On a cold, drizzly day (somewhat
suitable, one might say) at the Claridge's Hotel, there was a feeling of
excitement in the air that you could cut with a knife as the cast and creative team of the highly-anticipated new movie-musical Sweeney Todd crowded a press junket in London.
In a very special BroadwayWorld exclusive, London reporter Nick Hutson provides a very special Q/A series with the likes of Johnny Depp, renown composer Stephen Sondheim; plus stars Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and director Tim Burton and the stars
of tomorrow Ed Sanders, Jayne Weisner and Jamie Campbell Bower.
Stay Tuned as BroadwayWorld brings you even more exclusive content and features on Sweeney Todd! In theatres for limited national release December 21, 2007 and wide
January 11, 2008.
ALAN RICKMAN (JUDGE TURPIN)
Alan Rickman plays
the Right Honorable Judge Turpin and is no stranger to dark, brooding and
mysterious characters.
Alan Rickman: It
was great to do the movie because I was working with great film makers and
great actors and a great script with great music, so it was more than fun – it
was a privilege.
Fans of Alan Rickman
will be looking forward to hearing and seeing him sing in the film, and we
asked if there'd ever be a repeat performance of him singing in any other film
or stage projects.
Alan Rickman:
Well, let's wait and see if I'm asked.
Yeah…why not? You know, maybe it will inspire Mr. Sondheim to write
something maybe specific for the movies.
For musical theatre,
it's long been common practice to adapt exciting stories into musicals. We asked Alan if there were any stories that
he'd personally like to see made into musicals.
Alan Rickman: I
can't think of one off hand because usually the whole problem with them on film
is that they are so much of the theatre that it's very hard to move them but I
thought what was wonderful about this is that it naturally moves to the screen
because everything is so interior and it's about peoples' thought processes and
about a very dark world, so it's not happy go lucky leg kicking choruses or
anything; it's a movie that's not trying to be something else.
I asked if he'd ever
seen the original Broadway or West End
Productions of Sweeney Todd.
Alan Rickman: I
didn't see Angela Lansbury do it originally but I saw it a couple years ago
with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris in New York where they were all playing
musical instruments as well, and that was amazing, but it's like a completely
different piece of work; I don't recognize what we've done as opposed to what
they did.
Actors from the UK are working more and more in the US playing as are US
actors in the UK. As a British actor, famous in Hollywood, we asked Alan
his view on this.
Alan Rickman: I
think those barriers are all over the place these days. I think it's very easy to try and make up
some so-called trend truth about that, but I don't think any of that's true
anymore. You know have, in the last
couple of years, three archetypal English characters: Bridget Jones, Jane
Austen and Queen Elizabeth – you have them played by a couple of Americans and
an Australian…and Sweeney Todd, of course.
But you have an American playing, of all people Jane Austen – so I think
all of these things should be screwed up and thrown away and we should let
English people and American people dive into the mix and if you can do it…do
it. What's happened is, we've got better
at doing American accents and they've got much better at doing English accents,
so it's all moving around now so you have people like Kate Winslet playing
American parts as often as she plays English and visa-versa and Johnny Depp
playing a lot of English roles.
