Tobias Menzies interview: ‘Old-fashioned masculinity has largely vanished from our screens’
Actor Tobias Menzies – Andrew Crowley
“I’m temperamentally not well suited to being well-known or being spotted,” says Tobias Menzies. This can’t be the easiest of traits for the British actor, who has a peculiar knack for being cast in shows that go on to win devoted fan followings. “I can almost tell when someone comes up, whether they’re likely to be a Game of Thrones person or an Outlander person or a Crown person,” he says.
It was his marriage feast that turned out to be the bloodiest episode of HBO’s fantasy phenomenon. It has a reach that is “incredible, worldwide,” Menzies says – “every now and again, someone will come and point at me and shout, ‘Red Wedding!’”
The least likely to approach him, Menzies notes, are fans of The Crown. “Maybe it’s a natural reserve.” He won an Emmy for his subtle, emotionally constrained performance as Prince Philip in the third and fourth seasons of the Netflix drama, before the rows about its veracity had fully erupted.
Did he get out just in time? “It was always headed on a bit of a collision course,” he says. Writer Peter Morgan was “seeking to articulate something that has a larger truth about the institution… choosing certain events and spinning a story and meaning and conclusions from those events”. It didn’t surprise him that things got “bumpier” as the story got closer to people’s own memories. No one ever pretended it was history, he says, “but I think maybe audiences were more naive about that.”
We’re sitting beneath a big photograph of Bill Nighy in a room in west London. Menzies recently turned 50, which sparked “a bit of an existential crisis”, he admits. “It’s a very large number. I don’t like the size of it. But it’s a silly thing to worry about.” The sculptural lines of his face are only slightly starker than when he was on stage at the National as a teacher in The History Boys two decades ago. He’s dressed down: T-shirt, puffa and vintage Adidas Gazelles – not hastily purchased to replace Sambas after Rishi Sunak ruined their street cred, he insists. Menzies has some sympathy with a Prime Minister who draws criticism even for the trainers he wears. “He can’t catch a break,” he says.
‘It was seeking to articulate something that has a larger truth about the institution’: Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown – Sophie Mutevelian
He’s just played a politician of a very different time in Apple TV+’s Manhunt, in which he stars as the US lawyer turned politician Edwin Stanton, who was Secretary of War in Abraham Lincoln’s administration at the time of his assassination in 1865. The show tracks the hunt for his killer, the actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln in the head at a theatre in Washington DC, just five days after the surrender of General Robert E Lee in the American Civil War.
Menzies (along with Anthony Boyle as Booth) joins an honourable tradition of British actors playing American historical figures, from Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) to David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King) to Aaron Pierre (Malcolm X) – “It must be kind of irritating” for homegrown actors, he admits, “it seems to be easier for us to go that way than for them to do the British accent… maybe partly because our culture is so drenched in American cinema and TV that I guess we just hear that voice, we grow up with it.”
One of the show’s core themes is how the murder of Lincoln set back the process of civil rights for black people in America by a century. Its creator and showrunner Monica Beletsky is “a writer of colour, it’s part of her story,” Menzies says. There are present-day resonances, too, in its depiction of “a moment where democracy was under attack” – “obviously, America is headed towards a potentially consequential election… and there’s certainly a candidate at the heart of the election coming up in November who has not played by the rules and, some would argue, is stress testing the democratic institutions and democratic system out there.”
I do think it’s a political piece of work,” he says.
‘A moment where democracy was under attack’: Brandon Flynn and Tobias Menzies in Manhunt – Chris Reel
Menzies plays Stanton with an undemonstrative authority that underlines how brilliantly the actor is able to convey an inward self, the one behind the eyes. “I think Stanton fits into that kind of Henry Fonda/Atticus Finch stoic American hero… quite interior, quite masculine.” It’s a type that has largely vanished from our screens amid conversations about “toxic masculinity”, he says – but “because this is a historical piece, maybe we have the licence to go back and show a more old-fashioned type of masculinity at the heart of this story. I was interested in that type of character and that kind of acting,” he adds.
There’s an interiority to the actor himself. He’s very in-the-room and engages thoughtfully, but there’s always a sense of an inner presence, too, analytical and a little more watchful. He’s very private and doesn’t talk about his personal life.
“Quite early on, when I was quite young, I was going out with someone who’s pretty well known. And it came out in some way. And I had some journalists camped outside my house for a day or two and, yeah, it made me very wary.” He’s referring obliquely, one assumes, to a relationship with Kristin Scott Thomas, which set the tabloids aflutter in the early 2000s.
It was around the time he was in the historical drama series Rome, in which he played Brutus. The show became one of the first glossy international hits that majored in sex, nudity and violence – “it was very exciting to make,” he says. “It definitely felt like there was a slightly frontier spirit. HBO were really shooting for the stars in what they were willing to spend to make it right.”
‘Emotionally we’ll become hungrier for spaces which are not mediated’: Menzies as Irwin in The History Boys – Manuel Harlan
Would it get made now? “I have an instinct that it might be hard to make that now.” Are we more puritanical these days? “I would say there’s certainly some companies making TV who do have sort of an angle on what they’re willing to espouse, brand-wise… I think that feels a bit new. We obviously have some large tech companies who are in ‘entertainment world’ now, but they are very conscious that they have a brand to protect.” Of course, this includes Apple, the makers of Manhunt, whose CEO Tim Cook reportedly spiked a semi-biographical drama about Dr Dre because of its depiction of violence, cocaine use and orgies.
Menzies had nude scenes in Outlander; season one, he notes, was before the conversation about intimacy coordinators had really happened. “I think it’s a good development, but I think it’s largely there as a sort of safety net for when it goes wrong,” he says. Before that, in his experience, “it’s been fine… you sort of work it out with each other, but I have no problem with that implementation.”
The series, meanwhile, with its “big, warm, gregarious and vocal fan base”, is “dear to my heart”; he has a fondness for Scotland generally, after spending three years in Glasgow shooting the series. His family name is Scottish, but the direct link is rather distant – “there is a castle, but I haven’t tried to move in yet,” he says.
Menzies was born in London to a radio producer father and a mother who was a teacher. He went to a Steiner school in Canterbury before attending the independent progressive school Frensham Heights in Surrey, which produced comedian Jack Dee, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and actors Jim Sturgess and Hattie Morahan. Was self-expression mandatory?
“I didn’t do that much acting at school,” Menzies says. “I think more influential was my mum taking me to a lot of interesting theatre and seeing lots of contemporary dance.” (In fact, he toyed with becoming a dancer and auditioned and won a place at the Laban Centre in south London before ultimately deciding to take up a place at RADA.)
Menzies has continued to work on the stage as his on-screen career has gathered momentum, although the recent revival of The Hunt off Broadway after its 2019 run at the Almeida in north London marked the end of a near-four-year Covid hiatus for him and a return to the stage. The Hunt is adapted from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2012 Danish film about a small-town primary school teacher, Lucas (Menzies), who is wrongly accused of sexual abuse by a seven-year-old girl. It was his first play in New York, and he says he didn’t notice a difference between the audiences there and the UK, even if he can’t recall a single mobile going off during the run.
“I think audiences have really gotten smart with that,” he says, an Americanism slipping into his speech. I mention a New Yorker article about the battle for attention in an age when it suggests most of us have an attention span of eight seconds – less than a goldfish. Film and TV employ faster cuts; how can theatre flourish?
“Potentially, precisely because of that,” he says. “I think emotionally we’ll become hungrier for spaces which are not mediated. There’s no advertising, there’s no one controlling it. You go into a room and you take what you take from it. You could have a snooze, you could watch it, you can be bored by it. Your response is entirely yours, and there’s nothing between you and the thing. It’s so much more analogue and kind of crappier at some level, or less sophisticated. I certainly know that I find it very relieving to go to a theatre… I feel like people will increasingly be drawn to those spaces to get away from the whole digital phenomenon.”
‘Its reach is incredible, worldwide’: as Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones – DAMIEN ELLIOTT
In the entertainment industry generally, those terms increasingly mean strict marketing schedules and timed announcements, so Menzies can’t say anything about the Formula 1 drama he’s shooting with Brad Pitt. “The irritating answer is, I can’t talk about it. They’ve sworn me off.”
He’s not a particular motorsports fan, he hasn’t met producer Lewis Hamilton, and the rest is guesswork. I’d rather hoped, too, that we might see him return as nefarious MI6 spook Geoffrey Dromgoole in the upcoming sequels to The Night Manager but, he says, “there are no plans for me to be in the new one.”
Luckily, we do know that he is going to be starring alongside House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy in a new play inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone at the National Theatre later this year. The original was written before the Stoics had even arrived, perhaps even the strong, silent types, too. It will be fascinating to see what version of masculinity Menzies brings to it.
Manhunt is on Apple TV+ now
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