The Big Interview: Sam West

The Big Interview: Sam West  

 

 

By Nick Ahad
Published on Monday 21 May 2012 00:00

Sam West is a good looking chap who has appeared on screen with Julia Roberts and managed not to look like Quasimodo. He’s a respected director as well as a much admired actor and fiercely intelligent. He has charisma by the bucketload and exudes star quality.

But sitting opposite him in the wardrobe in the bowels of the Newcastle theatre I discover something else. Sam West is a total geek.
He’s excited about all the books on post-Great War Britain he’s been reading for research, he’s still got the sheet music from the first single he bought in 1978 – Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick – he’s really excited by the history of coal, he’s thrilled to bits to share the news that he kept a section of the famous carpet from the pre-refurbishment Sheffield Crucible. He is also, I happen to know of old, an avid birdwatcher.
Total geek.

And yet he remains pretty cool. Indeed, one of the things he has collected – the man is clearly a hoarder – is a call sheet from the last movie he appeared in and the story has more than an air of cool about it. “I was filming a movie for Focus International in April called Hyde Park on Hudson will Bill Murray, Olivia Coleman, Laura Linney – some quite brilliant people. Elizabeth Wilson was in it – she played Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate, was in Hitchcock’s The Birds and Notorious in 1946 with Cary Grant. It’s so remarkable to meet and work with someone like that and to be a few handshakes away from such greatness.
“In the movie Bill plays Roosevelt and I play King George VI. One day we were filming a nine-minute two-hander with just me and Bill – I kept the call sheet from that day – it just had my name and Bill’s name on it. It might not be a nine-minute two-hander in the final cut, but that was a great day.”
It’s stories like that, that make West undeniably impressive, but he immediately pulls the rug from under the feet of his own claims to cool.
“One day shortly before filming I found myself going to an out-of-the-way underground club in London to see the modern version of Booker T and the MGs – the Stax houseband (he gets very excited about this).
“They were amazing, playing Green Onions and Knock on Wood. Then someone who looked familiar came on to sing a number with them, holding a tambourine – and it was Bill. The following day I was in the make-up trailer and Bill came in. I said ‘I saw you on stage last night’ and briefly I became cool because it was this little out of the way club with 200 very hip people and I just happened to be one of them.”
The way he tells it, Sam West is a man in the right place at the right time and it might be tempting to consider that his career – like that of any actor – as a case of lucky timing. The truth is he has worked hard at his success. Perhaps being the son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales means that you have to work extra hard to prove yourself.
He certainly worked like a Trojan when he was running Sheffield Theatres for a couple of years from 2005 and he appears to have barely aged a day since he was appointed artistic director of the theatres (the Crucible, Lyceum and Studio) replacing the highly regarded Michael Grandage. They were big shoes to fill and West did an impressive job – but it ended on a less than positive note.
The Crucible was closing for refurbishment and West wanted to remain in post – and keep the theatre producing work – while it took place. The board didn’t agree and he left.
“The best thing I can say about Sheffield is that I enjoyed my first two seasons very much and would liked to have had a third – but there was a disagreement. Although it was amicable, it was also a disagreement,” he says, resolutely.
“I wanted to keep producing work but for all sorts of perfectly justifiable reasons they thought we couldn’t afford or handle it. I felt we should keep making work while the theatre was shut at all costs.”
Sour grapes? If there are any, West isn’t saying.
“I am delighted that since the theatre re-opened they seem to have re-captured their audience but that’s because Dan (Evans, the current artistic director) is doing very good work with some very good people.
“When Dan was appointed, in one of his first speeches – I think one of the first things he said – was that he was pleased that I had been there and taken the theatre into the refurbishment.
“My concern was that Michael had done such a great job in handing things over to his successor – me – that I wanted to feel I had done the same thing. When I left I didn’t even know who the new artistic director would be, so I never had that opportunity.
“When Dan thanked me, it felt like I had – that awful word – a sense of closure. It was a nod to me and what I had done and that was all that I felt I needed, nothing more than that.”
He has returned to Sheffield a number of times since and “had some very good evenings” but has not felt the need to keep harking back to that period. In fact, since leaving, he has had some of the best professional experiences of his career. He played the lead in Enron in the West End, one of the theatre world’s major hits of the last decade, has appeared in A Number in South Africa opposite his father Timothy (“we played together on his 76th and 77th birthday”) and in ITV series Eternal Law, had the biggest TV role of his career.
Filmed in York and written by the team behind Life on Mars, West played an angel sent to earth as a lawyer to help mankind. “It was absolutely the most enjoyable television job I’ve ever done. I’ve played leads in shows like Narnia and Cambridge Spies, but this was a lead in a six-part series filmed for three months. It was in York, in late spring and early summer, I had a little house next to Orla Brady and we used to have soup and learn our lines together. I worked 61 days out of 64 on the shoot, I’d walk to work, it was lovely.”
The show didn’t find an audience – or it did, three million, but it wasn’t the five million needed to return to the screen. The lack of another series is a shame, West clearly feels, but he has plenty to keep him busy.
What is doing that and making him buzz almost out of his seat in Newcastle, is Close the Coalhouse Door. Alan Plater’s early play is being revived for the first time since the playwright’s death in 2010.
“I’ve been mostly buying and reading books for the play – which is a list that unfortunately never ends. One arrived today called Communism in the Bible which is a really exciting and important book.”
I laugh at this, not the idea that the book is important, but that Communism in the Bible is exciting. West does not laugh along. He’s perfectly serious. “I can’t wait to get stuck into it. I’ve been talking to Paul Younger from Newcastle University, a civil engineer and an expert on water. But he’s also a Christian Socialist and knows a lot about the Prims, the Primitive Methodists, who took the Bible as a sort of radical text – very popular with pitmen in the 1860s. A lot of South American liberation theologists do today in fact, basically...”
And he’s off. It’s difficult to explain just how excited West is about the idea of pitmen’s religious beliefs in the 1860s. He’s almost as excited as he is about discovering that a member of the acting union Equity, is an expert in British political history from 1910 to 1926.
“He spent two years studying that 16- year period, can you imagine,” asks West. I really can’t. “It was the most fascinating period of British history...” He then gets excited about coal fields.
He also gets very excited about politics. Over the past few years he has become one of the arts world’s leading public figures in speaking out against the cuts to public funding of the sector. The fierce intellect, endless curiosity, the politics, make him the perfect person to lead a production of Close the Coalhouse Door.
Based on the stories of Sid Chaplin, Alan Plater’s play was first performed in Newcastle in 1968. It’s set around a wedding anniversary party and charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831. The story is structured around Alex Glasgow’s joyful and heart-tugging music inspired by north-eastern folk songs performed by highly-skilled actor-musicians and in this latest version has seen a script revision by Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall.
“It sounds facile, but it’s true – it’s a great honour to have been given responsibility of the first revival since he died of Alan’s best known play.
“We will have people who remember the first production, people who have never heard of it, those who won’t have the first inkling of what a miner’s life was like and it has to speak to all of them.
“I think when we bring the show to Yorkshire, it will really speak to people who feel connected to the history of manufacturing through their towns and the industry that was once there. In fact, did you know...”
He’s off again. The coolest geek you might ever meet.
Close the Coalhouse Door, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, May 23 – 26. York Theatre Royal June 26 - 30.

Sam West, Star of Eternal Law – We’ve Lost the Link Between Effort & Reward

Sam West, Star of Eternal Law – We’ve Lost the Link Between Effort & Reward By Alison Jane Reid

by Alison Jane Reid on February 16, 2012

Just who is actor Sam West? In a galaxy of one dimensional, pretty boy actors, West is hard to define or to pigeonhole. He acts, directs, tinkers with politics and goes off to Palestine to conduct The London Choir in the Magic Flute. To that you can add that he is an un-repenting atheist, ‘and doesn’t care who knows it’. Yet he is currently, and very happily, playing an angel, in ITV’s bold new drama – Eternal Law – with a delicious mix of charm, cynicism and masculine vulnerability; oh and a pair of wings to lust after – which have a tendency to ‘pop out at very awkward moments – like an unwanted erection’, explains Sam. The latest offering from Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham – the writers on Life on Mars – Eternal Law is whacky, whimsical and makes very good television. I am sure it will be a hit, and that it will deliver Sam West many new admirers, most of them I suspect – women.

The truth is Samuel Alexander Joseph West belongs to the great, British, swashbuckling, politically incorrect and imperfectly talented tradition of Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton. He thinks and worries far too much about the human condition: about beauty, politics, the death of British manufacturing, sex – lots and lots of sex, lest he miss out! – And yes, bird watching (Of which more later) and the peerless, incomparable beauty of the steam engine. He also uses the word ‘fecund’ a lot.
West is clearly talented, so why isn’t he a first-degree Hollywood star? He was very good as Anthony Blunt in Cambridge Spies and his performance in Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company garnered an award for Best Shakespearean Performance. My guess is that it’s because he doesn’t really care to be; he has too many other facets to his life that he enjoys more. Nor does he have the soft, bland, conformist perfection that Hollywood currently craves for its leading men.
Somehow, his features just seem wrong, if not a little outré. Take that mop of unruly, chorister boy curls, and those strong, aquiline features that can make him sometimes look rather fierce and cross on screen. Remember him as Julia Robert’s cold, gossipy, patrician leading man in Notting Hill? What he does possess is animal magnetism – you only have to look on film forums to see how he inspires such devotion in his female fans.
Now back to Eternal Law. In a piece of inspired casting and a superb, madcap, silly, affirming homage to Powell and Pressburger’s delicious A matter of Life and Death – West is finally cast as a leading man, and he doesn’t disappoint. He acts everyone else off the screen as JAK GIST, a deliciously cynical, wise-cracking, world-weary lawyer who has another secret life as an angel, dispatched to earth to clean up the lives of messy humans, when his own life is just as complex, and he can’t be with the woman he is mad for. At last, West has never looked more appealing or quite so fallible; hanging out on the very telegenic pinnacles of York Minster, be-suited, cigar and whisky in hand, and flexing a fine pair of lusciously downy, anatomically correct wings, complete with all the primary feathers – forget vampires! The angelic life is hot.
And so I predict is Sam West. Soon we will have the fascinating opportunity to compare West’s portrait of George V1, with Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning turn in the King’s Speech. West is taking on the shy monarch with a life-long stutter, for his role in Hyde Park on Hudson in the film about the love affair between Franklin D Roosevelt and his distant cousin directed by Roger Mitchell.
When we meet for the launch of Eternal Law, Sam has forty minutes to spare before dashing into town to put the finishing touches to a paper he has written ‘ attacking the Coalition government on the cuts to arts funding’. I detect he rather relishes all this. Then, in a few days time he is off to Newcastle to take a boat trip down the Tyne in preparation to direct Close the Coalhouse Door, a play about the HISTORY OF THE DURHAM MINERS, by Alan Plater.

‘ I’m going up for a little meeting about the play next week, and one of the first things I am going to do is take a boat down the Tyne. There are huge piles of coals on the Tyne – coals to Newcastle – but they are Romanian. So we have exported the union problems and the unpaid labour, and the danger to Russia and Columbia. Meanwhile, there are public sector workers who have just had a pay frieze, lots of ex-miners, and seventy five percent of the coal is still in the ground, and nobody is making anything; it does feel wrong.’
Somehow, I can’t imagine the new pretty boy pack of Brit actors even knowing about the miners strike, or caring; let alone being interested in anything other than the name of their dermatologist and the size of their next pay cheque.
West is complex, interesting, and has lovely manners, and speaks in a tone of mellifluous, rather beautiful, received English. He is also full of fascinating contradictions. He is the son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales. In fact he tells me “ I do know The Lady Magazine well. My mother has advertised in the magazine for nannies and housekeepers since before I was born.’
He was educated at Alleyn’s, a private school in Dulwich, and he went on to Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, where he read English Literature. When he broke the news to his parents that he wanted to act, they suggested that becoming a plumber might be a better career. He didn’t listen. On screen he frequently plays, toffs, aristocrats and royalty with ease and aplomb, and yet, he is no Tory. In his twenties, he was briefly a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and he maintains a life long passion and interest in politics and socialism.
Twice a year, since he was seventeen years old, Sam takes the sleeper, around midnight from Paddington to Penzance, ‘a whisky in hand until Reading, at which point he retires to his bunk’. He adds that if he times things just right, ‘ I wake to the view of St Michael’s Mount.’ He then spends a very happy, contented few days cooking, washing up piles of dishes and generally grafting behind the scenes at the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove.
Why, I ask him does he feel the need to do that?
For the first time in the interview, he grows very quiet, and almost becomes tongue-tied.
Is it the contrast between thinking and physical grafting?
‘Yes, it is partly that. I just like washing up… actually I don’t like washing up. But if you have a team of five washing up together, and you get to the end, it is enormously satisfying.’
I said West is complicated.

West’s trips to Penzance, also, happily coincide with the main spring and autumn migration patterns. Originally, he was inspired to study the birds, after a trip to Kenya in his teens to visit his uncle who was a solider working for the British liaison force out in Africa.
‘ I went out on safari, and looked into their garden, and I just loved the fact that birds were either four inches long and bright blue, or seven feet tall and couldn’t fly. It wasn’t too difficult to get the mixed up. I’ve also subsequently discovered that Nairobi is the most fecund city in the world for birds.’
But the years went buy, and he didn’t seriously take up twitching until he took over from Michael Grandage as artistic director of the Sheffield Theatres, a job he candidly describes as ‘reasonably stressful’.
‘ I lived eight miles from the middle of a grouse moor. So at six in the morning, I could just bomb west, and go for a walk before breakfast. And although the birdlife on a moor isn’t amazing, it was the first time I had lived anywhere near the country, as I grew up in south London; and it took me out of myself in a way I found completely captivating.
‘There is also the slightly nerdy, boyish need to catalogue things, to list things. I used to be a train spotter, and very proud one too. My dad had a great interest in trains around the same age. There is something enormously beautiful about steam trains, and the fact that we made them. I do worry very much that we’ve lost the connection between effort and reward that comes from making things. I also think we don’t know how things are made, if we don’t make them ourselves. David Nobbs, who I follow on twitter, said something very funny recently. He said, ‘ a lot of middleclass people regret the loss of menial jobs they wouldn’t last ten minutes in’, which I am sure is true.
‘ Nevertheless,’ he argues, Sheffield is a very good example of this decline. ‘It used to be a city that made things; now it is a city that sells things. And it’s losing its memory. It may be a very nice city; it is certainly cleaner, and there are more fountains. But there is something about the satisfaction of producing things with your hands, the sense of achievement, and pride and indeed all of that.’
West is certainly complicated but the one thing he isn’t is a hypocrite. When he says there is satisfaction in using your hands he means it.
When he isn’t washing up, he goes bird watching. ‘ There’s this valley near Land’s End. It ‘s called Cop Valley – and it must be the most beautiful setting in Britain. It’s like Rivendale. It’s this incredibly damp, warm valley, and the birds are amazing. The chances of seeing a real rarity are quite high, and even if they aren’t, you get lots of black caps and white caps, and spring and autumn migrants, singing, and the weather is wonderful.

‘Going birding gives me a completely different attitude to the year. Now I see the seasons as heralding different, migratory birds. Instead of November and it’s freezing, I think it’s November and the geese have arrived. Migration is one of the great mysteries of nature.’
Several days after interviewing Sam West, I stumbled across this quote from him on his entry for IMDB – the leading information site for filmmakers and actors.
‘Oliver Reed regretted not sleeping with every woman in the world, and Betjeman said he wished he’d had more sex. It doesn’t matter how much sex I have, I’ll be of Olli Reed’s mind when it comes down to it. And so will anybody who is honest.’
I would say that Sam West is a man who frets and thinks and lusts after life – keen to fill up everyday with meaning, purpose and experience – and what’s wrong with that?
Eternal Law is on ITV every Thursday at 9pm. It is repeated on www.itv.com
Close the Coalhouse Door Opens in April to book – www. northernstage.co.uk
Alison Jane Reid – Copyright January 2012
Download PDF of this Sam West Interview for The Lady Magazine Published February 2012

The Ethical Hedonist