Whether on stage, screen or in person, Matt Smith is all wired-up energy and movement — shifting like an escapologist desperately trying to escape his skin. He wriggles and lunges, ruffles his wild hair and gesticulates with fervour. He has a bit of the unbridled Jack Nicholson about him, with the soft sympathy of Anthony Hopkins, but when I ask whom he thinks he emulates, Smith smiles sweetly and simply says: “My dad.
“I feel like I’m always talking about my dad, but whatever,” he says. David Smith died in 2021 aged 73. He ran a plastics company and father and son were close. “Without sounding like a wanky old actor, which I am, I said to my mum recently that the truest bits of my work are impersonations of Dad. I borrow bits of his behaviour, or reactions to life events. I approach a character with the depth of his thought. . .” Smith, 41, beams. “There are so many moments where I’m nicking off my old man.”
Smith’s latest project is an excellent, weird, moving British folk horror film, Starve Acre, a story of grief and family made soon after David died. The film’s story, adapted from Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel, “presented its challenges”, Smith admits. Spells, creepy trees and lines like “summon the Dandelion!” conjure up The Wicker Man, but the film mostly reminds me of the masterpiece about mourning Manchester by the Sea. Smith plays Richard — husband to Juliette (Morfydd Clark) and father to an odd son, Owen (Arthur Shaw) — a taciturn Yorkshireman dealing with difficulty in a closed-off way.
“Dad was from Blackburn,” Smith says on the subject of northern men. “So I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times in this film where I wasn’t just pondering the greatness of my old man.” He sighs. “He was the warmest person in the world.” Thinking about David helped Smith to act sad. “I would think about certain moments that are very difficult in my life. I mean, some actors just turn it on and don’t have to do that. But others have to think about their auntie Joan who’s passed away, or cat Thomas, or whatever.”
He pauses. Such is Smith’s busy brain that subjects simply veer off. He says that sometimes he gets so into a character he cannot help but take that role home. “You feel like a berk but it can be really entertaining. When life’s boring you switch into some other guy.” What, so you sometimes imagine you are Prince Philip — whom Smith played at the start of The Crown — while sitting at home?
“Philip still creeps back into my life,” Smith says, nodding. “I’ll think, ‘I sound like Big Phil, the legend.’ I will get on the Tube and do a journey as an entirely different human. It passes time. I’ve had some mental baths pretending I was Doctor Who.”
Smith is an open book of stories and opinions — from a life lived with great enthusiasm. His CV is more impressive than you may remember, straddling three hit TV shows (Doctor Who, The Crown, House of the Dragon) and groundbreaking theatre (Ibsen’s polemical An Enemy of the People, with audience interaction, in the West End this year; a superb American Psycho at the Almeida in north London a decade ago).
Starve Acre is his finest film by far. He did not need big-screen fame, but boy does he have the charisma and the frame to fill it — he seems taller than his 5ft 11in — and Starve Acre makes the most use of him so far, after film work mostly confined to support slots and run-of-the-mill blockbusters.
I catch him at the end of an intense shoot for the adaptation of Nick Cave’s psychodrama novel The Death of Bunny Munro — “I was completely covered in blood!” — just before he starts filming Darren Aronofsky’s crime thriller Caught Stealing in New York. He finished the run of An Enemy of the People only in April.
Is this restlessness due to him hitting his forties? “I don’t think I’ve equated it to that, but I was doing too little,” he says, shrugging. “So I decided not to worry. After Doctor Who, which is a family show, I actively played messed-up people.” As well as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Smith took on the role of Charles Manson in the film Charlie Says. “Choices were based on, ‘What is the flip here?’ But I’ve worked lots this year because I chose to say yes to things, stop second-guessing.”
That said, Smith’s messed-up people continue. Richard in Starve Acre is a grump; Bunny in The Death of Bunny Munro is an alcoholic misogynist; Prince Philip had his issues; Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon is second only to Joffrey Baratheon in the original Game of Thrones when it comes to violent horror; and An Enemy of the People is about challenging our moral code.
When asked if he wants to play polarising people, Smith enthuses: “100 per cent! That’s the f***ing point. We should be telling morally difficult stories, nowadays in particular. It’s OK to feel uncomfortable or provoked while looking at a painting or watching a play, but I worry everything’s being dialled and dumbed down. We’re telling audiences they’re going to be scared before they’ve watched something.”
Ah, trigger warnings — the tedious modern idea that adults cannot cope with being upset by art. “Isn’t being shocked, surprised, stirred the point?” Smith says. “Too much policing of stories and being afraid to bring them out because a climate is a certain way is a shame. I’m not sure I’m on board with trigger warnings. I used to go to a local video shop and get Slither, Basic Instinct, Disclosure — all these erotic thrillers. I was way too young to be watching them. I watched Friday the 13th when I was nine.” He stops. “Actually, that scarred me. Absolutely ruined me.”
So maybe that film was a bit too much too young, but Smith, in life and in work, always tested the limits. Born in Northampton in 1982, he was meant to be a pro footballer, playing centre back. He was so good that he captained Leicester City’s youth team. Yet after a back injury kiboshed that hyper-competitive career, instead of settling for an easy vocation he leapt to another line of work full of broken dreams: acting.
Does he simply enjoy the drama? “Well, I think my friends would support you in that theory,” he says wryly. “But, God, if you’re lucky, you want to do something in your life that occupies you fully and acting really does. . .” He adores football and supports Blackburn Rovers, like his dad did. We talk at length about our fantasy football teams. Is he in a league with actors? “No! Mates from home.” That league occupies him but he misses playing hugely.
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“You see,” he continues wistfully, “I watched the Euros literally praying for England to win. You can never recreate those levels of ecstasy and tension in a play. Impossible. That level of total submission, eruption of unified emotion? When else do you ever get that collective energy?”
Is that why well-off actors like him still take stage work? Because it surely isn’t for the money. Smith nods. “Having a great night in a play is like scoring a goal,” he says. “I miss that collective aspect of football. And the liveness and challenge of theatre is the closest you will get to that. But let me tell you. When starting a play, I do go, ‘F***ing hell on a horse! Why am I doing this to myself?’ Still, some climb mountains. You do have to remind yourself when you’re nervous that some people have real shit to be nervous about.”
Smith loved Doctor Who. He played the titular role from 2010-14, bringing a swagger and, frankly, weirdness to it that made his stint, somehow, both a cult and a mainstream success. “It was overnight,” he says of the impact. “Nobody knew who I was and suddenly I was f***ing Doctor Who!” Does he still watch it? Ncuti Gatwa’s iteration as the Doctor began last year.
“Not much, but Ncuti’s brilliant. I feel very proud to have been in the show. It changed my life because few shows are watched by a nine-year-old, mum and dad and 83-year-old grandma. That’s three generations, and you’re in people’s homes at Christmas. It’s an amazing responsibility.”
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But, of course, Smith was in the series when culture was just culture, not the culture wars, which feels like an easier time to be in a mass entertainment show. Is it? “Those debates reduce it to a place that it doesn’t need to be in,” Smith scoffs of those complaining about the Doctor’s race or gender. “People that attack Doctor Who blow my mind. It’s about an alien who is cool and travels around the universe saving civilisations — what’s not to love?”
I also say that Smith was in The Crown at an easier time because his era was out of memory for most, compared with depictions of Princess Diana and her boys. “The Crown is a grey area,” he admits. “Because it’s about real people and it must be shit if you’re in that family. I get that.”
Given that we are finishing up on a rush through his hit shows, why did the second series of House of the Dragon have so much talking about an epic battle that we now have to wait for two years, and series three, to actually watch? “I am a mere actor. I turn up and say my lines,” he says, grinning. How many more series is he signed up for? “Well, I’m definitely in the next one.”
There is a delightful blast of no-nonsense about Smith, which is why his Philip and Daemon work well: he brings out-there rogues to our level. As such, he groans when I ask if an actor of his heft, who went to National Youth Theatre, finds certain work — Terminator Genisys and the superhero dud Morbius, say — rather dull to make.
“It’s your job not to be bored, even if you are,” he says bluntly. “You have got a duty to people who employ you, and the audience. If you’re bored, get a f***ing hobby. Ultimately I just feel lucky to be doing this.”
Starve Acre is in cinemas from Friday
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