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EXCLUSIVE: Billy Howle is so at home playing characters wading through pools of anger and angst that he had an “alien feeling” while playing idle rich boy Benji Winbury in Netflix hit The Perfect Couple.
The British actor, almost as a counterpoint to the Nantucket frippery on display in the adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s chart-topping beach read, can now be found on the stage of the prestigious Almeida Theatre in Islington, North London. There he opens tonight, taking on the theatre’s original angry young man, Jimmy Porter, a mammoth career-defining role, in a revival of John Osborne’s 1956 classic Look Back in Anger, which takes place in a dreary attic apartment where Jimmy rails at a society that has become “sick.”
“There’s all this talk about mental health,” says Howle, “and let’s face it, the guy has anger issues. It’s in the title of the play.”
He excels at portraying such characters, deftly exhuming their humanity; the more tortured the soul, the better.
Witness his Allen Lafferty in FX drama Under the Banner of Heaven, struggling after the murder of his wife and baby; or the anguished groom unable to consummate his marriage to Saoirse Ronan in the exquisitely bittersweet On Chesil Beach. Then there’s the pained diplomat and his unrelenting pursuit of a serial killer in the miniseries The Serpent. In Kid Snow, he is a fairground boxer who tours the remotest parts of West Australia, another damaged soul movingly this time played movingly in director Paul Goldman’s movie that was recently released Down Under.
Let’s not forget that Howle has played Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic, where he also played Edmund in Richard Eyre’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Oswald in Ghosts, also directed by Eyre. These are his comfort zones where he doesn’t feel at all “alien” — parts that demand our attention because of the passion and poetic beauty he brings to them.
In a sense, Howle’s the ideal thespian to grapple with Jimmy Porter, a young man resentful of his lot in life — the first in his working-class family to gain a university education, but unable to find a job that chimes with the injustices he sees in the world. The actor says that he knows the emotion of anger very well because from his late teens the emotion has at times been “a life force” that “has a use” in fuelling performances.
Look Back in Anger, directed by Atri Banerjee, will play in reparatory at the Almeida with Diyan Zora’s production of Arnold Wesker’s 1959 kitchen-sink drama Roots, which explores the domestic lives of a Norfolk farm-labouring family.
Morfydd Clark (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) stars as the play’s central character, Beattie Bryant, who comes to the startling realization that she has a voice of her own and is no longer required to parrot her absent boyfriend’s hectoring rhetoric. Clark plays Helena in Look Back in Anger, while Howle doesn’t appear until the third act in Roots, playing a sibling.
Susanne Bier’s gambit
Howle laughs as recalls when The Perfect Couple director Susanne Bier rang him she made it clear that she had seen his previous work. “She said, ‘I think you can afford not to tear yourself apart with this one.’ And I was taken aback by how forward this was.”
But, the director’s comment aroused his interest. They later met on Zoom, and Bier offered him two roles. Though he’s too diplomatic to reveal what the other one was, it doesn’t require more than a millisecond of sleuthing to fathom that there aren’t an abundance of other key parts he could have played, other than Benji’s philandering sibling Thomas, played by Jack Reynor.
Once his decision was made, the actor says that Bier encouraged him to see playing Benji as an opportunity to relax into the role and perhaps “not to have to go to a place of so much angst.” Howle says that he was able to see from the script that he wouldn’t be required to go to any dark places to find his performance. “But when you’re used to doing that, it’s very difficult to stop yourself,” he says. “It was difficult because it was just such an alien feeling. I’m always seeking out the brutality in the news. That’s what interests me.”
Well made, glossy TV dramas are okay, he says, with sincerity in his voice, “as long as silly knows what it is. I love silly, and that’s kind of what The Perfect Couple is.”
However, he remembers Nicole Kidman, who plays his best-selling author mother Greer Winfrey in the film, spelling out a pertinent point that he has taken to heart: “Never think you are better than the project.” Kidman’s attitude, says Howle, is “not to turn her nose up at things.”
Still, he readily admits that his cast mates were initially sniffy when asked to participate in The Perfect Couple’s opening credits dance sequence, where the actors gyrate to Megan Trainor’s song ‘Criminals.’ There were messages of uproar exchanged on the cast’s WhatsApp group, Howle divulges. However, it worked out for the best, at least for Howle. Modestly, he states: “It’s not my forte, but I think it turned out really well.”
Certainly, the cast being put through their paces by Dua Lipa’s choreographer helped, but Howle has forgotten to mention that he knows a tad about dance moves. When he was down in Bristol in 2012, he appeared in the musicals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Little Mermaid. A totally different world from Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, that’s for sure.
Howle sits opposite me sipping coffee in the Bellanger Brasserie, which looks out to Islington Green, a handful of blocks from the Almeida. His hair has a 50s, slick matinee-idol look, combed into a quiff ready for the double bill at the Almeida. No one bothers him while we talk. As soon as he leaves, three people approach in quick succession asking if he’s “the one from the Nicole Kidman Netflix thingy on the telly?”
I ask Howle how he considers Jimmy’s abusive rages towards Alison, his wife played by Ellora Torchia? Howle approaches the question head on and argues that sometimes there’s “a kernel of truth” in an argument that someone’s making, “but you might not like the way they say it.”
“You might not like the framework that they use, the actual structure of the language, and the choice of words. Especially now, that misogynistic and abusive behaviour is much more heavily frowned upon today than it was then, perhaps.”
But he can’t imagine that the way in which Jimmy talks in the play was considered palatable in 1956. He recalls reading about people’s reactions when they left the Royal Court Theatre 68 years ago. “They looked like changed individuals having watched this play, and that’s excites me as an actor,” he says.
The play challenges our preconceived ideas of the world, he insists, along with “the way we operate in the world, and especially our ability to extend our empathy to something that perhaps we don’t understand.” He chuckles: “Jimmy’s not immediately understandable.”
The conflict of the play, he says, is that you have to wade through scenes and emotions that are not “palatable.” Howle says we want to “judge” Jimmy, though “some of the arguments he’s making are as relevant today as they were then.”
It’s frightening, he believes, that class warfare is more entrenched and insidious now than it was in 1950s Britain. “We’re seeing lots of people in working-class communities incredibly angry at the hand that they’ve been dealt.”
The play’s remit, however, is not to transport audiences back to the 50s, but to “hold up an infinity mirror, if you like — two reflective surfaces facing each other.”
And as for Jimmy’s language, he quotes Osborne’s point that “they’re not tirades. They’re eloquent arias.”
Osborne’s point was that someone from a poor, working-class background getting free university education available to them was a nascent idea at there time, giving them the intellect to articulate their rage. The absurdity is that Jimmy is a failure at the new dangled post-war white-collar jobs on offer and ends up running a sweet stall. Howle finds that humbling. “The sweets offer joy to a person,” he says.
Howle says that Jimmy spoke to him too, relating in terms of his career. Early on, Howle says he felt that he was put on “this trajectory to fame” and in those early days, none of it made sense to him. ”I didn’t really understand what people were expecting of me, or even that there was an expectation there,” he says.
He pushed to play characters he cared about, that he could do something interesting with. “That’s my reality. The other stuff — the fame — is either a really great by-product or it’s a bonus, or something. The pursuit of something, the hamster wheel and all of that, I can do without.”
I ask him about the necessity for getting off of the hamster wheel, as he put it. He responds that for a while, a few years back he went through a phase of going from “job to job to job” and was “about to fall into a trap of just accepting gigs to pay the mortgage.” But he realized how unhappy he was. A trusted group of friends from his days studying at the Bristol Old Vic Drama School who act as his sounding board intervened.
In 2020, during the pandemic, he shook up his representation in Hollywood and London. ”I needed something different,” he says. He wanted to be away from the “Hollywood money-making machine,” he says, adding: “I felt like, perhaps, I was getting lost and had fallen down some gaps.”
And he was tired of feeling like he was chasing something and felt that alcohol, late nights went “hand-in-hand” with what he was doing. “I was surrounded by it a lot. That’s has taken me a long time to come to terms with, but it became a real problem for me, and that I was kind of pulling the cord,” he reveals. “You sacrifice so much,” in order to obtain fame, he says, “but you can’t sacrifice things twice.”
“That’s sort of what I was doing. It was a double whammy in terms of my emotional reserve, in terms of my own life, in terms of my welfare and my feelings towards myself as a human being.” Those feelings became very toxic, “and I was sitting in that space,” he adds.
His close friend, and mentor and physical and mental trainer, Patrick Viktor Monroe taught him “a huge amount” and helped him see his future in a more positive light. Monroe died of Covid during the pandemic, while the actor was away filming Under the Banner of Heaven. Howle says Monroe’s influence stayed with him. “He’s with me every day,” he says softly.
Also, he’s grateful to Nicola van Gelder of Conway van Gelder Grant, who took him on after he quit Curtis Brown. He praises her for a level of “compassion, understanding and empathy that is distinctly lacking in so many parts of this industry. Once you’ve got someone like that in your corner, it’s golden.”
Earlier this year, Howle starred opposite Lindsay Duncan, Bessie Carter, and Kate Fahy, in director Emily Burns’s illuminating revival of Dodie Smith’s pre-war success Dear Octopus ± the very kind of play that Osborne and Wesker pushed off the West End’s repertoire. However, Burns and her cast unearthed layers of meaning that made it shimmer anew, even though it gave Howle the same sort of “alien feeling” he felt during the twelve months he spent on The Perfect Couple.
He was more himself again working on Annmarie Jacir’s feature All Before You, which was shot for three months this year in Jordan. I have gleaned from elsewhere that Howle portrays a British diplomat in the Middle East in the 1930s at the time of the British Mandate for Palestine when promises were made and not kept. It’s a tinderbox topic and Howle is reluctant to reveal details. When I politely push back, he yields a little.
“I don’t mind saying this,” he begins. “Suffice to say that where we are today, where the Palestinians are today, the British have a lot to answer for in terms of the mistakes they made in diplomacy and how they dealt with the end of the British Mandate. Yeah, this country has a lot to answer for. I mean, around the world.”
All Before You is going to be a hot title.
Nodding to the rock star vibe his hairstyle gives off, I ask if he ever played in a band. After all, his father is a professor of electronic music who played guitar in a group. Howle admits he did as a teenager but took a hiatus from music “and never touched base with it again,really,” although there have been aborted attempts at playing the saxophone.
Howle says that his itinerant lifestyle, travelling for screen and stage work, means that he’s often found washing his socks and smalls in hotel baths, a ritual he finds “satisfying,” rather than being able to enjoy performing his music at a house he purchased seven years ago at a popular seaside spot on the Kent peninsula.
In his future, he hopes that Carl Tibbetts’ Coen brothers-esque crime caper Sweet Dreams to which he’s long been attached, will go into production in the first quarter of 2025. Then there’s a screen biography of Charles Darwin in the works. I ask if he’s had any calls from Barbara Broccoli. He gestures ‘no,’ but surprises by revealing how he once met with the James Bond producer early on in his career, for an informal chat.
“I was very green and I didn’t know what was going on, but I was very excited to meet her and we had a lovely chat about my career and the sort of actor that I am and what I’d like to go on and do.” Anticipating, my next question, he quickly says: “And I didn’t say I’d like to go on and play James Bond to her. I thought that would be a bit too on the nose, perhaps.”
We consider how well Daniel Craig has handled his career post-007, even though the role can be “quite a ball and chain in lots of ways, career-wise.” Howle says he remembers reading the script for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, starring Craig, a long time ago, saying. ‘Woah! That’s an out there, bold move.’ But I remember the writing was great and I think that’s a really exciting idea that Daniel Craig went on to do that.”
Over to you, Barbara Broccoli.
