Richard Griffiths

Once you've seen Richard Griffiths in The History Boys as Hector, an unconventional English teacher at a British boarding school, it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part. Luckily, Griffiths and the rest of the 12-person cast have shown remarkable loyalty to Alan Bennett's play: Since its premiere at London's National Theater two years ago, the company has remained together, starring in a film version and embarking on a three-country tour leading to Broadway. Bennett's brief description of Hector as "a man of studied eccentricity" who "wears a bow tie" is brought to exuberant life by Griffiths, who has spent the past 25 years in a variety of character roles on stage and in film, notably as Harry Potter's nasty Uncle Vernon Dursley. He's a charming conversationalist with strong opinions, but he doesn't want to contemplate a Tony victory—and please don't ask him to pose for a picture.

You've emerged as a favorite to win the Best Actor Tony…
[Groans] Oh, don't say that!

You don't like the idea of being the front-runner?
No, it makes me very nervous. I've been there before and lost. It's a new layer of responsibility, which is very daunting. I listen to the opening music thinking, "We'd better get this right, because there are 1,000 people out there and they're going to be unhappy if we don't.

It's quite unusual that the entire cast has been together for so long. How do you keep everything fresh?
Constant reexamination. We go back to it again and again and say, "Is there any way we can improve this?" When I first read the play, it was getting on to four hours long. It's been rehearsed and shaped and squeezed and cut back and sliced and polished and rubbed down. If it was a car, we'd have gone through 20 layers of paint by now.

Although the play is dense with ideas and literary references, it doesn't feel long.
No. I think the trick is there's no point when it grinds to a halt. When a scene ends, your eyes flick up to the video screen and some of the story being told there. And when that finishes, the lights come on and we're ready for the next scene. You're not aware of any pauses, so you don't get bored. That's very unusual. [Director] Nick Hytner believes that if you have to go to a blackout, you've lost the play.

You're making your Broadway debut. Has the experience been what you expected?
It's been absolutely amazing. We've been on this world tour since January. We went to Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia before coming to Broadway. Our six-week run in Australia was in a theater on the wrong side of Sydney Harbour Bridge; you'd come out after the show and couldn't even get a cab. There was no sense of a theatrical community, so the show began to struggle. We had full houses, but it was hard to stay with it because you thought, "Why are we doing this here?" I kept saying to the guys, "Just hang in, because once we get to Broadway, all of this is going to change. You're going to be in the middle of theater soup—the biggest theater area on the planet, with the most competition, and the audiences are going to be sharp, they're going to be savvy, and they're going to be sitting there saying, 'Show me.' So we have to get this right." We came to New York, and it took everybody's breath away. It's been fantastic.

So you agree with Faith Healer's Ian McDiarmid, who feels it's a myth that Americans have no attention span?
I've always thought that was a propagandist lie put out by advertising people. Because it seems to me if you can watch an episode of Star Trek with 10 commercial breaks in it, you must have a tremendous attention span to hold on to any idea of the story. It's a complete fabrication put out by Madison Avenue, who should be routinely made to eat their own garbage and lie there bloated and sick [Laughs].

What do you love about your character, Hector?
There's a line of Shakespeare that he exemplifies: Don't be a foe to life. He's not negative; he can sense the joy and the life in every line of poetry and in every stroke of an artist's brush and in every fragment of music. He's always looking for that and always trying to teach the boys to look for it. His idea is that education is nothing to do with what anybody teaches you, it's entirely to do with what you find out about yourself and how you handle your feelings.

One of the big debates in The History Boys is over the value of prepping for college admissions tests. It's ironic, since wealthy New York City parents routinely spend thousands of dollars on SAT prep. Hector is very much against all this, and the audience seems to side with him.
Yes, because the people Hector is against—the card punchers, the career makers, the ones who strategize for social success—are disregarding their humanity as far as he is concerned. They're undermining the very stuff that would make them achieve what they want. He just wants to get his students to understand themselves; all the rest is a snap once you've done that. You know, Cyrus, the first great emperor of Persia thousands of years ago, started out as a goatherd. Where you begin has nothing to do with where you're going to end up.

The play is set in the mid-'80s. Is the importance of attending Oxford and Cambridge as much ingrained now as it was then?
Oh yes. If anything, getting in to Oxbridge, as we call it at home, is more important now than it was 25 years ago. There are people going around with resumes saying, "B.A. Oxon: failed," which means the person took a B.A. course at Oxford and failed. It's a big enough deal that the person took a course there, even though he failed it! That's how silly it's getting. One reason the play was so successful in London is that people could see how timely it is, even though it is set 20 odd years ago.

I've read that you had a difficult childhood as the son of deaf parents. When did you realize you were going to become an actor?
Oh, that didn't happen for a long time. I trained for years to be a painter and got accepted by several art schools. They all said, "We can teach you what you want to know, but you're not doing 'the new thing.'" My generation of art students sat around painting rainbows on twigs; they were all utterly convinced that representational art, the kind of stuff I was interested in, was finished. I decided there was no future for me in art and abandoned it, which was the biggest nightmare of my youth. So I thought, "Well, I have to do something else. I've been a laborer; I've shoveled concrete and that's too much hard work. I have to go for something easier." I thought I'd qualify for drama and English and teach. That was Plan B. While I was doing that, I changed my mind and thought, "Maybe I can be an actor." That was Plan C.

Well, it all worked out for the best, since you're obviously doing what you were meant to do.
Yeah, but remember I've been around the block a bit.

Given the twists and turns of your life, have you ever thought about writing a memoir?
I've tried, but I get up to the age of puberty and everything goes shy. And then I find it very, very hard, if not impossible, to talk about the things that were happening to me and my feelings and what my body was doing. I just find it all too intense. I sit and look at the sheet of paper and think, "I don't want to talk about this." I'm still embarrassed.

I have to ask you about a headline on a feature story about you in a London newspaper: "I've Always Hated the Way I Look."
That's typical of a sub-editor. Sometimes I think sub-editors should be taken out and stripped of their manhood. What I actually quoted to the guy was a funny line in a movie I once saw, an old Jewish proverb: "Everybody hates the way they look, but no one complains about their brains." I thought that was hilarious, and that's the headline they pulled out.

So that didn't reflect something you seriously felt about yourself?
Well, I wouldn't deny it, in the sense that I don't think I look particularly great. I never have. I've never been conventionally good-looking, never been a jock, never been anything super-butch like that. I've always played character roles. It's hard for me to pose for pictures because I don't like the way I look in photographs. Most actors are incredibly vain and terribly good looking, so they're happy to be photographed. With some actors I've stood beside in photographs, you'd think they were having something going on with their sexual organs. [Laughs] But for me it's always been a real pain to stand there and have people say "Look this way, look that way, look the other way," because I think I look a bit like a sack. If I'm in a film, people see me differently. But if it's just a still photograph, if you're not presented at your best, you don't look very good.

I've seen you using a cane at various events. Do you feel okay on stage without it?
I damaged my knee on the flight from London to Hong Kong. I can get by on stage, but it hurts sometimes. I can cope with it.

You've done character parts in an incredible array of movies, from Gandhi and Gorky Park to Shanghai Surprise and Naked Gun 2 ½. You're not snobby about the movies you do, are you?
No, no, no, not snobby at all. The first priority is to pay the rent. There was a terrible press furor years ago when Jeffrey Archer wrote this play called Exclusive which the press spat upon and sneered at it. Two great actors, Paul Scofield and Alec McCowen, were in it. And the press was full of "Why are Paul Scofield and Allen McCowen appearing in this terrible play?" And I'm thinking, "I know why they're in that play—they've got to make a living!" Sometimes that means you do work that makes you want to puke. Not that that's how they looked at that play, you understand. But I've done things that were very questionable because they offered me some money and I knew I could live for an extra month on it. The competition out there is intense.

Tell me about the most arresting credit on your resume: playing Elaine Stritch's husband in a British sitcom!
That was back in 1980 and '81. Elaine Stritch was living in London at a suite in the Savoy. Noel Coward got it for her, no less! She'd been brought over to England to do Sondheim's Company. And the TV company asked her to do a show. As I understand it, there used to be a show called Till Death Us Do Part and it was brought by an American company and they changed it to a show called Archie Bunker [All in the Family]. There was one person in that show who wiped the floor with Archie Bunker, played by Bea Arthur. Then she got her own show out of that. I don't know the name of it.

It was called Maude.
Yes. In the fullness of time, there were hundreds of scripts written for Maude and most of them were garbage, because they were bought by London Weekend Television in a great big sort of circle. Maude came to London, and they offered it to Elaine Stritch. Out of those hundreds of scripts, we used 13, and I wrote one myself.

Was the show a hit?
It wasn't a miss, but not quite a hit. We did two series and then it stopped. I was 33 or 34 at the time.

What was it like to work with Stritch?
Lovely. Wonderful. It was the best part of my college education. Whereas teachers tell you stuff they think they know, they don't know the performance stuff—otherwise, they'd be performing. That was Elaine all over: She taught me pretty much everything I know about phrasing. She learned it from Frank Sinatra; that's what she told me. I asked her, "Where did you get this phrasing from?" And she said [he imitates Stritch's familiar growl], 'Francis Albert Sinatra, he was the greatest who ever lived.'"

She was referring to spoken lines, as well as lyrics?
It's all the same. It's all poetry, you see. Sometimes it's accompanied by music; sometimes it's not.

What was she like on a personal level?
Well, there was a door you couldn't go behind with her, down at the bottom of the stairs somewhere. As long as you stayed out of there, you were fine.

Has playing Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter films increased your visibility?
I've done two films that have dominated things. One with 15-year-olds and upwards is a film called Withnail and I.

That one is notorious, isn't it? You play a lusty gay uncle.
It's one of the great growing up movies about students who have finished their college careers and don't want to move on. And for people below the age of 15, there's this business of Harry Potter's uncle, which is a global phenomenon.

And so many alums of the films are on Broadway now.
It's incredible—Frankie de la Tour, Ralph [Fiennes], Zoe Wanamaker. We've got everybody over here except the kids and Dumbledore.

What are you and your wife enjoying doing in New York?
We occasionally meet nice people for dinner and have jolly conversations. I'm enjoying spending all my money. They give me lots of money and I just seem to sweep it across the table and drop it. Then the arm swings back and they give me some more. If only I could move my elbow and get it into my back pocket, this wouldn't be happening.

What are you spending your money on?
Me? Nothing. My wife is spending it. I was allowed to buy a pack of cards the other day and a notebook and a pencil. And that's about it.

See Richard Griffiths in The History Boys at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street. Click for tickets and more information.