Interview with Tom Hollander

What did you think when you first read the script, and what were the challenges you faced?

I thought I’d be alright as long as I could do the voice. That seemed to be the challenge. That’s generally what happens when I do anything. I think if I know what the character sounds like then everything else will follow. Because he’s a very well recorded performer, it was very easy to discover what he sounded like as a recording artist. It was harder to find out what he sounded like as a man. I sense that he was putting on a performing voice, a declamatory poetry style, but he can’t have been talking like that in real life. Or maybe he was.

There aren’t many people around who knew him so I asked Robert Hardy, the actor who was best friends with Richard Burton, who was one of Dylan’s biggest fans. I spoke to him and he said he did have a bizarrely fruity voice. He said it was preposterously posh. I had to find a voice, one that would plausibly take you to a world he lived in without alienating you that he sounded so strange.

The other challenge clearly was that it was going to be very difficult to shoot it, because we only had 18 days (three weeks), and Andrew had written a big time jump between 1936 and 1953. I couldn’t see how we were going to achieve that. He then wrote it so that we were going back a little bit to a little less specific time. Then there were weight implications - he bloated and bloated so in 1936 he was very different than he was in 1953. So we reduced that time difference, we just cut back to happier times rather than a specific date and weirdly I started to lose weight. That was accidental, maybe self-consciously, but weight was falling off me in the last week as we shot those earlier scenes. And we also had costume tweaks and tricks.

I didn’t want to do it initially because of the filming schedule and six-day weeks. I’ve done it before and I’ve found it so punishing, I couldn’t face it. But Aisling Walsh the director said ‘I know it’s horrible but I know how to do this I’ll do it by being prepared. I’ll know exactly what I want to do each scene’, and broadly speaking she did. We cut scenes out in pre-production too so the stuff that we did, we could do well, rather than being over scheduled and messing it up, and having to hit it and hope. So we didn’t hit it and hope, we had a plan.

Were you aware of Dylan Thomas’s work before you started?

I was aware of him although I didn’t know his poetry very well, but I got exposed to his best poetry. That was very satisfying and I got to read it, which went well. I had done quite a lot of poetry reading with the late Josephine Hart over the years, so I had an idea of how to do it but I was just copying Dylan. I liked the way Andrew Davies had dramatized this man running out of road, as it were, in his life. He’d done it really well - he’s a great writer. That they should have even offered it to me was a wonderful thing.

Did you sympathise with Dylan Thomas and the way he was?

It’s a sympathetic portrayal of self-destruction and it allows you to get inside him. It’s an eloquently done car crash but because the poetry is mixed in, it’s not just the car crash. I think maybe that’s why it works. Tales of self-destruction themselves are often not fun to watch, but it’s because you see the two things at the same time - you see the poetry and everything that was greatest about him at the same time as you’re seeing him destroy himself.

How was it playing such an ill man?

Eating a lot made me feel ill and the whole thing made me feel dreadful. I was glad from that point of view that it ended after three weeks, it wasn’t healthy. Without going into the details of it there were unpleasant physical side effects of overeating. I overate six weeks before filming, and it was all the stuff that you fantasise about wanting to eat - chips, pizza, ice-cream. The reality is if you eat those things for two days, you want a break immediately and you can’t have one if you’re trying to pile on the weight.