Bertie Carvel has reached the imperial phase of his career. This week he starts a run as King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon, but even when he is not playing actual monarchs, his characters verge on the kingly. He was Tony Blair in The Crown and Donald Trump in Mike Bartlett’s play The 47th. Next year he appears in a new Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, playing Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen, the heir to the Iron Throne.
Wearing a white shirt and sporting a new salt-and-pepper beard at the RSC’s south London rehearsal studios, Carvel, 47, insists that high-status roles aren’t all that interest him — but, yes, he has chosen to play a fair few. “That probably says something about me. I don’t want to psychoanalyse myself, but there’s probably some wish-fulfilment going on.” He won a Tony award in 2019 for playing Rupert Murdoch in James Graham’s play Ink, about the Times proprietor’s battle to relaunch The Sun in the Sixties.
Now Carvel is due to spend the next few years, on and off, filming the new Harry Potter TV series. He will play the scheming minister of magic Cornelius Fudge, the role played by Robert Hardy in the films.
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It’s not a job he would have taken as a younger actor. “I would have run a million miles from a project like that. I’ve been more interested in variety, in not doing the same thing twice. But I’m a bit older now. I’ve got a bit less wanderlust, I’m happier to stay still.”
He lives in north London with his wife, the actress Sally Scott, and their five-year-old son. For the past three years he has spent half the year in Northern Ireland, playing PD James’s detective Adam Dalgliesh in three series of Dalgliesh on Channel 5 (“a study in stillness”, he calls it). The Winter’s Tale will take him to Stratford for the rest of the summer. The Potter series, meanwhile, will be shot in Leavesden studios, near Watford, 40 minutes’ drive from his home.
In series three of Dalgliesh, as PD James’s detective; he has also directed two episodes
“I don’t know how it’s going to fit into my life. I’ve read one script, which I loved, and I’ve read the books. I hadn’t before I got the role. I think I saw one of the films, maybe two. As a boy if I had read these books I would have devoured them. So I am coming at it with a really open mind. Whether I come back [after the first series] probably depends on what the fans think. I mean, I’ll be furious if it’s not an amazing part.” He declines to talk about the online backlash some of the new cast have faced.
Not for the first time Carvel is playing an unsympathetic character. He was the cheating husband in Doctor Foster (2015), opposite Suranne Jones, and a scheming press officer in Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s Babylon (2014). Another bad guy, then? “Oh, is he? I don’t know.” Not for the first time Carvel wants to blur the line between goodie and baddie.
Take his present role, Leontes, a king who turns tyrannical after one ill-founded bout of jealousy. Carvel read The Winter’s Tale for the first time as an English student at the University of Sussex, when it didn’t mean a huge amount. “But reading it now, in middle age, has had a very profound effect. It’s about second chances. It’s about time and redemption. All these things have a much deeper impact when you’ve lived a bit and made some mistakes, however banal or grand those might be.”
Carvel in rehearsals for the RSC’s The Winter’s Tale
MARC BRENNER
Leontes, crucially for Carvel, gets an opportunity to repent. “To some extent it’s a play about toxic masculinity, about male violence. But if you make Leontes a monster I don’t think redemption is possible.”
Unsurprisingly for a man who has played so many prominent politicians — Nick Clegg in James Graham’s TV play Coalition (2015) too — he points to the play’s political resonances. “There is a sense around, politically, ecologically, that our darker side is overwhelming us and it may be too late. But the play offers a sense that if we recognise our mistakes, there is a chance of forgiveness.”
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It is, Carvel admits, the sort of juicy role that doesn’t come along that often. He tries to do a play every year: “Much longer and I feel I’m losing my lodestone.” And it feels significant to him to return to Stratford 15 years after his career-making performance there, as the terrifying Miss Trunchbull in Matilda the Musical (he went on to perform it 650 times in the West End and on Broadway, winning an Olivier award).
As Miss Trunchball in Matilda the Musical, which won him an Olivier award in 2012
MANUEL HARLAN
Leontes is only his third professional Shakespeare role. “It felt like a hole in my CV. I’m following in an amazing tradition, and as I get older I get more fond of supporting these cultural pillars.” He smiles — a flash of Carvel’s molars softens even his most earnest utterance. “Pillars of the establishment are not necessarily my thing, but some pillars are good pillars: they should be kept standing.”
Carvel is welcoming company and as urgently articulate as any of his characters. He inhabits his characters and takes a strategic view on them: being likeable is not a priority. “I care about being interesting. And, on stage as in life, I don’t believe people are one thing or other. They are not good or evil. I think the great tragedy of our moment is the lack of empathy and generosity — that people take positions rather than being curious about the other side.”
He excelled as Trump on stage in 2022, where he had to see the world as the president does. “And that is a good reduction of what my job is. My job, simply put, is to mean what I say. Some people are liars, are disingenuous. But you have to stand in that character’s shoes and understand what is at stake for them and what they intend. If you can do that, however you do it, intellectually or instinctually or a mix of the two, then I think you arrive at good acting.”
Carvel as Donald Trump in Mike Bartlett’s play, The 47th, in 2022
MARC BRENNER
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With his casually crisp diction and way of digging deep into any topic, Carvel could pass for a dashing academic, a famous writer or a director. (His father, John, was a political journalist for The Guardian, and his late mother, Patricia, was a psychologist.) In fact, he has directed one play (John Galsworthy’s Strife in Chichester in 2016) and a two-part Dalgliesh story last year. He’d love to direct more: “It’s nice to have your hands on the tiller.” For all his other achievements, Dalgliesh, watched by millions, is perhaps what he’s best known for. Has being a TV detective brought a different kind of fame? He chuckles. “I don’t think so. I mean there’s so f***ing many of us, we’re ten a penny.”
The younger Carvel wouldn’t have signed up for 18 episodes (to date) as one poetry-loving Seventies detective. But grief, ageing and parenthood have all had an effect. His mother died towards the end of 2019, and his son was born a few months later. Now he and his family live in Patricia’s flat in Hampstead, where he grew up.
Is being the son of a psychologist and a political journalist the perfect grounding for the thinking actor? “It’s a huge gift. I couldn’t have had a richer foundation, regardless of their professions. The love they gave — I never felt anything but endorsement. And that continues every day, even though my mum’s dead.”
Which is perhaps part of why, although he insists he wants to be liked personally — “Of course I do, everyone wants to be liked” — Carvel has the confidence not to need his characters to be liked. “Maybe that’s why I am so interested in trying to take a generous view of people, particularly these bad guys. I think if you can extend that sort of love and generosity to even the worst of us it’s going to have some positive impact. That sounds a bit high-minded, but it’s true.”
Spoken like a wise monarch. Now let’s see him play an emphatically unwise one.
The Winter’s Tale is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, Jul 12 to Aug 30, rsc.org.uk
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