14
15
Film
Summer
2013
You see how
much talent is out
there and how
diverse it is
Film Council, the BFI. It comes down to
publicly-subsidised bodies being under
pressure to bring in a commercial profit
and cater to mass audiences more. There
are very few people that are able to tick
the boxes of reaching mass audiences
and still tell stories that once would have
been called radical. Like what Shane
Meadows was able to do with This is
England, but he was able to establish
himself on the tail end of a period in the
90s when there were still public subsidies
for film makers making alternative films.
A lot of this simply comes down to the
slashing of Arts funding, public subsidies,
that is a lurch to the right socially, if not
necessarily politically.
Does that worry you that you are
typecast as the intelligent radical guy
in the intelligent radical movie?
I think if I was, that would be pretty cool,
but I don’t think I am typecast from the
point of view of an actor, because what
you worry about is playing the same
role again and again as it simply isn’t
satisfying. All the roles I’ve played have
been very different characters, even if the
thematics of the movies have overlapped.
One thing I am proudest of is not
humanism and social realism, so I think
we need to embrace that. Danny Boyle
has shown us how we can reconnect with
our history and move forward to a more
inclusive Britain in the opening ceremony
of the Olympics and we need to embrace
that vision.
The thing is the films I have been
lucky to do – and maybe the kind of films
that seek me out – are ones that maybe
are not catering to a mass audience but
often may have something to say about
post-riots Britain, like Ill Manors or Four
Lions. I would like to have a career that
has a cumulative impact. I love it when
I hear that certain actors are really well
respected though they may not have won
50 Oscars or broken the box office and
you kind of step back and look at them
and think that’s an amazing body of work,
that’s solid.
What was your star struck moment?
When was the moment you when felt
“Wow, I’m in the same room as …”?
It was when I met Mos’ Def at the Royal
Court Theatre and I was looking for him
so much that I actually missed him. He
was standing next to me at the time. He
was wearing a flat cap which made me
necessarily doing films that are pushing
to get a message through but just having
fun in a variety of roles. The kind of roles
in Trishna, or Shifty, or Black Gold, or
Rage, or Guantanamo – they are just very
different characters and that is satisfying
to me creatively.
As we aren’t big enough to sustain
a really commercial free market in
storytelling like Hollywood, we are forced
to do something slightly alternative, but
that’s cool because that’s the stuff that
resonates, that’s the stuff that touches
people’s hearts; even if the stories we tell
might not break a million in the box office
every year, the stories we tell resonate
because they come from an angle of
Riz opposite Liev Schreiber in
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
