Photo by Ray Stubblebine for Reuters

Stephen Dillane in The Hours

See Stephen's acceptance speeches for winning the Tony, Drama Desk and Variety Club Showbusiness Awards for The Real Thing in 2000.

The Guardian

Thursday January 13, 2000

The unknown heart-throb

He's talented, he's phenomenally good-looking and theatre audiences love him. So why hasn't Stephen Dillane made it big on screen? He talks to Bibi van der Zee

To theatregoers, Stephen Dillane is one of the finest actors of his generation. His performance in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing made him the Evening Standard's Best Actor of 1999. His Hamlet in 1994 for the Peter Hall Company was rated as one of the best of the decade, and Angels in America, where Dillane took one of the two lead roles, was universally acclaimed as one of the National's greatest ever shows.

But outside the theatre Dillane is virtually unknown. None of his films have done magnificently well (Welcome to Sarajevo was probably his biggest leading role), and if you want to remind people who he is, you have to mention performances: the good-looking one in The Rector's Wife, Horatio to Mel Gibson's Hamlet, Clov to Alun Armstrong's Hamm in Endgame. Then they either say "Nope, sorry, still can't place him", or agree that he is, after all, brilliant. It's odd, because he is so very good-looking, and such a good actor, that he really should have broken through to the big time. In Warsaw, where we meet for a meal during the filming of a TV series, he is just another anonymous Brit.

Dillane, 40, grew up in south London, the son of a surgeon, and got involved in theatre at school. He remembers being in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and thinking of the moment where Rosencrantz points out towards the audience and shouts "Fire!" as "a very thrilling thing to be able to do". Then he toddled off to Exeter university and read history and politics, before starting work as a journalist at the Croydon Advertiser. He hated journalism "from the moment I walked in".

Why? "I just didn't fit in. It seemed very_" He hesitates for a long time, looking for the right word. This happens frequently throughout the interview. "Pinched," he eventually concludes. "There was someone else who joined at the same time - a very expansive sort of person - and he really got put down and shown his place. I didn't like that. I kept a low profile, but I felt inhibited - it all seemed very dangerous. It demanded a resilience that maybe I didn't have." After a couple of bruising encounters at NUJ meetings, and a few years going round cemeteries checking how many cremations they'd had that week, he read an interview with Trevor Eve about how he'd given up architecture to become an actor, and that was it. He packed in the shorthand ("I was never very fast; I doubt I can still do it") and headed off to Bristol Old Vic theatre school.

Stephen Dillane in Ordinary Decent Criminal

Perhaps that's one reason he's not better known. I ask if he actually wants to be famous, and he spends a long pause trying to get at the egg yolk at the bottom of his soup. "I don't think so," he says finally, quietly. "It feels like a poisoned chalice to me." He dives back into his soup quickly and then surfaces to say: "I probably don't, because I keep taking decisions that turn me away from that. In some way these things are out of your control, but it's like when you get a script through, and it's associated with all sorts of people and you know it could be good for you and you find yourself either not going along, or going along and not working quite hard enough to get it. Some bit of you is holding you back. Maybe I'm not grown up enough: I don't want to spend 10 weeks of my life being miserable on a film set doing something I don't want to do."

As Karenin, the repressed husband in Channel 4's production of Anna Karenina (the reason he is in Poland), he will, I think, be brilliant. Of course, he won't even admit the possibility. He is useless at plugging himself. Asked about the film The Darkest Light, which is coming out this week, he starts trying to remember when he made it, and then is unable to recall the name of the film he did afterwards.