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Tom Hollander interview: ‘The future of theatre is in real jeopardy – it’s very bleak’

'Us' star Tom Hollander - Karen Robinson/The Guardian
'Us' star Tom Hollander - Karen Robinson/The Guardian

Tom Hollander is the consummate show-stealer. I remember first seeing him on stage in The Judas Kiss, David Hare’s play about the Oscar Wilde scandal in 1998. Even though I can picture him strutting around as the treacherous lover, Bosie, I had to look up who played Wilde (it was Liam Neeson).

Sometimes Hollander is the lead (remember his hilarious, deeply affecting performance in the church sitcom Rev which he co-created), but more often he spices things up with a piquant supporting role. Examples include the horrendous Corky in The Night Manager, which left a huge impression and won him a Bafta; his Edward Stratton in last year’s Baptiste was more memorable than Baptiste himself. From Gosford Park to Bohemian Rhapsody, Hollander has the happy knack of always being the best thing in the thing.

But try telling Hollander that – offer him puffery and he will re-route you faster than Waze. We are meeting to talk about his role as Douglas Petersen in the BBC’s adaptation of David Nicholls’s bestseller Us. It’s the story of the collapse of the Petersen family after Connie (Saskia Reeves), Douglas’s bohemian wife, wakes up one night to tell him that after 20 years of marriage she’s had enough. When their teenage son Albie (Tom Taylor) heads off to university, she wants to leave too.

They set off regardless on a long-planned grand tour around Europe’s great cities that Douglas hopes will bring them all back together. Hollander’s stick-in-the-mud Douglas is barnstormingly brilliant, of course – but he just wants to talk about how great everyone else is.

“Young Douglas [the drama contains flashbacks] is a really brilliant actor called Iain De Caestecker and he’s Scottish and you’d never know it. Gina Bramhill is young Connie and she is terrific. Tom Taylor, who plays our son Albie, is terrific. There’s a brilliant actress called Thaddea Graham who has only just left drama school – well, a year and a bit ago.”

Tom Hollander with Saskia Reeves and Tom Taylor in BBC One's Us - Colin Hutton/BBC
Tom Hollander with Saskia Reeves and Tom Taylor in BBC One's Us - Colin Hutton/BBC

Us was filmed pre-pandemic and so watching it is an oddly nostalgic experience. The story is in part a love letter to European capitals, art galleries and flitting across borders on a whim. There is romance and socialising without distancing. It is a bittersweet comedy caper first and foremost, but there’s an elegy in there somewhere for life pre-Covid.

“I’m very excited to see how the audience connects to it,” says Hollander, who never sounds excited, even when he is. “Some of those resonances are very thematically current aren’t they? The family holiday people may or may not have been on. The sense of claustrophobia within a family that people will have felt more intensely in the Covid time. The sense of youth and young adults with their terrible uncertainty about their future now. The very recent past is in this show. I hope people find it a comfort.”

Douglas, a man with the emotional intelligence of a Lego brick, is very different from Hollander. They are the same age – 53 – but Hollander is unmarried and has no children. Instead, he says, the role has brought to mind his own father Tony.

Tom Hollander in Rev - Gile Keyte/Television Stills
Tom Hollander in Rev - Gile Keyte/Television Stills

“I’ve thought a lot about my own father and the way that he raised me and I relate to him. Douglas’s father in Us was a bit Victorian parent. My own parenting was not Victorian, actually. My parents are not that English.

“My father is European – he was an immigrant. So they come from a central European tradition which is possibly a bit more touchy-feely.”

While Hollander’s parents are still together, the actor is often spoken about as some sort of gadabout, a stalwart of high-society parties with a string of famous exes like Jemima Goldsmith. His friend, the actress Emily Mortimer, said of him: “When you are with him, he is entirely present; as accessible, engaged, clever and funny as it’s possible to be. But, at the same time, he’s always imminently about to rush off somewhere. He makes you feel totally special and yet painfully aware you aren’t the only one.”

I wonder if the implication is that he should grow up, get married and settle down.

“Well, I think increasingly society is redefining itself and I think that pressure is weakening. There’s this bizarre paradox that apparently we might soon be able to medically sustain our own lives so that it would be conventional to live longer.

“If that is the case, there will surely be different conventions about the way that people partner up. Someone was saying, I can’t remember who it was, that there should be a new normal of people having three relationships: the young love one, the marriage one, and then companionship.”

If that is the case, Hollander seems to be straddling stages one and three – he mentions only in passing that he has spent lockdown with “somebody I love”, referring to his girlfriend Fran Hickman, to whom he was engaged in 2010 before they broke it off. And then he happens to mention, almost as an aside, that he has also had Covid himself.

Tom Hollander with girlfriend Fran Hickman  - David M Benett/Getty
Tom Hollander with girlfriend Fran Hickman - David M Benett/Getty

“That was scary. I haven’t been that ill before. I wasn’t in hospital but I was determined to not go to hospital because at that point hospital was also scary. Then I turned a corner, but it takes a long time to recover from it. I was more scared by the recovery time.”

As ever, Hollander doesn’t want to make a big thing of it. He would much rather talk about other people much worse afflicted in the crisis.

“The future of theatre is in real jeopardy at the moment. Nobody in the theatre gets rich, other than the odd producer or director or writer. Most people are effectively subsidising the theatre by working in it. The practitioners are all going from hand to mouth – there is a very real existential threat to people who work four or six months of the year in theatre and then have some other job. I do think it’s very bleak.”

Quietly, Hollander has been doing his bit, contributing to the Royal Theatrical Fund as he has for the past 30 years.

“It’s got a spotlight on it now because Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] and Olivia [Colman] have brilliantly tried to expand it into a hardship fund. So I mention that when I can. The acting profession is not used to begging for itself and it doesn’t sit well because it’s perceived as glamorous. Bit of a laugh, not really a proper job. But the theatre community are freelancers and the freelancer fund from the Chancellor is not a generous one.”

Hollander has spent lockdown editing Us, being ill and, once he recovered, reading books and scripts for his production company Bandstand (which co-produced Us). In recent years he’s become something of a regular in Hollywood movies and he says he likes the leisurely pace of films. “In a film like Kingsman or Bohemian Rhapsody, I’m not playing the lead, I’m playing supporting parts, so your contract is days spread over months, in which you turn up and have a wonderful time, and the pace of work is quite leisurely. It’s fun.”

And as for the future – well, there’s more work behind the scenes, and we’re back to that characteristic need not to be noticed. “As a producer, absolutely the proudest day will be when we’re producing something that I’m not in.”

Us begins on BBC One on September 20 at 9pm