Tom Hollander Hoped to Play Truman Capote 20 Years Ago. Finally, He Got His Chance

I appreciate the answer, unless you feel that you want to share anything else.

There are issues about representation. There are types of actors that have not been given sufficient chances to play great parts. All of these things are in the process of being revised and improved and changed, and that’s all absolutely right. At the same time as that movement is happening, what shouldn’t be sacrificed is the sort of basic fundamental principle of actors being able to play things that they are not necessarily, because then that’s not art. If an actor’s body is their canvas, my body is my tool—the painter uses a canvas, the actor uses their own body—so within that definition of acting, there has to be the possibility of transformation. And sometimes the most interesting, creative work comes from where somebody who is not something is coming up against it, and it’s the fizz of that—the joining of two that makes it interesting.

So what did that look like for you? What was your relationship to Capote’s work, and were you reading a lot of him in the lead-up to this?

Not as much as I should, I should be able to say, yes, I read every word, but… When we were doing it, literally, my day was spent learning the lines, the weekends were learning the lines, the evenings were learning the lines, and the days were shooting them. I’d read Other Voices, Other Rooms and In Cold Blood when I was young, and I remembered them, and I’d read a few of the short stories. And Music for Chameleons, I read just before we started. But I’m no authority on Truman Capote. I think I’ve read enough of him to have a sense of how good he was.

But in terms of what I know about him as a man, it’s what we did in this show, which has kind of come through what Robbie knows of him. I’m the actor. I’m the vessel through which all their work and their assimilation of the different elements gets presented. I just try and embody what they have created. It was beyond Truman, probably, at some point. I don’t think we should be thinking of it as a biopic. The biopics were those two films; this is taking him as a sort of mythical figure that you can do stuff with tonally.

What was it like to get into the role every day? Some of your co-stars have said they feel like they met you, Tom, only after filming wrapped.

I had an amazing team around me, without whom I would’ve had a collapse of some sort. Jerome Butler, my voice coach, was a wing man and sort of just buddy and brilliant collaborator, who helped me find the voice and was always there. Polly Bennett is a movement person who I’ve worked with before in the theater, and a couple of times she came over for a bit and helped me. We had fun working out what my version of Truman could be physically, to find a language for that. And then you learn the lines. Then I imagine saying the lines as me, and you try and sort of blur yourself with the character. What I couldn’t do playing this part was look at it. I couldn’t watch myself. I couldn’t look at the monitor because I found it literally physically nauseating to watch myself. He’s a very, very singular guy, Truman Capote. The ideal scenario is to be sitting completely still. beautifully lit with a cigarette doing a little pose. And then I can watch it and I go, okay, that looks fine. But Truman is too active, too mobile, too vocally extraordinary for me to watch it.