Alan Rickman's newly released film Bottle Shock, the actor is called upon to create an entrepreneurial and rather uncomfortable life for his character. The film tells the real-life story of Steven Spurrier, a British expat wine purveyor living in Paris in the mid-1970s. Spurrier is someone only Rickman could play: an open-minded snob, ripe for introduction to the upstart California wine industry. Also required by the role: Rickman must eat KFC and drive a Gremlin.
Yes, this is the iconic actor with the mellifluous voice and aloof demeanor who elegantly plays 19th-century romantic leads and 21st-century stylized villains. This is the actor who is at home on Broadway and London stages, as well as in cult-inducing goofy film comedies. And yet, to hear him tell it, he found the get-his-hands-dirty work on Bottle Shock inspiring and challenging.
Most of us remember our first sighting of the actor. For the lucky ones, it was in 1987 on Broadway in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. For some, it was in Die Hard, where he played debonair villain Hans Gruber. By 1990, many of us who saw him as the mostly lovable ghost in Truly Madly Deeply felt we had discovered a brilliant new leading man. His Colonel Brandon in 1995's Sense and Sensibility confirmed his allure. But just as we locked him into the sultry-romantic category, he made Galaxy Quest and earned a new wave of fans for his great comedic sense.
In the last decade, he has been playing the complex villain Professor Snape in the Harry Potter franchise, to whom Rickman brings more heartache than evil, a man who has all talents except those with which to earn the admiration of his students. And in 2007's film version of Sweeney Todd, Rickman plays Judge Turpin, in the actor's vision more subtly chilling than overtly diabolical.
Rickman recently spoke with Back Stage about the actor-director relationship, his early acting lessons, and the devaluation of American theatre.
Back Stage: After you get your script, when do you start creating your character?
Alan Rickman: You know, I know less and less about what I do as time goes on, I'm afraid. I know that I'm only as good as the script, and frequently it's a darn sight better than I am. And so, when I read it, part of the process of saying yes is, the images start to dance about on the page, and you want to grab hold of them. But as one goes on in this profession, more and more I'm waiting for interaction with other actors and an environment, if you talk about film, and to be fed by that, so that there's some element of not knowing involved.
Back Stage: So does the interaction start at the table read?
Rickman: I don't think we had such a thing [for Bottle Shock]. And I think as a director I would never do that. I'd never sit people around and say, "And now here's the moment where you prove why you got the job." Horrible. I'd never trust in that. We just move organically into.... I mean, I'm about to direct a play in London [Creditors, by Strindberg], and I don't think it will have a read-through as such.
Back Stage: When directors get too hands-on with you, what do you do or say?
Rickman: Honestly, depends who I'm working with. When I played Hamlet [in the 1980s], I did it with Robert Sturua, from the Rustaveli company in [Soviet] Georgia. Russian directors come from a completely different tradition, where the director is god and the actor is a tube of paint, to some extent. There was a negotiation with that relationship, with him. I did a play with Yukio Ninagawa [Tango at the End of Winter in London in 1991], who's a great, great Japanese director. That was completely different. Working with Howard Davies on Private Lives [2001-02] and Liaisons Dangereuses [1985-87] was very democratic, as it is most of the time in the British theatre, because it's had to be over the years. You usually have little rehearsal time, so there'd better be a conversation going on. But that came as a big shock to Robert Sturua: The actors had opinions. And I love him. He's a fantastic man, not least because he adapted to this culture that he found himself working with.
Back Stage: Directing Creditors, will you have the actors find their way through? Are you going to block it?
Rickman: To a large extent, I don't know. I know what the space is. So at times I'll say, "It's going to be better if we really look at how we're using the space." But that will be late on. We'll say, "Let's try and move you around the space here." But maybe they'll have found that anyway. I'll certainly never say, "Sit on this line; stand on that."
Back Stage: How did you create your Bottle Shock character? Did you wait for the costumes to come?
Rickman: Well, the costume is very important because it's period, No. 1. And so it feels very different on your body. It's not free; it's waisted. And also he's from a particular strand of the British class system, which means you make no concessions to the environment, and so he's in 100 degrees of Napa Valley heat in a wool suit and a tie and socks and shoes.
Back Stage: And a Gremlin.
Rickman: And a Gremlin car. And that has to become food for your character. It's part of his totally uncompromising attitude to an alien culture in a very particular British kind of way. "I have landed, I am here, I will now repossess you." He's an emblem, in a way, put down in this strange world, and so you see how he collides with it, which is why [director] Randy [Miller] and I talked about moments of him discovering strange food and driving a strange car and just seeing how this man interacts with this environment, given that he's not going to be intimidated by it.
Back Stage: Tell us about your early interests in acting and about getting into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Rickman: Well, I went to a school [Latymer Upper School] that had a hugely strong focus on theatre in the English department. So I had done a lot of theatre at school. And it had an after-school society where we did plays, but we'd always read them — in full costume and fully rehearsed, but we'd read them. And it'd be, like, Coriolanus one week and [laughs] Chalk Circle the next. Yeah, big learning experience. And then I went to art school, so there was a bit of a pause, and then I was working in design for a couple of years and then eventually said, "Now's the time."
Back Stage: Do you remember your audition for RADA?
Rickman: Burned on my memory. Yes, I do. I had to do two. I had already had a grant to go to art school, and so I couldn't get government support, so I had to audition for a scholarship. So the first time? I did Richard II and a piece from a play by James Saunders called A Scent of Flowers. And the second audition was from The Relapse — a Restoration comedy by Vanbrugh — and Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Back Stage: Was your voice this wonderful always, or is this a lot of RADA training?
Rickman: My voice. Well, I don't know, I hear something completely different to everybody else. No, my voice teacher had a constant struggle. And likewise people working with diction. Huge problems. My voice teacher at the time, who was called Michael McCallion — sadly dead now but is the author of a very fine book about voice and speech in the theatre — he said, "You sound as if your voice is coming out of the back end of a drainpipe." So, clearly I had work to do.
Back Stage: A BBC survey voted the perfect man's voice as a blend of yours and Jeremy Irons'.
Rickman: Hey, ho! [Laughs]
Back Stage: Tell us about getting your very first jobs.
Rickman: Well, of course when I left drama school, the actors' union was powerful — at least to some extent. It's had a lot of that power ripped away from it. Because when you left drama school, you had to get 44 weeks on your Equity card, and that had to be done in the regions because you were not allowed to work in the West End or on film or in television for 44 weeks. Which meant those of us who left at that time did a lot of terrible work, personally, in the regions, but in big brave productions where you were completely miscast but you learned a lot and without getting overly judged. It's much harder for young actors now because there's no union requirements. You don't even have to be a member of a union in England to be an actor; you can just wander in to a West End theatre [laughs] and say, "I want to audition."
Back Stage: So you had experience in the regions.
Rickman: I did all that for, like, two years. Then I did a production at the Edinburgh Festival of a Ben Jonson play called The Devil Is an Ass, which led to me going to the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time in the late '70s and then left fairly quickly, and my life changed a lot because I did some fringe theatre in London, which led to going to the Royal Court, which I suppose is my spiritual home. And as a result of working at the Royal Court Theatre, I then got invited back to the Royal Shakespeare Company but a bit more on my terms. So then I did Liaisons Dangereuses, and that went, eventually, to Broadway, and then as a result of that I was offered a movie. So you can see the steppingstones.
Back Stage: How is the Royal Court your spiritual home?
Rickman: Well, because the Royal Court is absolutely known as the home of the writer; it's not about the actor. Of course it's also where Olivier did some of his greatest work. And it's filled with wonderful actors, and its history is full of wonderful acting. But the absolute cornerstone of its existence is to work with and nurture writers. So the conversation there is always about the play and new writing and developing new writing both nationally and internationally, because it has a whole international arena.
Back Stage: And the focus at the RSC?
Rickman: The Royal Shakespeare Company of course has to focus on Shakespeare, largely, and also over the years has developed its ongoing relationship to new work. But that's the company I, as a schoolboy, grew up watching — and going to see Judi Dench and Diana Rigg and Ian Richardson and [Paul] Scofield and all of those people, and sitting up way back in the cheap seats, watching the magic.
Back Stage: Did you say, "I'd love to do that someday"?
Rickman: No, I kind of always knew that it was what I wanted to do, but some voice inside said, "You have to deal with the other thing first," which was art school. When I came to direct the first time, it was like I reached out to the shelf where I'd put that part of myself that had come from art school. I have quicker conversations with the production designers, the set designers, the DPs, costume designers, because of the art school training. And it's certainly crucial to what I do as a director.
Back Stage: How do you cast?
Rickman: I go to the theatre a lot. I see everything — in London, anyway. I'm also vice chair of [RADA], so I have a very strong ongoing awareness, if not knowledge, of all the young actors in London, and I'm aware of what's happening. And so I suppose the simple answer is, if I was going to cast a play full of 19- and 22-year-olds, then I would meet with young actors.
Back Stage: Do you teach?
Rickman: Well, I don't really teach, no. What I do is, from time to time, I'll go into question-and-answer sessions with a roomful of students, and we just have a conversation. They ask a question, and I say, "Well, this is my point of view," and then a couple of hours later we stop. So I don't know what that's called. Just handing something on.
Back Stage: What are their concerns?
Rickman: A combination of the joy of it all and the panic of it all, especially when they're about to leave training. And I suppose, with hindsight, the one thing I can absolutely tell them is that they're at a very competitive moment, especially at drama school. You've just spent two years being a functioning unit — a company almost — and then suddenly the world steps into your oyster and says, "You will now compete with each other." And so somebody gets an agent and somebody gets a job and somebody doesn't, and suddenly the world absolutely changes. But that's the real world. And so I suppose what I can say to them with total accuracy is that "you can look around the room at each other, and I can promise you, all of your careers are going to be completely different, and there will be moments when one of you is working and the other isn't."
Back Stage: You've had such a prolific career, but have you had times between projects when you panicked and thought, "I'll never work again"?
Rickman: God, yes. And it never leaves people, the whole "I'll never work again" thing. Yeah. Loads and loads of times.
Back Stage: Any words of wisdom to the starving young actor out there who is done studying and has put the time in?
Rickman: Well. I just wish there was more opportunity for them to get on a stage regularly here [in the U.S.], and I wish that actors would fight for a subsidized theatre in this country because, whilst it's constantly in the hands of — I mean, thank God for sponsors and all the rest of it. But the only reason I can go direct a play called Creditors at the Donmar Warehouse, which will have four weeks' rehearsal and run for six weeks with people at the top of their profession, is because it's subsidized and it does not have to make a profit. I mean, libraries and swimming pools don't have to make a profit. Why does theatre?