In the last week of January, Ben Whishaw, the waifish and intense star of “London Spy” and the 2008 remake of “Brideshead Revisited,” arrived in New York from London for a six-month stay. Installed in the West Village, for weeks Mr. Whishaw has walked across Manhattan to a work space in the East Village, and for five hours a day rehearsed for his Broadway debut.
Mr. Whishaw, 35, is here for the Broadway revival of “The Crucible,” now in previews. He stars opposite the Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Sophie Okonedo as John Proctor, the upright but errant linchpin of the play, who faces down, rather than buckles under, the accusations of witchcraft that roiled Salem, Mass., in 1692.
Despite being steeped in Arthur Miller’s grim, hysterical Puritan world, Mr. Whishaw recently tumbled into an East Village seafood restaurant merry and full of praise for New York.
“I love it here,” he said, settling into a corner table and ordering a glass of Chianti. “It’s a cliché, but it is true, and it’s quite stark when you come from somewhere else: It’s the positivity and optimism of this place. You won’t notice it, because you’re around it all the time, but it’s very ‘up,’ compared to England.”
He may naturally incline toward the English national character, he admitted with a giggle, but New York agrees with him. Here he, too, is up.
Despite a career that has taken him to tiny theaters and megabudget “Bond” films alike, he remains something of a cipher, a chameleon able to walk the streets of New York unrecognized and unbothered.
“He’s not an actor who pushes himself into the front,” said Ivo van Hove, the director of “The Crucible.” “Actually, the opposite is true. I have to push him to the front.”
Mr. Whishaw grew up in Langford, England, a “pretty unremarkable” village in Bedfordshire an hour and a half north of London, with a twin brother and parents unconnected to the theater.
“They were always incredibly supportive of me wanting to do acting,” he said, “and never put it in my head that there has to be a more sensible option to fall back on.”
And so there never was. So far, there has been no need of one. Mr. Whishaw found success early, playing “Hamlet” in Trevor Nunn’s 2004 production just after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and has worked continually ever since.
He is one of the most celebrated stage actors of his generation and has turned up in a wide range of film and TV roles. He is the latest Q in the 007 films, a precocious, baby-genius variation on the usual theme; he is “Richard II” in a televised adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, a performance that won him a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award in 2013; he is, whether you realize it or not, the voice of Paddington Bear. (“Endearing,” The New Yorker said.)
His calling card is a soulful fragility, all faunlike bearing and saucer eyes, with a teenager’s unruly mop mane. It is no accident that fashion has made him a favorite, and in 2013, he appeared in an ad campaign for Prada.
Many of his roles play up this quality: the doomed, lovelorn John Keats of Jane Campion’s biopic “Bright Star”; the preening, brittle Sebastian Flyte of “Brideshead Revisited”; and, more recently, the bereaved malcontent searching for answers after his lover’s murder in the critically lauded BBC mini-series “London Spy.”
The bushy beard that his part in “The Crucible” requires does little to dispel the tender aura he projects. John Proctor is typically played as a virtuous brute, a brawny man’s man of 17th century New England. (In the 2002 revival, the role went to the hulking Liam Neeson.)
Mr. van Hove said he thought that Mr. Whishaw could bring Proctor’s traditional robustness to the part but that “his fragility, his vulnerability is equally important.” “I think that’s what makes Ben into a great actor,” he said, “to reinvent this part for our times”
But Proctor, it is fair to say, is a departure, a headlong dive against type, and one undertaken with some trepidation.
By MATTHEW SCHNEIER
Source New York Times
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