2 weeks ago
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Tim Roth doesn’t like to watch any of the work he’s done, be that his Oscar-nominated turn in Rob Roy, his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, including Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, or TV work like Twin Peaks.
But for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, 64-year-old Roth admits he decided to ‘break the rule’ after pressure from leading man Cillian Murphy, creator Steven Knight and director Tom Harper to see the new movie at its Birmingham premiere earlier this month.
‘I missed the beginning, which was actually the only thing that I wanted to see because I improvised the line when we were filming that became the first line in the film,’ the London-born actor then tells me, with mock frustration.
Anyone who has seen The Immortal Man already will instantly recall the ballsy line he’s referring to, which immediately establishes the allegiance of his quietly sinister villain, John Beckett, as he stands on a train platform.
‘And I missed it because I was having a pee in Birmingham with Steve! So it’s his fault.’
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Roth slips seamlessly into the cast of Peaky Blinders as other stars have done before him, including Tom Hardy, Sam Neill, Adrien Brody and Anya Taylor-Joy, drawn by the immersive world-building of Knight that has swept the globe with its popularity after starting as a BBC Two show.
Having worked together before on 2012 coming-of-age drama Broken, Roth was onboarded into the Peaky universe very simply – courtesy of a text by Oppenheimer star Murphy.
‘I texted him when he got his Oscar because I know a bit of what that used to be like – I can only imagine now what it’s like,’ says Roth. ‘So I say, “You alright? Keep your head down and run for the hills” – and congrats and all that.’
Murphy’s response included the casual offer of doing a film together, and not just any: it was the cinematic conclusion of the character and story that made him internationally famous.
‘I hadn’t seen it, so I had to make that decision of whether I would watch the show or whether I would come in fresh – and I thought it would be better just to walk into their world and see,’ adds Roth.
The pair had first met when presenting the prestigious Palme D’Or to Ken Loach for The Wind that Shakes the Barley at Cannes in 2006, and in more recent years bumped into each other in Liverpool when Murphy was previously shooting for Peaky Blinders there while Roth was also working.
‘I always loved him. He’s properly a good man. He’s bloody good at his job, the real deal. Yeah, he’s a proper actor,’ is the soft-spoken Roth’s opinion of Murphy, whom he has now known and counted as a friend for 20 years.
‘I have stage fright, and he has film fright, and even now it’s still around,’ he muses of Murphy, 49. ‘We talked about it while we were making Peaky. It takes me a while, and he has that. And normally it’s something you get in the theatre, and he has none of it there.’
The Immortal Man is set during World War Two, once again with the Birmingham Small Arms Company a vital part of the backdrop of Small Heath, and takes Murphy’s Tommy Shelby all the way from a shellshocked WWI veteran in 1919 to the thick of the next devastating global conflict.
It’s a setting that resonates with Roth, whose Fleet Street journalist father, Ernie, was a rear gunner in the Bombers, having been born an ‘American slum kid’ in Sheepshead Bay before taking a boat to Liverpool to escape that life, working in brick factories, and then in the hop fields of Kent.
‘And the war, he ran to it to get away from what he was living through there. And he survived that.’
His dad was on his mind while making The Immortal Man, which doesn’t shy away from the complexities or harrowing consequences of war, just like its prior TV series.
‘There was no such thing as PTSD until recently, and so it stayed with him for all of his life. But I know I wanted, in a way, to get it right. It was a nod to him privately, to my dad, to have it be right. I think he might have enjoyed it.’
Roth has an enviable career, booked and busy – he tells me about at least two films he has lined up next, although he won’t consider them confirmed until he’s on set – for the past more than 40 years, jugging Hollywood franchises (he’s Emil Blonsky/Abomination in the MCU) with TV work like Tin Star and quality independent films like John Maclean’s period action drama Tornado last year.
‘I really did not expect any of this, but I always wanted it to be anarchic, the whole journey. So I’ve worked with a lot of first-time film directors, Quentin being one, James Gray [Little Odessa] and people like that,’ the star says of his varied career.
‘I never know what’s coming. There’s always that feeling someone is building up to write something that two years from now might come walking down the street towards me.’
Roth actually had his scenes as a butler deleted from his last film with Tarantino, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but calls the whole experience ‘excellent’, seeing the funny side. His son, Hunter, also worked on the production as a runner and, ultimately, Brad Pitt’s PA.
‘The film came in at about four and a half hours long, so he had to cut a whole half of the film out so he’d stuck with the two characters. And if you didn’t get into that world, you were out. But Quentin being Quentin, there was the premiere and my son went along to it, and I got this phone call with laughter after the film, and Quentin had put me up with the actors in the billing, and it said ‘Tim Roth – cut’!’ he laughs.
He also confirms there’s still an active group text chain with the cast of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, who were disappointed not to get the chance to join in on his reunion with co-star Kurt Russell on The Jonathan Ross Show.
With such a tight-knit, repertory cast feel between actors on the filmmaker’s projects, might Roth receive a phone call to take part in his final film? (We’re speaking before Tarantino’s West End play is announced, in what appears to be the latest move to put off making his much-teased tenth directed feature.)
‘Maybe, we’ve all got him in our phones. So, yeah, if it lights up, you do it and we love it,’ says Roth. ‘It’s such fun. It’s hard work, proper old-school filmmaking, and it’s fantastic. We all have such a great time doing it.’
‘Old school’ is very much Roth’s preferred way of doing things. The biggest change he’s witnessed in the industry is the rise of phones, counting himself lucky to have been working before then.
‘Watching that go down and cinemas closing and then cinema becoming, not a fad, but eccentric. All of that changing, and more and more addictive as that goes on,’ he muses, having previously said he was nervous that The Immortal Man’s director Tom Harper might be keen on doing ‘shaky camera acting’ for the film.
‘He really made it like a proper movie, but old-school, and didn’t do that awful stuff that people do now, so it didn’t feel like it was made with a phone.’
He’s also not interested in embracing AI’s creep into films and the creative sphere with inventions like AI actress Tilly Norwood – again, his favourite word crops up: ‘I’m old-school. I’d like to work humans.’
But he has had conversations about it recently.
‘There’s a film that I’ve been asked to do where I have to speak two or three different languages, which I’ve done before. And the director said, “I don’t know how you feel about AI, but you can just have the conversations, and we’ll fix it with AI.” And I was like, “Nah, not doing that.” It’s part of the interest of the job. But I do see the threat of AI coming.’
Roth has lived in the US for many years but wouldn’t want that to be interpreted as any kind of slight towards the UK.
‘I love coming back, and I’m always looking for a job out here and across Europe. I’m treating this as an employment agency,’ he laughs, ‘but quite seriously, if something comes to me with a UK or European location attached to it, it generally goes to the top of my list.’
He’s recently wrapped a film in Wales, ‘but there’s still that indie stuff, tucked away, that is happening over in America, which is what I’m heading back to do next’; it’s a Prohibition-set film with Timothy Spall, who Roth ‘did a Cillian on’ and got in touch to suggest he take the title role.
Before our time finishes, I have to quickly ask Roth what he thinks the secret is to a great onscreen villain, being one of the go-to actors for that type of role after his 1982 debut as racist skinhead Trevor in Made in Britain. Alongside The Incredible Hulk, Rob Roy and his hangman character in The Hateful Eight, he was also the terrifying General Thade in Tim Burton’s remake of Planet of the Apes.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he baulks at first. ‘Generally, people just tend to remember the villains, which is weird. So you can play good guys for ages… or maybe I just don’t do them so well! But villains stand out. People enjoy a good villain.’
Beckett, a British fascist who teams up with and manipulates Tommy’s son Duke (Barry Keoghan) in his absence from the Peaky Blinders, is the next great addition to Roth’s catalogue of cinematic baddies.
‘The one thing about this one was to make him just a nice guy. He’s trying to end the war, trying to bring that peace,’ he says of Beckett, who he reinterpreted from the original script to come across as more akin to a gentle ‘geography teacher’.
He then settles on a more definitive answer.
‘It’s to bring a good twist to them and have fun and make sure the audience has fun too.’
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is streaming exclusively on Netflix now.
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