Mark Rylance, of Wolf Hall and Bridge of Spies fame, is currently starring as Ron in the play Nice Fish, on stage now at the American Repertory Theatre. Rylance and poet Louis Jenkins assembled the play using Jenkins’ prose poems, and the result, directed by Rylance’s wife, Claire van Kampen, is a meditation on the meaninglessness of life, the meaning of life, the beauty and brutality of nature, human bonds, and isolation, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.
MARGERY: We absolutely loved the play. Can you tell us a little bit about the ‘meaning of life’ you gave us in Nice Fish? What’s it about?
Rylance: It’s about two old friends, one from Minnesota and one from Wisconsin. They go out ice fishing, they haven’t seen each other for a few years, they were friends in high school and now they’re in their fifties. They find they don’t fit quite so well as they used to—things have changed, as it’s turned out, it’s a little bit about that view: you’re hitting your fifties, and the mentors and the teachers and the fathers… the men who have been kind of inspiring you, they’re on a hill facing forgetfulness, physical frailty, or death, and you see that that hill is the next one across the valley. You think, I see, there’s less time ahead than there is behind, now.
JIM: On that upbeat note, what’s the genesis of this thing? How did you and Jenkins get involved?
Rylance: For my sins, I was given some award on Broadway, and I find those ceremonies rather boring, so I thought, well, I’ll learn a Louis Jenkins poem and speak that.
JIM: This was for your first Tony, for Boeing Boeing. You know the best part of that? If you watch the video, the people in the audience have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.
Rylance: That’s true. My wife had begged me not to do it, but I hadn’t confirmed whether I was going to… I wasn’t sure, myself, whether I would. You can hear my nervousness in my voice.
JIM: And you didn’t know him at the time you did this, correct?
Rylance: I hadn’t met him yet. I think he heard about it by newspaper reporters calling him to ask him what it meant.
JIM: And then the relationship began how?
Rylance: I had been ice fishing up at the Guthrie Theatre where I had done a play called Peer Gynt by [Henrik] Ibsen. A cast member had taken me out ice fishing, and it suddenly struck me, the thing about ice fishing as a form of hunting is that you don’t have to be quiet. Actually, not very much happens, so you talk a lot. You sit in a little wooden shack, looking at the radar, and the TV screens, and fish swim up to your hook, you don’t even have to really watch the pole. It’s all on the TV and submarine-type radar. The idea came off of two fellows speaking these poems back and forth with each other, and what surprised me after that Tony awards speech is that people thought I was just speaking my own thoughts. Though they’re called poems, they’re written in prose, and they actually come across as dialogue.
MARGERY: In the play, you both start in very heavy gear, with the hat and the big heavy pants… the whole outfit. Then, at some point, you’re wearing far fewer clothes. You went from lots to nothing.
Rylance: Louis has this wonderful gift of spinning, or flipping on a word or a sentence or a thought, into something much wider. There’s a transcendent thing he does out of rather mundane, wonderful, recognizable, mundane qualities of life, he’ll then flip into something quite transcendent. They play has that aspect to it, I’ve tried to make the play almost like the structure of one of his poems. We do take off some clothes—not everything.
JIM: Does Jenkins have prior acting experience, or was this a first deal for him?
Rylance: This is a first deal. He’s very authentic. We got to a place where we just thought, well why not go for the authentic thing, rather than search for an older actor who could learn these poems. He’s read his poetry in public a lot, and I could see that he had a good sense of how to play a laugh, not to talk over a laugh, and to wait… his timing is very good. But it’s a completely new thing for him. But even last night, walking down the hall, I asked him [how it went] and he said, ‘well, it went okay, I got a few things wrong’ and it was like working with an old pro.
MARGERY: I loved the way you guys did the stage. You’re in the forefront, you have this little tiny truck in the dark that kind of rides out with the headlights on, and this little tiny shack that’s on the stage, with this little tiny couch. Tell people about that scene.
Rylance: In the research I did on it, I became fascinated by ice fishing, and there’s a picture of a woman in a bikini stepping out of a sauna on a lake in Minnesota, and I couldn’t believe it. It’s true—people build saunas houses out on lakes, they have amazing places with televisions and bunks and all the modern things… street signs, and things like that. The set, in the distance, moves into little models to give you the perspective of this big lake with different things happening on it. I think yesterday we even cut an SUV car in half and stuck it in the ice in miniature in the back.
MARGERY: And there was a little miniature Mark Rylance laying on the couch in the back.
Rylance: I’m afraid that wasn’t me! That was the girl, that wasn’t me on the little couch!
MARGERY: Tell me a little bit about Wolf Hall, we’re in WGBH, they do all these great shows right across the street…
Rylance: No one would have seen Wolf Hall in America without PBS.
MARGERY: It was absolutely phenomenal, you of course played Thomas Cromwell, the political fixer for Henry VIII. As many people have said about your performance, it was what you didn’t say that really struck people. For people who haven’t read Wolf Hall—in real life, Cromwell lost his wife and three daughters to the plague. Many people have remarked on your reaction in Wolf Hall when you got that news.
Rylance: He wasn’t expecting it, though it was a common thing in those days. Who expects that kind of news? Yeah, it was not a great day for Thomas Cromwell.
MARGERY: Your silence, your quietness, which marked your whole performance…
Rylance: Well, that’s how she wrote the book. She described him as the ‘one who looked like a wall.’ Someone would ask him, would you like some cheese on your bread, and about six pages later, he would go, ‘maybe later.’ In those six pages, he would have thought, ‘where does cheese come from, why are the workers who make cheese not paid properly, what’s the Catholic church’s involvement in cheese… all kinds of different things before he mumbled something back. He was written as someone who you had enormous access to, in the book, but actually the other characters around were looking at a poker player with a very good poker face. I knew, when I was cast in the part, that people love the book and the character already, so I had to try to be loyal and faithful to what Hilary [Mantel] had written.
MARGERY: What’s your opinion of Thomas Cromwell, who many would see as a great villain, but many others, not so much?
Rylance: I didn’t feel it was my research to try and second-guess Hilary Mantel. I’ve heard people very upset with her research, but I have not heard anyone disprove of her research, I would have thought that there’s interpretive space between the known facts, and maybe she’s interpreted it one way or another. I know it was a shock for people who admire Thomas Moore to see a darker side of [him], a more fundamentalist, religious aspect. I’ve heard that he did carry a portable torture kit around with him, he believed what he believed, and he believed he was right. My job is really to make manifest what Hilary had written, and then for other people to argue out the historical facts of it. I know she’s going back—she’s now writing the last year of his life, the third book, and I know she’s going back and revealing some different things about the relationship between Moore and Cromwell, I think it’s going to be a very interesting third book, and hopefully a third series.
MARGERY: Thomas Cromwell sort of orchestrated the demise of Anne Boleyn… you disagree with me, I can tell.
Rylance: Well, he also orchestrated the rise of Anne Boleyn, and in the way she writes it, he tried his best to get her to retire and save her life. Go gracefully, well, safely, I suppose. That’s what interested me about the character—you take a job, maybe it’s more familiar than not—for someone you believe in, and then you discover they’re a sociopath, and you’re stuck, and there’s no way backing out of the snow. You’ve got to think, well, how do I make the best of a situation? That kind of pragmatism, a lot of people find themselves in those situations in work. Not at such a high level, with the consequences so difficult, but I think it’s difficult not to avoid, at some point in your professional life, working for someone who is tyrannical, or fearful. How do you make the best of it? Do you sacrifice other people? Or do you sacrifice yourself?
JIM: Your face has become so familiar. Are you offended when Americans say we discovered this guy in his fifties...obviously you’ve been the Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre forever, you are Shakespeare, as far as I’m concerned… are you offended when Americans just discover somebody who has been practicing his craft at this kind of level for so many decades?
Rylance: No! It’s lovely to be discovered. You feel like a precious metal, don’t you? You feel like the Grand Canyon when somebody walks over the ridge; I’ve been here for ages, where have you been?
JIM: Speaking of precious metal, you’re nominated for best supporting actor for Bridge of Spies. That’s pretty exciting.
Rylance: There’s the case in point, because Steven Spielberg, who has just been the most wonderful man, and a brilliant storyteller, and he lives stories, too. His story is that he’s discovered me. I’d say he saved me, saved me from the back alleyway of the theatre. Occasionally, I’ll mention one of the other 15 or 20 films I’ve made before he discovered me, and his eyes glaze a little bit. That fell on the editing floor a few weeks ago.
JIM: Is there any demonstrable difference between American directors and British directors, or is it all an individualized kind of thing?
Rylance: I haven’t worked with enough people to make an authoritative comment like that, there’s a difference between Steven Spielberg and everyone else.
JIM: What’s that?
Rylance: Well, he’s just… it’s a bit like if you met Wayne Gretzky, or Mozart, or Picasso, or someone who is born with the ability to do what they love to do, and didn’t get injuries that prevented them from doing what they love to do. He’s had some hard times with some of his films, but primarily, he’s been able to do, all his life since he was a kid… his mother cleared their spare bedroom in the desert, and he sold tickets to kids to come around and sit on the floor and watch films that he would show. He just loves film, and so it’s a great delight when you meet people like that, it’s a great delight to be around them. You’ve also got a whole lot of other people around them who love film.
If you want to see black actors and you want to see more women in films, then go to films that have women as the characters, and don't go to the films that have all-male characters. That's how you can play your part.
JIM: What will you do if this boycott thing grows? Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith are boycotting over what they’ve called whitewashing of the Oscars?
Rylance: I don’t know, I’d love any excuse not to have to go to any award ceremony, personally. I’m so busy with the play, I’ve only been seeing it out of the corner of my eye. I mean, I don’t think awards are any kind of measure of whether you’re good at what you do, they’re just a shop window to sell things. What’s unfortunate for any minority group who doesn’t feel that their films are being seen enough is that they don’t get access to that shop window. There’s no question that black actors have been celebrated over the last few years, and that they’re making great films. I think the issue is more—are they getting the funding? And are women in films getting the funding, too? How many films tell stories where women are the main characters? We were talking the other day on set about even extras. Apparently, even extras in films are predominantly men, rather than women. Why is that?
It comes back, as all these things to, to the consumer. I ran a theater, and if Pericles had sold out, we would have been doing Pericles every few days, rather than Midsummer Nights Dream. If you want to see black actors and you want to see more women in films, then go to films that have women as the characters, and don’t go to the films that have all-male characters. That’s how you can play your part.
To hear more from Mark Rylance’s interview with Boston Public Radio, click on the audio link above.
