Skip to main content

Ioan Gruffudd on sexism, Weinstein and his distressing new role: ‘I found myself crying’

The Welsh actor, star of ITV’s Liar, reflects on Hollywood, sexual oppression, and the perils and pleasures of full-time parenting

Before Ioan Gruffudd’s first day at drama school, he had been told to wear something comfortable. He recalls walking towards the entrance of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), where his fellow students were waiting, “looking like Marlon Brando” in white T-shirts, cool jeans and leather jackets. Gruffudd was wearing a shellsuit. A Welsh football association shellsuit. “And I was a very young-looking 18-year-old,” he says. “Very patriotic, very fervently Welsh. I was a virgin as well. All the girls were like: ‘No, we’re not going to be the first, we can’t have this young kid falling in love with us.’” He laughs. “This is who I am.” This was also the unworldly, naive boy who almost joined a fundamentalist church around the same time, but more of that later.

The man who sits opposite me in a central London restaurant – despite being a successful, handsome actor with a much better-developed dress sense – seems to have retained enough of that endearing unaffectedness that I can perfectly picture him rustling through central London in head-to-toe polyester. In fact, there is a rare and touching openness about Gruffudd; he is perhaps the least guarded actor I’ve met.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/39X1UcZ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more