‘It is a relief,” Dominic West says in tones as playfully patrician as any in the land, “not to be playing a posh bloke for a change.” It’s not what he does best, he argues.
Sitting with the actor in a plush theatre anteroom at the Theatre Royal Bath, where he recently had a success in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the idea seems jarring. Although the 54-year-old made his name as the rugged Baltimore detective Jimmy McNulty in the American TV show The Wire (2002-08), he has just finished a two-year stint playing the extremely “posh bloke” Prince Charles in The Crown. Coming soon: a return stint as the smooth intelligence chief in the BBC wartime series SAS Rogue Heroes. It’s the kind of role one imagines he plays more than he actually does.
It’s just that, combined with people’s perception of what it is to be an Old Etonian — “a stigma that is slightly above ‘paedophile’ in the media”, as he once put it — and his marriage to the aristocrat Catherine FitzGerald, a perception may have hardened of West as a sort of upper-class specialist. Especially when he spends family holidays at Glin Castle in Co Limerick, building his own natural swimming pool and hosting the odd fox hunt at an estate that has been in the FitzGerald family for more than 700 years.
“But my wife,” he says, “who is genuinely upper class, always tells me, ‘You’re much better in the working-class parts, you’re not very good as upper class, you’re not convincing at all.’ And I agree with her.” At which he roars with infectious laughter. An interview with West, even when he gets on to darker territory — including the aftermath of being pictured in romantic clinches with his co-star Lily James in 2020 — is rarely without levity.
“I’m McNulty, and I’m Jean Valjean [in a TV version of Les Misérables] and I’m Iago [with a broad Yorkshire accent in a Sheffield Crucible production of Othello in 2011]. I think those are my best roles. Some people look good in stiff collars but I don’t think I’m one of them. I understand upper-class attitudes and ways, and I like those characters, but as an outsider.”
West is aware that this can appear a bit rich. Most people, after all, won’t distinguish between a boy who went to Eton because he was born to it and a boy, the sixth of seven children, who went to Eton because his father ran a successful company making plastic bus shelters. We all make assumptions, after all. I was at Eton at the same time as West, in the year above. I appeared — in a tiny role — in the school production of Hamlet that he starred in when he had just turned 16, and knew him only as the best actor in the school. Fellow Etonian Damian Lewis, 18 months West’s junior, once said that seeing his Hamlet was what made him want to be an actor.
Yet privilege doesn’t preclude a sense of not belonging. “Maybe we all have some difficulty in fitting in, and that’s why being sent away to Eton was so useful. It made me quite resilient. It gave me a sense of detachment or dislocation that was useful.” He laughs again: serious and not-serious in one beguiling breath. “Once I worked through the trauma.”
All of which, to his pleasure, is a world away from the working-class Brooklyn of Miller’s 1955 play, soon to move to the West End. He didn’t see the raved-about 2014 revival, starring Mark Strong as the wrong-headed docker Eddie Carbone. He did, however, find out everything he could about previous performances, checking out any clips he could. And West can still recreate some of the cadences of the great Michael Gambon, whom he saw play Carbone at the National Theatre in 1987.
“You’ve got to give these great parts a go, see how you manage,” he says. Rereading the play, though, West wondered if its time had gone. Can we still lend our hearts to an antihero who takes in two illegal immigrants, cousins from Sicily, then rats them out after one of them falls in love with his wife’s orphaned niece, a 17-year-old he has his own, less than avuncular feelings towards?
“So many things have moved on socially now,” West says. “I talked to a few younger people about Eddie, including my oldest daughter [Martha, 25, his child by his former girlfriend Polly Astor], and they go, oh, he’s the paedo, isn’t he?” And so I did worry that maybe this is like so many lesser plays — their time has moved on.”
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But the more he worked on the play, the more he felt it had all the complexities of Eddie’s crimes covered. “You realise he has got to be sympathetic, otherwise there is no play. Miller takes care of it all.”
It’s a big part, and the last time West was on stage, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in London in 2015-16, he had some well-reported problems with his lines. “Did I?” West says, incredulously. “I don’t remember it. I mean, there’s always problems. So I did start work a few months ahead.” He chuckles with his characteristically seductive mix of fruity frankness and self-mockery. “About 30 per cent of rehearsal time — too much, but you can’t avoid it — is spent with a bunch of younger actors standing around waiting for older actors to remember what the f*** the next line is.”
The tanned West is just back from Sicily: an Easter family break with a sprinkle of research for playing a Sicilian-American. Doing the play in Bath, he loved being at home, a half-hour drive away from the theatre. Mind you, Eddie could intrude on that drive sometimes: he had a couple of instances of road rage as he drove in, gearing himself up for another night of theatrical trauma. He found himself shouting at fellow drivers in fluent Italian-American. He recreates it now, muscles clenching: “Come on then, whaddya want?” If he can keep that sort of passion up for a whole evening …
But he guards against confusing great volume with great acting. “The line between narcissism and a great performance is a thin one,” he says. “Often you feel if you’ve cried and you’ve given your all then everyone must think you’re amazing, but of course that is rarely the experience the audience is having.”
A View from the Bridge is structured like a Greek tragedy, and West suggests there was an element of that too to his stint on The Crown. It took in Charles’s affair with Camilla, divorce and the death of Diana. The one topic West won’t talk directly about are the events of 2020, in which he was pictured kissing James, his co-star in the BBC drama The Pursuit of Love, off screen while on location in Rome. FitzGerald stood by him: indeed, they appeared together in front of their home, with a piece of paper on which was written, “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you.” Then, in 2022 he began playing Charles, a man whose indiscretions had also gone public. Did his experience of the goldfish bowl of fame and notoriety feed into his performance?
“Definitely. I’d had a very acute understanding of what it’s like to feel the horror of your name or your photograph coming up in the newspapers. There is that dreadful freezing moment when something is being revealed about you. I think anyone can understand how that feels. But I’d been through it a couple of years previously and it must have informed how I approached it. That gut feeling of horror isn’t something you get inured to.”
West is great company, so that you can almost forget that this is dangerous territory for him. But he admits he is wary. “I’m terrified of journalists,” he says. “Inevitably I say something I’d rather not have said.” Is he really as water-off-a-duck’s-back as he likes to make out, though? Is he in character even now?
He gives a shake of his head. “I suppose I like to please people. I like to try to be interesting. Or funny. And that’s a terrible mistake.”
Another question about the E word: West had a mixed time at Eton, and yet his two sons, Senan, 15, and Francis, 14, are there. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, he says. And it’s a far more liberal place than it was 40 years ago. “It’s paradise. Slightly wasted on traumatised 13-year-olds, as we were then, but it’s an astonishing school.”
School fees may have encouraged him, he admits, to concentrate on screen work rather than stage for the past eight years. Screen work including, recently, his first advertisement campaign. West plays a callous rival banker sneering at Nationwide’s nicey-nicey attitude. School fees sorted, laughs had, job done. Except the adverts had to be pulled from TV in their original form this month because they incorrectly implied that the building society had not closed branches.
West looked into it “as carefully as I could” and decided Nationwide “were the good guys”. But he admits he didn’t look into the specifics of branch closures. “I just assumed [those details were] all taken care of. And maybe it’s a bit cheap, but having a crack at bankers, who cares?”
It does sometimes feel as if controversies accompany West. His longest-running role was in the TV series The Affair (2014-19), playing an American writer who has an affair with a younger woman (Ruth Wilson). In 2020 Wilson said there was a situation on the show where “things didn’t feel right”. She left the show a year before West, and later said she “didn’t feel safe” on set, and questioned why she always had to show her “orgasm face”.
Were these issues that Wilson and West ever addressed together? For once the loquacious West is slow to comment. “Um … we … we talked a lot about it and I suppose I did experience it. I don’t really like talking about it but … yeah, everything Ruth has said is absolutely right.” He leaves it there (there has been speculation that Wilson signed an NDA for The Affair).
In happier news, he is starring in a play he loves, until August, even if that means leaving the “blissful life” he has with Catherine and their children. Is it perverse to wonder, four years on from his moment of infamy in Rome, if there have been any upsides to his family’s most testing moment?
“I hesitate to speak on my wife’s behalf because it was obviously horrible, particularly for her,” he says. And then he gives out a cackle, all the tension escaping from him like air from a balloon. “But we do joke about it sometimes. Because whenever we went out together, the papers would always say we were ‘putting on a show of unity’. Even if we’d just been rowing about parking the car or whatever, even if that couldn’t be further from the truth. And so when we go out we do sort of say, ‘Shall we go and have a show of unity up in London?’
“It was an absurd situation. It was deeply stressful for my wife and my kids, but there were lighter moments.” He gives a slightly grimmer chuckle. “That was the best that came out of it, really.”
A View from the Bridge is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, May 22-Aug 3, trh.co.uk
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