By Ed Caesar for GQ, 20 January 2015
From Shakespeare to Steven Spielberg, the actor his peers agree is the greatest of his generation is breaking character and stepping off the stage to lend his gifts to two Hollywood blockbusters (and playing Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall). When GQ met theatre’s star turn we found a man powered by inner conflict and never more at peace than when the curtain rises.
“I wish the bastards dead,” said Mark Rylance. The audience laughed and gasped. It’s not usually a funny line. In Act Four of Richard III, Shakespeare’s psychopathic king is ordering the murder of two children. But when the instruction arrived clear as ice water out of Rylance’s mouth, those five words – by some alchemy – became corrosively funny. A monstrous decree became banal, offhand. It was as if Richard were asking for the leaves to be cleared from his porch.
I stood yards away from Rylance that night, with my elbows on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe, transfixed. It was 31 July 2012. The London Olympics were on and the theatre was swollen with tourists. Five-pound punters stood in the roofless yard in shirtsleeves, while helicopters buzzed overhead and church bells sounded on the hour. It had been seven years since Rylance had performed on this stage, with the company he led for a decade as artistic director; seven years since he had walked away from this building, dejected. Now here he was again, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation – maybe the greatest actor regardless of category – playing the title role in Richard III and Olivia in Twelfth Night in back-to-back productions.
When Rylance said the “bastards” line, he held more than 1,000 people in the palm of his hand. But he felt little pleasure, either in its delivery or in the reaction it generated. There was, instead, a sting in his chest.
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