Actor Mark Strong can be seen in no fewer than eight films this year, including Guy Ritchie's 'RocknRolla', but in real life, he insists, he is nothing like his villainous on-screen persona, writes Donald Clarke
WHAT AN ODD place to be. It's Monday morning and I find myself in an artfully distressed building some short distance from London's National Theatre. If you were a little over-tired - or had recently been slugged in the mush by a geezer - you could mistake this place for a genuine disused warehouse. Look a little closer, however, and you will see that the paint has peeled from the wall in strangely ordered fashion and the graffiti appears a little too polite and arch.
Guy Ritchie, director of Snatchand Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, has finished work on RocknRolla, his latest gangster knees- up, and the press have been invited to interview members of the cast in Ritchie World. We've got bacon butties for breakfast and donuts for elevenses. Cor blimey! How long will it be before Madonna - the current Mrs Ritchie - turns up to play My Old Man on the old Joanna? In a small, dim room a few flights down from the holding area, I find Mark Strong kicking his heels. Of course Mark is here. Mark is everywhere these days. In the space of the past four weeks alone, he has popped up in the likable Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, the deranged Babylon ADand, now, the amusing RocknRolla. He's the hardest-working man in the warehouse.
"It's looked that way recently," he says. "Mind you, just yesterday a guy came up to me in the airport and asked if I was an actor. I said, 'yeah'. So he says: 'What did I see you in?' He starts listing this series of films and I had to say: 'No, no, no. It wasn't that. I wasn't in that either.' It went on for ages."
Tall, thin and bald with Mediterranean eyes and a splendid voice, Mark Strong, now 44, has been straddling the line between character parts and leading roles for the past two decades. Once a versatile classical actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he achieved more widespread fame as dim, harmless Tosker in the BBC's epic 1996 series, Our Friends in the North. Since then, he has barely been out of work.
RocknRollafinds him playing one of several villains shuttling between Tom Wilkinson's cockney kingpin and Karel Roden's dodgy Russian oligarch. The film could be regarded as a make-or-break project for Ritchie. His last two releases - the stupefying Swept Awayand the stunningly pompous Revolver- bombed with the public and made it on to more than a few worst-of-the-year lists.
The consensus on RocknRollais that it finds Ritchie getting back to basics. He has ditched the yob metaphysics of Revolver, which also featured Strong, for a more straightforward study of London gangland life.
"I don't think Guy would regard it as going back to basics," Strong says. "He, I think, sees it as a natural evolution of the first two films. You know how some audiences don't like to see, say, Tom Cruise playing a character role. I think it can be like that with directors too. Audiences like to see them do what they did when they first became famous."
THIS IS NOT the first time Strong has played a dodgy geezer. Smiley and jokey, the real Strong doesn't come across as a recovering Kray twin, but directors have tended to put him in situations where shooters and knuckledusters come in handy. He was cracking as a gay gangster in The Long Firm, the recent TV adaptation of Jake Arnott's cult novel, and delivered a mean Toby Crackit in Roman Polanski's 2005 adaptation of Oliver Twist.
"I don't know why that is," he says. "Thankfully, everybody who knows me says I am just not like that. Maybe I have the odd latent streak of anger, but I am very definitely not a violent person. The art of those performances is finding a way to inject charm into those guys. That's the challenge."
Though he now makes a point of asserting his peaceable normality, Strong went, he admits, through a tearaway phase as a child. His mother was an Austrian au pair who "came to London looking for the Swinging Sixties and had me". His dad, a second- generation Italian immigrant, walked out on the family when Mark was still in nappies. This is the sort of story that causes American actors to blub on Oprah, but I suspect Mark is made of sterner, less sentimental material.
"I didn't know him. He wasn't there," he says of his dad. "It might have been a trauma if he'd left when I was, say, 10 or 11, but, for me, being without him was all I knew. I did meet him much later and we got on okay. But, when you have spent that long without somebody, you either gel with them or realise you are just completely different. I think - if this makes sense - the only thing we had in common was that we had both gone these separate ways."
Strong claims that, unlike so many actors, he wasn't much of a show-off as an adolescent. Though currently stringy as a whippet, he was a bulky kid and got noticed by excelling at rugby and other contact sports. Indeed this acting lark appears to have come upon him entirely by accident. After leaving school, he signed up for a law course in Munich, where his mother was then living, but rapidly realised that he was in the wrong game. While flicking through a prospectus for the University of London, he happened upon a photo of students frolicking merrily in a play and decided the stage was the place to be. He eventually made his way to the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and has barely rested since.
"I've been quite lucky," he says. "The very first job I had was a full nine months at the Swan Theatre in Worcester. Then there was a period of nine months where I worked as a telemarketer - which was bloody good money actually - and then I got another job in Manchester, then several years at the RSC and the National Theatre. So I never really had to worry about finding a proper job."
STRONG MAY HAVE been well known to the theatregoers of Hampstead and Highbury, but it wasn't until Our Friends in the Norththat he achieved widespread visibility. Peter Flannery's sprawling series followed four working-class Geordies - the others played by Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee and Daniel Craig - as they negotiated their way from Harold Wilson's white heat to John Major's warm beer. Strong excelled as Tosker, the dim-witted but essentially decent layabout who came to embrace Thatcher's revolution. A less sensitive actor could have turned the character into a total jerk.
"Well, I think, actually, that's how he was originally meant to be," Strong says. "But I just saw him as this ebullient kid. He's stupid, but he's not really a bad person. We didn't really know what we had with the series. I can remember walking through Newcastle with Daniel and saying: 'Do you think this is any good?' "
As things worked out, all four actors were catapulted into healthy careers (though only one got to be James Bond). It did, however, take some time for Strong to launch his current colonisation of our movie screens. If you haven't had enough of him yet, you can, later this year, catch him in Ridley Scott's Body of Lies. The thriller, a tale of skulduggery in the Middle East, also features Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio.
"That is all the result of a decision I made four or five years ago to get into movies," he says. "I never had problems getting plays or TV, but it was hard to sustain that movie career. It is like a club that's difficult to break into. But eventually I was lucky and got a good part in Syrianaand things just developed from that."
Reflections of a Fool, one of the eight - yes, eight! - films in which Mark can be seen this year, took him to Africa. Body of Lieswas shot in Morocco. How on earth does he manage to maintain a home life? He does, apparently, have two young sons and a partner.
"Well, I like that part of the film business. I like to travel," he says. "But I do find it easy to achieve a balance between work and normality now the kids are young. It just seemed like last year was mad. This year, with the writers' strike in Hollywood, it's actually been a bit quieter, but you're now seeing the stuff I did last year."
Though unlikely to be confused with his new mate, Leonardo, Strong has, through application, talent and good looks, finally achieved modest fame. Happily, he seems quite comfortable with that state. He is neither desperate to be recognised nor intimidated by the attention of strangers.
"Recently somebody told me there is a Mark Strong Appreciation Society website out there," he laughs. "Do you know what the tagline is? 'You know you've seen him before.' Fair enough. That's the kind of guy I am."
This year, you've seen him everywhere.
RocknRolla opens tomorrow
