The Birmingham Post (England); 6/15/1999
Mention Rupert Penry Jones at most wine bars during happy hour, and the general reaction is likely to be: who's he?
A small number of theatre buffs may remember this excellent actor's stunning performance last summer in the Almeida's world premiere of Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby at Malvern. One person in every ten million may just have glimpsed him playing Ferdinand to Kylie Minogue's Miranda in an open-air all-singing, all-dancing, hip-hop version of The Tempest set on a disused plantation in the Caribbean, "Where I used to get to the theatre on a jet ski." And yes, Penry Jones told me that Kylie Minogue is a very good actress, his loyalty silencing my doubts about her verse-speaking capacities.
Yet all that virtual anonymity may change when his new film is released next month. Called Virtual Sexuality , and tipped to be the big teen hit of the summer, it is a movie which will showcase Penry Jones's astonishing good looks and with its provocative theme should put him on the covers of the Sunday glossies.
"I actually play a creature who is a virtual reality sci-fi creation with the mind of the girl who created it. So it's a male exterior with a female mind inside."
Meanwhile he is playing the title role in Don Carlos, the Schiller play much better known in Britain for the opera Verdi based on it, at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford-upon-Avon studio, The Other Place.
He arrives very late for a meeting which almost becomes the interview that never was.
"I have damaged the vertebrae in my neck," he says, apologetically.
"I did it in March, and the fencing in Don Carlos has only exacerbated the pain."
Anyway, here we are at The Other Place snack bar two hours late. He looks exhausted and flushed and the profuse apologies give way to a revelation - there is another side to this well-meaning, six-foot, 28-year-old actor.
"I decided I didn't want to go to university, preferring drama school instead. So I went to Bristol Old Vic. But unfortunately I was thrown out after two years, so I didn't complete the course and I failed to graduate."
But the mind boggles. How could this effortlessly charming man, son of actress Angela Thorne, who is at the moment calmly pouring brown sauce over a hot bacon sandwich as to the manner born, get thrown out of drama school?
"The answer is quite simple - I was highly objectionable. I would stand up and argue the toss about anything and everything. I would rubbish the lecturers and was inclined to dismiss things as a load of old cobblers.
"Finally, we decided we had had enough of each other and I left. Sadly, the authorities felt they couldn't recommend me to an agent. Actually, I think I was too young to recognise the quality of what I was being given and in all fairness I did have a very good voice teacher during my two years at Bristol."
For 18 months, Penry Jones was a marked man and failed to get an audition - nobody in theatreland was anxious to recognise his talent. "In desperation I wrote to a top agent, Jeremy Conway, and he took me on to his books," says Penry Jones. Since then things have picked up. Recently, Penry Jones played Fortinbras in Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet , understudying the lead. "Which taught me a lot since I managed to see most performances and Ralph was superb. So much so that even though I knew exactly what he was going to do each night every performance gave me a lump in my throat."
At last, we seem to be cooking with gas. Then, to my absolute astonishment, the stage manager for Don Carlos suddenly butts in to say that Penry Jones is wanted on stage for a rehearsal.
He heads towards the stage looking hot and uncomfortable, wearing what passes in 1999 for a Crombie overcoat (in June?).
"Just 15 minutes," he says, looking apologetic and leaving behind his RSC accident report form.
I drink a fifth pot of tea and wonder whether to chuck in the whole thing and leave. Yet it isn't the actor's fault really - so I stay and decline a bacon sandwich.
When Judy Garland sang Born in a Trunk she was telling the story of many theatre children whose early lives were spent in dressing rooms in every theatre their parents happened to be performing. Before he was whisked away, Penry Jones told me it was very much the same thing for him.
"Instead of babysitters, I just sat among the costumes in my parents' dressing room and I suppose the influences began then. My father, Peter Penry Jones, was in The Mousetrap and I recall being placed on stage behind the fireplace so that I could watch him at work through the coals. My early inspiration lay there I suppose and later I remember thinking how wonderful my mother looked in a scarlet riding habit as Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance at the Chichester Festival."
Rupert Penry Jones returns. We settle down and he's about to reveal more interesting facts about his early life when Nemesis looms up again. "You're wanted on stage for a bit, about 20 minutes."
It's not the actor's fault again, I tell myself again, but decide to go anyway. I'm up to here with The Other Place and this interview. But Rupert Penry Jones comes back and I must say I admire the courtesy he extended to me in what has become an impossible situation.
Two o'clock was meant to be the cut-off time for this interview and now it's after four. He needs, he says, "a hot bath and a rest". He has a performance coming up within hours and he looks exhausted. So we cover the usual territory for a few minutes. What are his future ambitions? He mentions Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and adds "I'd also be delighted if someone would offer me the brother in Chekov's The Three Sisters you know, the poor man with that dreadful wife."
I wondered if he had ever thought about playing low-life - the sort of characters who slither in and out of TV cop dramas. He explains that he tends to be typecast because of his looks.
"I generally seem to play middle and upper class people," he says looking paler by the minute. "I'd love to play hoods, but you can get the real thing easily these days - at least on television. So they can cast according to type. But in the theatre, it's different, people have to use their imagination. One of the nice things about the intimacy of The Other Place is that you can almost see people doing just that - you can see their faces - I like that, and it doesn't make me nervous." And what about the movies? Does he have any particular ambitions there? "Oh yes," he says, putting out a well-groomed hand to say goodbye. I'd like to be the first blond Bond."