I’m not doing anything.” I think I’m getting better at it. I thought: “What the hell, that sounds like fun. Also it was just a series of scripts that came in that I really liked, including some students that wanted to make a 15,000-pound film in Gloucester. Was that so you could keep acting while theaters were closed?
But when you see her in the De Sica films like “Two Women” or “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” she is just diamond.ĪP: You made six films during the pandemic. It, of course, wasn’t her first language so you got a muffled version of her. Joel Coen has just introduced me to De Sica’s films and that’s led me to rediscover Sophia Loren who I had only seen in English-speaking films. And you get maybe one take, two if you’re lucky. The more famous you get, at least in America, the less confident crew people are to talk with you, or even look you in the eyes. Whereas film, now even more with COVID, you’re just locked in a caravan. RYLANCE: For someone who loves acting to be in a play where I’m acting for three hours and in the company of the actors for five and a half, six hours - because there’s a two hour vocal warm-up, there’s lovely games of volleyball, there’s all the fun of a social dressing room, because I don’t cut myself off.
How has your relationship to film work changed since then?
On his day off from the stage, Rylance reflected on “The Phantom of the Open,” “Jerusalem” and his still-evolving relationship to film acting.ĪP: You had acted in films before Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” but that 2015 movie began a new chapter in movies for you, and raised your profile in Hollywood. Rylance is currently in the midst of a 16-week run revival of “Jerusalem,” reprising his defining role as Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Tony-winning play about a clash between outsiders and authorities and a soon-to-be bulldozed encampment. “All acting is basically passing a ball of energy of some kind between people,” Rylance said in a recent interview by Zoom.Īnd for Rylance, the hurly burly of theater - “a dance with the audience,” he calls it - has always most propelled him as an actor. Rylance prefers volleyball, which he plays as a pre-show warm-up with castmates to prepare for the improvisations of a play. Courses in tightly populated urban settings, he thinks, should be turned into parks.
He compares his own instinct for it to how a professional soccer player is drawn to kicking a ball.
Rylance has long seen acting in sports terms. To Rylance, Flitcroft - a kind of folk hero to imperfection - stood for irrational dreams and amateur pluck. The 62-year-old actor stars as real-life amateur golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a former shipyard crane operator of modest golfing skill whose persistence in entering the British Open earned him the reputation as the world’s worst golfer. Rylance also starred in a quirky and charming sports movie: Craig Roberts’ “The Phantom of the Open,” which Sony Pictures Classics releases Friday in theaters.
A tech billionaire in Adam McKay’s apocalypse satire “Don’t Look Up.” Satan in Terrence Malick’s upcoming “The Way of the Wind.” Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones & All.” A tailor in the chamber-piece thriller “The Outfit.” Rylance even acted for free in a student film. NEW YORK (AP) - With London’s stages closed for much of the pandemic, Mark Rylance - one of the theater’s most soulful actors and a leading interpreter of Shakespeare - made six films.