Ian McShane

It's never fair to assume that in real life an actor is like the characters he plays—and in the case of Ian McShane, it would be pretty scary if that were true. From the Devil in the musical version of The Witches of Eastwick and a cold-hearted gangster in the feature film Sexy Beast to a Golden Globe-winning performance as lawless bar owner Al Swearengen in HBO's Deadwood and now Max, Pinter's father-from-hell in the Broadway revival of The Homecoming, McShane has gleefully and believably played the baddie. But in conversation, the deep-voiced 65-year-old is a charmer: friendly, talkative and happy to be back on Broadway for only the second time in an acting career well into its fifth decade. His last appearance, in The Promise, lasted for 23 performances exactly 40 years ago alongside Eileen Atkins and Ian McKellen. McShane has worked on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1960s, but his charismatic performance in Deadwood heated up his movie career, with character roles in We Are Marshall, Scoop and Hot Rod, plus a handful of films yet to be released. Luckily for Broadway theatergoers, he was able to carve out a window of time for The Homecoming's limited run.

How are you feeling now that The Homecoming has opened?
In the words of my good friend [and Homecoming co-star] Michael McKean, if you read only the good reviews you'll become an egotist, if you read only the bad reviews you'll become a manic-depressive and if you read both, you'll become schizophrenic. But I hear that the reviews are pretty great all around, and that's nice. It's a pleasure to go in every night and do this play.

Good reviews give the audience permission to assume they'll like the show.
Oh yeah. Sometimes audiences are a many-headed beast and sometimes a single-headed beast. So if they've been told, in a sense, "This is good," their anticipation is quite exciting. And they've been told it's funny, so they're not frightened to laugh, which normally in Pinter they might be.

How did you get involved in this production?
About a year ago, [producer] Jeffrey Richards called me and asked if I would like to do it and I instantly said yes, if they could wait until the end of this year because I had commitments to a couple of movies. I had worked with Jerry Frankel, who is a major partner with Jeffrey, 28 years ago on a film called Cheaper to Keep Her, a prophetic title because I met my wife [actress Gwen Humble] there. The film wasn't a success, but Jerry said, "At least you and Gwen came out of it." We got married and we're still together, which is terrific. It'll probably be another 28 years before I work with Jerry again.

This is your third Pinter production, right?
Yes, I did The Caretaker on television in 1965, which won the Emmy in a category they had then for "best international program." Then I did Betrayal about 25 years ago at a great theater in L.A. called the Matrix, with Penny Fuller and Lawrence Pressman. It was a great production and we won all sorts of awards. Also Gwen, my wife, did a play that Pinter directed in London in 1990, an American comedy called Vanilla by Jane Stanton Hitchcock. I spoke to him a couple of times before we started rehearsals and he said [about The Homecoming], "There are a couple of good jokes in there. Don't take it too seriously; go out and have a good time." The seriousness takes care of itself but it's a scathingly funny play. And the despair in it is just extraordinary. Beckett was [Pinter's] hero, and Harold is in a natural progression of that kind of theater—emotions stripped bare. I love doing that mixture of naturalism, surrealism and a sort of stripped down quality. It's a strange mixture, so you have to be quicksilver in your approach to it.

A lot of Americans are wary of Beckett and Pinter. Is there something they should know if they've never seen a Pinter play?
They should know how funny it is, with lightning switches between humor and piercing nastiness. It's rather like a more surrealistic version of Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, which I loved and which is in the line of American naturalistic theater. Pinter is in the same tradition except it's a little more stripped down and surrealistic. They're both soap operas, in a way, of the highest order, about family crises and family life. The Greeks wrote soap opera, and so did Shakespeare. There's nothing wrong in that.

Why is Pinter's writing a good match for you?
I think it's the sudden switches. I just enjoy the process in the same way that [creator] David Milch in Deadwood gave me speeches that would switch from anger to rage to self-loathing to happiness, so it keeps everybody off guard. I like that in writing and I seem to respond to it pretty well.

Did you have any qualms about mixing American and British actors in the cast of The Homecoming?
None at all. Dan Sullivan is one of the most wonderfully calm, even-tempered, strong-willed, sensible directors I've ever worked with. And I think that hybrid, the three-on-three English and American mix, has worked beautifully. Raul [Esparza] and Michael [McKean] and I work very well together; it's been seamless. There's never a problem with the accents, and I don't think anyone would blink at the idea that we're all in the same family. It's been very much a march toward excellence, and we all get on well. We don't all go out to dinner every night, but we look forward to working on that stage together.

It's been 40 years since your Broadway debut.
Yes, it's 40 years since The Homecoming was done, in the 1966-67 season, and I did The Promise at this same time of year in the 1967-68 season.

With Eileen Atkins and Ian McKellen. Not bad!
And the original in London was Judi Dench. That was a phenomenal time to be in New York. It was the summer of love! The Village was the hot place to be, Hair was done that year, Horowitz had his last concert before he went into retirement, all sorts of extraordinary stuff. Ian and I were young and had a great time running around all over New York. I have fond memories.

Is it simply circumstance that it took 40 years for you to make it back to Broadway?
Yes. My career, like most English actors, has been all over the place, and it just never happened. I did theater in London and on the West Coast, but not here. I guess the timing was right this time.

Was there a point that you decided to concentrate on film and TV rather than building a classical career in the stage?
Yeah, I never wanted to be part of the RSC or the National Theater or one of those companies, thank you very much. It's not my style, not my kind of thing. Noooo. I like the hours in movies rather than theater. I like my evenings free sometimes. I'm one of those guys who wakes up like a meerkat. The head pops up! But I'm getting into [the theatrical schedule] this time. This morning I slept till half after 10. I couldn't believe it.

I was startled to read that you were in the original cast of Joe Orton's Loot. What are your memories of that?
It was amazing. We did a six-week pre-West End tour, and like a lot of productions, they fucked up the author's second play. They tried to make it into, "Oooh it's the second great play" instead of just doing the play. They tried to dress it up and get a fancy director in Peter Wood, and I didn't think he knew what he was doing. The star was the wonderful English comic Kenneth Williams. It was a great cast. Geraldine McEwan played the nurse, a Scottish comic Duncan McCrae was in it. I played Hal. But there was a lot of insecurity, and people were constantly bitching that it wasn't funny enough. It's a very difficult play; instead of playing it as black comedy they kept arguing about it.

What was Joe Orton like?
He was incredible. He would just keep giving them sheaves of lines, more and more stuff. "How's this?" He was totally unfazed by any of the kerfluffle that went on. Eventually we died in Wimbledon; instead of going into the West End, they decided the production wasn't going to go anywhere. I always thought it was an opportunity missed, and it didn't surprise me that a year later they did exactly the same play with a cast of relatively unknown people, like an off-off-Broadway play, and it was a huge hit in the West End. Kenneth Cranham played my part and he's going to be playing Max in The Homecoming next year at the Almeida in London.

Tell me about your experience with The Witches of Eastwick.
That taught me a lot. It taught me never to do a musical again [laughs]. I say that glibly, but it was a sadly missed opportunity. I'd never done a musical, so when they ask you to do it, you jump and think, "That's going to be great." But I don't think the book was ever strong enough and the director [Eric Schaeffer] wasn't strong enough. It was one of those "too many cooks spoil the broth." I think you have to have one strong hand at the helm.

Had you been known as a singer?
No, but I did an album when my [British TV] series Lovejoy was on called Both Sides Now. You can probably find it on K-Tel [laughs]. They gave me a gold record for it! I had sung in TV shows; I had done a black comedy about a crooner, and early on I did a thing about a rock-and-roller, so I could carry a tune, but a musical is different. I just felt that The Witches of Eastwick was never dark enough all around. It should have been a lot nastier, and at the end, with musicals, they tend to throw everything in. You want to say, "Why don't you throw in another kitchen sink and see if that works?" Also, they didn't concentrate on the acting. You'd have to say, "Excuse me, can we go into the part where people talk to each other? I know you want to have this little dance there, but there are times when people do need to speak, particularly in The Witches of Eastwick." But we did okay; it ran for a year, playing to about 80 percent in a barn of a theater. It's good for your soul to have done something like that, so you never look at anything as a disaster. It was enormously instructive for me to have worked in that milieu.

Let's talk about Deadwood, a show that became a cult hit. Did your scary performance in Sexy Beast lead HBO to cast you as Al Swearengen?
I'm sure the casting people who suggested me for the part had that in mind. David Milch wasn't looking for me to play the lead in the show, but they couldn't find an American. I read the script, and when they said, "Walter Hill is directing it and David Milch wrote the script for HBO," I said, "Jesus!"

Did you realize that Deadwood would be a something special?
I knew that we'd done something good, but you can never foretell the reaction. The actors were extraordinary; some of them came to the theater the other night and we went out. It was a really great group of people, rather like this one [in The Homecoming]. They parked their egos at the door when they went into that soundstage in the desert. We had a great time.

I always thought the name "Swearengen" was a joke [since the character cursed constantly]. But I read that he was a real person.
And he had a twin brother. Can you imagine? I said. "Don't even go there!"

Did you have any idea that the character would be hailed as TV's "sexiest villain" in People magazine?
No, no. It's hilarious all that, isn't it? Rolling Stone called me, what was it? "Hot barkeep"? They'll invent anything to sell a magazine [laughs].

When Deadwood was canceled abruptly, there was talk of a couple of two-hour films to tie up loose ends. Will those ever get made?
I have no idea, I truly don't. One would like to think so, but I wouldn't hold my breath. David's got a new series that he's working on, a 1970s New York cop show; he always had other series in the works. [HBO] didn't expect the disappointed response when Deadwood was dropped by some number-crunching idiots.

You obviously enjoy working in America—you've gone back and forth for your whole career.
It's like having the best of both worlds. I've produced and starred in TV there [in England], but at the moment, America is my favorite. I think the quality of work here is better. American TV—I'm talking about cable—has been of the highest quality for the past few years. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Dexter, Sex and the City in a different kind of way—they're much superior to what is crossing the channel the other way.

In many cases these days, TV is better than feature films.
Film studios are not studios anymore, they're conglomerates, and they just produce product. The director is not king anymore. Nobody is king; nobody knows who's making the movie, whereas on TV the writer is the king.

You've been busy with all kinds of movies since Deadwood ended.
I did quite a few animated movies. I've got The Golden Compass out now; I voice the bad bear. I have one coming out next June with Jack Black, Kung Fu Panda, where I play a villainous snow leopard who believes he's a kung fu master. That's a funny script. I also did an animated one with Dakota Fanning called Coraline. I did a [non-animated] movie with Renee Zellweger called Case 39; I play a good family cop in that one. And I just did a wacky remake of Death Race 2000, the old Roger Corman movie, with Jason Statham. I was in Romania doing a movie from January through April and I will probably be doing my next movie in London in April with Ray Winstone. It's a script by the same writer who did Sexy Beast.

Did your wife ramp down her acting career to be able to travel with you?
She did. One of you has to do that, in a sense, and we kind of like each other. We have a good time together.

Your two grown children were here for the Broadway opening as well.
Yes, my son Morgan and my daughter Kate came from London and spent a week. They had never been to New York, so it was great having them here. My daughter left her three babies at home, but her husband is a great father and took care of them. It was fabulous.

You have a career that's impossible to sum up—you've played Disraeli, you were on Dallas, you've done all kinds of films….
I'd be dead if I summed it up. I don't want to! It's not over yet. When they said, "Why don't you do Desert Island Discs?" I said, "I'm not ready to die tomorrow."

What is that?!
It's a program in which people talk about their career and pick records they'd take with them to a desert island. There are still too many records yet to come out. I always say. "Actors don't retire, they just lose their scripts."

See Ian McShane in The Homecoming at the Cort Theatre.