Tobias Menzies interview: 'The issues Thomas Vinterberg explored in The Hunt feel pretty live'

Acting royalty: Tobias Menzies is starring alongside Olivia Colman in The Crown
Rex Features

"I agree my face in repose is quite hard,” says Tobias Menzies when I ask if he’s often typecast by features that resemble a clenched fist.

“It has quite a forbidding look and you can definitely see that in the parts I’ve been cast in: anti-heroes, or villains, or aggressive, high-status personalities. The funny thing is, on the inside I’m not at all like that.”

Indeed, my interview with the 45-year-old Londoner was delayed while he rang the vet to check in on his sick cat (yes, really). But Menzies remains best known to TV audiences for playing a sadist in Outlander, Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones and morally ambiguous or purely arrogant characters in HBO’s Rome, The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager and Catastrophe.

To this rogues’ gallery he will soon add Prince Philip. Menzies will be consort to Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth in seasons three and four of The Crown, the two of them playing royals who have already been portrayed to great acclaim by Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Which must be weird.

“Matt’s a friend but it’d be very hard for me to look like him: you know, I’ve got a different body,” says Menzies. He did study Smith’s physical mannerisms and intonation in the first two seasons but relied more on archive footage of the prince himself. “He was less mannered when he was younger, much less of a Spitting Image puppet,” he muses. “In the Nineties and 2000s he became a more extreme version of himself.”

His and Colman’s stint covers events from 1964 to 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee — the period after Philip’s alleged affairs are supposed to have occurred and before Diana Spencer hit the house of Windsor like a bombshell.

Menzies is sworn to secrecy on the plot — he learned the code of omerta on Game of Thrones, where he was only given the pages his character was in for the finale — but he does say: “Peter [Morgan, The Crown’s writer] is taking quite strong lines on these characters. Who knows whether that’s the truth? It is a work of fiction in that respect.”

For the record, Menzies is “not naturally a monarchist” — his sparse media feed includes retweets of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott defending Julian Assange, and exhortations to vote in the Euro elections. But he won’t diss the Queen, or her fictional counterpart.

Colman, he says, “is a born artist, she’s an absolute delight, she is incredibly generous, very humble, works very hard and is just very brilliant”. Season three was filmed during the run-up to her winning the Best Actress Oscar for The Favourite, and Menzies says having “a ringside seat” to someone going through that was gripping.

London theatre still to come in 2019

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He hoped to become a stage actor on graduating from Rada in 1998, but his first job was a six-month stint on Casualty, which gave “a crash course in film acting”.

Menzies has alternated stage and screen work since then, and this month returns to the Almeida to star in the stage adaptation of The Hunt, Thomas Vinterberg’s 2012 Danish film in which a pupils makes an accusation against a primary school teacher. The moral arbiters in his community are his male colleagues in a hunting lodge: both hunting and male bonding carry less pejorative connotations in Denmark than in the UK.

“We are negotiating in rehearsal a tone of masculinity that is represented by the lodge, and we are keen to avoid something that feels laddy or beery or like a kind of toxic masculinity,” Menzies says. “Maybe something older, more mythic, a bit Viking — men with antlers on, the ritual of that.”

The core themes, he says, are universal: “The central issue of how a group deals with a very traumatic accusation feels — off the back of #MeToo — pretty live. There’s a very fundamental, existential narrative at the heart of it — what it is to be expelled. There’s also this idea of childhood being this purely innocent thing, and I think Vinterberg would probably say he was interested in the vengefulness of children, their bloodthirstiness.”

The production was a chance to reunite with old friends in a familiar setting. He and director Rupert Goold worked together early in their respective careers on The Colonel Bird at the Gate theatre. Menzies also played a well-received Hamlet for Goold in Northampton, and has continued to work for him — and for the iconoclastic Robert Icke, for whom he played Astrov in a brilliant 2016 Uncle Vanya — since Goold took over the Almeida. David Farr, who adapted The Hunt, also adapted The Night Manager for television.

“Increasingly I value relationships that have developed over years and multiple projects because that means you’ve built up a common language, a common sensibility,” Menzies says.

“Straight away that makes the work quicker and deeper: you get further faster, as it were. Part of the appeal [of The Hunt] was the work David had done translating and adapting it from screen to stage: it’s both faithful and a real translation into a different medium. And I like how Rupert thinks about theatre: he wants things to earn their place. He is an enlivening, energising, exciting theatre brain to be in a room with.”

Menzies grew up in Kent and Surrey but was born just off Finchley Road, his mother a teacher and his father a radio producer and writer. He has a younger brother who is now a solicitor in Australia. His love of acting came from teenage visits to the theatre with his mother. “I remember seeing Tom Wilkinson in The Crucible at the Olivier in the mid-Nineties, Ian McKellen’s Uncle Vanya, lots of physical theatre and contemporary dance.”

At Rada he fully engaged with the capital. “I love the multiplicity of London, its obviously culturally incredibly rich, the diversity of it,” he says. “My dad, who passed away in the last year, was always jazzed by the youth and energy of London whenever he came up and met me.”

Beyond this, Menzies’s private life is a closed book. He lives in Kentish Town, likes to eat out with actor friends and play tennis, having competed at a “semi-county level” in his youth. But when I ask if he has a partner or a family, he says, simply, “pass”. In 2006 he was alleged to have had an affair with Kristin Scott Thomas, his co-star in a West End production of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me and 14 years his senior, which supposedly contributed to the end of her marriage.

Neither he nor she has ever commented on this story, and his private life now is “not stuff that I want to chat about in the press”. This is said amiably, with a smile softening his stern features: we shake hands, and he goes off to check on his cat again.

The Hunt is at the Almeida, N1 (almeida.co.uk) from June 17

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