Monday interview: Ian McDiarmid (original) (raw)

Ian McDiarmid runs a little theatre in north London. When he and his friend, Jonathan Kent, took it over 11 years ago, few people had heard of the Almeida. When he and Kent announced recently that they were quitting as artistic directors, it was headline news. Somehow, in the intervening years, the theatre has gained a significance out of all proportion to its size and budget. The Almeida has become a refuge for movie stars pining for the cerebral and artistic. Kevin Spacey, Juliette Binoche, Anna Friel and Ralph Fiennes have all played to great acclaim for tuppence a week.

But McDiarmid the impresario is a secondary incarnation. He is better known as an actor, most famously as Emperor Palpatine in the biggest movie franchise ever - Star Wars. But it's a peculiar form of fame. Many people know the name, but few can put a face to it. Many people know the face, but few can put a name to it. He belongs to a world of shifting shapes and shades.

I'm waiting for McDiarmid with a little trepidation. To be blunt, I expect him to be barking. It's not simply that he plays the ruler of the evil Empire in Star Wars. It's all the roles he has played over the years. McDiarmid has a penchant for raving, raging monomaniacs. Twenty years ago I saw his voracious Edward II meet his maker via a red-hot poker up the arse. Since then there has been Volpone, the Jew of Malta, and any number of playwright Howard Barker's crazed, poetic madmen.

"You thought I'd be an anarchic spirit?" McDiarmid asks with a shy smile and camp lick of his lips. He laughs it off. Anarchic spirit! What could be more ridiculous? He is wearing a thin spivvy tache and badly dyed ginger hair for his role as Teddy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer. Teddy is an old-style manager from the variety-hall days - a wide boy with a huge, aching heart. Hardly a typical McDiarmid role.

Ah, he says, maybe not a typical role, but a character he knows well. He grew up in the 50s immersed in variety. When he was five, his father took him to the theatre in Dundee to see an act by the name of Tommy Morgan. McDiarmid says he saw the show and was instantly hooked. "It sort of fascinated me, and it also scared me. All those lights, all that make-up. I said to myself, 'I don't know what this is, but I want it.'"

It's funny the way he confesses to his love of acting - it could be a skit on "coming out". "When I discovered what it was, I knew I was one, for better or worse. I was just, 'Oh! That's what I am!' And that's the only thing I've been certain about in my life: I'm an actor." Uncertainty is important for McDiarmid. Almost a principle. Something to be embraced, nurtured and feared.

But he didn't tell his father, a manager at an engineering firm, what he'd discovered. "I didn't think he wanted to hear that. And he didn't, frankly." What his dad wanted to hear was that young Ian would go to university and follow a respectable profession. So he did a degree in psychology, followed by a masters in social science. It bored him rigid - all salivating dogs and caged rats rather than Freud and imagination.

He often paints himself as a coward, lacking the guts to follow his instinct. Eventually, he braved drama school. He still felt guilt, of course. "Oh, you know, it's all that Scottish Presbyterian stuff. It's not something you're supposed to do." At the same time, he says, he knew he would have been unhappy for the rest of his life if he hadn't done it.

He felt pretty much the same about taking over the Almeida. First he was weighed down by doubts (he had no experience of running a company; they'd kick him out after a few months), but the assertive McDiarmid told himself he'd regret it if he didn't take the job.

That was at the beginning of the 1990s. When he and Kent said they were leaving in 2002, the arts establishment voiced surprise. Not only were the pair an artistic success, they had also brilliantly managed a temporary move from salubrious Upper Street to whory King's Cross while the old building was refurbished. But McDiarmid was simply doing what he had promised to do when he first arrived at the Almeida.

At the time he was quoted as saying that he thought a theatre should be blown up after 10 years. Actually, he says, he was quoting another director, but yes, he does agree. He often quotes people - those who know better than him, those whose words he values more than his - and rigorously attributes them to their owners. Recently he and Kent decided the time was right to self-detonate. "As John said, if you're any kind of artist, you've got to keep scaring yourself, keep opening yourself to new possibilities. And we do want to leave. We think it's enough. We're a bit tired."

McDiarmid's forehead is incredible. It seems to be longer than his face. I tell him that the first time I saw him I found the fact that he wasn't a dish very appealing. "Oh God! I've never been that. Noooooah. An interesting face - that's the nearest I get to a compliment. I'm not Brad Pitt." He says to be a movie hero you need great eyes. "I've got OK eyes, but not eyes like, 'Ah! Ralph, wonderful cinematic eyes!' " He swoons. "Joe Fiennes does too. The Fiennes family trait! Hopkins has great, great eyes. I envy him his eyes. And his talent."

Ah well. There have to be advantages, I say. Perhaps the forehead encouraged director George Lucas to cast him in Star Wars. "Certainly the nose did. George doesn't say much, but on the way out he said, 'Great nose' and I thought, ' Ooh! I've got the part.' " He squeals with delight, and tells me how much he likes Lucas. "He's incredibly friendly. He's rather shy. That's why we got on so well."

I ask him to do the voice for Emperor Palpatine."No." Oh go on! "No, it'll cost you a lot of money to hear that voice, I'm afraid." He says it took him an age to discover the appropriate tone, "deep and sepulchral, like a terrible old disgusting toad would speak".

McDiarmid has to go off for a meeting with Kent. The two have been close friends for more than 30 years. The great thing about his relationship with Kent, he says, is that he can ring him at 3am when he's having cashflow nightmares and he'll find that Kent's sweating too. I ask him whether it will be hard for them to separate; both are going freelance. "Yes. But I think that's good too. I think we probably need a break from the day-to-day business."

It is often assumed that they are lovers, but they are not. "We're great friends. I suppose kindred spirits is the phrase." McDiarmid has lived alone in Notting Hill for 20 years. "I'm quite good with my own company," he says.

We agree to continue the interview after the show that night in King's Cross. He feels more at home there. "I love the roughness. I like the fact it's in the red-light district. And I won't like it when King's Cross becomes the next Covent Garden or whatever it's supposed to become in the next 10 years. Then I'd want to move somewhere else. And that's to do with my spirit."

He stops himself, apologetically. "It's not because I want to keep young and anarchic." And then he changes his mind. "Well maybe it is. Maybe that is the spirit." At 57, there is definitely something young and quietly anarchic about McDiarmid, allied to something older and conservative. There is also constant self-doubt battling against a more resolute ego.

He is, he says, an artist rather than a craftsman. It sounds a grand claim, and he knows people will think that it's pretentious, but what the hell. I ask what it means to be an artist. "I don't know, really. I suppose it's about something happening to you." In a way it's the opposite of a grand claim. "In the end, when it works, you're not in control. It's doing it to you, whether you're a painter or writer or it's coming out of your lips."

McDiarmid's performance in Faith Healer is astonishing. Somehow he makes the audience smile through Teddy's tears and laugh through his misery. At one point he describes how, once, he was kissed on the forehead by the faith healer's wife. It's an unbearably tender moment.

After the show, we meet up. My friend doesn't recognise him when he walks into the bar. Did he feel it worked tonight? "Moments," he says. I tell him how much I loved the kiss on the forehead. He looks pleased and says yes, he lost control at that moment. "I said the wrong words." He says Faith Healer is a play about death, and he's always thinking about death. "Not just your own mortality, but death in life." You sense that death is not necessarily a negative for him; that death and change are two sides of the same coin.

He looks around the theatre that was knocked up out of an old bus shelter and tells me how much he loves it, how it gave them a new challenge. "But there's only so much refreshment and re-scaring you can do. King's Cross was scary enough, and going back to the old Almeida building would not be scary."

And if you're not scared, he says, what's the point of going on?

I ask him whether he became bored with success, bored with the celebs doing star turns to sell-out audiences. He thinks hard, and says no, it's not that easy. There are no easy answers in McDiarmid's world.

We talk about the future. He says there was no truth in the rumour that he and Kent had fancied running the National Theatre. That, he says, would have been too establishment. "I'm not going to pretend we're not part of the establishment, because we are. But the National is the very centre of it. I'm happy with the whores around the corner."

So what does he plan to do? He hasn't got a clue, he says with obvious pleasure. Blank slate. Apart from the next Star Wars, there is nothing booked. "I'm under contract for three films, and George is generous to the people he works with. It's not going to make me a millionaire, but yes, I'm comfortably off and leaving the Almeida I know I'm not going to starve. Even if nothing comes up, I'll be fine. For a few years." Once again, there are few certainties in his life. And, as he says, what could be better?