The camera loves him

“I wanted a change, just a change from the stage,” he says in his soft, halting speech, delivered between drags on a roll-up. “Wolf Hall came along around the time of the end of the run of Richard III and Twelfth Night in London. Then I was off to do a play I’d co-written, then to direct Much Ado, then I knew we’d be doing the New York thing [Twelfth Night/Richard III on Broadway].” He was, he says, just a little washed out. Many of those parts — Rooster Byron in Jerusalem; Valere in La Bête (who opened proceedings with a nonstop 25-minute monologue), Viola in Twelfth Night, Richard III — had been big, physical, orotund. Cromwell offered him a more internal piece of work. And in the interim, he had softened towards the film industry.

“A few years ago, I decided I didn’t really want to do film any more. I certainly didn’t want to be involved in going off round the world to promote films. I was really happy in the theatre.” In part, he admits, this was pride. “As an actor, you’re told all the time by your agent you must do a film. After a while, I thought, ‘F*** it. I always wanted to be a theatre actor. I make a good living, I have wonderful stuff to do. I’m gifted in that area. Why should I have to struggle and always feel I’m somehow inadequate because I don’t do television or film?’”

In equal part, though, he wasn’t sure if he was good enough. “I just didn’t feel at that time that I had done enough film to be offered parts that were interesting. I just didn’t like the whole business of it, really.”

Then he met an agent, Christian Hodell, who suggested that, given how much Rylance loved watching films, maybe it was time for our greatest living actor to appear in some. Wolf Hall was the first screen project he liked.

He has appeared in big movies and television series before, notably in The Other Boleyn Girl (as Thomas Boleyn) and The Government Inspector, for which he won a Bafta. But he never achieved the early success of some of his Rada contemporaries.

“I think I got a bit chippy about it. When I was younger, there were a lot of people of my generation who had great success in film, and I never could get into it. Partly, I couldn’t have, and partly I was always busy in theatre, and I wouldn’t wait. I hated the idea that you had to wait around to get a film job. I watched Dan Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman and Ken Branagh, Tim Roth, lots of really brilliant actors who do fantastic things on film. And while I kind of idolised what they were doing, I thought, ‘I just can’t do that. I’m not that kind of actor.’”

He refers several times to a meeting with Day-Lewis in New York last year, while he was doing Twelfth Night and Richard III, that has obviously been something of an epiphany. “I had no idea he would even be aware of what I was doing. And, of course, he was very aware of it. Very, very friendly. And I thought, ‘How ridiculous!’ I could have been friends with Dan all these years, you know, and shared my delight with things he pulled off, rather than putting him on a pedestal.

“I think that really poked the ice for me, and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ I’ve loved films since I was a kid... this is the pride of a 20-year-old man now.”

Typically for a man obsessive about detail and groundwork, he prepared for his return to the screen in Wolf Hall by devouring movies and parsing performances. “I watched about 25 films. I just saw how little people were doing. I watched Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James. I thought he was just remarkable. I’ve not particularly noticed Brad Pitt before. I watched a lot of Robert Mitchum’s films. I’ve always been such a fan of his — he’s so wonderfully normal. Clooney, too, an amazing actor, so understated and, again, draws you in.”

Another actor he has bonded with is Penn, whose invitation to appear in The Gunman he took up at once. “I remember, when I first met him, thinking he had so much dash to him. I thought, ‘This must’ve been what film stars of the 1940s were like.’” The film has Rylance, who plays a professional soldier in a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe and Africa with Penn’s character, doing new things — “running around and pointing guns at people”.

The Wolf Hall shoot, despite the lack of guns, was as much a screen acting tutorial as a job. “There was no one at Rada teaching us about film acting. It is still a profession you only learn about by being on set and in front of a camera.”

One thing he picked up sounds straight from the Day-Lewis school of preparing. “One way to deal with the shortness of time in front of the camera is to stay in character while everyone else is preparing the lights and all of the other stuff — to stay in character in the same way they all stay in character when you are acting. The grips and everyone, they go quiet, but they keep the engine going. So, likewise, when you are sitting waiting to do a scene, keep the engine turning, keep in character.”

If he chooses to stay in character for Spielberg’s BFG, that will be some set to be around. It will undoubtedly be his most high-profile film role to date, and one of those castings you might not have predicted, but could not have bettered. Rylance and the Big Friendly Giant are both men with a love of language and a twinkle in their eye.

“Roald Dahl has this marvellous connection with the childish part in us all. I think of all the fathers and mothers who must have had fun saying those crazy words to their kids — that would have helped all kinds of child-parent relationships. The allowance of farts? It really is a clever thing.”

The Gunman is released on March 20