Mary Wakefield talks to Roger Allam and discovers that he thinks acting is only a game
As I meet Roger Allam’s eye, in the bar area of Shakespeare’s Globe, I feel a lurch of dread. I love Roger Allam. I’ve held a torch for him since the mid-Eighties, when he starred in Les Mis as the original and best Inspector Javert — but the look in his eye today is one of profound boredom. It bodes badly.
You must be in the middle of rehearsals [for Henry IV Part 1] I say, brightly. ‘Yes.’ He looks out of the window at the glittering Thames. It must be difficult to do interviews then — do you still feel in character as Falstaff? ‘No. Not really.’ Roger Allam is, everyone says, a nice man. He’s certainly talented: one of the most versatile actors around. He’s played Hitler (‘It’s a matter of getting the eyebrows right’); a drag artist (for which he won an Olivier award); a royal retainer (in The Queen, opposite Helen Mirren). But he’s not putting on his best performance right now.
I start again, this time with his childhood. What sort of a schoolboy were you? Allam shakes the hair out of his eyes and thinks. He’s attractive, a little louche-looking — like Christopher Hitchens in his heyday, if he’d had a heyday.
‘My school was full of psychotic bastards,’ says Allam. ‘It was an eccentric school called Christ’s Hospital and it seemed a very hostile environment to me.’ Your nickname was ‘Zombie’, wasn’t it? I say. Why was that? He looks at me with cold dead eyes. Oh, Lord.
How do you deal with Zombies? The answer, in Allam’s case, turns out to be simple: just ask him about the theatre, and the light goes on.
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