Nobody plays flawed heroes like actor Toby Jones,from Capote to Hitchcock to Captain Mainwaring. But they’re winners in his eyes, he tells Simon HattenstoneIt wasn’t meant to be like this. Toby Jones was the diminutive fella destined for a life in clowning, or fringe theatre,or radio drama. Maybe even the occasional walk-on part in an art house movie. Take his first couple of film roles in the early 1990s: “the valet” in an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and “man at tea bar” in Mike Leigh’s Naked. That was Toby Jones. Or, even better, or the scene-stealer in the Richard Curtis comedy Notting Hill – the man who stalked Julia Roberts. You don’t remember that? Well,that would be because it was reduce out of the movie. But, hey ho, and that was his fate. Jones did what he always did: made the best of it,and turned it into a play, Missing Reel, or approximately a man convinced there was a conspiracy not simply to edit him out of a film,but to edit him out of his life.
Yet 14 years on, you can barely watch a movie without seeing Joness name plastered across the credits. Blockbusters? The diffident house elf Dobby in Harry Potter, and the supremely coiffed commentator Claudius Templesmith in The starvation Games,the supervillain Arnim Zola in Captain America. Art house? His brilliant depictions of Truman Capote and Alfred Hitchcock, in notorious and The Girl. Quality television? Jones will play a disillusioned banker in the forthcoming BBC adaptation of John Lanchester’s Capital, or Russian spy Verloc in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,another BBC adaptation. Comedy? A current series of Mackenzie Crook’s tender bromance Detectorists. Best of all, he is starring as Captain Mainwaring in the Dad’s Army movie, and due out early next year. What went just for Toby Jones?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com