Mark Rylance: married to the job (2024)

How to interview a great actor? You hope he will bring his wife along; otherwise, he could be anyone.

I am at the Globe Theatre, with Mark Rylance and his wife, Claire van Kampen. She is a composer; she has a warm and vulnerable face and veers wildly between moods, usually pensive or laughing. He is quieter. She has written a superb and desolate play about mental illness — Farinelli and the King — in which he will star this year; he also plays Thomas Cromwell in BBC2’s production of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Rylance is possibly the greatest stage actor now working. At the stage door, I walked past a statue of his head.

They are late; Claire comes in first and immediately starts talking to someone else, who has also wandered into this fake-Tudor theatre. Is she nervous? Farinelli and the King is her first published play. It is about Philip V, king of Spain, and his relationship with the great castrato singer Farinelli. It is a play about madness and, as she wrote it, she was grieving. Two years ago her daughter Nataasha died, very suddenly on an aeroplane, of a brain haemorrhage.

Mark enters. She stops talking and sits down in the auditorium, just below him. He is very slender, with a delicate pixie’s face and a soft, immensely soothing voice. Sometimes he speaks so quietly that the Dictaphone only records a mumble. He wears a hat with a jaunty feather, as actors do; perhaps only they can get away with it. When he is quiet, she fills the gaps with jokes. I do not interview them. They interview each other; I think they forget it is not a play. For instance: how did they meet?

It was during a production of The Wandering Jew at the National Theatre in 1987. She was the musical director; he played Agricola. It was “a wonderful piece”, says Claire, “but no one came to see it because it was five hours long. I didn’t really notice him,” she says, “until one day I was playing the piano and, out of the corner of my eye, I just saw these wonderful calves, dancing away. I thought, ‘Gosh! Those are really well-developed calves. That’s unusual. You normally see that on a sportsperson.’ And I looked up and it was him!

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“It took me a while to realise you were interested in me,” she tells him. She turns to me. “He had a little song to whistle. He kept coming up to the piano and saying, ‘Can we run through my song just one more time?’ And I thought, this is bizarre. What’s wrong with him that he can’t remember?”

Is this the famous shyness? He barely spoke before the age of five — maybe he had nothing to say? — but his mother says he always acted. He acted out the funeral of Robert Kennedy when he was eight “and walked serenely around the corpse”. “Yes,” says Claire, “he’s very shy.” We stare at him.

He nods into his chest. “Ummm,” he says, “Ummm.”

When they met, Claire was married to the architect Chris van Kampen; they had two daughters, Juliet and Nataasha. Chris, who Mark calls a “very forgiving man…one of my best friends”, agreed to a divorce. They married at the Rollright Stones, an ancient stone circle in Oxfordshire, on the winter solstice in 1989. Now Chris and Mark go on a walking holiday every year.

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“He brings small tents,” says Mark. “Two-man tents, like slices of a pie. We sleep very close together.” He clarifies: “Two sleeping bags. The girls were very insistent, they would accept nothing less than we all became friends. They were adamant.”

“It was very important to them,” says Claire, “that it wasn’t a superficial relationship. It was very important for the children that I was committed to something serious and not something that was going to be taken away from them.”

In the early days, the couple fought a lot. “You taught me to fight,” he tells her; this is an unusual — and lovely — tribute. “I didn’t have such happy relationships before [you] because I would just retreat. I wouldn’t fight. Or I’d be passive-aggressive or victimy. But you demanded that things were fought out.”

“You used to be a very volatile personality,” she tells him. “People used to see this lovely, sweet-natured person — and he is — but he has Irish grandparents somewhere in there. It can flare up very quickly, you know. You access your emotions very quickly and easily.”

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To demonstrate his current lack of volatility, she tells me that after the first preview of Nice Fish, a play he wrote and starred in, she informed him they had to lose 25 minutes from the first act.

“Forty-five,” he says, very quickly; but he took the cut. They do not have children together — was that deliberate? “No,” says Mark: “We’ve had great pleasure trying!” They cackle. “We started to go down the path of seeing doctors and finding out what my sperm were like; active but ill-formed or something, and it started to get very expensive. I wasn’t sure if they knew why we weren’t conceiving. In the early 1990s I had the feeling that, if there was a child that wanted to come, it would come; and if it wasn’t coming, maybe we weren’t meant to have another child. And to force it, scientifically force it, with all the procedures they were going to do… I think I was a little bit resistant.”

“We were bringing up two children,” says Claire. “I think it would have affected Nataasha,” says Mark. “When you are a stepfather, making a relationship with young children is very sensitive and takes a lot of care, and if we had suddenly had another child in that mix, I think that might have been very hard for the girls. It was a good reason.”

“We came to the Globe, really,” says Claire. “We got stuck in there — and then it was just too late.” He was born in Kent but raised in America; then he went to Rada, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and, in 1995, became the first artistic director of the Globe, where they shared an office for 10 years. “And we thought: this is a child. It was hard enough seeing our own children. I was rather grateful we didn’t have some small child at home, parentless while we were here. We never got home. We would get home at 10 at night.”

“Now, of course, we think it is a shame,” says Mark.

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“It is what it is,” says Claire.

“Our projects became like our children,” he says. “Ever since we met, we were always involved in imagining projects, doing things together. Or maybe they have been like cooking experiments.” They conceive them around the dinner table. Claire’s daughter, Juliet — an actress — once said: “It’s like we run a circus!”

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Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Pal Hansen)

I mention dishwashers, because circuses don’t have them. “I haven’t got a dishwasher,” says Claire. “He doesn’t believe in them. I’d like that to be made public.” She is flirting.

“I don’t believe they exist,” says Mark, fake laconic. So who does the washing up? “Me,” says Mark. “I like washing up. Compared to acting or writing or making stories it’s very concrete and achievable. You begin it, it’s chaos and by the end you can ready the space for something new to happen — a new meal — so it’s satisfying.” He looks intensely content. He smiles; he says he would like to join a club — a fetish club? — for people who like washing up.

“You need to get out more,” says Claire. They swap a look; is it sexy? Anyway, they have charmed me.

Rylance once said he trusts himself more on stage than in life. How do you put your stage self down, since it is so vivid? “It doesn’t last,” he says. “Things fade after a while.”

“When you played Hamlet all those times, I definitely felt that I was living with Hamlet,” says Claire. “Certainly towards the second half of the day.”

I cannot imagine, I say, living with Hamlet; having a suicidal Danish prince in the kitchen. “That’s not all,” screams Claire. “Imagine living with Rooster Byron!” Rooster Byron was the drugged hero of Jez Butterworth’s decayed-state-of-the-nation play Jerusalem, for which Mark received incredible notices in London and New York; it was, the critics told him, the performance of the century.

But he doesn’t read the critics. “I don’t find it a very useful form of feedback,” he says. “I don’t want to be self-conscious from the outside.” There is another reason: “When we were at the Globe, I don’t think I met any critic who really made an effort to understand what we were trying to do with original practices or had read anything about Elizabethan theatre. They just attacked it as pantomime-type performance.” In Japan, he says, “critics have to study theatre and know about it. I don’t find [British] theatre critics have the same degree of interest. They were more,” and this is very rude and surely accurate, “a thermometer of some kind of fashion among themselves.

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“The Globe is still not accepted as part of the English theatre,” he says, “it’s still considered a tourist site, not just by the critics, but by members of my own profession.” He pauses, briefly; the Globe, for 10 years, was his life. His child. “The Globe has never been really welcome,” he says. “There have been amazing performances I have seen by young actors and experienced actors here, [but] you rarely see them included in any of the big, fancy London-critic award things. So I’m not very interested, really, in what critics have to say and what they think. I don’t think I share taste with them,” and he gives a devastating pause, which reminds me not to cross him, because his voice is, by profession, weaponised — “even when they like me”. He can talk, you see, when he wants to.

But as Rooster he was wild. “Rooster,” says Claire, “liked to stay up very late, go out after the show, didn’t want to go to bed early.” Now Rooster sounds like a recalcitrant baby, Claire’s baby; I like this.

Audiences confuse him with his characters; they say to Claire, by the stage door, “Oh, my God, how can you live with him?” “I say, ‘I don’t live with him,’ and then” — she laughs a huge laugh — “they are disappointed! They don’t want to think he’s Mark and he has a lightly boiled egg for breakfast.”

Claire encouraged him to take the part of Cromwell in Wolf Hall; she read the book first. Mark read the script, by Peter Straughan, then the book. “The script was very good,” he says. “I didn’t realise how good until I read the books and saw how clever he was to distil it down to six hours. I’d like to do anything with Peter Kosminsky — he is my favourite director.” (Kosminsky directed him in The Government Inspector, in which he played the weapons expert David Kelly, who committed suicide after he was exposed as the source of a BBC report that the Labour government had exaggerated Iraq’s weapons capability.) “And, of course, the part is amazing. It’s stone, isn’t it [Cromwell’s heart]? He describes himself as having a stone heart.”

I have seen two episodes of the BBC’s Wolf Hall; and the play, which was by Hilary Mantel and Mike Poulton. It was a hit at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon and in the West End, and it goes to Broadway this year. Both are marvellous, but the screen adaptation seems more realistic, probably because TV, as a medium, is less remote. Cromwell’s loathsome father, the Putney blacksmith, appears in flashback; there is landscape, which theatre cannot do; and there is Rylance’s face. When Mantel called for accuracy in historical drama at a literary festival last year, her words were misinterpreted. Some journalists thought she meant that the BBC’s Wolf Hall was moronic, like the preposterous TV drama The Tudors, and that she did not like it. She had to write to a newspaper to quash the nonsense.

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Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (BBC)

“I wonder if she [Mantel] knew she would revise history when she set about it,” he says. “I wonder if she knew there was a different version of Thomas More and a different version of Cromwell to be found when she set out. Sometimes, I thought they [the scriptwriters] had simplified it.” That is, they took out some sub-clauses — and why wouldn’t they? It’s a vast book. “I feel, maybe because I have done so much Shakespeare, how helpful sub-clauses are for making a line sound human and natural. I felt Hilary sometimes had the sense of that better — sometimes we put Hilary’s line back in.”

“Mark plays him as anything but a monster. It’s a fantastic performance,” says Claire, “really wonderful. He’ll get embarrassed now and tell me off. But it is. I have to be careful, I suppose, because I am his number-one fan.”

“We’re very connected,” says Mark. “It is like me praising myself, almost.” But she is right. He is superb; as is Anton Lesser as Thomas More, and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, a man with a big, dumb smile. Rylance plays Mantel’s Cromwell precisely. I didn’t really understand the essence of the part until I saw him play it. His wife is dead. His daughters are dead. He doesn’t care what happens to him, but he is kindly because his father wasn’t.

He is “only frightened that I might not be believable. Sometimes I get full of doubt, and depressed and self-destructive; then I will get very frightened — but that is rare. I will get frightened of going near the theatre. Mostly I don’t feel frightened at all; mostly I feel playful.”

I believe him. I saw him play Olivia in Twelfth Night so many years ago that all I can remember is his expression of ecstasy.

“You often have a dip after opening night,” she tells him, “and it is a combination of exhaustion and pressure. The nerves of an opening night seem hardly to affect you. But it all mounts up. And there is always a kind of depression, isn’t there? When you have playfully imagined something together and it’s been ours, as it were, and then you have given it over. After the play is opened and shared, it’s no longer ours in the rehearsal room — it’s yours, it’s everybody’s.”

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What was it like, writing a play for your husband, about a man who speaks to fish? “I’m not writing it for my husband,” she says coolly, a professional writer now, not a wife, and I wonder if I have made an error. “I’m writing it for an actor I admire.” They debate who is more important — author or player? — but tentatively, both of them trying to make the other seem more important. It is a delicate dance, slightly painful to watch. She praises him again; he says, “I have to be careful that I don’t overshadow you.”

He explains to me why she understands Philip V. He prompts her: “You had an auntie who wasn’t very well.” It was her mother’s sister, who came to live with them after her marriage failed. “We all loved her, you see,” she says, “and when she wasn’t ill, she was incredibly kind, sweet and rather vague. But when she was ill, her behaviour was monstrous.” She looks, briefly, helpless: “There was no target except the illness itself.”

Claire lost her father when she was 12. And so, when Nataasha died, it was not, Claire says, “the first time tragedy has struck in my life. All experiences impact on what you do if you are an artist. Certainly, I wouldn’t use that experience consciously. But you can’t put aside what happened to you and pretend it didn’t.” She speaks very slowly, calmly. “It becomes part of the fabric of your world and everything you do is informed by it. That’s what is so wonderful about art, isn’t it?”

“It has been helpful to have creative things to do,” says Mark.

“I feel there are so many people in the world who have a worse situation than me, who don’t have that,” says Claire. This rationalisation is careful, and difficult to listen to because, I imagine, it takes so much effort; as such, it is almost worse than a scream.

“When your father died, your mother just had to go back to work, didn’t she?” asks Mark. “To work as a secretary.”

“Yes, she did,” says Claire. “She didn’t have the luxury of being able to make plays. If it has made me a better artist, I don’t know. I can’t judge that. It has given me an appreciation that life is very short. You have to think: what is the best way for me to spend my time?”

“And watching MasterChef,” says Mark, “is usually the best…” She interrupts him with a scream of: “Tennis! I watch a lot of tennis.” So they pratfall, to show they can cope. They do this, I think, because if you say you are coping, then maybe it is true. I think she is writing her way out of grief and he is helping her. The loss of her father made her an artist, she says, and, although I have no idea why he is one — he simply isn’t as loquacious as Claire, curls up and says only “It was what I enjoy” — they both love dream worlds. They are tender towards each other; and also, I imagine, towards the dream world.

Wolf Hall will air on BBC2 on January 21 at 9pm. Farinelli and the King opens at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe Theatre, London SE1, on February 11

Mark Rylance: married to the job (2024)

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