vallierojas: Tom Wilkinson: down with the big boys

Tom Wilkinson was in his mid-40s when he decided being a respected theatre actor wasn't enough. He tells Stephen Moss about cracking Hollywood, playing Joe Kennedy ? and the two women who inspired him

Tom Wilkinson is a most unlikely Hollywood star. For a start, this interview is taking place not at the glitzy Dorchester hotel ? time-honoured home of the film junket ? but at his unassuming house in north London. Though he hates giving interviews and is being forced to miss his beloved Friends on TV, he is too polite to ask me to leave, and I hang around in his living room for two hours asking ever more incoherent questions. As if this wasn't enough, he then drives me a couple of miles to the station. Now ask yourself: would Tom Cruise do that?

But that's the point. The tall, angular, intense, somewhat intimidating Wilkinson doesn't want to be like Tom Cruise, doesn't want to be pursued by paparazzi or adopt Peruvian children. Being a public figure would place a filter between the audience and the character he is playing. He craves anonymity, for creative as well as personal reasons, which is why he'd really rather I wasn't here. "I don't like doing interviews, and do them very rarely," he says, before I've managed a single question. "Actors always come out sounding stupid."

We are meeting because this week sees the broadcast of the first part of The Kennedys, a US mini-series in which he plays Joseph Kennedy, the domineering patriarch of America's iconic political clan. The series has had a troubled genesis: historians have questioned its veracity, members of the Kennedy family have called it a rightwing hatchet job, and it's now getting critical flak as feeble drama, too. "It's been bizarre," says Wilkinson of the controversy, "and still you can't really get to the bottom of it. When I got the script, I thought it read well as a drama of the family. It's not an attempt to be a docu-drama; it's about this strange, driven family."

Much of the argument stems from the fact that the executive producer is Joel Surnow, creator of the TV series 24, who is a Republican donor and a close friend of shock jock Rush Limbaugh. Not a man, say Democrats, who should be trusted to play fair with the memory of JFK. "I didn't have any inkling of this [when I read the script]," says Wilkinson, "and, of course, those sorts of political nuances are specific to the US." The furore was enough for the History channel in the US to drop the series, which is now being shown there by the little-known station Reelz, though the UK version of the History channel has stuck with it.

The series is highly watchable but overpacked: how can eight hours of TV encompass the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the movement for civil rights and two assassinations, not to mention walk-on parts for Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe? But Wilkinson is superb as Joe Kennedy, ageing from his late 40s to early 80s and ending up in a wheelchair and unable to speak following a stroke. "I swear that my heart beat faster whenever he was onscreen," wrote the New Yorker's TV critic Nancy Franklin in an otherwise unenthusiastic review.

I ask Wilkinson whether he's pleased with the series. There is a pause while he searches for the right words ? he may dislike interviews because he tries to answer truthfully, rather than offer polished banalities ? but he eventually manages a loyal thumbs-up. "I think it looks pretty good," he says in his mutable, slightly transatlantic accent. "It is what it is." In any case, if it bombs it's not his fault. "You do the best you can, and then you walk away. It's not your responsibility to cut it, or put the music to it, or market it. You're paid for what you do, and it's a great feeling when every now and again you do something, and when you go and see the final thing it's better than its constituent parts."

Wilkinson is 63, and it's really only in the last 10 years that he's established himself in the US. But he rejects my suggestion that it's because stardom came relatively late that he's so determinedly Muswell Hill rather than Hollywood. "I've always been quite successful," he says. "I was a leading performer in stage, and getting great roles on television." But in his early 40s, soon after his marriage to Diana Hardcastle (who appears alongside him in The Kennedys as Joe's wife, Rose), he realised he wanted something more. "I saw a lot of my friends doing films, and there's a bit of you that says, 'I want to sit down with the big boys.'"

Drive-by shooting terror

The 1994 film Priest, written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Antonia Bird, was a watershed, not least because he had to make his first trip to LA to publicise it. "I was terrified, terrified. They put me up in the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. I'd finished for the day, it was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and I thought I'd go for a walk. So I went out, walked through the car park, looked down the road, and thought, 'This place is the home of the drive-by shooting.' If I walk down that street, there's no question I'll be gunned down, so I went back inside and watched TV."

The Full Monty ? a resolutely British production that was a surprise hit in the US ? followed a couple of years later, and from then on Wilkinson knew he wanted to concentrate on film. "I was simultaneously offered the lead in a TV series and a possible part in a low-budget movie. I remember phoning a friend and he said, 'Take the TV, take the TV'. But I didn't follow his advice, and the TV turned out to be crap."

His Oscar-nominated role as Dr Matt Fowler, the grieving, vengeful father in Todd Field's 2001 film In the Bedroom, was crucial in building his profile in Hollywood, though he loathes such careerist language. "That movie worked very well, but I didn't see it as a profile-builder. It was going to do two things for me: one, I could play the lead role in a movie; two, I could play an American lead role. And it did both of those things."

His ease in American roles may reflect the fact that part of his childhood was spent in Canada. He had an unsettled upbringing. His father was from a farming background in the north of England, but the farm had been sold and when Wilkinson was five his father shipped the family off to Canada, where he intended to make a new life. The new life didn't work out, and five years later they headed back to the UK, settling in Cornwall, where his parents ran a pub that struggled to make money. His father died when Wilkinson was 16, and his mother took the family back north.

Wilkinson's real name is Geoffrey, a name he disliked and was pleased to have to lose when he became a member of Equity, which already had a Geoffrey Wilkinson on its books. Young Geoffrey was clever enough to get into grammar school, but says he was lazy until headteacher Molly Sawdon started to encourage his interest in drama. Sawdon had a female companion called Paddy, and the two of them organised soirees for favoured pupils. At one, he remembers telling Paddy he was thinking of trying to make a career in theatre. He adopts a grande dame voice to give her reply. "'Well Geoff,' she said, 'you mustn't accept a knighthood. The only thing you want is the order of merit.' And there wasn't a trace of irony." He studied English and American literature at the University of Kent, went to Rada, and by the early 70s was building his stage career, notably with Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse.

There is a photograph of Molly and Paddy on the wall of Wilkinson's living room, suggesting how central their role was in shaping his future. For one thing, they helped him make the transition from a fairly deprived working-class life to the artistically inclined middle class. But he never entirely made the jump, and has always felt an outsider. "Being an outsider is good for actors," he says. "I don't know whether I've rationalised my slightly reclusive tendencies in this way, but I've always resisted the clubbiness of some actors." As well as being uninterested in fame, he is suspicious of actors who talk about their "art". He prefers to call it a knack. "What Lucian Freud does is art," he insists.

Despite his apparent tenseness and committed cigarette smoking ? this is a six-fag interview ? he says he has a high boredom threshold and, when he's not working, is happy doing nothing. As well as episodes of Friends, which he endlessly rewatches, he likes Midsomer Murders ? "that very English programme", as he calls it with a chuckle ? mainly to spot actors he thought had died years ago. "That's probably what waits for me." He starts acting a scene with a fruity English voice: "Oo-oh-ooo [he emits a flutey, long-drawn-out sound, impossible to capture in print], there was nobody here. I went to bed very early last night." He laughs uproariously as he imagines telling a disbelieving policeman how he discovered a body in his drawing room. A couple of decades from now, when Wilkinson has tired of Hollywood and is tempted back to British TV, Midsomer Murders could really be worth watching.

? The first part of The Kennedys is on History tomorrow, at 9pm.

Stephen Moss

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