DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins are to star in a new television adaptation of King Lear, directed by Richard Eyre.
The TV film is being produced by Playground and Sonia Friedman Productions for BBC2.
Friedman has previously collaborated with Playground on the TV adaptations of Wolf Hall and The Dresser.
King Lear is a co-production with Amazon Studios, which will air the drama on Amazon Prime Video in the UK following its premiere on BBC2 in 2018.
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“I was completely responsible for developing that backstory, and that particular scene was my one opportunity to tell the story of Stupe. So I did, I took advantage of that, I told his backstory. I wanted to tell something that would make people think, and kind of be able to relate to, and I think anybody in a marriage could relate to that.
Originally in the script, Stupe was on his way back from overseas, he was in the military, and as he was on his way home his family was killed in a car accident, and I didn’t think that was very interesting at all. So I actually proposed that to the directors one day. I talked to the directors and Brittany [Snow], and I said, “Well, what if this was Stupe’s backstory?” And [I] gave them kind of a general outline of the story, and then I said “Well, if you trust me to tell my story when I have the opportunity, then I’ll just do it.”
And that’s actually what I did. I had a story in my head and I just told it as a story rather than a written-out monologue.”
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“The challenge with Thrones is that unlike some of the smaller, maybe independent movies, where it’s a single camera and it’s in a room, and it’s very domestic — it’s far more actor- and performance-focused. With this, in the nicest and best possible way, you are one part of the scenery in various shots. You have to sometimes go into a zone with Thrones where you just shut off everything around you, because everything has to be so detailed. The background has to be in exactly the right place, the smoke has to be the right level, the light has to be right — there’s a hundred things that have to be right. At any one moment, the take could not work, because of any of those elements. It’s exactly like shooting Lord of the Rings. Any big, epic movie would be like that. And it’s a different way of acting where it can get very frustrating, but you have to zone out the background noise a bit. And there are times when you don’t, when it’s a less intense scene or something. It’s a certain skill, and one that I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to try and craft, because some actors come into this and it’s way too much going on and they can’t zone out.”
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“It’s nice to be able to work on two different characters at the same time. It’s a great challenge as an actor, and there’s something very satisfying about it. Before when I did it in The Island, one was a clone of the other, so they were very similar. And when I did it in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, Last Days in the Desert, one was Jesus and one was the devil, but the devil appeared to Jesus in his own form, so again, they were exactly the same character, really, although they had to feel like different people. But in this instance, they look completely different, and they should feel different, and then the challenge for me really as an actor was to try and play the two parts without it being a hindrance to the audience. My goal was to make people not see me playing Ray and me playing Emmit, but just see Emmit and Ray and forget that it was being played by the same actor. That was sort of what my challenge was that I set myself. Otherwise, it’s a gimmick, and a gimmick doesn’t really hold over 10 hours of television, so that was my goal. And that’s quite difficult to do, and it was quite satisfying. I was happy that I actually achieved that, so yeah, I loved it.”
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Turner was introduced to acting at a very young age and fell in love with it. She says, “My mom putting me into a one hour acting group on a Saturday because she wanted some time to herself. She sent me off with all of my friends and we all did this acting class and we all ended up loving it, just completely falling in love. It ended up being kind of like our church. We were so dedicated to it. It was like a haven for me.”
Turner looks at playing Sansa as a rare opportunity to progress within a character over a long period of time. She reveals, “It has been such a blessing. Normally you play a character for a month or so, and then you are done with it, but to be able to flesh out a character for over eight or so years has been really amazing. She’s a project that I really feel is part of me now. Everything that happens to her affects me. I have kind of been living through two people for the past eight years.”
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Jones believes that the foundation of the character came from the writing, and his performance helped strengthen the material. He says, “I trusted that Dan [Fogelman] was going to take that character in a direction that was going to be layered, and deeper than what’s on the surface of it. I also knew that as an actor, I could bring something that was deeper and layered, and I think it worked both ways. When they saw that, they realized they could also be deeper and have more layers, because I understood how to carry those layers, and where they came from. There are nuances in the character of William that are directly pulled from my life, and my life experience. They’re very subtle and small little moments—detail-y things that happen—but there was room for that, so I didn’t have to worry about that. It wasn’t a cliché role, right from the beginning. You might think it would be, but it turned out that it was fuller than I could even imagine.”
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