Rhys Ifans from "Notting Hill"

 

I’ve been a fan of Rhys Ifans since watching him steal scenes from Hugh Grant in “Notting Hill,” and (as an imported Euro-kicker) in “The Replacements.”


He’s done period pieces (“Vanity Fair,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”) and comedies, straight dramas (Enduring Love,” with Daniel Craig, is his best) and big budget films.

He had a small but crucial role, as Luna Lovegood’s journalist dad in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” But his immersion in big budget blockbusters came from the film we will see him in next year. Ifans, 44, is Dr. Curt Connors, “The Lizard,” in “The Amazing Spider Man.” He’s the main villain.

“I dipped my toe into ‘Harry Potter,’ but I put my whole body into ‘Spider-Man.’ It was a thrill to work with Marc Webb [ of "(500) Days of Summer). He's like Roland Emmerich (his "Anonymous" director, famed for spectacles like "Independence Day" and "2012"). He's doing blockbusters, but he has an 'indie' heart, an indie character-oriented sensibility.

"That was a very telling thing on the set. We knew it would be action-packed and epic and all that. But Marc made sure that the human dynamic was paramount, and that’s going to elevate the film possibly to a place that the other [ Spider Man] films got to.”

Like everyone else, Ifans was blown away by Emmerich’s painstaking and spare-no-expense efforts to recreate Elizabethan England for “Anonymous.”

“Often period films have budgets that keep us from seeing London in full. There are several helicopter-like shots which Roland, the master of CGI, made sure our film has. It liberates the film to see that. I really got a sense of London, a very old city that becomes a character in the film, as it was in Elizabethan times.


“Roland does paint with a big brush. But what separates him from blockbuster film contemporaries is his attention to the emotional dynamics between characters. It’s FORENSIC. Very detailed. In his films, the strand you see running across these huge canvases, through these huge universes he creates is that they’re populated by very real human relationships. That’s the ace in his deck of cards.”
One oddball question I posed to Ifans was the connection between playing an artist in the shadows — he is Edward De Vere, whom “Anonymous” says is the “true author” of Shakespeare’s plays — and the last thing we heard him in, as narrator of “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the documentary about underground artist Banksy.

“It’s purely by chance, that. But there is high irony in that I guess Banksy is that rare artist working today in near total anonymity is Banksy. Perhaps there was some sort of subliminal marriage there that I made.”

“Anonymous” opens Oct. 28, nationwide. More from