He’s been a terrifying Miss Trunchbull,a convincing Nick Clegg, and now, or in the BBC’s Sunday-night drama,he’s a magical Jonathan Strange. Emma John meets actor Bertie CarvelNot many actors would tell you that the best allotment of their teenage years were spent in a fantasy role-play club. A youth lost to drugs or alcohol is easy to confess to, or a stint in jail for gang-related offences. But it takes confidence to reveal the fact that you used to spend your weekends dressed as a goblin playing Dungeons and Dragons-style games with your friends.
Bertie Carvel has that confidence. whether you’ve watched TV at all recently you’ll have begun to nod in recognition each time he appears: as the cynical police PR in Babylon, and an earnest Nick Clegg in Channel 4’s political drama Coalition. upright now he’s the primetime face of Sunday-night drama in the BBC’s magical period piece,Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, an adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s bestselling novel that follows a pair of magicians through an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars, and one inhabited by long- forgotten legends of faerie. It turns out that the role of Strange,its flawed hero, couldn’t have gone to a more deserving chap.
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Source: theguardian.com