Tobias Menzies on starring at the National and how playing Prince Philip in The Crown made him a leading man
When Donald Trump was shot on July 13 it made Tobias Menzies feel “goosebumpy”. Months earlier, the 50-year old London-born actor was playing Edwin Stanton, the lawyer tracking down Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth in Apple TV’s Manhunt.
“That was a time in American history where democracy was really under threat and the rules were thrown up into the air,” he says. “And yes, they're going through a period [like that] again with Donald Trump, who is a disrupter, someone who doesn't play by the same rules. After we made it, seeing that extraordinary attempt on Trump's life felt very goosebumpy, the news cycle coming so close to our show. But those echoes, those repeats of history, make for potentially really great drama.”
Manhunt wasn’t Menzies’ first experience playing a real figure in a great, historical drama, of course. After starring roles on stage and on TV in Rome, Game of Thrones, Outlander and The Night Manager, his Emmy-winning performance as Prince Philip opposite Olivia Colman as the Queen in series three and four of The Crown from 2019 won him an Emmy and kicked him up a notch in terms of bankability. “I try not to get caught up in the economics of it, but I think a lot of people saw that and it probably helped in terms of a company like Apple asking me to lead a show like Manhunt,” he says. He raises a hand in salute to Philip. “So God bless him, wherever he is!”
He feels not only gratitude but respect for the late royal couple for “the dedication and seriousness with which they took their roles” although as a Republican he “would prefer someone elected” as head of state. “Yeah, I’m definitely, you know, ‘another liberal actor’,” he says self-deprecatingly. “I’ve never voted Tory, and I voted Labour in the election. I felt like we were in desperate need of a change of government. It’s early days but they've got a sizable majority, and so hopefully they'll be able to be dynamic and improve things. Because it feels like there's a lot of infrastructure and services that are really creaking.”
He was particularly glad to see the cancellation of the Tory plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda – the one constant of his sparse Twitter feed was opposition to the previous government’s immigration policies. When we talked, he hadn’t really clocked the row over Keir Starmer’s free glasses, suits and Arsenal tickets, though, because he’s been “snowed under in rehearsals” for The Other Place, Alexander Zeldin’s new play at the National, which we’ll get to shortly.
Munching on a Pret salmon roll between answers, Menzies is chatty and friendly today, his lean frame clad in a t-shirt and jeans, a baseball cap atop his stern, tight-lipped face. “I agree my face in repose is quite hard,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2019. “It has quite a forbidding look and you can definitely see that in the parts I’ve been cast in: anti-heroes, or villains, or aggressive, high-status personalities. The funny thing is, on the inside I’m not at all like that.”
He’s the opposite of many actors I’ve interviewed, in that he wears his politics on his sleeve but his private life is a resolutely closed book. In 2005 he allegedly had an affair with Kristin Scott Thomas, his co-star in a stage production of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me: she was 15 years older than him and married at the time, so he was catapulted into the tabloid glare. Ever since he’s maintained a monkish silence about his life outside work, only allowing that he shares his Kentish Town flat with a cat.
Fortunately, politics and society are very much at the heart of The Other Place, an adaptation of Antigone that transposes Sophocles’ Greek classic to contemporary Oxfordshire. It’s a departure for Zeldin, the writer-director best known for the ‘Inequalities Trilogy’ of plays at the National detailing the brutal effect of government austerity on the worst-off: Beyond Caring, Love and Faith, Hope and Charity. But there are thematic links to The Other Place.
“It’s an investigation of patriarchy in a post-Brexit England,” says Menzies. “You could definitely watch it and not notice, but it’s in the water of a play that we’re in a post-austerity world.” The original deals with the brutal repercussions of the Theban king Creon’s refusal to allow his niece Antigone to bury her dead brother. Zeldin improvised his version with the cast around a draft script: Menzies plays Chris, who has moved his family into the suburban home of his late brother. He must deal with the past hurt carried by his niece Annie (House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy) and her sister Issy (Saltburn’s Alison Oliver).
“I was very drawn to Alex’s work and I wanted to work with Emma ever since I’d seen them [Darcy is non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them] in a production of the Crucible at the Yard in Hackney years ago,” he says. “The three of us were the first tentpoles in the ground [for the show]. It’s a pretty free adaptation but true to the themes and the muscle of the play, which is about the past: you may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with you. It deals with self-slaughter, and how people deal with suffering. We live in straitened times. People aren't being looked after properly. A lot of people live on the streets. That makes it a difficult society to live in because you can't help everyone. So you have to turn away from suffering.”
When improvising “inevitably you draw on stuff from your own life, my own experience of masculinity, so it feels excitingly close to the skin. There’s a weird schizophrenia to it; it’s you and it’s also sort of not you.” He insists the play isn’t an exploration of the toxic masculinity embodied by the likes of Andrew Tate, or indeed Donald Trump – “masculinity is just a colour [in the overall picture]”. His recent 50th birthday was a hurdle but it didn’t tip him into a midlife crisis: “I haven’t bought a sportscar.” Menzies has been open in the past that he’s had therapy for personal issues, but true to what he calls his “cussedness” has never said what those issues were.
He was born in Hammersmith, but he and his younger brother were brought up in Kent by his mother, a teacher and masseuse, after she separated from his radio producer father when he was six. Before his brother was born he spent a few childhood months amid the orange-clad mystics at Baghwan Shree Rajneesh’s Sannyasin ashram in Pune where his mother taught massage: “I have very fond memories of it. It was a lot of very energised, very happy people. I don’t know much about the philosophy because I was just a kid, scampering about and trying to get food from the canteen.” No wonder he calls himself “a hippie boy”.
He was a talented junior tennis player but theatre visits with his mother in the Eighties (including at the National, where he later sold programmes while studying at RADA) turned his focus to acting. His first job after graduating from drama school was a six-month stint in Casualty: “A crash course in film acting.”
As well as his heavyweight TV credits and regular film roles (he recently played Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s husband, “a slightly bruised male, a departure for me” in You Hurt My Feelings), he has a burgeoning stage career. He’s done everything from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Caryl Churchill, and worked many times at the Almeida with its artistic director Rupert Goold and former associate Robert Icke. Goold’s 2019 adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg’s film The Hunt, starring Menzies, was revived in St Ann’s Warehouse in New York earlier this year: another manifestation of the Prince Philip effect.
It's almost 30 years since he moved back to London to train in 1995, and we discuss how the South Bank was then, and now, a refuge for the homeless. “Both times after long periods of Conservative governments,” he observes. After flitting between Brixton and Ladbroke Grove he is settled in the aforementioned Kentish Town flat. He loves “the dirtiness” of London, its theatres and galleries, playing tennis in the park.
At 50 is he happy with where his career and life are? “Yeah, it's okay,” he smiles. “I feel like 50 for us is not the same as 50 for my parents’ generation. You’ve still got some youth, still got some vigour. I feel very proud of a lot of the work I've made, and that's not easy to do. And there’s nowhere else I'd rather be right now than working at the National with an amazing group of really talented people, with the chance to make something very special. You can't ask for much more than that.”
The Other Place is at the National Theatre from October 8 to November 9; nationaltheatre.org.uk
