“It’s about catharsis,” he says.
“You understand what it means to be human through other human experience.”
He is jealous, merciless, self-destructive, but doing what he truly believes to be the right thing.
Credit: Jan Versweyveld
(As with Strong,Bridgemarks van Hoves Broadway debut.
The shows publicist has offered to buy him a coffee.
you’re free to never have enough coffee.
Jan Versweyveld
And thats a perfect cue for my first question for him.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How is your blood pressure?
Mark Strong:[laughs] Yeah.
But watching you onstage, it seems like the show must be taking a toll on your health.
I understand what youre asking.
But I know whats coming in the play, of course.
So I can build to the climax.
Its not taking me by surprise the way its taking the audience by surprise.
Whats an average day for you like?
Theres something about the rhythm of the day when youre in theater.
Im not very good in the morning, because Ive been up late the night before.
I wake up at 7 in the morning to get the kids to school.
[Strong and his wife have two sons.]
And the morning is very hard because my body is just telling me that I shouldnt be up.
But then as the afternoon begins I can feel myself getting back into gear.
How am I going to do this again?
But then the show takes over.
Theres no way you might go right to sleep after that show, right?
The curtain comes down at 10 oclock but I cant sleep much before 1.
The moment when I have to be at my best is between 8 and 10 in the evening.
Im so wired up.
So those few hours afterwards are like the rest of my day.
Yes, thats how Miller originally wrote it when it premiered here in New York.
When I saw it there was absolute silence in the audience.
That happens every night.
There is a moment near the end every night where I can just feel that everyone is very attentive.
People dont start shuffling around or rustling as we grow towards the end of the play.
Have there been incidents of people being too overwhelmed or feeling really claustrophobic by the play?
Both in London and here, some people have been in floods of tears.
Ive come across people who literally cant get out of their seats.
Some people telling me that they turn out onto the street, saying, Where am I?
Have audience members reacted in ways that surprised you?
People have screamed when I kiss Catherine and then Rodolfo.
Wow, that shows how the play is working.
Ive talked about it with Michael Gould, who plays Mr. Alfieri.
Back in London, I wasnt afraid to make Eddie unlikable.
And I could drift into being too aggressive or too macho or too brutal on occasion.
But when I try that here, I can really sense from the audience their disapproval.
I just feel a little frostiness from them.
I can sense them thinking, Are we supposed to like this guy?
Do you think we are supposed to like him?
I think he was furious with America for wanting him to betray his comrades.
It just so happens to end in tragedy.
The lawyers final speech is a very thorny one.
It took me ages and ages of listening to it to figure out what Miller is trying to say.
Its either cloaked in 1950s speak or he was writing some Greek aria thing.
The audience he was writing for would have been pretty middle-class.
Ive heard that you werent too familiar with this play until a couple years ago?
No, incredibly, I wasnt really.
What was your gut reaction to reading it?
I was reading movie scripts at the time.
But the playA View from the Bridgewas in there and it was head and shoulders above everything else.
Miller is an amazingly lean writer.
But in there is very potent subtext as well as whats necessary to drive the narrative along.
Were you familiar with Ivo van Hove?
Id never seen any of the plays hed done but I was familiar with his work.
I remember saying to my agent, I really want to do this.
What did you think?
I went, Wow.
Oh, my God, whats he going to do with it?
Were you aware how he was going to stage it when you signed up?
No, I just wanted to play the part.
And throw myself on his talent.
And I loved it.
Not that we didnt fight about certain things along the way.
Not just me, but the other cast members as well.
He isnt a maestro, oppressive figure at all, but he knows what he wants.
Whats an example of a fight you guys had?
The day he told us all to take our shoes off, we were bewildered.
We all asked him, Why?
What did he say?
He just said, You should all just take your shoes off.
And a lot of us said, Really?
Can we know why?
But the question very quickly became irrelevant.
We realized once we did it that it suits the space and it suits the style of production.
It definitely contributes to the primal feel.
Well, of course.
Now I wonder if I can ever do a play againwithshoes.
What else bewildered you?
The Italians and their accents.
He said, No, I dont want them to be speaking in Italian accents.
We all immediately fought that.
But we rehearsed it and a day or two later, we never looked back.
How do you communicate to an audience in the simplest, clearest, most dynamic way possible?
He understands that the audience will experience joy most of all when they understand what theyre seeing.
So many plays get bogged down in the extraneous matter of the stage.
Youve seen plays that desperately take a stab at pretend that theyre real.
And oftentimes those productions spend so much effort being real that the emotions seem totally phony.
But, I mean, its not about whether the table onstage is real or not.
It about whether you believe it.
There is a moment in this play when one of the characters asks me what time is it.
And I say, Quarter to nine.
And he said, No, Im not interested inhowyou know what time it is.
The watch is irrelevant.
He wants to get the meaning and the story out without slathering it in actors handling props.
I mean, the first 20 minutes ofA View from the Bridge, theyre all making dinner.
Its all plates and forks and knives and pasta and this and that.
Its taking away from the story and the words.
Thats at least what I think.
Theres no point anywhere in this production when we dont think were watching real people.
I dont think so.
Its like this netherworld is that a fair description?
I mean, what is the space?
Its an arena, its a boxing ring, its a Petri dish in a laboratory.
In a way its just a space inside of which we watch these people tell their story.
Ivo described it once as lifting a rock and seeing a bunch of insects crawling underneath there.
Its ironic because its anti-theatrical but at the same time incredibly theatrical.
Somehow it manages to achieve both things.
How has it changed in the three different theaters that youve performed it in?
Its a small theater, too, only 400 seats.
We didnt have to worry about projecting, delivering the play out to the audience.
We just did it for one another.
And the audience were like observers, which was very much Ivos plan.
On the West End and now here, we have to give it to the house a bit more.
But thats the genius of onstage seating, right?
And its so strange to say but it makes the piece seem less theatrical.
It distracts from the story.
It instantly becomes a fiction.
Michael Gambon did it.
Ken Stott did it as well.
What do you think thats about, why it appeals to the British?
Our heroes while growing up were Macbeth and Richard III and Coriolanus.
In America, you grew up with the cowboy and the homecoming king.
And Miller doesnt sit easily with those types.
Was your Brooklyn accent different in London as opposed to here?
I think it was probably more pronounced in London.
There it is more exotic.
If you overdo it, you just sound stupid.
When you finished the run in London, did you think that was it for you in this part?
Oh, my God, yeah.
I nearly didnt do the play because Id gotten very comfortable making movies.
I get to be home more.
I get paid better.
And I get to go to a premiere and see an amazing movie Ive been in.
And you get to do work that youre proud of.
Sure.Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.The Imitation Game.
InZero Dark Thirtyyou have a great couple of scenes.
Yeah, thank you.
Film is both art and entertainment.
Which is going to undo all the good work Ive been building up here [laughs].
No, your stock is way, way up after this.
But what do people here recognize you from the most?
Its tricky because sometimes you have a wig on and look different, like inZero Dark Thirty.
Someone recently told me I looked like Steve Carell inZero Dark Thirty.
I was like, Um, really?
Oh, thats funny.
That film, I just wanted to be in that.
It was so unusual.
Mark Strong inSunshine,above.
Do you see yourself as a character actor?
Absolutely Im a character actor.
It that means wearing a wig or applying prosthetics or having an accent, Im up for it.
But this role as Eddie gives you very little to hide behind.
Theres nowhere to hide.
Its ironic that this is probably the most starkly revealing kind of environment to be in.
How do you interpret the reaction that audiences have toA View from the Bridges climax?
People were in tears when I saw the play, as you say, stumbling out.
Its strange, isnt it?
But Eddies downfall really hits people.
But the plays run had just come to an end the night before.
And that was, I thought, a terrific question.
And I realized, its about catharsis.
You understand what it means to be human through other human experience.
Thats what all art does.
It takes you out of everyday life and asks you to ask those questions of yourself.
Not only Who am I?
but also What would I do?
How can you not judge yourself against these characters?
Would you do what he is doing?
Would I behave like shes behaving?
Everybody came backstage afterwards to ask me those questions.
They wantmeto tell them why Eddie kisses Catherine.
I thought, What a great question!
Oh, thats so great.How many children had Lady Macbeth?Its terrific to speculate.
You cant ignore that reality.
Would you say that this production has changed you?
But what this has done has reminded me that live performance can be so powerful.
Theres nothing quite like the experience of feeling an audience hang on every word.
It must make you pleased that people are coming to this and filling up the theater and loving it.
But thats changed in the last 20 years, I know that now.
Theres an incredibly theater literate audience, who are just dying to be challenged.
I heartily recommendThe Long Firm, about a gangster in the 60s called Harry Starks.
It was done for the BBC and there are four episodes.
Tickets forA View from the Bridgecan be purchasedhereorhere.
