Jonathan Hyde Gets to the Psychotic Heart of Capt. Hook

Jonathan Hyde has been impressing devotees of stage and screen for a good many years, finding his broadest public as the none too personable J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line of steamships, in the James Cameron cinematic leviathan, Titanic. Other Hollywood credits include Macaulay Culkin's generous-hearted valet, Cadbury, in Richie Rich and Warren Westridge, the ever-sarcastic narrator in Anaconda. When not propping up American blockbusters like Jumanji, Hyde is lending his inimitably resonant voice to the English stage as suits someone who arrived in London from his native Australia at the end of 1969 and within six months had started at RADA: the first English drama school for which he auditioned. A veteran of virtually all the state-subsidized London playhouses, Hyde is having a bit of a lark this summer in a Kensington tent, playing Captain Hook in the director Ben Harrison's production of Peter Pan (the play, not the musical). Broadway.com caught up with Hyde to talk about J.M. Barrie, luck and whether one day he might play King Lear.

You've played many of the great theaters in Britain and elsewhere, but this must be your first big-tent experience.
This just seemed a wonderful caper largely because the idea seemed so outlandish to build a tent that would seat 1200 people and provide 360 degree CGI and try as get as close to J.M. Barrie's original play as possible, give or take modern technology, of course. In Barrie's day, they would have had these too-funny bits of flying, and not much else, [whereas] Bill Dudley has designed this all-singing, all-dancing set. I was as curious as anything else to see what this would entail.

I bet you didn't anticipate having to do a nine-show week.
That's more than I've been used to in 40 years of shouting at life! I didn't until they told us we had to, and then I thought, Well, it's in a park, it's Peter Pan, little realizing that it is an extremely arduous show. Everybody's covered in bruises: it's that kind of gig. You've got fights on a mast, people falling through holes in the wall, things spinning around. I've got to swim away from a crocodile on a skateboard which inevitably gets something caught in it. It's a heck of a swim, as they say.

Peter Pan, the play, is such an English literary template, though in the U.S. we tend to know the musical first.
It's extraordinary, not least that I've never been involved with Pan before. Capt. Hook has always been on my wish list, to say nothing of Mr. Darling since both are really as neurotic as the other. They're both children. Hook is completely a psychopath, certainly: a mixture of cruelty and sentimentality, which of course marks out most dictators from Mugabe onwards. And there's a bit of Hook in Darling: the way he boots the dog down the stairs, which he treats as matter-of-fact. It's the parent as tyrant, of course, particularly the father—the father as tyrant figure.

As a presumably untyrannical father, you have a daughter, Georgia King, who looks as if she is doing pretty well for herself, with roles in all sorts of Brit flicks and TV shows.
Georgia is amazing. She's 22 and has never been to drama school. She trained on the hoof, as they say. My other daughter, Willa, is 27 and went to RADA where she graduated with distinction but her career was put on hold while she built up her linguistic skills going to Italy for two years to perfect her Italian.

Why the surname King?
Hyde is my stage name. There was already a Jonathan King who did a song back in the 1960s, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and became a pop guru and made programs about pop music and was then popped into jail for inveigling 14-year-old boys into the back of his Rolls Royce. My grandmother's name was Hyde, so I thought I'd use another family name. My wife, who's Scottish, is an opera singer by the name of Isobel Buchanan, so there's yet another name. She's now developing into a sensational dramatic soprano, and there are very few of them around. She sang at Ian McKellen's 70th birthday party, an aria from Adriana Lecouvreur, and it was wonderful. I'm surrounded by talent!

You have such a famously distinctive voice, and I'm sometimes seen you described as "Gielgudian" in reference to the late and legendary actor John Gielgud.
[Laughs] I think that's wildly offbeam: I would have said Olivier-esque, if anything, in that with me it's all to do with the physical shape-making rather than trying to do it through the gilded phrase, which was the technique associated with Gielgud. He was the master phrasemaker as against Olivier who was a physical actor who corralled the verse to his particular physical interpretation.

Does that interest in physicality extend to your current assignment?
With Capt. Hook, I think I've tried to look physically to the late 17th-century, I suppose, just in terms of the turn-out of the thigh and foot: a certain sort of courtly carriage. We're playing on a huge stage that does require a physical presence: there's not much point in trying to be naturalistic when you're playing to 320 degrees. It's not completely in the round but pretty close, so you have to be able to turn yourself around quite a lot. What's been interesting is that we have explored the idea of Hook as a total paranoid nightmare figure who scares the shit out of absolutely everybody, including Smee. Actually, I think now having done that one can afford to look more at Hook's own vulnerability.

However once characterizes it, this job is certainly different from your dual assignments for Trevor Nunn on the McKellen-led world tour of King Lear and The Seagull.
That's what I called my year of selfless devotion, since Kent has to look after Lear and Dr. Dorn in The Seagull has to look after just about everybody. I felt particularly looking after Ian was such a joy: I doubt I would have done it with anybody else. In fact I'm staying out in east London in the basement of Ian's house during the run of this play. Our actual home is in Bath, 12 minutes from the railway station, six minutes from the Royal Crescent, but I haven't been there since April.

Have you ever played Broadway?
Never. I could have gone with Jumpers [the David Leveaux revival of Tom Stoppard's play, starring Simon Russell Beale] but that just saw me off really, doing eight months at the National and then five months on the West End, so the thought of another six months, I thought, was stretching it too far. I regret so many decisions I've made in my career, but I don't think that's one of them.

You share with so many actors here a scintillating second career where you get to pop up a big deal movie and have some fun…and make some money.
You'd have to be mad not to be grateful for good fortune in this business. I am among the very fortunate in being able to mix and match what I've done, which has been a huge joy in terms of keeping my enthusiasm going. I've forgotten some of the stuff I've actually done, which is dreadful [laughs],. but I'm just a very lucky bunny: no two ways about that.