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Jared Harris (Chernobyl, The Crown, Mad Men) is going full circle and returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time in 34 years to play Claudius, the treacherous uncle in Hamlet. It is a play much-loved by his father Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies and Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott’s original 2000 Gladiator.
Harris said that when he and his brothers, thespian Jamie and director Damien, were kids, their stage-struck parents — dad Richard and mum Elizabeth Rees-Williams — would sit around the dinner table and discuss the productions they’d seen and “Dad would actually get up from the table and act them out for us boys.”
His father “adored” Hamlet and many of Shakespeare’s other plays. “I saw his version of [Laurence] Olivier’s death scene in Coriolanus quite a few times,” he chuckles from his hotel room in Iceland, where he’s shooting director Michael Russell Gunn’s movie Reykjavik, about the breakthrough 1986 Icelandic Cold War summit attended by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union.
Jeff Daniels portrays Reagan, while Harris plays the Soviet leader.
Harris will play Claudius in a new production of Hamlet, described as a “high concept” version by its director Rupert Goold (Judy). Luke Thallon, an accomplished young actor, who portrayed Roman Abramovich the Russian oligarch and former owner of Premier League team Chelsea, in Peter Morgan’s play Patriots on Broadway and in London — directed by Goold — will play the troubled Danish prince.
Hamlet will run in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s main stage Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford upon Avon from February 8-March 29, 2025.
It will mark the third time Harris has appeared in a production of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.
He got to play the title role 23 years ago in an “experimental” production for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival as a 40th birthday present to himself. “It was slightly bonkers but I absolutely loved doing it,” he says.
His first time in the play, though, was in 1989, when he played Fortinbras in the 1989 RSC production of Hamlet that starred Mark Rylance. It was derided as the “pyjama Hamlet” because Rylance played the part wearing bedroom attire.
“They [the critics] dismissed it as the ‘pyjama Hamlet,’ which was a perfectly legitimate psychological choice,” Harrison declares.
“The character’s thumpingly depressed. You find it hard to get out of bed,” he adds.
He laughs as he recalls that his character in that production of Hamlet comes on late in the play. “When finally my big scene comes, everybody was dead in the play, and all I could hear is handbags being undone and car keys coming out, and then this giant groan as they go, ‘Oh my God, there’s a new character on stage, and this person’s really milking it.’ ”
The play was one of four he appeared in over a two-year season at the RSC in Stratford and London.
They included Romeo & Juliet, again with Rylance in the lead; Danny Boyle’s production of Ben Johnson’s The Silent Woman; and a musical version of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange with a score by U2’s The Edge and choreography by Arlene Phillips. It was the most delicious flop.
After Hamlet was ripped apart by reviewers, Rylance gathered the cast backstage, stood on a chair and told the company that their duty was to go on doing it around the country for the next 18 months. “That night he told us that our job was to make the audience think that the critics are speaking though their ass, and they have no idea what they are talking about, and it rallied us to get through it,” Harris says.
Harris enjoys screen work but his first love is the theater, and he’s eager to fit in more stage work when he can. “You can’t just say you want to do more theater, you have to show up. And I like the idea of doing Hamlet again, playing Claudius. It’s a really juicy, fun part. He’s kind of interesting in that he kind of lays low for a while, and he gets exposed in the Mousetrap, the play within the play, and then you start to see who he really is.”
He observes that the marvelous thing about doing theater is that “it’s immediate” and “the thing that’s fantastic is there are no nasty surprises. You don’t sign onto a project in the theater and then suddenly you find your part isn’t what it was, and they’ve changed it, and you’re dead in episode 2 or something. You are in control of the edit of your performance.”
We chat briefly about his two seasons in Netflix hit The Crown, where he portrayed Queen Elizabeth’s father King George VI. He says it was “one of the first times that I was on the right side of the storyline, if you like, rather than being the antagonist,” and he also liked the fact that The Crown was “widely seen,” as was Mad Men, but the latter’s Lane Pryce was a much more complex character.
Harris wraps up his scenes in Reykjavik next week and then joins Goold and the Hamlet company in Stratford for rehearsals in December.
In addition to Harris and Thallon, the cast also includes Nancy Carroll as Gertrude; the distinguished classical actor Anton Lessor as the Ghost and the Player King; Elliot Levey, currently starring in the smash hit play Giant, opposite John Lithgow, at the Royal Court Theatre, as Polonius; Kel Matsena as Horatio; Lewis Shepherd as Laertes; and Nia Towle as Ophelia.
Goold tells us that he and Harris have know each other for years and that they attempted to work together on a film several years ago but it never got off the ground. He has worked with Thallon, his Hamlet, several times before at the Almeida Theatre in London where Goold is artistic director.
In fact, Goold cast Thallon in his first job in Mike Bartlett’s play Albion. “He’s a great young actor who’s really committed to the theater. I remember thinking, even back then that I could really imagine him doing Hamlet one day,” Goold says from New York, where he is directing the Broadway production of the Elton John musical Tammy Faye, which is in previews at the Palace Theatre.
I saw Thallon at the start of his career and got him nominated by the Evening Standard Drama Awards panel I sat on, as a contender for best newcomer. He didn’t win, but he has proved himself a winner again and again. Remember the name.
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