at the Globe, and his new play ‘Dr Semmelweis’

Mark Rylance: ‘There are great benefits when someone is an immigrant to the reality they’re playing’ (Getty)

Mark Rylance was the last big name to arrive on the set of The Trial of the Chicago 7. The star of Wolf Hall and Jerusalem, recognised by many as the finest actor of his generation, was playing the radical defence lawyer William Kunstler in Aaron Sorkin’s film, and turned up for a readthrough of the courtroom scenes after the 1968 riots in Chicago had already been shot. “I entered the room not really knowing what they’d been through,” he tells me. “Later on, I found that it had been quite intense. And they were a very strong cast with very different approaches to acting, you know – Eddie [Redmayne] and Sacha [Baron Cohen], John Carroll Lynch, Yahya [Abdul-Mateen II]. And Aaron, of course, wasn’t a director. He was a writer. So it was a potential minefield... There weren’t explosions. But we were all watching each other with curiosity.”

The cast of the 2020 Netflix drama also included Jeremy Strong (Succession’s Kendall Roy), whose immersive acting techniques seem to have triggered strong feelings judging by the reported comments of his co-star Brian Cox on his method acting – “Oh, it’s f***ing annoying. Don’t get me going on it.” (Strong calls his process “identity diffusion”.) Did Rylance have a similar reaction? “No, I didn’t find Jeremy annoying at all,” he says.

“But what was funny for me was at the first readthrough, suddenly this guy came in with a headband and a Sixties T-shirt – Jeremy – and I thought, ‘Wow, where’d you get those vintage clothes? I haven’t seen someone wear a headband like that for a long time, man. Respect.’ I didn’t realise for a number of weeks that he was in character. You could speak to him about his daughters or whatever. Sometimes you’d hear him say, ‘Hey, man,’ or he’d use Sixties terminology. I just thought he was a really eccentric guy.”

Rehearsing is important to Rylance – “I find my thing by playing” – but when confronted with actors whose practice is different from his own, he says, “Increasingly now at 63, I just kind of think, why not try something different? See where he’s going. But I get the impression, because [Jeremy] is very particular, some actors find that challenging.”

The British actor, meanwhile, was having his own issues on set. “Aaron, who is such a precise thing, you know, he would give a note, note, note, note, note, note... He’d say, ‘Mark, you’ll find it’s a comma rather than a semicolon, and it will help you. Action.’ He was that particular. I remember looking at everyone else like, ‘What?’ But that was him. Afterwards, I thought probably it was him thinking, ‘You’re a Shakespearean actor, you know, I can talk to you on that level. I’ll show everyone else, also, that this is a way of doing things, as well as everyone improvising.’ At the time I was mildly offended by it, that kind of micromanagement. But it was a very wild set.”

The word “mesmerising” is overused, but it fits Rylance on stage and off. He’s packing Olivier awards, Tonys, Baftas, and an Oscar for Bridge of Spies, but he’s not remote in any way. He’s a storyteller, with a soft-spoken way of looking at you that exerts a strange pull, as if drawing you towards the still surface of a deep, dark pool. His quiet intensity matches his look: hat, open shirt, necklace – there’s definitely something of the weather-beaten New Age shaman about him. No surprise that he took “a very distilled garlic solution every morning” instead of the Covid vaccine, as he admitted recently.

Time has an odd way of slowing down around him, too, as it did so compellingly on screen when he played Thomas Cromwell in the BBC’s Wolf Hall, and so terrifyingly in last year’s suburban horror film Bones and All. He laughs a lot if something tickles him, though. He’s hilarious as the tech entrepreneur Peter Isherwell in Adam McKay’s eco-parable Don’t Look Up, in which he based his character’s voice on the speech of Jordan Peterson, and he slips easily into an impersonation of the way the controversial academic has “this curious way of making a point with a very high inflection” that makes me laugh, too.

We’re in a small room at the Harold Pinter Theatre to chat about his return to the West End in Dr Semmelweis, the play he has co-written about the Hungarian physician who challenged medical orthodoxy in Vienna in the mid 19th century, when operating theatres were places of unimaginable horror and death. Surgeons worked in squalid conditions without gloves, switching between autopsies, amputations and delivering babies, drenched in blood, pus and brain matter.

Rylance as Dr Semmelweis (Geraint Lewis)

Rylance plays Semmelweis, who noticed that a higher proportion of women were dying from puerperal or childbed fever (caused by bacterial infection of the reproductive tract) when attended by medical students rather than midwives. He grasped the idea that the men were carrying “cadaverous particles” into the bodies of mothers giving birth. It was 40 years before the germ theory of medicine would be accepted; the physician’s experiments were met with mockery. The play premiered at the Bristol Old Vic last year, where it received good reviews, but Rylance says he had “my own criticisms of it”, and that it has “evolved” since then.

He has been mulling over the contentious issue of whether actors should have the lived experience of the characters they play. “I think it’s a bit of a dull theatre if theatre’s politically correct,” he told the BBC recently. “I was thinking about it today,” he says, when I bring up the live debate about disabled roles, gay roles, trans roles, and more. “I understand Michael Sheen’s feelings about Welsh identity and the denial and lack of recognition of the Welsh people as separate from the English, and that they should have their own separate identity. I agree with that... [But] there are great benefits when someone is an immigrant to the reality they’re playing. People playing things they are not, that’s what the theatre is. I’m not Dr Semmelweis. It’s almost like saying all painting has to be naturalistic. I don’t think it’s a movement that’s gonna last.”

In Semmelweis, Rylance did see something of himself – a mind that thought differently: “My consciousness is eccentric, it’s outside the circle.” He’s well known as a sceptic of the idea that William Shakespeare was the author of the plays attributed to him. “Maybe the huge vocabulary, the huge amount of learning was because there was a group of people working around a genius, much as they were in music and painting in the Renaissance; it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a central genius,” he says. He notes that the poet Mary Sidney, the philosopher Francis Bacon, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford – all aristocrats – “are reported to have had groups of writers that they kept, like in a stable, to write things for them”. So he doubts that the glover’s son from Warwickshire was the central genius? “I do think it’s reasonable to doubt, yes.”

I was very depressed and exhausted when I finished the Globe. I felt it had been a failure – my work, not it, but that I had really failed

The Oxford academic Jonathan Bate has said that the future King Charles once wrote to him for help with arguments to defeat his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, in dinner table discussions about the authorship question. The late Duke is believed to have thought Shakespeare was a front for the work of diplomat Sir Henry Neville. Would Rylance like to get stuck into debate with the new king about it over dinner? “I have talked about it with him,” he says. Did they agree to disagree? “No, he’s not that kind of person when you discuss things. He just listens and asks very good questions. He’s very, very discreet about his own personal views. I’ve heard that he and his father would talk about that, but the King has never mentioned that to me. You never feel he’s secretive, but you feel he’s properly discreet...

“When I’ve spoken about Shakespeare with the King, we have spoken about the themes of kingship,” he adds. “We spoke about Henry Five. I did have a friend of mine who’s a Baconian come with me once, and we were talking about landscape and the Baconian thing [the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare], but he didn’t try and argue it. It’s always his way.” The King occasionally expresses opinions obliquely, Rylance suggests. “Sometimes, maybe, he’ll say, ‘Don’t you find...?’”

“I don’t doubt that he’s a Stratfordian,” he adds, “[but] if someone else wrote the plays, they wanted us to attribute them to the Stratford man. So that’s important to remember.”

Rylance revealed recently that he had turned down an honour before accepting a knighthood for his services to theatre in 2017. “That was at the time of me leaving the Globe,” he says. Rylance was the first artistic director of Sam Wanamaker’s reconstructed Elizabethan playhouse on the banks of the Thames, which he ran between 1995 and 2005. “I was very depressed and exhausted when I finished the Globe. I felt it had been a failure – my work, not it, but that I had really failed. And so it was partly me [going] ‘I don’t deserve that.’

“Also, I think it was influenced by my turmoil about the Iraq war,” he says. Rylance was troubled by questions such as “Why would a leader like Tony Blair not respond to such a huge outpouring from the nation: ‘Please don’t take us into this thing’? I really didn’t want to be associated with any kind of governance at that time.”

I wonder if he sees any parallels between Semmelweis and Dr David Kelly, whom he played transfixingly in Peter Kosminsky’s TV film The Government Inspector in 2005. The former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire in July 2003 after his name was released as the source for BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan’s story that the government had “sexed up” a dossier about weapons of mass destruction. Rylance recognises Kelly as someone whose truth “certainly wasn’t welcomed... Was Dr Kelly wrong to talk about it? No. I tend to think, God bless whistleblowers.”

Rylance accepting a Tony award for Best Performance in 2008 (Getty)

He distrusts the verdict of the 2003 Hutton Inquiry, which decided that Kelly had died from cuts he made to his wrist arteries. “The jury’s out for me about the accusation that he committed suicide. I don’t know about that. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t make sense.”

Rylance was in his forties before he achieved great fame, having forged his reputation almost entirely on the stage. He was born in 1960 in Ashford in Kent, before moving to America with his parents when he was two. He grew up in Connecticut and later in Wisconsin, where he discovered theatre, arriving in Britain “with long hair and a central parting” to claim a place at Rada in 1978. From there, he went to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre before joining the RSC in 1982 at the age of 22. Theatre audiences recognised early on how extraordinary he was, the RSC handing him leads in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in his twenties.

I’m interested in how he contrasts his experience with that of Timothée Chalamet, his co-star in Bones and All. “It’d be too much for me,” he says. “I bless my lucky stars I didn’t have to deal with that at his age.” As far as he could tell, he says, it “comes with benefits and shadows – the shadow being that you can’t go out” – but there is “a not self-deprecating, not paranoid” sense that “I’m on this particular ride, and here I am. Timothée’s got a kind of... like the clothes he wears... he’s got just a very infectious wildness to him, which is really nice, with everyone, you know, fearful and being so correct.

Taylor Russell and Rylance in ‘Bones and All’ (Yannis Drakoulidis/MGM)

“There’s so much money to be made off of people like that, young actresses and actors, that the hard thing for them, I think, is to say, ‘No, I’ve got my whole life. I don’t need to do it all in these five years and burn up.’ It’s always been the case that when a youth burns bright like that, everyone comes around the fire and throws more logs on.”

Rylance has found stability in his long marriage to the director, composer and playwright Claire van Kampen, with whom he co-parented two daughters, Juliet and Nataasha van Kampen, along with Claire’s former husband, Chris van Kampen. In 2012, Nataasha died from a suspected brain haemorrhage on a flight back from New York, when she was just 28. Last year, Rylance’s younger brother Jonathan Waters – Jonno – wine director at the world-famous Chez Panisse restaurant in California, was killed when he was knocked off his bike in Oakland. In a recent piece in The Observer, Rylance spoke of having been convinced at one time that he himself would die before he turned 40. “I think, you know, that there’s many deaths that are as...” he pulls up short, makes a sound as though hit by a physical blow, then slowly begins again. “I think, because I believe in an afterlife,” he says, “I see that there are many deaths while we’re alive in this body that are probably as powerful as that physical death of our body.

“That’s a pretty powerful experience. I imagine it will be a powerful experience for me. But I see people also die in this life. I think of Kevin Spacey, the death of everything his life was about. I’m not judging or anything, but he had a massive change. I think for me, there was something that needed to die and change in my forties. The ending of my time at the Globe was really the ending of Shakespeare being the dominant thing in my life, which it had been from 16. And then a birth, with [producer] Sonia Friedman, into new drama and new plays.”

Film and television, too, became more important. We talk about Terrence Malick’s biblical epic The Way of the Wind, in which he plays Satan. The project has been in the works for a number of years already, as Malick’s projects often are. Does he think it will attract controversy when it’s finally released, as depictions of Christianity, from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, sometimes do? “I expect it will because it’s about someone people care so much about,” Rylance says. “What was being filmed was [the apostle] Peter’s story, from meeting a very powerful messianic-type person to Peter’s eventual crucifixion upside down.” (This holds to a Christian tradition that Jesus prophesied the manner of Peter’s death as an older man in the Gospel of John.) “So Christ, and Christ’s relationship with Satan, is part of the story, really, in terms of Peter. What Terrence described to me at the time [was] this is a story about what happens to a normal person, so to speak, when a force of nature like a Christ or a Muhammad, or Abraham or Isaac, or anyone with that kind of life force, comes through your life.”

I like the human voice. I like being in the room with actors and musicians, dancers. That’s why, with this show, we are a totally acoustic production

Rylance is from a religious background. In 2015, he told Desert Island Discs that his parents, both teachers, took the family alternately to different churches (his father was Catholic, his mother Episcopalian/Anglican). Is Satan a role he was born to play? He laughs. “Of course. Everyone knows that. But I’m just one of many Satans in it. God knows if I’ll end up in the film.”

His most famous role is as the outsider Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, for which reviewers have run out of superlatives. We talk about one of the unruly influences on his performance. Rylance swapped James Taylor for the Sex Pistols when he arrived in Britain. He still loves them. He extols Rotten’s “lovely Irish wit”, spits out a line from “Bodies” on Never Mind the Bollocks..., and says, “The recklessness and the irreverence of it – that’s in Johnny “Rooster” Byron. I don’t think Johnny Lydon ever came along to Jerusalem. I should have invited him. Maybe he’ll come when I’m older.”

Rylance in ‘Jerusalem’ (AP)

I want to know whether, if AI developed rapidly to the point where an AI Shakespeare was able to add another play to the First Folio, he would be prepared to take a role in it. “You mean, would I turn it down on ethics – that it was AI? No, I don’t know that I would, no. I’d more turn things down that were amplified. I won’t ever do a play that’s amplified. I don’t believe in that... I like the human voice. I like being in the room with actors and musicians, dancers. That’s why, with this show, we are a totally acoustic production.”

He compares the difference between being amplified and not amplified on stage to “being a football player on a Subbuteo table rather than on a proper piece of grass, it’s that different”. “Directors love to have control. And they can make very powerful things. But it’s a right old bore for actors. I think it denies the old, incredible power of being in the room with people. I mean, can you imagine if Richard Burton was amplified, or John Gielgud was amplified? Those audiences back then, they never would have stood for it.”

I wonder if one day he would like to return to Hamlet, the character he played at school and in all his early auditions, as Ian McKellen did last year in a performance at the Edinburgh Fringe. He acknowledges its great importance to his life, but says, “I don’t have a desire to play it as an old man. I mean, I’ve wondered sometimes about learning the whole thing and playing the whole thing... but actually I’ve got a little more curious in [Hamlet’s prime antagonist] Claudius now. It’d be interesting.” 

It’s an intriguing thought, one of the great stage Hamlets taking on the role of his tormentor, but there’s a sense of him leaving the field clear for those that follow. “I love the play very deeply. But I kind of promised at the time that I played it that I would never speak about it. I’m often asked to be on panels about it...” He pauses and the rebel returns with a grin. “And it was such a bore when you were playing the part to have all these people pontificating about what that means. I remember, in my dressing room, thinking: ‘I will never do that to future Hamlets.’”

‘Dr Semmelweis’ is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 7 Oct