Interview: Colin Firth on the Oscars, Lib Dems

Colin Firth’s turn as George VI in “The King’s Speech” has all the qualities Oscar voters look for: royalty, a period film, a character with a physical disability, an actor who plays against type. Which explains why it looks like the golden man could find a new home on the British actor’s mantelpiece next February.

But talking to journalists at the Dubai International Film Festival on Sunday on the first day of the festival, where his film was the opening gala, Firth downplayed his chances of winning an Academy Award.

Oscar chances

And perhaps rightly so, having lost out this year to Jeff Bridges for this year – despite a stellar role in Tom Ford’s directorial debut, “A Single Man”.  Oscar voters, after all, famously don’t like the decision to be made for them.

Firth has attracted tremendous critical applause for his portrayal of the reluctant king with a seemingly insurmountable disability, winning two awards this month alone, including actor of the year at both the Richard Attenborough Film Awards and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

And on Monday at DIFF, the 50-year-old star was named ‘International Star of the Year’ by trade paper Variety. (Since this article was published, he has been nominated for a Golden Globe award, often considered a key indicator of Oscar performance).

“Nothing I say at the moment has any value at all," he deadpanned at the end of a rather long elaboration that he used to evade the question of Oscar glory nicely. "When you're out on an awards circuit, your feet are sort of a few inches above the ground most of the time, [but ] you’re jet-lagged all the time. It's not something you factor in when you watch people on television or on the red carpet but they mostly have no idea what they're saying.

"They've just stepped off a plane. And the chances are the journalist is exactly the same because they've just flown in as well. It's extraordinary to reflect on the fact everything which is said about a film at a junket or on the red carpet is by someone who is struggling to remain conscious as well. And so everything we read – we have to bear that in mind – is not true.”

Political disillusionment

So take his next response with a pinch of salt, too. Asked by Emirates247.com how he feels about being supporting the Liberal Democrats, the minority partner in the UK government coalition, he said simply, “I’m without an affiliation now.”

Firth came out in support of the party and its leader Nick Clegg rather publicly earlier this year. From almost the moment election results were declared, however, Britons who voted Lib Dem have felt betrayed, with the party changing its stance on several issues. Among these is the rise in university tuition fees, which has seen widespread protests in the last few weeks.

“My compass hasn't stopped spinning. I think it’s profoundly disillusioning if you are a student who has registered to vote simply because of what the Liberal Democrats were promising – and many, many did and simply because of what the Liberal Democrats had to say about tuition fees and things. It’s one of the reasons i went in that direction; they had policies about all sorts of things that would prompt me to vote Labour,” he said.

So, while he let Clegg off the hook – “I'm not impuning his integrity, simply because i do believe he did what he thought was his only choice at that time, given the parliamentary situation and it being impossible to do a deal with Labour” – Firth made it clear he was unhappy with the way things have turned out.

“It made it difficult for us who thought progressive politics would be the way forward,” he said.

A recent poll showed that Clegg’s popularity is waning quickly: 61 per cent of those asked said they would call him untrustworthy – eight months after another poll declared him the most popular British party leader since Winston Churchill.

Stansilavski and History's B-Plot

Firth himself has been unusually popular with his recent work, first with Tom Ford's directorial debut, "A Single Man", where he was cast as a suicidal college professor who finds getting over the death of his lover an almost insurmountable task, and now with "The King's Speech", where he plays Albert, Duke of York, who goes on to become King George VI.

But the man his friends knew as Bertie (and his family cruelly nicknamed B-B-B-Bertie because of his debilitating stutter) would lead a nation to war against Hitler and become the last Emperor of India, he was nevertheless never meant to be King. Until, that is, his brother Edward abdicated in 1936 so he could marry the love of his life, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Firth said taking the role was a no-brainer. "Films and plays have been written about royalty since plays were written, sort of taking human drama and raising the stakes. [But] this is one about a man in the shadows, it's not another biopic about one of our great heroes. He's a man who's qualities have been obscured somewhat by the history books," he said, referring to his character as "History's B-Plot", where the Edward VII and the abdication drama were the "A-Plot".

That Geoffrey Rush was attached to the project, cast as the King's controversial Australian speech therapist, and that director Tom Hooper has had a "100 per cent success rate as a director" were attractive enough even before he'd read the script, he said.

"And the idea of telling a story about someone who's struggles were so personal, private and so quiet was very appealing to me."

Certainly, the biggest challenge was learning how to stammer. "There are no manuals on the subject. Nobody's in the business of teaching people how to stutter," he said, explaining how he needed to find that isolated place that stutterers are confined to by society.

"You're blocked in a kind of silence. It's a suffocating sensation, something you never think you'll climb out of. And it's the loneliest place in the world because you can't call for help. Watching other films about George VI, there are one or two moments where you can see him in that abyss."

But how, I ask, does an actor play someone who isn't stammering? How does one give interpret a negative emotion?

The consummate actor that he is, Firth takes it back to the method made famous by Russian drama coach Constantin Stanislavski. "That's acting. It's your job description to enter into an experience that is not your own. You take whatever imaginative journey you can into that person's point of view. And you try to own it.

"We're having this conversation because stammering makes it very obvious. But actually that's what we're doing every time. If you're playing someone who's grieving you have to go towards grief. You have to want to grieve.

"Go to a place where I know what it's like and then try not to. So you are always making the journey inwards and the journey outwards. The way to play emotion is to try not to have the emotion.

"They drummed that into us in drama school. You never ever play the emotion. The emotion is there, you always have to play against that. The emotion is your obstacle. A character who walks on stage bursting with sadness and trying not to cry is an effective story-teller. If the actor is on stage trying to cry, it's going to be hideously unconvincing."

Glass half-full kind of guy

Firth made a name for himself playing Mr Darcy on the BBC version of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", following with a series of roles that required him to be a posh, upper-class Brit, including, of course, "Bridget Jones' Diary".

“But at drama school people saw me as a Brideshead Revisited type. So I whored myself out immediately! I’ve embraced typecasting as a way of being employed. I’m more afraid of not being employed,” he told the Daily Express last week.

In Dubai, however, he added that although he had always looked for different roles, as an actor, he was limited to what was offered to him. "And then the material you get has to get lucky," he said.

"I consider myself lucky to get work in the first place at all," he said, talking of the number of actors he knew who were out of work. "The odds are not very good in this profession, but I'm very much a glass is half-full kind of guy. Better typecast than not work at all.

"I got to my mid-30s and remember thinking, ‘I suppose if I've not done a comedy by now I never will'. I remember people saying ‘why do you never do comedy?' Fast forward 10 years and now I'm asked, 'Why do you only do comedy?' So the shifts have been slow sometimes and they are sometimes more to do with perception.

"When i took on 'A Single Man' for instance, it felt like a very interesting role. I didn't think it was going to turn my life around. You never know, you don't have a crystal ball. But I'm glad to have done ['The King's Speech'] and that it's gone out there and registered to some extent -- or it will after this, I don't know."
 
So what's next on his plate, then, I manage to ask as his publicist steps in to say our time's up. "There are none," Firth answers simply, graciously fielding the question before getting up to pose for pictures with the journalists.

His name is only attached to one film at the moment, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", based on John Le Carré's 1974 novel, but news has now also broken that the actor is considering playing cat burglar Harry Dean in a remake of the 1966 British action comedy "Gambit", scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen, as the much-delayed project finally gets off the ground.

When asked the same question by audiences at the Variety event on Monday, he joked: "I'm still looking through kings with disabilities. I heard King James I had a lisp so that's something."

(With inputs by Bindu Suresh Rai)

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