Interview: George Blagden Talks TARTUFFE

George Blagden is well known for the roles of Athelstan on Vikings and Louis XIV on Versailles, as well as Grantaire in the Les Misèrables film. He is currently playing Damis in Tartuffe at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

How did you first become interested in theatre?

I first became interested at school. When I was about ten years old, I was brought to London to watch a production of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I think it was at Sadler's Wells in maybe 2000. I watched it because my school was putting on a production of it and it was the first school play that I was able to audition for a speaking part. I came in watching it, thinking, "What's this theatre thing all about?".

I remember at the end of the production, while they were doing their curtain call, saying to my mum, "I really want to be one of those people one day". I did school plays and then at the age of 18, I applied to drama school in London and I got in. I've been very lucky that no one so far has stopped me from being able to live my dream - the industry or my parents.

How was your experience training to be an actor?

I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and that was amazing. I absolutely loved my three years at Guildhall. It gave me a good grounding for what I do in my work now. I've spent a lot of my career working on screen so far, and only recently in the past year or two have I been able to start doing theatre projects.

It's kind of testament to the training at Guildhall that even eight years after having left school, I still felt confident with stuff that I learnt to be able to walk into a production like Tartuffe at the Haymarket and feel like I wasn't going to be swamped by playing in such a big space.

They have a good ethos at Guildhall in that they basically throw loads of different things at you. Their theory is that after you leave, if you use 10 of those 100 things, that's great. The other 90, you might not agree with or might not work for you as an actor. But if you can find 10 that work for you, then ultimately you leave as a better actor. That was definitely my process. I wouldn't be where I am now in my career if I hadn't been to Guildhall.

A lot of theatre fans may remember you as Grantaire in the Les Mis film. What was that experience like?

That was extraordinary. I was sort of the musical theatre boy at Guildhall. I mean I wasn't on a musical theatre course or anything, but of the actors in my year, I think I was perceived to be the one who might go have a career in musical theatre because I could sing.

I left Guildhall to go do a film in Indonesia and when I got back, I found out they were auditioning for the Les Mis movie. It seemed like a perfect marriage of two worlds: training in theatre school, developing my voice and learning how to act through song properly, and then I'd just done this movie and learnt how to tell stories to the camera. It was such a lucky chance that this job came along at that moment. I gave it everything in my four or five auditions with Tom [Hooper], the director.

The experience was amazing. It was like working on a theatre project for me almost, because the group of students (apart from Aaron [Tveit], who was playing Enjolras, and Eddie [Redmayne], who was playing Marius) had been in the Les Mis show in the West End at some point in their careers. It felt like being in a theatre company.

We rehearsed, which is very rare in film - you usually just show up on set and shoot what you're supposed to shoot that day. On the Les Mis movie, we rehearsed for a good month before we started shooting, making sure all the singing elements were in place, blocking some of the scenes. It actually sort of felt like my first theatre job, if I'm honest. Plus working with that calibre of cast was amazing. I was just desperately trying to be a sponge and soaking everything up when I was on set with them.

You've also spent the past few years playing King Louis XIV on Versailles. How has that been?

That has been another extraordinary adventure that I was very, very lucky to be able to be a part of. They decided that they wanted to tell that French story in English and hire British actors, so I had the opportunity to audition for it. I'm kind of still processing it. I finished filming Season 3 in October, which I know is a long time ago.

But it's the only kind of environment as an actor where you spend that much time with a character who continues to develop. You can spend years in the same theatre job, but you're repeating the same journey for that character every night. Only in long-form television do you get to spend that amount of time with a character who is continuing to develop. You really do grow with that character yourself as well. When someone says, "You're not going to be doing that anymore", it takes time to say goodbye and move onto other things.

It was an incredible opportunity and I feel very privileged that I've been able to play characters that are very different from one another throughout my career. Playing Louis was quite a transformational thing for me because I don't see a lot of George in him. Obviously, I'm there somewhere under the wig, but a lot of his character traits and aspects of his personality are very different from mine. I enjoyed kind of escaping to another world and another character for three years.

There's some irony in you now being in a play that was actually banned by Louis XIV, right?

Yeah! I'm ashamed to say, having spent three years playing Louis XIV, I didn't actually know that he'd banned it when I came to audition for the show.

In my audition, I was going in to read for the part that I'm playing, which is Damis, and I remember one of the producers got very excited at the idea of me playing the officer at the end of the play. I never ended up reading for the officer, because the director said that he'd like me to play Damis.

But I remember thinking "Hmm, that's weird. The producer got really excited about me for that role, I wonder why". Once I got on the job and learned that Louis XIV had banned it, it made sense. The officer's character comes in and delivers this speech that Molière added to the play to enable it to be put on. It's sort of a sardonic homage to the king, or in our version at the moment, the American President. So, there's a bit of irony. I've had a lot of fun playing Damis, who is again not that similar to George.

I have to ask: did you name your dog after Louis XIV?

Yes. Full stop, I did. I wanted to take some time off when I finished filming Versailles in October. Me and my partner Laura had been talking about getting a dog and we were playing with names, and Laura jokingly said, "What about Louis?". The annoying thing was it really suited him and so we just thought, "Why not?". And it does; it really suits him.

What drew you to Tartuffe? Were you familiar with it before being cast?

I knew of it. It was actually done at my school whilst I was there. I wasn't a scholar of it, as some of the actors in it are scholars of it. What drew me to it this time was the director's setting it in modern LA, sort of Trump's America, and having Tartuffe be this American evangelist priest.

I think what Paul [Anderson] does with Tartuffe in the show is phenomenal. He really is able to balance that creepy fine line between being very, very nice and playing some of the high comedy moments of the piece, but also being really dark. The point of our adaptation is that there is a dark underbelly to this world.

I know the director wanted to try to reflect modern-day politics in the show and highlight that they can be quite farcical at the moment in 2018 - the extremity of politics in the Western world. What's important is that we have to remember that there is a frightening, dark undercurrent underneath it all, and sometimes it's really not funny, as extreme as it is.

I was just drawn to this new take on it and the aspect that it's a bilingual production. Since my second season on Versailles, when I started becoming really comfortable with French, I'd wanted to act in French. This opportunity came along and I thought, "Great, I can do my West End debut in two languages". That was very exciting for me as well.

You've been in several projects in which you play French characters. Did you study French growing up?

No, I learnt a little bit in school and my parents lived in France for some years, but I wasn't fluent at all in French. I'm still not really! But between when I signed on to Versailles and the end of three years, my French improved incredibly. When you live in a foreign country, you just pick up the language so quickly. I made a point of speaking to all the crew in French.

I convinced my director I could order a coffee in my audition. We got here and of course, it's Molière, it's classical French, the equivalent of Shakespeare. I realised that as much as I could grasp the word "croissant" or "pain au chocolat", some of the Molière might be slightly beyond me. But it was great that I could have that challenge to not only understand what it was that I was saying, but also mean it as I'm saying it. That's sort of the fundamentals of acting.

What's it been like working with this cast that's a blend of French and English actors?

What I learned on Versailles was that culturally, storytelling is very different. I mean, largely not. We all like the same stories. You can go to any culture in the world and sit around a campfire and tell the same story in different languages, and a good story is a good story. But techniques in storytelling, I noticed on Versailles, are different in different cultures.

I knew that would be the case coming into this process as well, working with French actors and a French director. Stories are told differently, and that's been a really interesting process. Also, acting as well is different. The basics are all there and are all similar. But acting a classical Molière, you have to act it in a very different way than you act the English that Christopher [Hampton]'s written.

For example, we discovered in rehearsals that when we see classical performances here in the UK in English, we're able to absorb the story more when an actor is able to hide the rhythm and the rhyme. When you see Shakespeare and it seems like normal colloquial language, for my taste anyways, I feel like I understand and buy into the story more. When I see Shakespeare in the UK and it feels too much like poetry, I sort of become less attached to the story and the characters I'm seeing.

Whereas in France, with classical Moliere, I've learned it's actually the opposite. The alexandrine rhyming couplets that Molière writes in are structured in a way that you have to obey them and play with them. A lot of the French actors, you hear them speak it beautifully.

When you get to a certain level of understanding with the French, you realise you understand it better when you play with the rhyme and the rhythm and accentuate it more. It's not just the first level of speaking two languages; it's the second level of how you have to perform in those languages. It's been a real challenge, but very enjoyable.

Do you think that there should be more dual-language productions like this?

I think there was opportunity with Tartuffe because we made the character of Tartuffe only speak English and not understand any French. The kind of farce comedy element of the show could actually have another layer of comedy attached to it in the lost in translation element. You can have characters speaking French onstage around Tartuffe and him misunderstanding what they're saying.

I think there's such a culture for it from the world I've come from, the screen world. A lot of my friends really enjoy watching subtitled dramas now. You know, there's that thing on Channel 4 called Walter Presents, which is a collection of foreign dramas, and it's becoming a lot more popular.

We're able to consume, as an audience here in the UK, foreign drama a lot more easily. We're less bothered with the fact that we have to read subtitles. I'd love to see more shows like this in the West End where people are trying to do them in more than one language. As long as it fits with the narrative of the piece and it enhances the storytelling rather than gets in the way, then why not?

Why do you think people should come and see Tartuffe?

I think people should come and see Tartuffe because it's fabulous. No, I'm kidding. Anyone who knows it will know it as quite a high comedy. It's usually done as quite an outrageous comedy, apparently. We've tried to make it a slightly darker, sleeker, modern take on this world, and comment on hypocrisy in 2018.

I think people will enjoy the parallels and see characters like the character Paul [Anderson] has created and perhaps recognise him as someone from our modern society, people who try to hoodwink others. And also, by the end of the play, fall in love with him. We love antiheroes, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, or Louis XIV in Versailles. Paul is fantastic, and I think people will enjoy watching him have his wicked way with this quite self-involved West Coast LA family.

Are you hoping to do more theatre in the future, or focussing on screen roles?

I'd love to do more theatre - I really enjoy doing it. I'd love to do more screen stuff as well. I've always had that aptitude of wanting to do as many different things as possible. I would love to do a musical at some point, and I hope that I get the opportunity to do that in the future. I'll let you know when I find another job!

Do you have any future dream roles?

You know what? I don't. I think (I'm going to sound really pretentious now, so I'm sorry) there's a beautiful thing about this industry if you let the industry lead you. A lot of actors would probably not agree with me saying that - they like to decide what role they're doing and say, "I'm in charge of my career".

But if you can relinquish control, there's a beautiful way in which this industry puts things in front of you and goes, "Hey, would you like to do this?". It can teach you something about yourself and your abilities as an actor. It can lead you to things you never thought you'd be in. I never thought I'd be Louis XIV in Versailles for three years and go and live in Paris.

If you let roles come to you, you end up having a much more colourful and interesting journey than deciding, "This is what I want to do" and limiting yourself to one branch of the industry. I would love to carry on doing as many different things as I can: TV, theatre, film, anything.

Any advice for aspiring actors?

I was asked this a couple of years ago and the response I gave was: be brave. That's still really important, and it's something I still find hard to do. It's very tough to go into an audition room and be brave. It's one of the most nerve-shattering moments in an actor's life.

It's very easy, as a young actor, to think, "I just don't want to get this wrong" rather than "I want to make this as interesting as I possibly can". I still do it. I go into audition rooms and think "What do they want to see? There's obviously a right way of doing this". You should be finding the most interesting thing you can and doing that. I'm trying to do it more and more. It makes for more interesting work.

Tartuffe is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket to 28 July.

Photo Credit: Helen Maybanks