“I’m structurally not well-suited to being recognized or noticed,” says Tobias Menzies. This can’t be the easiest trait for the British actor, who has an uncanny ability to star in series that have gained loyal fan bases. “When someone comes in I can almost tell if it’s someone from Game of Thrones, someone from Outlander or someone from Crown,” he says.
The bloodiest episode of HBO’s fantasy phenomenon was his wedding banquet. “It has an incredible reach around the world,” says Menzies. “Every now and then someone will come up and point at me and say, ‘Red Wedding!’ ” he shouts.
Menzies notes that fans of The Crown are the least likely to approach him. “Maybe this is a natural reserve.” He won an Emmy for his nuanced, emotionally restrained performance as Prince Philip in the Netflix drama’s third and fourth seasons, before the controversy over its accuracy became fully established.
Did it come out just in time? “It was always heading towards a bit of a collision course,” he says. Writer Peter Morgan was “trying to express a larger truth about the institution…picking out specific events and drawing a story, meaning, and conclusions from those events.” It didn’t surprise him that things got “more twisty” as the story moved closer to people’s own memories. No one has ever claimed that this is history, he says, “but I think maybe audiences are more naive about it.”
We are sitting in a room in west London under a large photograph of Bill Nighy. Menzies recently turned 50, which he admits has led to “a bit of an existential crisis.” “It’s so high number. I don’t like the size. But it’s a stupid thing to worry about.” The sculptural features of his face are slightly sharper than they were when he was on stage at the National two decades ago as a teacher in The History Boys. Scantily clad: T-shirt, pouf and vintage Adidas Gazelles; Sambas after Rishi Sunak ruined his street cred Menzies insists he was not bought in a rush to replace . “He can’t catch a break,” he says.
He played a politician from a very different time in Apple TV+’s Manhunt series; here he plays Edwin Stanton, a US lawyer and politician who was Secretary of War under Abraham Lincoln when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. We are on the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, the actor and Confederate sympathizer who shot Lincoln in the head in a theater in Washington, DC, just five days after General Robert E Lee’s surrender in the American Civil War.
Menzies (along with Anthony Boyle as Booth) joins the honored tradition of British actors portraying American historical figures, from Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) to David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King) to Aaron Pierre (Malcolm Must be polite” It’s annoying for native actors,” he admits, “it seems easier for us to go that way than to have them do British accents… maybe it’s partly because our culture is so embedded in American cinema and TV that I think it’s just We hear it.” We grow with that voice.”
One of the main themes of the series is how Lincoln’s murder set back the black civil rights process in America by a century. Creator and showrunner Monica Beletsky “is a colorful writer, that’s part of her story,” Menzies says. His portrayal of “a moment when democracy is under attack” has echoes today: “Clearly, America is heading towards a potentially important election… and there is certainly one candidate at the center of the election in November. “Someone who doesn’t play by the rules and who, some would say, is stress-testing the democratic institutions and the democratic system there.”
“I think this is a political work,” he said.
Menzies portrays Stanton with understated authority; This underlines how masterfully the actor is able to convey his inner self, what is behind the eyes. “I think Stanton fits that kind of Henry Fonda/Atticus Finch stoic American hero…quite genuine, quite masculine.” It’s a genre that, he says, has largely disappeared from our screens amid conversations about “toxic masculinity” – but “since this is a historical piece, perhaps we have permission to go back and show a more old-fashioned type of masculinity.” this is the heart of the story. “I was attracted to that kind of character and that kind of acting,” he adds.
There is an interiority to the actor himself. He is very much in the room and interacts thoughtfully, but there is always a sense of an inner presence that is analytical and slightly more attentive. He is a very private person and does not talk about his personal life.
“Pretty early on, when I was pretty young, I was dating someone who was pretty well known. And somehow it turned out. And I had some journalists camp out in front of my house for a day or two, and yeah, that made me very cautious.” He is assumed to be indirectly referring to his relationship with tabloid-rumouring Kristin Scott Thomas in the early 2000s.
It was during his time in the historical drama series Rome, in which he played Brutus. The series became one of the first brilliant international hits to focus on sex, nudity and violence; “It was very exciting to make,” he says. “I definitely felt like there was some frontier spirit. “HBO was really targeting the stars with the money they were willing to spend to fix this.”
Can it be done now? “I have a gut feeling it might be hard to do this now.” Are we more puritanical these days? “I would say there are certainly some companies that produce television and have a certain perspective on what they want to embrace in terms of brand… I think it feels a little bit new. Of course, we have some big tech companies in the ‘entertainment world’ right now, but they also know they have a brand to protect.” Of course, this includes Apple, the makers of Manhunt, whose chief executive Tim Cook has mooted a semi-biographical drama about Dr Dre due to its depictions of violence, cocaine use and orgies.
Menzies had nude scenes in Outlander; He notes that season one was before the conversation about intimacy coordinators actually happened. “I think it’s a good development, but I think it’s largely there as a kind of safety net when things go wrong,” he says. Before this, in her experience, “everything was fine… you kind of work it out with each other, but I have no issues with that practice.”
Meanwhile, the series is “dear to my heart” with its “large, warm, gregarious and vocal fan base”; He has a love for Scotland in general, having spent three years in Glasgow filming the series. The family name is Scottish but the direct connection is quite distant; “There is a castle, but I haven’t tried moving there yet,” she says.
Menzies was born in London to a radio producer father and a teacher mother. He attended a Steiner school in Canterbury before attending Frensham Heights, the independent progressive school in Surrey that produced comedian Jack Dee, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and actors Jim Sturgess and Hattie Morahan. Was it necessary to express oneself?
“I didn’t do much acting at school,” Menzies says. “I think it influenced me even more that my mother took me to a lot of interesting theater and saw a lot of contemporary dance.” (In fact, she considered becoming a dancer, auditioned and eventually won a place at the Laban Center in South London before deciding to take part in RADA.)
Menzies has continued to work on stage as his screen career gathers momentum, but the recent revival of The Hunt on Broadway after opening at the Almeida in north London in 2019 marked the end of a nearly four-year Covid hiatus. that and returning to the stage. The Hunt is adapted from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2012 Danish film. The film is about Lucas (Menzies), an elementary school teacher in a small town, who is falsely accused of sexual abuse by a seven-year-old girl. It was his first play in New York, and although he doesn’t remember a single mobile phone ringing during the run, he says he didn’t notice any difference between audiences there and the UK.
“I think the audience has gotten really smart about it,” he says, a hint of Americanism creeping into his speech. I’m talking about a New Yorker article about the battle for attention in an age when most of us claim to have an eight-second attention span (less than a goldfish). Film and TV use faster cuts; How can theater develop?
“That’s potentially exactly why,” he says. “I think we will be more emotionally hungry for non-direct spaces. No ads, no one checking. You walk into a room and take what you get from there. You can procrastinate, you can watch, you can get bored. Your answer is entirely yours and there is nothing between you and that thing. It’s much more analog and on some level it’s messier or less complex. “I definitely know that I find going to the theater very relaxing… I feel like people will increasingly be drawn to these spaces to get away from the whole digital phenomenon.”
In the entertainment industry in general, these terms mean increasingly tight marketing schedules and timely announcements, so Menzies can’t say anything about his Formula 1 drama with Brad Pitt. “The disturbing answer is; I can’t talk about it. “They made me swear.”
He is not a particular motorsport fan, has not met producer Lewis Hamilton and the rest is guesswork. I too was hoping to see him return as treacherous MI6 spy Geoffrey Dromgoole in future sequels to The Night Manager, but he says: “There are no plans for me to appear in the new film.”
Luckily, we know he’ll be starring alongside House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy in a new play inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone at the National Theater later this year. The original was written before the Stoics came along, perhaps even the strong, silent types. It will be fascinating to see what version of masculinity Menzies brings to it.
Manhunt is now on Apple TV+