Massive interview in Sunday Times,Culture Magazine (well - Tom Burke Online has screencapped to 6 pages worth)
In the interests of accessibility/readability I just copied and pasted. The original is at www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/culture/interview-tom-burke-lfq03hgcp and you will need to register to read it on their website - which just means your email address will then get a daily email telling you what their top stories are.
Interview: Tom Burke
Having cut his teeth in ‘quirky’ TV, the actor’s role as the crime-busting Cormoran Strike will turn him into a household name.
By Louis Wise
Caption for picture:
Brace relations: Tom Burke’s family has a strong acting pedigree
FRANCESCO GUIDICINI
Typecasting is a funny thing and, naturally, most actors hate it. Yet Tom Burke, who you probably know best as Athos from the BBC’s The Musketeers, is suddenly at an uneasy truce. For years he was defined as “quirky”, due to his mournful voice and wonky face; more recently he’s played a string of “oblivious husbands”. Now, though, things have shifted again.
“At the moment, I’m going up for people who are a bit shuffly and bedraggled, kind of heroic, but in a slightly bluff way,” he says in his muffled RP growl. “And I’m quite happy with that. I don’t know if that’s to do with my vanity, my curiosity or what.”
Hmm. Without wanting to kill the mystery, you could hazard a guess that Burke, 36, is fine with it because it has bagged him the role of his career. In BBC1’s Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling, he plays Cormoran Strike, the detective created by Robert Galbraith. The wonderfully named sleuth is indeed shuffly, bedraggled, heroic and bluff. In The Cuckoo’s Calling, he investigates the mysterious death of a mega-famous model; he then reprises the role in two further adaptations of the Galbraith/Strike novels. It’s a sweet mix of wry drama and grisly whodunnit, and looks set to turn a very recognisable actor into an instantly recognisable one.
Whether you automatically recognise him as Strike is another matter. Not to be indelicate, but in the novels Cormoran Strike is basically fat. Burke, sitting today in a cafe in east London, is nigh-on slim, although he still has a large, looming frame. For Strike, he says he went to the gym to widen his back and avoid just piling it on at the front — but he could never quite keep up with the character’s appetites.
“I tried very hard to match the kill rate in biscuits that they had in the book, but I had to give up on that quite early in filming. It was like, ‘I actually can’t speak in the scene without spitting crumbs ...’” (Strike, by the way, is also one-legged — but nobody expected the actor to go that far. Good coaching, good costume and, well, good acting have made up for that.)
The other thing to point out is that Robert Galbraith isn’t Robert Galbraith at all, but one JK Rowling. The author wrote these crime thrillers under a pseudonym until she got rumbled. Burke isn’t really sure what her effect on the show will be, except that people keep saying to him in anticipation, “Oooh, God!” Rowling’s signature style should, Burke suggests, help distinguish the show from all the other hundreds of detective shows out there.
“The thing I really loved in the books was that, tonally, it wasn’t one thing,” Burke says. “Things often are, you know? Especially in TV, things can be very dark and gritty or light and fluffy, and I think that’s great. But it was really nice to do a show that had lots of different tones. It’s got a real warmth to it, but it’s also quite dark.”
Over coffee Burke isn’t that dissimilar: affable, meandering, chattier by the minute after a slow start. The main impression is one of sweet-centred lugubriousness. He says that he is trying to write something with a friend and then immediately rolls his eyes: “I’m really not saying watch this space.” However, the piece itself, which he describes as a “sort of period-piece comedy, but with a slightly Beckettian vein”, already speaks volumes.
“I think there are two sides to me,” he offers. “This goes back to my childhood. There’s a kind of Byronic thing and then there’s this kind of ridiculous thing. This piece is very much trying to twin those two things together.”
Fans may argue that we see flashes of both quite regularly, but clearly it’s in the dosage. When I ask what other roles Strike compares to, he mulls it over. “I think he’s very different to Athos, but I suppose there’s a slight feeling of fraying at the edges.” What is it about you that attracts that?
“I think I’m fraying at the edges! I’ve always felt very drawn, in my real life, to hang around with people who have a very definite sense of who they are. I find it very hard to say I’m this, or I’m that. I think it’s why I’m drawn to this job, because you’re not examining life in that way — you’re more asking questions, rather than telling anybody what to think.”
There is the typical sense of an actor’s shapelessness here, but what is not so typical and, in fact, quite refreshing is Burke’s full and frank confession to it. I say that many actors feel that they have to use their profile as a platform. He looks vaguely pained.
“I do try to be well informed about things, but I just find it all so confusing. I just don’t have the brain for it. So it’s partly that. But also, theatres can get very pushed into doing the ‘exposé’ of one thing or another, institution-wise. I’ve always liked the old Greek stuff, which is saying, do you know what, the Gods are taking the f piss, life is against us, there is no obvious answer, there is nobody to point the finger at.”
All this diffidence, drift and doubt does rather gloss over the fact that Burke was very clearly destined to perform. His parents are the actors David Burke (Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock, in the 1980s Granada version) and Anna Calder-Marshall (a National Theatre regular); his godparents the actors Bridget Turner and Alan Rickman. It really is in his bones.
“I remember someone once asking me about the ‘earth-shattering moment’ when I realised I wanted to be an actor’. But I don’t remember that moment. I just remember feeling like an actor.”
He then brings up the inevitable question. Yes, people may well think he had it easy because of his background. “But actually, when it started people didn’t really know who I was. It gradually dawned on people. And whenever I met people who my parents worked with, they always had this look that said, ‘Don’t ask me for a job!’”
Rickman, however, had a huge impact and is another subject Burke doesn’t want to talk about, but keeps talking about anyway. “It’s hard not to, because he was such a big influence on my life and still is. I can still hear his voice. I mean, not like, ‘whooo’!” he says, imitating something ghostly and passingly Rickmanish. “But you know, he was such a particular voice for me in my life and it’s kind of easier to check in with that and listen.”
Rickman directed his godson to award-winning success in the Donmar’s 2008 production of Creditors, their only experience of working together. Burke says that he was “a wonderful man and a wonderful director; so meticulous and so patient”. He was also always on hand for advice. “Alan told me about being disciplined. He talked about having an iron gear stick inside of you. I never quite found mine, so I’m always trying to jerk my way around.”
Here we are then, back to the Byronic-cum-ridiculous. Is that innate or gained? “Do you mean ‘affected’?” he asks wryly. He then offers a full explanation.
“I was a morbid child and I had no reason to be. I grew up in a very idyllic part of Kent. A teacher told me I was melancholic — I didn’t know what the word meant. She said, ‘Well, you’re melancholic — you’ll always be unhappy!’ Which I think is a very wrong take on melancholia,” he tuts. “I think melancholia is much more interesting and nuanced than that.
“But I was quite a melancholic child and quite obsessive, too. I remember we were studying Far from the Madding Crowd for GCSE and our teacher said, ‘In this novel, there are three types of love: there is sustained love, passionate love and obsessive love. And what the narrative teaches us is that really the only true love is sustained love.’ And I put my hand up and gave this cringey defence — not of passionate love, but of obsessive love — and all the girls looked very weirded out by it!”
At this point, you may be reassured or worried to hear that Burke has a long-term girlfriend with whom he lives. He has learnt to channel his more “tragic, romantic” side, it seems, in life as much as in his work. “I got a lot of quirky parts,” he nods. “I think that was even at the top of my CV at one point: ‘quirky’. When I first started, I think I went from ‘strapping’ to ‘quirky’ within a year.”
And then he ends up with Cormoran Strike, who is both strapping and quirky and a whole lot more. If Burke were more gimlet-eyed, you’d assume he had a ready-made plan to storm Hollywood, but he says not — and this seems just about, almost, believable.
“Usually, in interviews, people go, ‘Oh, how do you feel about America?’ And I go, I don’t know. I just don’t. I don’t even know that it’ll be there. Not America, I mean — that invitation, or that avenue.” And so on and so forth, in that period-piece, Beckettian vein.
The name of the game.
It took three months to unmask JK Rowling as author of The Cuckoo’s Calling; it took 20 for the book to be optioned by the BBC. Considering her fame, both seem rather a long time. Rowling had been rumoured to be writing detective fiction for a while, but when it was published in April 2013, nobody thought Robert Galbraith was her. In the few papers where it was reviewed, it got warmish notices; when it was revealed that Rowling had written it (by this paper), it leapt from 4,709th to No 1 in Amazon’s bestseller chart. The Silkworm and Career of Evil have enjoyed similar success; the three books have been turned into a seven-episode series by the BBC.
Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling begins on BBC1 on August 27
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Other pictures they used:
The Tolstoy factor: Burke starred as Fedor Dolokhov in the BBC’s War & Peace MITCH JENKINS
All for one: Burke, second from right, played Athos in The Musketeers
DUSAN MARTINCEK