An Interview with James Faulkner
Actor and producer James Faulkner talks to Roger Crow about his life, career, how he made the epic Zulu Dawn (on 4K UHD in July) and other beloved projects including Game of Thrones, Knives Out 3, and a recent BBC advert.
James, tell us how you got Peter O’Toole to co-star in Zulu Dawn.
I read the script and I said, ‘Well, this is fantastic. There’s only one person to play Lord Chelmsford… Peter O’Toole’. Eight o’clock the following morning, my house in Hampstead, my front doorbell rings. It had a first-floor drawing room. I go on to the balcony. In my front garden, there’s a very tall man. (Affects a Peter O’Toole voice) ‘I’ve read it. It’s brilliant! I’m doing it!’ I’m 29 years old. I do my first deal.
How amazing. And it’s not a small film, is it?
At the time, it was the biggest independent film ever made. It was not surpassed until Dickie Attenborough made Gandhi.
Zulu Dawn really took me back to the era before CGI crowds.
You had to have bodies. We’re filming in the middle of nowhere and we have to deal with, house and feed five-and-a-half-thousand people.
You’ve appeared in some of my favourite projects of the last 30, 40 years. I loved your work on Game of Thrones.
The first time I’ve ever played somebody with no sense of humour whatsoever.
Adding gravitas to a scene with dragons, that is the art of any great actor for me.
Especially a man who’s looking at a tennis ball on a stick.
“It says a lot about me”
Was that an amazing experience?
It was the first time I’d been on a set as big as Zulu Dawn. And I had no control. But it was very different because, you know, the difference between analog and digital is very considerable. So you don’t have 5,000 extras. You only have 200. The rest are in CGI, you know? And these days, your director may have one, two, maybe three cameras, and he’s in ‘Video Village’. He’s not on the floor. So you’re rather divorced, really, from the shot-making, as it were.
So what was it like working with director Rian Johnson on Wake Up Dead Man, the last Knives Out?
Great. What a nice guy. Terrific guy. I really liked him. He was inclusive. I’m doing f*** all in the thing, you know. I’m really doing a cough and a spit. But anyway, you know, you’re working with a top cast. It’s a really interesting script. The security was extraordinary on that thing. But anyway, delighted. I couldn’t have asked for more.
You’re no stranger to voice-over work. Give us an example of a recent project.
Did you see the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics just passed?
I loved it.
Well, guess who did all the advertisements; It was me. Fantastic, the coverage this time, you know. I mean, I know they didn’t quite get the result that they wanted in terms of the spread of the medals, but they did all right. For a country that has no fu**ing decent mountain range.
What are you working on next?
I’ve got a public reading of a new play tomorrow. I’ve got two, three, four films coming out. And my manager in Los Angeles is working on a deal for a lead in a movie. But I hope you saw All Those Small Things. It’s available on YouTube. It’s not quite the film I wanted to make because I’d fallen out with the producers and my director and I didn’t get final cut. But it ain’t bad… and it says a lot about me as an actor.
If you had to sum up yourself in one sentence, what would it be?
I think of myself as the missing link between that lost world of glamour and the inexorable rise of the potato head.
The 4K UHD release of Zulu Dawn is available from July 6 courtesy of Severin Films and Munro Films.
The full version of this interview can be found at podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/james-faulkner
Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
crowsfeat.com; nostalgiahhh film podcast
