‘Film sets can be a hierarchical, beastly, power-abusing structure’: Bertie Carvel on Hollywood, typecasting and Dalgliesh

It’s straight in at the deep end with Bertie Carvel. The London actor, who was once the most hated man in the country as Suranne Jones’s cheating suburban hubby in Doctor Foster, is speaking to me about the second season of his Channel 5 detective drama, Dalgliesh. He appears over Zoom from the Hampstead house he grew up in, which he moved back into with his wife during the pandemic. That must have provided some comfort in uncertain times, I proffer. He tilts his head sideways. “Well, it was distressing in some ways, because we moved back here because my mum had passed away.” Oh, right. “It was a lot to encounter all of your history in that way, but amazing, too.” Around the same time, Carvel’s son was born. “I was looking back over my life as he was starting his,” he says. “It was sort of amazing and poetic and wonderful.”

It was at this intersection of life and death that Carvel signed on to play Adam Dalgliesh, the poet-detective created by the baroness novelist PD James in the Sixties. Dalgliesh is no Luther: he pootles around the British countryside in his immaculate Jaguar E-type, stoically solving crimes while grieving the untimely deaths of his wife and child. “One of the reasons it was exciting for me to take that role was to have somewhere to put it all,” he says. “​To me, it was about grief.”

The mild-mannered detective is the kind of role one might assume Carvel, a Rada graduate born in Marylebone, would have played throughout his career. He’s conscious of that. “The truth is that I have spent my career trying, I think with some success, to outrun typecasting,” he says. “That’s my driving motivation.” It’s hard to disagree with him. In 2012, he won an Olivier for Best Actor for his performance as Miss Trunchbull in Matilda the Musical. With a heaving bosom, a giant wart and a clarion shriek, Carvel successfully transformed into the fearsome headmistress of Crunchem Hall Primary School.

Today though, the chameleonic actor – who was also unrecognisable as an orange and sagging Donald Trump in Mike Bartlett’s 2022 play The 47th– looks, well, normal. He’s wearing a navy crew neck, and his beard is wiry and unkempt. Day to day, he looks much more like the politicians he’s often cast as, such as Nick Clegg and Tony Blair. “I like to work in a universe of moral relativism,” Carvel says. “Maybe that’s a good twinning with politicians!” Carvel’s father, John, was social affairs editor at The Guardian – something that played a pivotal role in his fascination with politics. “These are the people making decisions that impact all of us ordinary mortals; they are the demigods of our epoch. So it’s thrilling to look at them and think about them,” he says.

Blair is the latest politico on Carvel’s rap sheet, a role he took “without seeing any scripts”. He succeeded Jonny Lee Miller’s John Major at the end of The Crown’s season four and is due for a lot more airtime in season five. The latest series of the Netflix drama aired without a fictional disclaimer, despite the efforts of the government’s former culture secretary Oliver Dowden and actors Helena Bonham Carter and Dame Judi Dench, who accused the series of “crude sensationalism”. Despite understanding the “sensitivity” there, Carvel firmly believes that “in a free society, it must be legitimate for artists to represent the real world and reframe it artistically. Otherwise, we might as well all go home.”

Carvel next stars in Pygmalion at the Old Vic, playing the eccentric, egotistical linguist Professor Henry Higgins. It’s about as far from the understated Dalgliesh as you can get. While any reimagining of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play (itself based on an Ovidian myth) must convince the audience of its relevance to modern society, Dalgliesh trades in its lack of urgency. At a time when every TV show seems to feel the desperate need to tackle every social issue at once, Dalgliesh is happy to stay in its lane. It is, in a word, nice. What’s wrong with that? I am worrying about how to raise this point delicately when Carvel does it for me. “Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s the most urgent piece of drama ever. But it’s OK that it’s just good,” he says, with a chuckle. “It doesn’t have to be shouting its relevance from the rooftops.”

Carvel is at the stage in his career, now, where his presence in a project has become a draw for other actors. In the bonus content for Dalgliesh’s first season, Northern Irish actor Jonjo O’Neill says the chance to work with Carvel, whose work he’s followed for years, was a “huge” part of the project’s appeal. Carvel grins from ear to ear when I relay this. “I’m not gonna lie, that feels amazing... how amazing,” he says, genuinely elated. “It’s really hard to respond to that without virtue-signalling. I’m really proud of myself; I’m really proud of my career.”

A couple of years ago, Carvel found himself in a similar situation when working with the titans of Joel Coen’s Hollywoodified Shakespeare adaptation, The Tragedy of Macbeth. As Macbeth’s confidant, Banquo, Carvel played a key part alongside Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand’s power-hungry couple – both actors are Academy Award winners. Was it intimidating? “However far somebody’s star ascends, if they’re a good actor, then the focus is on what’s in front of them, not what’s behind them,” he says. “And that’s very levelling, because you can’t afford to rest on your laurels if you’re climbing Kilimanjaro. It’s really thrilling to be in the race with these thoroughbreds, and to try to keep pace with them.”

Much of Carvel’s talk about acting is in these high-flown, cerebral terms. He is an actor’s actor, through and through. On the lively debate surrounding Method acting – where a performer lives as their character even once the tapes have stopped rolling – he says he could write a book. It’s a mistake to think there are just two types of acting, he says. “It’s a spectrum. Acting is either convincing or it isn’t. It’s lifelike, or it isn’t. It doesn’t matter how you got there, and it doesn’t matter how you talk about how you got there. All that matters is that it’s convincing.”

Carvel himself has tried “all of it”, from speaking in his character’s voice off-set to “whatever the opposite of that is”. Ultimately, “​​there’s no one way to paint a picture”, he says. “There’s room for every artist.” Nevertheless, he stipulates that “a lot of monstrous behaviour is hung on that peg”. “When you have a mysterious process, it can be enabling for people who just want to exploit their power to get people to do things.”

Carvel is also incensed by the power imbalance on Hollywood film sets. “At their worst, they can be a very hierarchical, beastly, monstrous, hideous, power-abusing structure. Whereas theatre rehearsal rooms, on the whole, are democratic,” Carvel says. “There’s no reason why [film sets] couldn’t have the same kind of creativity and openness.” If he had to choose, then, between theatre and screen acting for the rest of his career, what would it be? He laughs. “I don’t have to choose! That’s the great thing about it.”

‘Dalgliesh’ season two begins on Channel 5 on Thursday 27 April at 9pm