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Martin Freeman’s Richard III production opens in a few weeks at Trafalgar Studios in central London. Here he talks about it with the UK’s Daily Telegraph. <\/p>\n Martin Freeman’s Richard III production opens in a few weeks at Trafalgar Studios in central London. Here he talks about it with the UK’s Daily Telegraph. <\/p>\n
He also touches very briefly, and quite diplomatically, on the Viggo Mortensen CGI-non-stoush that made predictably made a bunch of waves on the internet a few months back.<\/p>\n
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The man sitting in front of me in a south London rehearsal space doesn\u2019t look much like a bottled spider or a foul bunch-back\u2019d toad. He\u2019s upright in his chair, trim, almost prim, in dress trousers and top-buttoned Lacoste shirt. Only the rough, grey-flecked beard hints at some incipient transformation.<\/p>\n
This is Martin Freeman, three weeks shy of the opening of Richard III. The actor is playing the deformed Machiavellian regent at Trafalgar Studios in central London. It\u2019s his first play in four years, since a production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park at the Royal Court.<\/p>\n
But for all the variety of his screen work \u2013 The Office to The Hobbit, Sherlock to Fargo \u2013 the actor has described the production as his \u201cfirst professional Shakespeare\u201d. Does that mean Freeman has turned in some sloppy, unprofessional ones that we didn\u2019t know about?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere have been amateurish-in-drama-school ones,\u201d he replies with a smile. At London\u2019s Central School of Speech and Drama, the 42-year-old from Aldershot tried his hand at As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. \u201cBut yeah, I can\u2019t believe it \u2013 I\u2019ve been out of drama school 19 years, and this is the first time I\u2019ve done it professionally. I\u2019m surprised,\u201d he says, the unsurprise writ large on his seemingly mild-mannered face.<\/p>\n
So Freeman is glad to be treading the boards again. Still, \u201cit\u2019s been long enough to find it slightly bewildering being back in the rehearsal room. But it\u2019s a reminder that it\u2019s absolutely where I want to be,\u201d he says firmly. \u201cIt\u2019s where I learnt how to act. It\u2019s a zone that I feel extremely comfortable in.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the helm of the staging is Jamie Lloyd. Last year at the same venue he directed James McAvoy in a dystopian, very physical, very gruelling (for actor and audience), in-the-round reimagining of Macbeth. Now, he and Freeman\u2019s Richard III has been billed as \u201cprovocative\u201d. How so?<\/p>\n