Simon Callow

How did you get into acting?

I was about eighteen; it was my first real job, and it was a very unusual job because I was working in the box office of the Old Vic theatre.

Then, not only did I get to see an awful lot of plays, but I also met the actors and I was able to sneak into rehearsals, in the theatre – quite illegally – and I became fascinated by the work of the theatre.

The thing that fascinated me, as I said, was when I was in rehearsals, there was this... the work of the theatre, the sort of work it was.

So, I’d stand at the back of the Old Vic theatre when the actors were hearsing, but mostly it consisted of people sitting rather glumly about saying,

‘Well, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to make this scene work, I don’t understand my character,’

and the director would try to help them to understand the character or suggest a move here or a move there, or maybe they’d try walking in a different way or putting on a different hat, and bit by bit it started to fall into place.

And I thought, ‘What a wonderful job, what a fantastically interesting job to wrestle with these kinds of problems, try to understand the characters, trying to find out how best to express them and show them off.’

So I came to acting very much from that point of view.

What was a challenge was that Mozart was a person who’d actually lived and was indeed one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the whole of Western civilization, and I was a great lover and admirer of Mozart’s music, so there was a tremendous challenge to bridge the character that Peter Shaffer had written.

Peter Shaffer knows all about Mozart; he could so that Mozart was sort of a smutty hysterical child, really in a lot of the play.

My job was to reconcile that with the fact that he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, and that was tremendously hard.

No, I wouldn’t say that it was the most satisfying.

It was the most exciting because its fame almost from the moment it was announced was overwhelmingly greater than anything I had ever done, and to be honest, ever have done since.

The fact that the play was very, very controversial when it opened proved to be very shocking for many people, only increased the excitement around it, and it was astonishing to look out into the auditorium every night and to see Paul Red-Newman, or Robert Redford, or Ava Gardner, or Margaret Thatcher sitting out there, because everybody had to see that play.

They’re absolutely different media.

They require different things from you as an actor – I love them both.

But they are each of them completely different; you bring completely different things to them.

Obviously, the crucial difference with the theatre is that there’s an audience there, and that’s such an important aspect of it in every way.

It’s important because you have to reach out to them – make sure that everybody can hear and see what you’re doing.

The beauty of the theatre is that every single performance is utterly different from every other one.

I think as you get older, you realize that you never get it right.

I mean, I’ve probably about half a dozen times in my forty years of acting have thought, 

‘Well that was a really good performance,’ but it can always be better.

And so, one goes to the theatre every day hoping that it’ll be in some way better. You know, there is always the possibility you might get it right. I mean, you never do; you never can.

In movies or television film – which is what almost all television is nowadays – a lot of those responsibilities are lie with the diretor and the editor.

And having directed a film myself, I know perfectly well that you can make a sad scene funny; you can make a slow scene fast in the editing suite.

It’s an astonishing power that a director and editor have.

You can make a character seem stupid just by editing them a certain way, or make them seem brilliant by editing them in a diferente way. So in that sense, the actor is rather powerless.

The other thing that’s very hard about acting on film is that, hilariously, it’s regarded as a sort of naturalistic medium, but in no sense is it that for the actor, because you’re, you know, first of all, there are some, you know, little metal objects right in front of you, sort of, staring at you as you’re doing your love scene or whatever else it might be.

I love watching other actors acting.

I’ve been obsessed by acting since I was a child, and I’m a great connoisseur of it, and I think I’m quite a good judge of it, and so I adore watching other actors work when it’s good.

When it’s not, it’s a great pain to me.

As a young man, and a boy, I was extraordinarily lucky to see that fabled generation of actors of Gielgud and Richardson, Olivier, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft.

People now almost all completely forgotten.

Even if they made movies, it’s unlikely that people of a younger generation know who they are, but when they were alive and kicking, and doing their extraordinary work onstage, it was something quite remarkable.

I mean, it was the sort of thing that nobody attempts any more.

In movies, not always, but sometimes Daniel Day-Lewis does I think probably approach a role in the way that a lot of them might have approached it.

I don’t much like wearing make-up.

I sweat a lot, it comes off, it’s uncomfortable, it’s sticky, and I do everything I can to avoid wearing make-up.

I don’t get stage fright, but I do get self-conscious, and I hate that and I wish I didn’t, particularly at events like first nights – because I don’t know how

it’s impossible to ignore the fact that there are at least 100 people sitting out there, judging you.

You know, I think almost all actors feel tremendous longing for the first night to be over, but it has to happen.

It’s like a sort of operation – it’s, you know, it’s got to happen, it’s going to hurt, but you will feel better afterwards.