How does it feel to have been the star of the Guardian’s film of the year?
You know what, it’s really wonderful. Thank you so much to the discerning people at the Guardian.
What are your main memories of making All of Us Strangers?
They’re extraordinarily positive. It doesn’t necessarily always happen that the process equals the product, but this was a really heartfelt process and a really special film that came as a result.
Did you know the three other actors?
Claire I’ve known for many years. It was my first experience working with the magical Jamie Bell. Paul and I knew each other a little bit. So it was a wonderful personal experience. I had just spent a year away playing Tom Ripley, and I began Strangers two weeks after I’d finished that very, very long job. I’d get the tube to work every day. I just loved being back in this sort of hustle-bustle excitement of London in the summer. And to do that with these incredibly beautiful people and just to play love in that extraordinary way, and to wear my own clothes, and to do that with [writer-director] Andrew Haigh, was amazing. Paul and I became very close during the filming and we had a great time promoting it. It doesn’t feel like work when it’s a film that you adore and you’re promoting it with people that you love.
How did you set about playing Adam? Did you draw on things from your own life?
Yeah, absolutely, it feels like a marriage between Andrew’s experience and my own. In some ways, it felt like we were co-parenting the character, because parenting seems to be the essence of what the story is about. It didn’t feel like I was playing myself in any way, but I certainly feel like it was emotionally autobiographical.
People picture actors as being pretty gregarious, so how did you lean into Adam’s loneliness?
That’s a myth, actually. The reason I started performing was because I was very shy. Adam’s been in a sort of purgatory because he had this terrible tragedy that happened to him when he was a young boy. So he’s been stuck. Any intimate conversation with his parents as an adult, he’s only able to draw on the memories that he had of them as a child. I guess it’s just an examination of how powerful our imaginations can be – he conjures up his parents in order to have some sort of cathartic experience. And I suppose that represents, in some ways, the creative process, that it’s a way that we can heal ourselves.
It’s interesting you’re talking about Adam using his imagination because the film is quite ambiguous. Do you think he’s imagining his parents and that they’re not actually ghosts?
People have come up with extraordinarily personal and creative ideas about what they think the film is saying. All of Us Strangers is great because it ignites the audience’s imaginations and sometimes there’s a poverty of imagination in our movies. Sometimes, the worst thing you can do is to reduce the magic by over-explaining it. I guess that’s my way of saying I’m not answering that.
And you’re also not going to want to answer my next question, which is whether you thought that Adam was dead.
I don’t believe that Adam was dead.
I have to say that, partly because I was 13 in 1987, when Adam is about to turn 12, and because I’m also gay, that this film had a massive impact on me. Have you had a lot of those kind of intense responses?
I can’t tell you how extraordinary the response to All of Us Strangers continues to be. It’s got that magical thing in the sense that it’s a film but people feel like they have discovered themselves through it or they feel very personally near to it, you know? Of course there are people within the gay community and people who grew up in the 80s that feel so attached to it, but people beyond that have responded to it too. Everyone has a family, and there’s this beautiful, incredibly simple idea at the heart of the film – what would it be like to see your parents as your peers? That’s something that we cinematically find so exciting, because we always see our parents as older and wiser and to be able to look at them with objectivity is so difficult.
The film also visualised, in a very unusual way, the idea that love can transgress the boundaries between life and death.
That’s something I certainly believe myself. Love is the most powerful force on Earth and it exists beyond death. When you can place those metaphysical and spiritual ideas in a very naturalistic setting, the juxtaposition makes it really intriguing, the idea magic exists even in a lonely high-rise apartment in central London.
Have you been back to any of the places where you filmed All of Us Strangers?
The Vauxhall Tavern is a staple of the London queer community, so yeah, I’ll always go there. I went to a Chappell Roan tribute night there a few months ago and I’m sure I’ll be back. Oddly I was in Croydon yesterday, passing through from Kent and it was wonderful. I saw the tower block where we filmed the exterior shots.
There was a sense that All of Us Strangers was a bit overlooked awards-wise. Is that something that bothered you at all?
Do you know what? I had more accolades and award nominations for this role than for any other I’ve ever had. So I don’t know. Of course it’s lovely when those things come to you. But every single one of us was invited to at least one of those awards parties. I’m delighted with how it’s been received, honestly.
People were shocked that you weren’t nominated for a best actor Bafta.
It’s OK – I genuinely feel like I got a huge amount of attention and love for the role. But it’s nice that people think that.
Another extraordinary thing about the film is that it was unabashedly sad.
Yeah. Sometimes, I want to say: it doesn’t end well for any of us. Life ends in death. And of course it’s sad, but I find the ending of the film incredibly beautiful. The Power of Love plays over the end of the film, and to me, it’s incredibly hopeful. It’s this love story between these two men that takes its place among the stars. Andrew always said that he wanted it to be unabashedly romantic and to recognise that this love story between two people who are of the same sex is every bit as potent and historic and groundbreaking and life-changing as a heterosexual relationship. Those relationships have existed since the dawn of humanity and will continue to exist until the end of humanity. So why not have that epic, extraordinary, otherworldly feeling? The feelings that happen in same-sex relationships are just as strong as those more often portrayed in cinema.
Where do you stand on the idea that gay actors should play gay roles?
I’m always reluctant to give a quick soundbite about that. Every individual story has to be examined. There are certainly much more opportunities; the playing field is becoming more even and that has to be considered in every casting decision. But people can be very extreme and hysterical. What is important is that we have representation for everybody, not just in front of the screen, but behind it, so that when somebody is on a set, if you’re portraying somebody that’s different from you, that somebody can say, “Well, that’s not authentically the way it is.”
Thanks Andrew. I’m seeing All of us Strangers again tomorrow. It’s on at the Brixton Ritzy.
Oh, wow. Well, I hope you enjoy crying in the dark.
