#which. is awful. as i am solidly Irish | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blackjack-15 · 3 years

Text

Leavin’ on a Jet Pack — Thoughts on: The Haunting of Castle Malloy (HAU)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. Like with all of the Odd Games, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I go into what makes this game stand out as a little strange.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: HAU, mention of DAN.

The Intro:

Yup, this is the jetpack banshee game.

Honestly, that’s probably the best introduction to this game. It’s semi-famous among the fandom for just being balls-to-the-wall nuts, and for good reason; while HAU isn’t quite as confused as some of the other Odd games, it’s definitely less organized, and there’s very little story to tell here.

And the story that is there? Well, we’ll cover that in The Weird Stuff.

The Haunting of Castle Malloy falls near the end of the Odd Games, and honestly it more than deserves its place. Sure, we’re in a different, ‘exotic’ location like…well, most of the Odd Games, but it’s not like it really matters, as Nancy sees very little of Ireland. A car drive, a brief interlude outside of a pub, and the weirdest outside interface ever seen in a Nancy Drew game (even being reused in the next game briefly), and for all of that we might as well be in the Florida swamps.

Let’s not even mention the teetotaler pub. The less said about that, the less silly that this game comes off. Everyone in Ireland drinks a tall, frothy cup of Juice when they want to relax.

Sigh. Honestly, HER. Just skip the pub entirely.

HAU is also a game that tries to contextualize itself in Nancy’s past, but doesn’t do a very good job about it. It’s not inside reference-y like Secret of the Old Clock, but it’s also not grounded in character like…well, all of the Nancy games (ASH through SPY). It just springs in the ‘hey remember this character you’ve never heard about nor had referenced because we made her up whole cloth for this game’ little mechanic and tries to whisk the player away with it.

Consider me unwhisked.

And maybe that’s the biggest problem – or rather, the biggest signifier – of The Haunting of Castle Malloy: it relies on whirling the player away in the Sights and Sounds and Juices of Ye Olde Greene Eire, but instead…well, it doesn’t have the power to whirl the player. It doesn’t even have the body to muss the player’s hair when the wind comes around.

HAU is very little like its source material; in fact, really the only thing that the book and game have in common is that they’re both set in Ireland, and that the mystery involves Nancy’s friends. Sure, in the book it’s Bess and George, rather than an obscure, hitherto-unknown exchange student, but since there’s nothing else, we’ll give them points for it.

The majority of this meta (and the majority of this game) falls under the weird stuff designation, so let’s pop on over and talk about what makes HAU truly odd.

The Weird Stuff:

The entire premise of this game isn’t too far off the mark of normal – Nancy’s summoned to help a family friend, which is the case for quite a few Nancy Drew games (more than the opposite, I believe, at this point in the series) — but it does stand out a bit that she’s going to be in a wedding as a maid of honor.

While I could see it for Bess/George, Hannah (which would be fun) or Ned (which is my personal headcanon), it’s a bit odd that this is a character we’ve never heard of who considers Nancy her closest female acquaintance. You’re telling me Kyler got through elementary, middle, high, and University without making a single friend other than the weird little kid she knew while studying in River Heights?

That’s weird enough to get a section by itself, but it’s not even scraping the surface of this game.

Going deeper, our predominant theme/conflict/effery in this game is a convoluted love triangle between the bride, groom, and their best friend (who for some reason isn’t involved with like anything with the wedding, regardless of the fact that he should be doing at least as much as Nancy is doing, and possibly more since he’s an actual friend of the couple), with Kit still being in love with Kyler (for some unimaginable reason) yet friends with Matt. Kit, notably, doesn’t really do anything about it, but just having that plotline being our main thread is a super weird choice, honestly.

This is also a story about marriage troubles; sure, they haven’t officially tied the knot yet, but the fact that Kyler thinks that her fiancé disappearing the night before their wedding is a “classic Matt prank” and not either something deeply worrying or a sign that he’s too immature for a commitment is a Huge Yikes.

Best case scenario and he’s playing a prank…does he think people won’t take this as a bad sign, that early-arriving guests won’t freak out, that this won’t cause any problems?

And worst case, he’s been kidnapped (the truth of course being even dumber than that), and the first 48 hours after a kidnapping are the most crucial, meaning that Kyler’s inaction could result in a death that didn’t have to happen on her watch.

What I think HER really didn’t think about was the implications of this setup. Either way, it doesn’t just look bad for Matt and/or Kyler (to say nothing of Kit), it looks bad for their future.

We have no faith that these two are actually interested in each other, let alone in love and committed to this relationship. Nancy, famously deaf to emotions like this, doesn’t really make any comments about how this bodes ill, but the player is bound to think that something’s not quite right if these two people are so mismatched.

In a slightly less uncommon theme for the Nancy Drew series, this is also a game about unrequited love. Let’s face it, for the majority of the game the only suspect really is Kit, since Donal isn’t big enough to kidnap Matt, and it’s a Nancy Drew game, so Matt definitely isn’t out there playing a very poorly timed prank on his bride to be. Kit even has suspicious documents (the land drawings) and such that add up to him wanting Matt out of the way, even without his unrequited love schtick with Kyler.

Honestly, how two people were in love with that chick is just…it boggles the mind, honestly. What is appealing at all about Kyler? Her weird hair? The fact that it looks like she’s wearing a green dress the whole game only to have it be pants? Her bland personality? Awful voice? The way she looks in the weird photographs in the game?

Sorry for the digression, but I am struggling here.

The last section within this section will talk about the thing that’s by far the oddest conceptionally in this game – the banshee/jetpack storyline. Most of the time when it’s a folk/faerie story in these games, it turns out to be not true, and that’s still the case here. To have it not be a banshee, but instead be a senile, badly mentally damaged old woman flying around on a jetpack from World War II, on the other hand…that stretches the limits of believability to where it would have been better to just have it be a banshee.

Fiona and her backstory and her jetpack are pretty much the oddest pieces, with none of them actually fitting into the larger themes of the story. Our backstory in this game — WWII Ireland and its scientific achievements — isn’t integrated at all with the present day, dethroning previous WWII-focused backstory game Danger by Design for ‘least related backstory’ award, and it’s not justified at all within the story or characters either.

The Title:

As far as titles go, “The Haunting of Castle Malloy” isn’t bad at all; it’s fairly standard, slightly pulpy Nancy Drew fare, and certainly better than the title of its book inspiration (“The Bike Tour Mystery”, so named because Nancy et al go on a bike tour in the book). It tells you the “what” (haunting) and “where” (Castle Malloy), and is fairly evocative.

I really just have a problem with it being the title of this game. Not only is the Castle not really relevant — sure, it’s where the game takes place, but it’s not important to the game outside a conversation or two — within the story, but the game doesn’t really pull off the ‘haunting’ side either. It’s established pretty early on that there are weird lights and sounds, but that’s about it.

If you want to keep the location, “The Banshee of Castle Malloy” I feel like would have been a better choice, as it tells us right away we’re dealing with Irish mythology, and shows it’s supposed to be a Haunting game (no matter how poorly it pulls that off) without any excess fuss. It’s also a little more specific, which is generally a good move to make the title more interesting — like how “The Shadow in the Fog” is better than just “The Shadow” as a title.

HAU’s title seems to be solidly in the middle of Nancy Drew titles, so there’s not much more to say about it. Let’s move on to the mystery it somewhat, but not completely, speaks of.

The Mystery:

Nancy’s been summoned overseas again, but this time it’s for pleasure, rather than business. An exchange student that Nancy and Carson housed for a few months is getting married, and wants Nancy to be her maid of honor.

And no, I have no idea why Carson wasn’t invited. Way to snub the man who fed and housed you, but invite his daughter (who was 14 at the time Kyler knew her) to hold one of the most important places in the wedding.

Anyway, by the time Nancy arrives — the night before the wedding; bad form Nancy — the groom — Matt Simmons — is missing, which Kyler suspects is a practical joke (as Matt has a reputation for pulling pranks) and Donal, the caretaker of the Castle, thinks is a sign of being kidnapped by faeries for the crime of being English and marrying an Irishwoman.

Out of the many crimes of the English, I don’t think this one ranks enough with the Fae to merit a stepping-in, but hey, what do I know about crudely-drawn stereotypes in a HER game. I’m sure they did all of the possible research, talked to experts about Irish mythology, spent about 5 minutes on the Wikipedia article for “banshee”…at least one of those.

The only other person on the Castle grounds is Kit Foley, Matt and Kyler’s friend — and Kyler’s unrequited admirer. A land developer, he’s literally the most suspicious person at the castle by being the only one actually in the castle and by holding the (honestly reasonable) opinion that Matt just got cold feet and left.

Once Nancy finds Matt’s broken glasses and Kyler mentions that he’s blind without them, however, the race is on to find Matt — who definitely couldn’t have broken a spare/fake pair of glasses as part of the prank, shush you — before the wedding the next day. What should have been a grueling search takes an hour or so, and they find out that he accidentally fell in a secret passage and got trapped there, being fed carrots and potatoes by the resident crazy woman like he was a blind, helpless rabbit.

Yeah.

As a mystery…I mean, is this even a mystery??? What honestly went on in the pitch room that day? “We’re gonna write about fidelity, unrequited love, the stress of a wedding, a friendless woman who invites an 18-year-old because she never made any friends…and a crazy old woman with ties to World War II. And a jetpack.”

I don’t even know how I would begin to rate this mystery. Bad? Because that’s honestly the word that comes to mind. I’m never a fan of “oh it was all a Hilarious accident, ho ho ho” endings to mysteries, and this one is worse than most. Nothing follows, the backstory is such a non-entity it really doesn’t bear spelling out, and the characters aren’t even a little likable. This section could delve into each problem with the mystery but, honestly, that sounds exhausting and I’m gonna go over the bigger points below anyway, so let’s get to the clowns that make up this circus.

The Suspects:

Beginning with Kyler Mallory, our bride to be who, for some reason, has her hair and tiara done the night before the wedding — I guess she’s not planning on sleeping? — is searching for her prankster groom to “teach him a lesson” and so he knows that once they’re married, “no more pranks ever”.

Sounds like she loves him dearly and wouldn’t change a thing, huh. If that wasn’t worrying enough, she’s not super fussed that he’s disappeared the night before their wedding, and considers it a “Classic Matt” sort of thing to do.

As a culprit – man that would have been a dark turn, to have her kidnap/hide away Matt to teach him a lesson about not pulling pranks. It, of course, would have made a friendly acquaintance of Nancy’s into a bad guy, and that’s a huge No-No for HER, but it would have been kinda cool all the same.

Kyler’s groom is Matt Simmons, an Englishman who is decidedly unwelcome in Ireland (at least, according to Donal) and who has a strong reputation for being a little too heavy on the pranks — so much so that when he disappears, his own fiancée just thinks it’s another prank. To be fair to her, he did disappear while pulling a very sad little prank on her, so she wasn’t entirely off base.

As a culprit…how would that even work? That would be like FIN’s Maya kidnapping herself for no purpose whatsoever. Matt isn’t really given any character beats other than “prankster” and “fed like a rabbit”, so there’s really not much to speculate on here. I do wonder what Kyler sees in him…but then again, I also wonder what he (and Kit) see in Kyler, so we have that as well.

Next up is the couple’s friend Kit Foley, who’s sporting an enormous shiner to the wedding courtesy of a wayward branch (and a bit of karma) that smacked him while he and Matt were pranking Donal. He’s in love with Kyler (why????) but seems happy enough for his friends, and is of the opinion that Matt simply got cold feet and left.

Not sure why you’d be friends with someone who’d do that, but no one in this game has any character at all, so we’ll blow past it.

A land developer, Kit is basically the only suspect and yet a terrible suspect at the same time. Sure, he’s in love with Kyler (again, why???), but he also doesn’t really gain anything from them not getting married, just like he doesn’t gain anything from them getting married. I never thought I’d see the day where a brooding best friend is so…unaffected by the marriage of his long-time crush, but that just goes to show you how little depth even Kit — who somehow has the most depth of any character — really has.

Finally, Donal Delaney is the caretaker of Castle Malloy, and a firm believer in the Fae. He’s also really the only Irishman in the cast, which isn’t a great look for HER. He thinks that the Fae have taken Matt in return for being in Ireland and sleeping in the old nursery room in the castle, and is easily frightened.

Seriously, that’s his whole character.

As a culprit…as much as Donal is grumpy, he’s not really any sort of entity as a suspect. He hangs out at the pub, drinks fruit juice, and talks about the Fae, and that’s the extent of his involvement in the plot. The most importance he gets is inadvertently being the source of Kit’s black eye, and that’s so tertiary to the plot that it might as well not be there.

The Favorite:

Even though this game is, by all accounts, a ridiculous non-entity, there are a small amount of things that I do like.

I’m actually a fan of the opening sequence; it’s like a better version of CUR’s opening, has Nancy crashing her car (always fun) while telling Ned she’s not gonna crash (even more fun), and she doesn’t show up right away at the castle. Honestly, the first about 10 minutes of the game are actually solid, and more fun than the rest of the game as a whole. So that probably qualifies as my favorite moment in the game, spliced with the revelation that Matt has been subsisting on raw carrots and potatoes, which is just…honestly unimaginably funny.

My favorite puzzle is the seating chart for the wedding. Veterans of this meta series (all 5 of you) will know that my favorite types of puzzles are word and logic puzzles, and this is a great logic puzzle. I honestly could have done an hour of that puzzle and been happy as a clam. It really stands out as, well, the only fun I had during the majority of the game, but it was honest fun.

The Un-Favorite:

And then, on the other hand…

There’s a lot about this game that isn’t great, but almost none of it do I hate; there’s just not enough effort for me to hate it.

Except the background setting.

Having already done WWII as a backstory, HER really should have thought twice about returning to it only five games later. With Brendan Malloy developing fuel for armored vehicles, only stopped by it exploding in his (and everyone’s) faces in 1944…honestly, there’s no reason that this game’s backstory should take place in World War II, other than to have a reasonable chance of Fiona still being alive. It also makes it seem like ‘oh the War really didn’t touch Ireland that much hahahaha” which isn’t a great look either.

Honestly, HER’s treatment of Ireland is pretty ‘un-favorite’ here, but since HER never really does a good job handling any country (or most states outside the Pacific Northwest), it’d be fairly pointless to begin talking about it at length now.

My least favorite moment is probably the reveal of the culprit/mystery at the end; it’ so anti-climactic, honestly, and only comes after much struggle through two very stupid puzzles. It doesn’t give any meaning to the game, no one learns any lessons, and — probably unpopular opinion here — it probably would have been better for everyone involved (including Fiona) if Fiona would have died in that explosion 60+ years ago.

My least favorite puzzle would actually be the two puzzles at the very end — the chemicals and the rocket ship. The chemical puzzle is the worst offender, but both are pointless, do nothing for the story, and really feel like they’re there because Nancy Drew games have to have a puzzle at the very end. Putting something into a game because you ‘have’ to is never good, and this is a prime example of how annoying that obligation can truly be.

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Haunting of Castle Malloy?

The first thing I’d say is that, despite the games in the Nancy Drew series often containing one, I don’t really think the HAU needs a historical backstory. If you must give something to the Castle and the explosion, set it back in World War I, which would at least be something different.

But honestly, it’d be better to just get rid of it entirely. It’s old, it’s a castle, it’s in ruins, move on. The present has enough potential for drama without mucking up the past.

The second thing I would do is to take out Fiona entirely. Sure, still have the legend of the banshee going around the area, but it’s all things that are (mostly) easily explained, like in most haunting games. Figures in the fog? That’s just grounds crew who have been working for months to prep the site for the wedding. Strange lights? Well, yeah, the castle wouldn’t be wired for electricity if it’s been abandoned, so the workers have to bring in their own lights. Screaming noises? That’s just pre-marital jitters. Or something; you get my point.

As in all haunting games, have one or two unexplained things to suggest that the banshee actually was real, mourning the “death” of the last Malloy — because Kyler’s taking Matt’s name, or some other such nonsense. The sad thing is that it doesn’t really matter; anything that adds meat to the story would be an improvement on such a nothingburger of a game.

I would also bring in Alan, the best man, as more than a phone contact. Let’s face it, only having Kit and Donal as suspects (as Matt’s gone and Kyler doesn’t even pretend to count for a second) is really stupid, and this game needs some more detail and at least an hour more of playtime that doesn’t just involve getting lost in the bog.

Bring in Alan who is confused as to why he was chosen as best man, but suspects it’s because Kyler also has feelings for Kit and thus didn’t want Matt to choose him to be the Best Man (in other words, take out the weird social climbing angle). It would take a subtle hand, but I actually wouldn’t mind Alan having a bit of a thing for Matt himself, just to re-emphasize the “love is like an Egyptian painting; everyone is looking at the back of someone’s head” sort of theme we’ve got going on in this game.

The last thing I’d do is to bring Ned in, and have him be in the car with Nancy on their way. Think of it; usually wedding guests get a plus one; it would be a good excuse for Nancy to ask Ned out rather than leaving him behind as per usual, and Ned would probably be able to relate to Kit/Alan better than Nancy can, on account of Ned having actual emotional intelligence.

I wouldn’t say to have him be player-controlled, but I think Ned hanging around the castle, trying to help out with the emotional snarl that the guys have gotten themselves into (with Nancy focusing more on Donal and Kyler) would not only be in character, but would be a great way to make room for some emotional depth — something that Nancy herself, if not the games, usually skirts around or ignores entirely.

Would these changes fix the game completely and make it a winner? No, I don’t think so. I think the game is too structurally weak to really ever rise above mid-level, and possibly not even lower mid-level. But I think, along with some sprucing up of motivations and puzzles, these changes could help make HAU better than it is — and that’s worth it, no matter if it makes it into the Top 10 Nancy Drew Games list or not.

#nancy drew #clue crew #nancy drew games #the haunting of castle malloy #HAU #nancy drew meta #my meta #long post

10 notes · View notes

bbclesmis · 5 years

Text

King Of The Castle: At Home With Dominic West

As the star of HBO's The Wire and The Affair, Dominic West made his name playing conflicted Americans battling their demons and struggling to find their places in the world. And cheating on their women. In real life, he's a self-deprecating father of four from outside Sheffield, and among his chief preoccupations is how to preserve the 800-year-old Irish castle inherited by his wife.

"Excuse me," says Dominic West, "I’m just going to wipe this so you can sit down and you won’t be infected with disease." About seven crumbs on his otherwise clean kitchen table disappear with the swipe of a tea towel, and he gets back to the business of making lunch. We’re in the kitchen of his house in Wiltshire, where he lives with his wife Catherine and their four children.

His head turns from cupboard to cupboard, like he’s watching a tennis match. “Where has the rice gone? Would you like rice?”

Yes please, if that’s what you’re having.

“I am, if I can fucking find it.”

He fucking finds it and a pan of rice goes on the hob next to the pan of leftover beef stew. “So I’m on the cover?” he says, looking out of the window. “But doesn’t that mean you’ve got to try and make it interesting?”

In 2000, Dominic West joined an Argentinian circus. This was the year before he auditioned for and won his breakthrough role of Detective Jimmy McNulty on The Wire and the year after he had a single line (“The boy’s here to see Padmé”) as a guard of one of those science-fiction sliding doors in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. He was 30, five years out of drama school and father to a one-year-old daughter.

The circus, De La Guarda, had a show, also called De La Guarda, at the Roundhouse in Camden. It was the hottest ticket in London that year. The audience entered the round to ambient music under a low paper ceiling. Performers would burst through the paper, on ropes, and eventually a pounding live soundtrack accompanied a dozen or more roped performers as they ran around the walls of the circular venue. Water rained down. Some audience members would be lifted into the air; others, perhaps more fortunate, would be pressed into urgent dancing with attractive, adrenalised Argentinians unclipped from their shackles. Or indeed, West himself.

‘What’s amazing,’ says Keira Knightley, ‘is that Dominic can play characters who should be total dickheads, yet he manages to give them a point of view and his own incredible charm. It is a great skill’

“Why did I do it?” says West, somewhat incredulously. “You saw it! Wouldn’t you want to run away and join that circus? It was such a sexy show. I saw it in London and New York, then heard they were auditioning in London and I had to do it. I did a lot of shows in five months with those amazing men and women, then they went to Vegas. It was a disaster there. The water. People dressed up for a Vegas show — of course they didn’t want to get wet.”

West didn’t want to go to Vegas. But he would end up spending a lot more time in America, filming five seasons of The Wire and four seasons of The Affair, with a fifth and final one due to start filming a couple of days after we make lunch.

“The toughest part of making these big episodic American television shows is missing my family and the boredom,” he says, gearing himself up for the process to begin again. “Sitting around waiting and not being bored is hard. There was a time when I had a play in the West End [Butley, 2011] and was learning Iago [for Othello] and I had more on than usual. That was hard work, but the harder that aspect of the work gets, the more enjoyable it is. Actual graft is what’s great about acting. That’s something I relish, because most of the time, it’s about coping with tedium.”

To stop himself being bored on set, West likes to have fun. “You can’t not have fun with him,” says Keira Knightley, soon to be seen alongside West in the film Colette. “I think fun is something that Dominic brings to everything. He very much likes a night out, is always up for a laugh and is, in the best way, wicked. And he is a phenomenally good actor, he really is. So effortless.”

“For a lot of us,” Knightley says, “who do actually need to concentrate when we’re working, it’s, ‘How are you that good when you're chatting and joking until the very last second?’ Even I had to tell him to shut up so I could concentrate. Which I had to do quite a lot.”

West is not about to shut up. And he’s not the only one. “I just did a thing with Olivia Colman [a BBC mini-series adaptation of Les Misérables] and: fuck me! Ha ha ha! The whole thing is like playing top-level sports with her. How frivolous can you be up to ‘Action!’ and then be amazing. She doesn’t do that consciously, she is just really fucking good. She is way, way, way better than me. I had to stop listening to her because she is so funny.”

Then a more serious thought occurs. “Malcolm Gladwell’s thing about 10,000 hours [the writer’s theory, from his book Outliers, that to be expert in any field requires that exact amount of practice time]? I worked it out and I’ve had at least 20,000 hours. I’ve acted so much now I can turn it on and off, and that’s maybe where the humour thing comes in. I have had an awful lot of practice at this.”

Dominic West first got the taste for drama when he was nine years old. His mother, Moya, gave him a part in her amateur production of The Winslow Boy, at Sheffield University’s drama studio. His father, George, had a factory in Wakefield that made vandal-proof bus shelters. George’s father, Harold, a managing director of a steelworks in Barnsley, fought in WWI and was wounded at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. “After, he wrote a note to go with his medals,” says West, “that said, ‘Here are a few mementos from a deeply happy part of my life’.” West has found documentaries commemorating the centenary of the Armistice “deeply moving.”

He is the sixth of seven children, with five sisters and an elder brother. They grew up in a large house on the edge of the Peak District, about 10 miles southwest of Sheffield. He boarded at Eton and hated it to begin with. “I was very homesick, had no reference to it, didn’t know anyone who had gone and I felt I was in the wrong place.” Inspiring teachers and school plays gave him something to be excited about and set him on his path.

“It’s pretentious to say, really, but my acting education was defined by doing Hamlet at Eton, reading Ulysses when I was doing my English degree at Trinity College in Dublin, then War and Peace, which we put on at Guildhall [School of Music & Drama in London]. That’s it, really. All I learned anywhere.”

Legend has it that in the audience watching his Prince of Denmark was Damian Lewis, a couple of years behind West at school, and later the star of Band of Brothers, Homeland and Billions. So taken was the younger lad by what he saw that he decided to become an actor.

“Categorically: no,” Lewis tells me, over the phone from Los Angeles. “I had always acted at school and always enjoyed it. Me thinking it was something I could do more seriously didn’t happen until I was 16 years old, after seeing Dom do Hamlet. He was very charismatic. A big, booming sonorous voice, especially for a 17-year-old. I was very taken with him, he was very captivating up on stage.”

Since graduating from Guildhall, West has worked solidly. He is not a huge movie star but is highly successful and versatile. There aren’t many men who could convincingly play both Fred West and Richard Burton, as West has done. He won a Bafta for his Fred West. He’s most memorable as Jimmy McNulty, not least because he and The Wire are so good, but also because constant reminders of those two facts have become standard reference points in the increasingly vast conversation about the New Golden Age of TV.

He has, in his own words, played “a long line of philandering cads”, from McNulty on to Hector Madden, the Fifties news anchor in two seasons of The Hour for the BBC, to Noah in The Affair and Willy in Colette. “What’s amazing,” says Keira Knightley, “is that he can play characters that should be total dickheads, yet he manages to give them a point of view and his own incredible charm, so you sort of forgive them for how terrible they might be. It is a great skill.”

But he is far from typecast. His five film roles previous to Willy in Colette are: Lara Croft’s dad, a sort of country-gent Indiana Jones, in Tomb Raider; a quietly pompous pyjamas-wearing modern artist in the Swedish film The Square, which won the Palme D’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival; Rudder, a comic-relief Cockney sea lion in Pixar’s Finding Dory; a Teflon swine of a CEO opposite George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Money Monster; and, in Genius, Ernest Hemingway.

There have been stage successes, including star turns in the West End. Following up the blockbuster and critically lauded play Jerusalem, the writer Jez Butterworth and director Ian Rickson could have done any play with anyone on any stage. They chose Dominic West to star in The River, a short, intense play with one man and two women in the 90-seater upstairs room at the Royal Court Theatre in London, for which West won universal praise.

‘It is a bad thing to be self-deprecating. It’s quite an English thing, which you become very aware of in America. People don’t understand: why do yourself down? I sort of agree with it, now’

“Dominic is able to unleash his unconscious in a really ‘present’ way,” says Ian Rickson. “It allows him to fuse into the darkness of Fred West, for example, or the troubled soul of McNulty. In terms of archetypes, he has a trickster quality hiding a warrior/lover inside. That’s exciting. There’s very little ego and a lot of generosity of spirit. He actually has a refreshingly comic sense of himself, so he does really value the opportunities he has, and doesn’t take them too seriously.”

West feels he does and he doesn’t. “I suppose deep down there’s a feeling that what I do isn’t desperately serious. It might have been Mark Boxer, the cartoonist, who said he went to some lunch for cartoonists, an awards maybe, and he was having a piss and the guy next to him said, ‘Cartoonist. It’s not a real job, is it?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not. Isn’t that great!’ He took great comfort from that and I feel the same about acting. But there is something in me which feels, partly because I have been doing it all my life and did as a hobby before I did it professionally, that this is not a serious job for adults.”

Perhaps this is why he’s so self-deprecating. Twice during our conversations, he says that he’s not a “real actor”, bringing up Daniel Day-Lewis’s commitment to doing an accent the entire time he makes a film, on and off set, and his own inability to match that; and pointing out Robert De Niro’s weight gain for Raging Bull. For Colette, West wore a fat suit.

And yet, during our conversations, he trots out seven perfect accents and imitations: Mick Jagger, the German film director Werner Herzog, Northern Irish, Irish, Australian, New York and a deep, thespian-type voice to convey mock indignance. He’s not showing off. Some of the voices were to make anecdotes funnier and others were just as anyone might do an accent subconsciously when you think of someone with an accent. You know, for fun.

But he can be serious. “It is a bad thing, to be self-deprecating,” he says, a little bit disappointed with himself. “Maybe it’s an educational thing. It’s quite an English thing, which you become very aware of in America. People just don’t understand why on earth you would do that. There are enough people who would do you down, why do yourself down? I sort of agree with it, now. It is tiresome.”

Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon in The Wire, and Othello to West’s Iago on stage in 2011, has a different view of his friend’s dilemma. “As good an actor as he is, his self- deprecating comments are his truth. He would prefer to be playing than talking about himself; exploring a character, discovering nuances, dissecting a character’s arc, is where he’s comfortable. Presenting all that unseen work is nerve-wracking. And actors are never the best judges of their own work. So, to be safe from criticism and microscopic scrutiny, self-deprecation is the best defence."

The fat suit in Colette was no cop-out. “I was then about to play Jean Valjean,” West says, more forgiving of himself now, “a man who has been in prison for 19 years, so there was a clash of waistline imperatives.” He plays the lead in a song-free, six-part Les Misérables — the project in which Olivia Colman out-joked him — the BBC’s first big drama of 2019, with the opening episode broadcast on New Year’s Day.

According to Keira Knightley, the extra padding, and a walrus moustache, did not mute West’s physical attractiveness. “Nobody looks good in that,” she says, “but he somehow manages to be dangerously sexy through it. It was a main conversation between the rest of us on set: how he managed to ooze sexuality while he was farting in two fat suits. Quite extraordinary. I can’t think of another actor who might be able to do that.”

Sarah Treem, the showrunner of The Affair, could not conceive of anyone else but West as her leading man, Noah Solloway. “He didn’t audition. I wrote it with him in mind,” she says. “I was a huge fan of The Wire and I just loved how complicated he could be — both likeable and unlikeable at the same time.”

The Affair begins with Noah, a married father of four, embarking on a fling with a waitress, Alison, played by Ruth Wilson, and then follows the fall-out for the two of them, their spouses and extended families. West, Wilson and the wider cast are terrific, as is the show’s central conceit of telling the story from the point-of-view of different characters, usually two in each hour-long episode.

“Dominic is so good at playing all different facets of Noah,” Treem continues. “His intelligence, his lust, his insecurity, the pain of his childhood, his love for his children. He lets Noah be a very complicated, sometimes deeply generous, sometimes horribly selfish, man.”

West concurs, with a caveat. “I have had difficulty wondering why someone who I can identify with — he’s my age and has a bunch of kids — would do the things he does. Sarah, a very brilliant woman younger than I am, looked at me with a raised eyebrow when I said, ‘Men my age just don’t do that. Why leave your wife and kids for a waitress and start another family?’ She told me the stories of several real people who had. Not that I want my characters to be sympathetic, but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and I have struggled with Noah in that regard.”

West has five children: a daughter, 20, with former girlfriend Polly Astor, and two sons and two daughters aged 12, 10, nine and five, with his wife, the landscape designer Catherine FitzGerald. It is Catherine’s beef stew we have been eating for lunch, their children’s clothes drying on the Aga behind us. On a smaller table in a nook in the corner of the kitchen, next to some half-completed maths homework, is a pile of dad’s hardbacks: The Flame by Leonard Cohen, William Dalrymple’s retelling of the Indian mutiny of 1857, The Last Mughal, and Changing Stages, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright’s history of 20th-century theatre.

Out in the driveway, a small child’s BMX has been discarded in front of mum’s Audi A3, in perfect position to be crunched into the gravel next time the car sets off. At lunch, West didn’t know where the rice was because he and his family have only lived in this house, a former brewery in a Wiltshire hamlet, for a few weeks. They used to live in Shepherd’s Bush, in a house that once belonged to another actor from Sheffield, Brian Glover.

“I have led my family out of London slightly against their will,” West admits, “and quite legitimately want my children to be around plants and animals more than they perhaps might be in London. My wife said I’m trying to create my childhood home here and I said, [now, the thespian accent] ‘No I’m not! Preposterous! What do you mean? It’s nothing like that!’”

His wife’s childhood home is Glin Castle in County Limerick, Ireland, a true country pile (15 ensuite bedrooms, 380 acres, secret bookcase doors) that, in various versions, has been in her family for nearly 800 years. (It’s the house you can see in the background of the photographs on these pages.) She and West want to hold on to it. To do so, the house needs to become a going concern as an events and private hire venue to cover its annual £130,000 running costs.

“I do like history and I do like old buildings,” West says. “I’m also conscious of my wife’s father and his and her legacies. He worked in conservation in Ireland, to try and preserve these old buildings, which were out of favour for many years. It’s up to us to try and keep that going, because when they’re bought by hotels and the like, they’re often destroyed.”

This Christmas and New Year, he says, “we have a super-A-list celebrity taking it. Who, I can’t possibly divulge. Actually, can you do us a big favour and put the website, please, at the end of the piece? ‘Glin dash castle dot com.’ It would make my life easier.”

It’s time to do the school pick-up. “We can keep talking in the car,” he says, and leads the way to a silver Chrysler Grand Voyager. “It has,” West says, buckling up, “the biggest capacity of any people carrier.”

Precisely something a turning-50-next-year dad-of-five should say. “I have no problem getting older,” he says. “For male actors of my age there is less emphasis, and I have already started to play the dad of the lover instead of the lover. The pressure is off. Some swami said that the key to happiness is ‘I don’t mind what happens.’ You mind less about things, let go of them. Turning 50 is great. My daughter is also turning 21, so we should have quite a party.”

He has regrets. “I suppose I wish I had played more Shakespearean roles.”

What about the old-man ones? “Only Lear is as good as the young ones.”

What about not being James Bond? “Fuck no! I’m delighted now that I didn’t get it.”

Auditioning for Bond, in 2005, West turned up in a T-shirt and tatty jeans. “I remember the director, Martin Campbell, saying, ‘Thank Christ you haven’t turned up in a tux like everybody else’. It was for Casino Royale. At the time, I really wanted to get it. I love Bond, and I was the right age for it. They asked me, ‘What do you think should happen with Bond?’ And I said something deeply uninspired like, ‘I think he should go back to being more like Sean Connery’. I thought then that it was the best job you can do. Now, I’m not so sure. You have a year-and-a-half of hell doing publicity.”

West pulls up opposite the school. “Wait here. Enjoy the smell. Kids’ banana skins,” he says, opening the driver’s door. Puzzled, I sniff the air. There is no unpleasant aroma. The interior of Dominic West’s car smells perfectly fine. But, of course, he claims otherwise. He’s a terrific actor and a thoroughly likeable chap, but that self-deprecation still needs some work.

Colette is in cinemas on 11 January; glin-castle.com (https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a25557268/dominic-west-interview/)

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #dominic west #Interviews

6 notes · View notes