What was the appeal of The Outfit? It has an old-fashioned 1950s style to it that is dependent on the storytelling and the ensemble of actors. It has twists and turns you don’t expect. It all takes place within three rooms. If I hadn’t been offered the part, I would have wanted to go see it. Describe your character, Leonard. He’s a Londoner who worked on Savile Row. At some point he moved to Chicago and set up his own men’s haberdashery shop and built up a clientele. Tailoring is a particular artistry that takes quite a while to learn and apprentice, and that’s Leonard. The Outfit is the name for the crime syndicate in the film, but Leonard is a tailor whose job it is to outfit wealthy people. Is there a double meaning to the title? I think there are probably a few meanings that [writer-director] GrahamMoore thought up, and probably some meanings we didn’t even realize. There are all kinds of meanings to those words. Does Leonard think he is smarter than these criminals and will be able to outwit them? I don’t think he’s sure. I don’t think he’s certain about that, but he’s going to have a go. Did you do any training for the film? I did study how to make fantastic suits for people. In a tailor’s shop like Huntsman & Sons, which is the shop on Savile Row where I was trained, every client has a set of papers, brown pieces of card, which are the measurement of their suit. When you move into that level, there are two people working. There’s a tailor, who sews everything together, and there’s a cutter, who measures the client and cuts paper patterns that make up the different pieces that make up a suit: a waistcoat, and trousers. Having spent time on Savile Row, are you now into bespoke suits? Yeah! I will probably be wearing it at a few premieres for the rest of my life because one of the ways they trained me was having me take part in the construction of my own suit. The thing about a Savile Row suit is everybody has an irregular body, and it is particularly cut to your form, and they leave a lot of generous material inside, so if you get fat or thin, they can change it. These clothes are clothes for life. And some of the beautiful tweeds are made within a 20-mile radius, including the construction and the dying and everything, probably organic wool and organic dye. It is a great antidote to the fast fashion form of capitalist fashion, which is very, very polluting and environmentally unfriendly. You worked with first-time director Graham Moore. Any concerns with a first-time director, or is there a bit of a thrill in working with new talent? When you sign up for any project, it’s a risk, isn’t it? I met him and I liked him a lot and my instincts were right. He is a superb director, and he had the hand of people like me and DickPope, a marvelous cinematographer. He had some very experienced people on the set, and he was very, very good. He was both open to better ideas than what he had planned, and also firm when he wanted to stick to his own ideas. He was a mixture of both, not one nor the other, and that is really, really good. He was very nice to me in that he arranged room for rehearsals before we started the film and he let me apply some of the acting techniques and preparation that I would use if I was preparing a theater show. I didn’t direct the piece in any sense of the word, but I was grateful to develop some language, and for the first time, the director said, “Some good notes,” which meant a lot to me. You also have Don’t Look Up on Netflix, a satire addressing environmental issues. Do you think movies can move people to action? I do think that violent films that don’t show any of the consequences of violence have a particular brutalizing effect, and I think films that show compassion and mercy, and the effect of love in people’s lives, have a very positive effect. I am not sure we as storytellers can control the effect our stories have, but I do think they have an effect. In Don’t Look Up, you play Sir Peter Isherwell, a super-rich tech mogul. Did you look at any real people to prepare? Elon Musk has been suggested, but is Isherwell a combination of tech giants? I certainly read Elon Musk’s biography and found it very fascinating. I watched some interviews with him, especially a documentary from a few years ago featuring an interview with him. He was so shy and unexpressive. Generally, if it is a fantasy character, it is made up of a composite of a few people I know, or I have watched and enjoyed, and then it is just largely me. If you knew a meteor was going to hit Earth, like in Don’t Look Up, what would be your end-of-the-world plans? I would certainly gravitate to the people who I love, like Leonardo’s character does at the end of the film. Even though Isherwell, with all his arrogant algorithms told Leonardo’s character he was going to die alone. That is one of the things that Isherwell and that kind of dominating mind gets wrong. I would gather with people I love. I would certainly gather with spiritually minded people. I would think the majority of people are going to be more panicked about the physical pain and the physical loss involved. I would try to get a wider perspective and think that this is something we face, and it is an extraordinary fate. The best thing for me would be to get a play and be acting in a play when it happens because I am very, very happy when I am acting in a play, and nothing really worries me. What are you working on now? I am making a play which I have co-written with a couple of friends of mine about a man called Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the first human being to discover bacteria, and he wasn’t able to convince people. He discovered it 40 years before LouisPasteur and Dr. Joseph Lister discovered it with the help of a microscope. Dr. Semmelweis discovered it in the maternity ward where the doctors would come in immediately from doing autopsies to help the women give birth and then infecting the women with childbirth fever. Thousands and thousands of women and their children died because of this. He cracked it. He figured out there was something on the doctors’ hands that we couldn’t see that he could smell that was being carried from the dead bodies to the women. That was the first description and realization that there were hordes of bacteria. I didn’t know anything about it. How did your fondness for hats start? When I was in Milwaukee in the ’70s [after emigrating from England to the U.S. with his family], we used to love going to all the secondhand clothing shops there and in Chicago. There were these fantastic hats. And then there were the Blues Brothers; but I got into it at that time because there were such beautiful hats available. I’ve always worn them. Next, 50 Best War Movies of All Time
