Speaking in Tongues' Ian Hart on Disliking Theater, Hollywood Honesty and the Impact of Harry Potter

Ian Hart burst on to the scene as the Liverpudlian drama school dropout who landed the starring role of John Lennon in Backbeat, Iain Softley's 1993 film (soon to be a stage play) about the early days of the Beatles. Since then, he's worked regularly on screen—in The End of the Affair as well as Harry Potter's Professor Quirrell—while dipping an occasional toe into the theater: in New York and Dublin, for instance, in a revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, opposite Ian Holm. More recently, Hart has taken to the London stage in a big way, appearing at the Duke of York's Theatre in Andrew Bovell's puzzle play, Speaking in Tongues. The warmly engaging, always direct Hart recently met Broadway.com to talk about sustaining a career, his forays to Hollywood, and why he actually doesn't much care for the medium in which he is making so impressive a mark.

Not having seen you in the theater for years, suddenly you're everywhere: the Bush, opposite Joseph Fiennes [2000 Feet Away in 2008], at the National [in Caryl Churchill’s Three More Sleepless Nights this past August] and now your West End debut. Does this mark a change of heart?
Far from it: it's an economic necessity. The things I have been getting sent recently—I mean television and film—just haven't been very good; it's as simple as that.

You've never previously played the West End.
No, but as with the Bush and the National, you just do it because the writing's good or it's an interesting project . I mean, I sat in the house with some TV scripts thinking, I can't do this, it's just too dreadful, even if the money is good. Money is money and you need it to survive, but I'd like to leave the dreadful television until the very last minute when I've got no money left.

That's fascinating since you have made plain elsewhere that you don't really like doing theater.
I don't get anything out of it at all. But I have to say if I'm going to continue to [act] for a living, I'd rather do something good in maybe not my preferred medium than look back on my work, thinking, "Oh that was dreadful; why did I do that dreadful job?" I'd rather sleep at night, if that makes any sense.

What are your reservations about the theater?
I simply don't enjoy the process; I don't enjoy the relationship between the audience and the actor—or let's just say that my brain isn't wired up in terms of the response an audience gives you. I just think [after a performance], there you go, finished now, so for me it's just arduous. I find it hard work.

It seems to me that as you get older, you're so incredibly cast-able in the theater. Think of all the other Pinter plays you could do.
I know, and actually I do have sort of a love of Pinter, only because I knew him and loved him as a man. I just thought he was dynamite. I worked with him as an actor to begin with [on the film Mojo] and just adored everything about him. When I did The Homecoming, there was this perceived ethos of the Pinter pause and that whole nonsense and then when I met him, I realized he isn't bothered.

In Speaking in Tongues [in which Hart plays three distinct roles in two acts], you come offstage at the intermission and you come back on—
—and you've got another play. That's how it feels. None of the people in the first act reappear, really, or at least in any major way. It's like a whole fresh new batch of characters appears. Everyone spends a lot of time hiding things, and there's a confession element to the last act where the veneer slips and people are forced to give up the information that they had planned to withhold.

Was the film adaptation [Lantana] useful?
I'd never seen the film. I'd like to but I was warned off by the director, so I didn't. I was a good boy.

The Churchill play must have been a challenge—all that work for only 10 performances or whatever? Speaking in Tongues must be your longest stage run to date.
I've got the attention span of a gnat. It's just the way it is. Some people, and I envy them, can endlessly explore the minutiae of the internal journey. I can't go down the same alleyway 48 times without realizing that it's just an alleyway at the end of the day.

Isn't film just as repetitive with all those takes?
Yeah, but your responsibility on film is to a moment. The structural aspect of filmmaking is that it is a director's and then an editor's medium. For me oddly enough I feel I have more chance of molding a moment in a film than I ever will shaping a play. Plays are not going to change as a result of any of my actions. They're sealed; they have to be. With a play, I can make it sadder one night or darker another but at the end of the day, the beast is still going to resemble the beast.

What was your life like before your performance in Backbeat changed things for you?
I'd been working in cafes in Liverpool for the two years leading up to it. Actually, I'm quite good in the kitchen. I've got no imagination, but I can chop vegetables like nobody. I was a kitchen galley slave: "chop 300 onions, peel 3000 spuds." That's what it was like. But at that time, no one would cast me as anything but a car thief—or a burglar.

After you started doing films, how did you find the whole L.A. scene?
I found it quite lonely, quite frankly, plus I'm a little ugly Hobbit-like fella, you know what I mean? I remember someone saying to me [does perfect American accent], "Ya know, Ian, you're never going to work in this town: you're bald! The best advice I could give you is get back on the plane and go home." [Laughs.] In some ways it's a very honest industry because it's so brutal.

On the other hand, you've been in Harry Potter! That must have helped?
That had no impact, not a jot. I don't think I've ever gotten a job from being in Harry Potter. No one has yet said, "Oh, I really liked your work Harry Potter and that is why we're having this meeting."

I bet your daughters liked it, though.
At the time, yeah. My big one [Daisy] will be 13 in January, so she would have been about three; the baby was a baby: she has no memory of it. But the big one remembers meeting elves and goblins and a boy with glasses. She was so unimpressed by the fact that Harry Potter was really just a kid with glasses, and there was a kid with glasses in her school—I think she felt you could see that anywhere.

Is it true that you have two films coming out about the Easter Uprising?
It's just one film but a big script. It's taken them two years to raise funds, since which time, we've had the worst financial collapse since the 1920s, which is a bad time to start an epic! We'd be better off if this were two men set in a park, and instead they've gone and written about the 1916 uprising involving large buildings being blown up and massive political shenanigans and a complex back story. It's not something that can be achieved with $150,000. Fingers crossed, we're good to go in September.

In the meantime, you can do more theater… or not.
I’ll certainly see what's offered to me. It has to be something that's worth me doing it because as I say [the medium] is not something I enjoy. I would rather go to work doing something clever and that I don't feel ashamed about rather than just doing cops 'n' robbers telly. It sounds odd, I know, but that's the truth.