I met the actor Rufus Sewell years ago at a party in London. I remember that he made me laugh and was charming in an irreverent, English sort of way. I think I might have had a slight crush on him. There was an edge to him, which I found unsurprising, given that in his presence reasonably sensible film journalists became totally insensible, announcing him breathlessly, like a teenage girl would: He was "Byronic," "unruly," "haunting," "smoldering," and—poor man—the "living incarnation of Heathcliff." The adjectives that went before him were trite and reductive because, above and beyond his physical beauty (Sewell is a joy to look at), he is a bloody good actor, a fact that had been mainly misted over.
Sewell, who is 40, grew up in Twickenham, the son of a Welsh mother and an Australian animator father who worked on Yellow Submarine and died when Sewell was 10. He had a muddling, bohemian childhood and adolescence, which incorporated a peacock's pride worth of hair dye, troublemaking, bad punk bands, and the moniker "fat white duke" (in homage to the thin one, David Bowie) during a bout of teenage roundness. After leaving school, Sewell applied to London's Central School of Speech and Drama, borrowing the audition fee from one of his teachers. When Judi Dench directed a student production at Central, she saw in him that elusive "thing" that others have been seeing ever since. Sewell got an agent, and the career began.
"I only ever wanted to do interesting, diverse, independent stuff," he says when we have tea in the rain on Portobello Road. But his career has taken a curious trajectory. "For the past few years," Sewell goes on, "I haven't been offered any independents at all. If I want to work, I have to do big films. So if I'm the prick on the horse, chances are I can be in a movie. Otherwise, I'm unemployed."
From Hollywood holiday feel-good films to bodice-rippers (including the breakout role of Will Ladislaw in the 1994 BBC production of Middlemarch), Sewell has played the "prick on the horse" perhaps more than he might have willed. But he has also had a prolific and celebrated theater career. He was nominated for an Olivier Award in 1994 for his Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the National, directed by Trevor Nunn. But it is in Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard's glance at the Soviet invasion of his native Czechoslovakia in 1968 (opening on Broadway in November), that Sewell gets to show us what he's really made of. Shuttling between Prague and Cambridge, spanning 22 years, and set to a period soundtrack both nostalgic and stirring, the play finds Sewell's Czech student Jan sent to Britain during a time of insidious unrest. He goes ostensibly to spy, but ends up getting lost in music and love.
Sewell's performance—for which he picked up an Olivier during Rock 'n' Roll's nine-month run in London—is startling. It is wiry and jumpy, wry and heartbreaking. I wonder how a guy who was born in 1967 could get his head around a time and character so removed from our own immediate consciousness. "I'm slightly thought-blind," he says with a burst of laughter, then explains: "Don't worry about the details too much and just let the sweep of it hit you. I think it can be an advantage when watching or reading Stoppard, too—the speed and the love and the wit and the ping-pong of it. People can come to the play with very different levels of understanding and still take a lot away."
