Tim Roth: ‘Gary Oldman was going to Hollywood. He wanted that. I didn’t’

Tim Roth came to prominence at the vanguard of the socially conscious, fervently anti-Margaret Thatcher wave of British cinema of the 1980s. Alongside Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis, he was part of a corps dubbed the Brit Pack by the now-defunct Face magazine in 1986.
He earned a Bafta as most promising newcomer for his turn in the 1984 film The Hit, and rave reviews for his portrayal of disaffected youths in Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain, in 1982, and Mike Leigh’s Meantime, a year later. Writing in the New York Times in 1986, Walter Goodman expressed his admiration for Meantime and Roth’s “very well played, with locked-in force” performance.
It was a great era to turn on your telly, the actor recalls.
“Something like Boys from the Blackstuff would never be made today,” he says of the groundbreaking BBC drama series. “Or Made in Britain. That was part one of four films made about the education system in Britain under Thatcher and all those monsters. It was an extraordinary thing. British television now is so strange, isn’t it? There’s lots of reality TV, and there’s always Coronation Street. But you don’t turn it on and see [Ken Loach’s] Kes.”
At 63, the actor is circumspect about the swaggering, macho roles that brought him to prominence in Britain and Ireland: a 16-year-old skinhead in Made in Britain, a leader among Brick Lane squatters in King of the Ghetto and a punk in Ray Davies’s musical Return to Waterloo.
“It was raw cinema, but it was also quite blokeish,” Roth says. “I remember very clearly talking about this because we were all lefty types. And what seemed on the surface to be a very male-dominated world had all these incredible women producers behind it. Margaret Matheson, in particular, was extraordinary. She was the producer of the first thing I did – Made in Britain – and then went on to run Central Television for a while.
“She was such a boss. Alan always said there’s this group of women at the BBC who never knew what we were going to do from film to film. And they were the ones that were making all these decisions. They were guiding all the extraordinary political drama that was taking place at that time. But not in the director’s seat. That came too late for them.”
In recent years the actor has worked with such female talents as Ava DuVernay, the maker of Selma, Mia Hansen-Løve, the maker of Bergman Island, and, now, the first-time Dutch director Désirée Nosbusch, on Poison, her sensitively translated version of Lot Vekemans’s grief-chronicling play Gif. Poison, which took its Irish bow at Galway Film Fleadh in July, stars Roth and Trine Dyrholm as an estranged couple who meet up many years after the death of their son.
“It had a theatrical life, which is neither here nor there, but the idea of a conversation between two people who hadn’t seen each other in a very, very long time was appealing,” Roth says. “Especially as the last time that they saw each other was during a tragic and difficult event. From those first moments I thought it was a fascinating idea for a film.
“The script, when it arrived, was very powerful, even though it still had a theatrical quality to it, which we worked through when we were preparing. I was completely taken with it. My only worry was: who am I going to be playing off? Then I met Trine – and she’s one of the funniest people and as tough as they come. She has such a spark. It was a fantastic experience.”
Roth had signed up for Nosbusch’s emotionally devastating debut feature when he learned of his son Cormac’s diagnosis with a stage-three germ cell tumour in November 2021. Cormac Roth, a guitarist and composer, died aged 25, on October 16th, 2022. The actor discussed the project with his son before he left to shoot the film in a Luxembourg cemetery.
“We discussed what the film was about and what he thought about me doing it and all those things,” Roth says. “We would talk sometimes when I was filming. It was a brief shoot, about six or seven weeks. I was in and out, so I could be back with him. It was difficult at times. The subject matter felt close to me. But it felt important. And at that time we were feeling a real positivity about him getting through. In a way he helped me make it. And he wanted me to do it.”
Roth suggests that the largely female crew, which also included the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann, helped him negotiate a particularly painful time.
“I was very, very fortunate,” he says. “I can’t remember how far in we were. I was absorbed in the script. But I looked up and realised there were two women at the camera. It was brilliant. It meant everything was efficient. I’ve worked with women before but never with so many as heads of departments. We finished early. That never ever happens on a film shoot. And it’s a film by an actor turned director and she’s a first-time director.
“Those are all things that appeal to me. Everyone has to start somewhere. It never bothers me in the slightest if someone is directing their first film or they are not on my radar. All I care about is if they are good or not. I worked with James Gray on his first film. I worked with Quentin.”
Quentin is, of course, Quentin Tarantino, who has directed Roth in five of his nine features, although the actor’s role was excised from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when the film-maker was required to shorten his initial five-hour cut. Roth was already having a moment when he landed the pivotal role as an undercover cop in Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs.
“Twenty pages into Reservoir Dogs I knew he was a rare talent,” Roth says. “Twenty pages in and I was reaching for the phone. The dialogue was extraordinary. He had done all your improvisation for you in the script. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Me and Quentin were counting the walkouts in cinemas. But the reaction was mind-blowing.”
Roth parlayed his subsequent American roles into an Academy Award nomination for Rob Roy and a recurring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the supervillain Abomination. He has worked with Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Haneke (on the Austrian’s English-language version of his shocking Funny Games).
It’s a strange twist for an actor who never intended to go to Hollywood.
“I was doing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead with Gary [Oldman]. He was going to Hollywood. He wanted that. I didn’t. I wanted to work with Ken Loach. I didn’t want to be a movie star and end up playing the same kinds of parts. I wanted to be a character actor, because I wanted to do as many different things as I possibly could.
“When I made Vincent & Theo with Robert Altman I couldn’t wait to get home. I had no interest in being there. But my agent kept me floating about there for a while. And then Reservoir Dogs landed. And then I discovered that you work anywhere in the world in this game.”
Harold Pinter wrote a version of King Lear specially for the actor. Decades into his career, Roth retains the on-screen presence that once inspired Pauline Kael to describe his acting as a form of kinetic discharge.
He shrugs, amiably.
“Good or bad, I never read reviews,” he says “Once my participation is done, the film belongs to somebody else. I never even look at any photos. I have no social media. So I can just concentrate on the job.”
Despite the odd franchise film – Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk – and a list of former co-stars that includes Tupac Shakur, Roth remains committed to edgier independents, including Julius Onah’s provocative Luce and his blackly comic collaboration with the director Michel Franco, Sundown.
“It still makes me laugh,” Roth says. “The fact that I am allowed to do this job is quite extraordinary. Considering I have no qualifications as an actor. Apart from working in a supermarket! I am quite amazed that it happened. I’m never comfortable. I mean, I’m comfortable doing the work. But I never take it for granted. It always surprises me, and I’m hoping it always will.”
Poison is being screened at Dinard British & Irish Film Festival, which runs from Wednesday, October 2nd, to Sunday, October 6th