Bertie Carvel on His Astonishing Transformation in the Buzzed-About London Musical Matilda

Bertie Carvel made his name across London’s not-for-profit sector, winning raves at the Almeida (Rope), Royal Court (The Pride) and Donmar Warehouse (as Leo Frank in Olivier-nominated performance in Parade). But only now is Carvel, 34, making his West End debut as Agatha Trunchbull, the hammer-throwing battle-axe of a headmistress in the acclaimed Roald Dahl-inspired musical, Matilda, beautifully directed by Matthew Warchus. Both the show and Carvel’s performance have been shortlisted for the 2011 Evening Standard Theatre Awards based on its debut run last season in Stratford-upon-Avon; the London incarnation opens on November 24 at the Cambridge Theatre, where Carvel was headed when Broadway.com rang up for a chat.

It seems amazing, given your credits, that only now are you making your West End debut.
It’s actually quite a privilege to be in something that started in the subsidized sector [under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford]and was made with the kind of love and care that can only be fostered in that sector, then becomes a commercial piece. I’m crossing my fingers as I say this that it’s the best of both worlds!

Do you envision a long run in Matilda?
I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t want to look too far into the future. [Carvel is contracted to Matilda through mid-April.] But this is such a delightful role and such an outrageous opportunity for an actor that there’s a lot left for me to give to Agatha. It’s interesting: I don’t think actors like me often get the opportunity these days to do long runs, which is why what Mark Rylance is doing in Jerusalem is so extraordinary —coming on and being as electric and alive more than two years [from the play’s Royal Court debut] as he was on the first night.

Miss Trunchbull is such an out-there role: a harridan of a headmistress who exists to scare her students. What’s that like to play?
To me, she’s about walking the tightrope between cartoon grotesquerie on the one hand and, on the other, a sort of lifelike and truthfully observed performance. The job is to straddle the tightrope so that you don’t tip over into one side or the other. I think as a child, there’s something frightening about certain adults, particularly when you’re in their clutches or power. That must be the reason why Roald Dahl creates such brilliant characters: He taps into something in the collective memory of people. God forbid everybody can remember someone as awful as Miss Trunchbull [laughs].

Do you freak out the kids in the cast offstage, as well?
You want to have that feeling of being genuinely scary, but you can’t go around terrifying them; one of your professional responsibilities is to be genial! I admit when we started I was unsure how to handle the scary thing, since obviously it’s important when they’re on stage with Trunchbull that we believe they’re scared. But on the other hand, it isn’t real, is it? Happily, it all happened fairly naturally, via osmosis.

What was your feeling initially about taking on the role?
What mattered most was that people not be sure whether a man or a woman is playing the part, and I do get a kick out of passing people afterwards who say, “She [sic] was terribly good!” [Laughs.] It can be slightly embarrassing coming out of the stage door where there are people waiting with programs; one doesn’t want to assume that they want to say hello to you. But I have had these slightly awkward conversations where I say “hi” and then give them half a second to realize that I was that woman they just saw. Someone chased me up the street the other day after realizing belatedly who I was.

I love that Agatha turns out to be powerfully built, while also sporting a bit of a hunch and a quasi-Hannibal Lecter voice.
The part gets you fit very quickly and keeps you fit! I decided that if the RSC should fall on hard times, they ought to market the Trunchbull weight loss program, where people pay a lot of money to do a single performance so as to sweat out all those unwanted toxins and lose several pounds. I had the whole idea of a basketball section in the show that never quite made it but I did learn to throw the hammer first time around; that was part of wanting it to be authentic. There’s a hammer cage at the athletics track near where I live that I walked by every time I went to Hampstead Heath and it never occurred to me to use it.

Her get-up is pretty cool, too.
There’s a breastplate that is currently being remade by the superstar of theatrical padding, Phil Reynolds, who was responsible for the Batman films; the old one was made by the RSC’s armory department following many, many fittings and neurotic specifications from me about the exact angle of her décolletage and the number of milliseconds that her breasts should enter the room before I did! And it was very important that she should have this enormous trapezius muscle which—given that she’s older now—has developed into a sort of hunch; she’s a powerful woman but gone to seed a little and run to fat: very lovingly sculpted, individual rolls of fat!

You took part in a workshop of the stage musical of Bridget Jones’s Diary with Sheridan Smith and Julian Ovenden. Any news on that?
I was going to do another [workshop] this past summer, but my grandmother sadly died, and her funeral coincided with that. I was Mark Darcy, the Colin Firth part; it was fantastic, especially being part of something in response to a piece of work that is already known and loved. Beyond that, I can’t really speculate since I don’t know what the dates will be and when I’m going to end up [leaving] Matilda.

So for now, it’s about sharing the stage with copious numbers of kids—even though W.C. Fields famously warned against acting opposite children or animals.
The kids are all gorgeous, and part of what’s charming about the show is that you’re not just watching a bunch of stage children who’ve been drilled and have a certain way of finishing a line even though they do these incredible feats of choreography and they sing and they act and do all that stuff. As for animals? I haven’t tried acting with them yet. Maybe I’ll end up in a stage musical of Old Yeller or Lassie.