Is Roache ready to be famous?



By Madeleine North
The Independent
June 4, 2000





Linus Roache ran shy of stardom after 'Priest'. Now he's back in the
limelight opposite Ralph Fiennes



Several critics disliked Linus Roache's interpretation of Bolingbroke in the Almeida's production of Richard II. "Lightweight" was the pejorative term of choice in describing his performance. So it was interesting to hear the actor in question admit to an initial error of judgement in his approach to the role. "I didn't realise till quite late on that actually I see the play
through Richard's eyes," says Roache, perched on a stool in the vastly empty bar area of the Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch. Last time he did the play, he took Ralph Fiennes's part of Richard, and some time during the show's previews it dawned on Roache that he was infected by the royal role.
"I wasn't taking the crown properly," he recalls, referring to the scene in which Richard bitterly relinquishes his title. "I wasn't doing my job properly." That he turned things around is evident in the more complimentary reviews which talk of his chilling, calculating usurper. Now he is to play the malevolent Aufidius to Fiennes's hubristic Coriolanus in the second offering from Jonathan Kent and company.

They had just broken from rehearsal when we meet: the lines are so fresh in Roache's mind that at one point he slips quite naturally into a recital of a favourite speech. Though he is a well-respected actor of both stage and screen, Roache's status palls in comparison with the stellar Fiennes, whom probably 99 per cent of the audience each night have come to see. But if
Roache is having to play second fiddle to his more famous colleague, it doesn't show. He is fulsome in his praise of Fiennes. "He is an extraordinary actor," Roache offers, without prompting. "I genuinely really admire the guy. It's a bit like, I imagine, how it must have been working with the young Olivier - that kind of tenacity and focus and intensity and commitment." They are exact contemporaries - Roache would have been in the
same year as Fiennes at RADA had he not decided to plump for Central - and go back to their early days at the Royal Shakespeare Company. "We're friends," Roache explains, "but it's more like ... it's a great working relationship. We don't socialise a lot. But there's a lot of mutual respect and admiration." So he doesn't find working with this latter-day Olivier intimidating? "Oh no!" he laughs. "I can't be bothered with all that. No, no. I just want to keep up."

Roache first came to most people's attention in 1994, playing a homosexual Catholic clergyman in Antonia Bird's film Priest. He was lauded for his performance and swiftly became the British Actor to Watch. His response to impending stardom has been well documented - he pressed the pause button and
retreated to India for two years - and it seems to have worked in his favour. He quietly slipped in another critically acclaimed performance in 1997, taking the lead opposite Helena Bonham Carter in Iain Softley's adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. But he wasn't ready, Roache says of that Priest period, to be in demand, to dive into the all-consuming melee that is fame. "I just wanted to stop the wheel," he explains matter-of-factly. It was a personal decision but, in retrospect, it did his career no harm. "Well, it's a lot of kudos ... 'Mysterious actor
disappears for one year'," he shrewdly points out. "Exposure can kill you."

In the case of his father, William Roache, who plays Coronation Street's Ken Barlow, exposure certainly took its toll. Ridiculed in a tabloid article for being boring, Roache senior sued the paper for libel, won, but wound up bankrupt and something of a laughing stock. It was, Roache winces, a terrible time for his dad. "I kind of think it would've been better to put fish and chips in the paper," he comments, while recognising that his father had "just had enough" of casual character assassinations. Linus Roache, too, has had his fair share of unfavourable press, targeted mostly at the spiritual organisation to which he is affiliated. Face, or Friends of Andrew Cohen Everywhere (Cohen being the "all human" guru who, I am led to believe, teaches spiritual enlightenment through self-enquiry) is now, Roache corrects me, the International Fellowship for the Realisation of Impersonal
Enlightenment. The title change is presumably a reaction to tabloid scaremongering that Cohen is a manipulative cult leader, but it sounds no less pompous and I indicate as much to Roache. He is neither ruffled by my cynicism nor preachy in response. Like a man who has had an extraterrestrial
experience, and knows that the more fervently he tells his tale, the less his friends are going to believe him, he is careful to explain his enthusiasm. "It's actually about taking responsibility and becoming independent - not becoming co-dependent," he imparts. "I suddenly realised we all think we want independence, but what does real independence really mean? It means actually standing up. Being accounted for and taking a risk in life."

As a philosophy of life, it sounds fairly harmless, yet even the Independent did a hatchet job on the organisation, he declares. When I express surprise that he subsequently agreed to this interview, Roache admits that he had thought of refusing any questions on the subject, but decided that "No, it's a big part of my life. It means a lot to me." It has, quite evidently, changed his life. Without a trace of irony, Roache tells me that Cohen should win the Nobel Peace Prize, and he is working on a documentary about the man. Is he planning to recruit people with it, I tease? "It's not about forcing people," he laughs dismissively. "It's natural if you find something that gives people confidence in life, you don't hold it to yourself. That's not the point. It's about sharing it."

Whatever the nature of the organisation, it's clearly given Roache a self-assuredness that was previously lacking. He won't be running away from fame if it comes recruiting again. And it may well do. He has three maverick new films in the can (Pandaemonium, Julien Temple's "bonkers" take on the
Romantic poets, in which Roache plays Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Siam Sunset, about "a bus ride across Australia to hell"; and, more obscurely, The Venice Project, a semi-improvised piece shot in 12 days with Dennis Hopper) and the
Almeida stint, Roache notes, has inevitably raised his profile. One thing's for sure: he is steering well clear of theatrical projects once the Shakespeare double bill is over. "I feel like I've done a lot of theatre," he remarks, "and I'm not one of those actors who goes, 'I have to do theatre, that's where my home is'." He is unsentimental about the fate of the Gainsborough and the transient nature of the project. "It's here for a few months and then it's going to be a block of flats," he says. It is a
statement of ephemerality that could apply just as neatly to the actor himself.

'Coriolanus': Gainsborough Studios, N1 (020 7359 4404) previewing, opens 14 June. In rep with 'Richard II' from 21 June until 5 August

 

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