Thread by @thetimes

When did Matthew Macfadyen feel he’d got the measure of Tom Wambsgans?

“It was the scene with Greg at the baseball where he turns on him, and that was the hook. I thought, ‘Oh, OK. This is good. He’s that awful bully who kicks the cat.’"

thetimes.co.uk/article/matthe…

Macfadyen relishes Tom’s toe-curling dialogue. “There’s always a part of you thinking, ‘This is excruciating.’ But it’s delicious to play. And very therapeutic."

He and Sarah Snook, who plays his wife, Shiv, in Succession, discussed the central puzzle: what this smart, beautiful, worldly heiress sees in Tom.

The script has one allusion to how messed up she was when they met.

"We extrapolated on that backstory a bit. Maybe she’d been f***ed over quite badly, been badly hurt, and she was never going to make herself vulnerable again. Tom is just very safe, dependable."

He is delighted at the praise for series 3 of Succession. It was a long, hard shoot.

Usually he and his actress wife, Keeley Hawes, follow a rule where neither is away longer than 3 weeks from their children.

But Macfadyen landed in New York last November and, as visa rules changed, he couldn’t return home until July.
Instead, he lived in a series of Airbnbs around the locked-down city.

“It was weird. I was just sitting on my own, praying for days where I worked.”

He’d walk Manhattan alone. “I had such an unstructured, weird, solitary life. So I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to become a vegan.’ I did it for six weeks and quite enjoyed that.”

Only as New York slowly unfurled did he socialise with his cast mates. “I’m friends with all of them."

"I went out with Nick Braun a few times, and Sarah and her husband were there for a bit. Latterly we went out for dinners, once every couple of weeks. But it wasn’t an especially convivial time.”

thetimes.co.uk/article/matthe…

Now Macfadyen is alone at home with his kids while Hawes is filming a BBC drama in Tenerife.

None of the kids watch Succession – “too dense” – and his daughter would rather he was in “something I’d see as a bit schlocky. Ideally something vampire-related.”

Macfadyen says he’s never worked out how to fan the flames of good performances into stardom. Perhaps he lacks the ego.

“I’m still sort of ambitious, but I’m happy to go, ‘Pick me. Tell me where to stand.’"

Having worked with big film stars, does he think they’re happier? “No,” he says decisively. “I know they’re not.”

Macfadyen didn’t really enjoy his early break, playing Mr Darcy in the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, opposite Keira Knightley.

It took such a long time to win the part, “by the time I got it, I felt sort of miffed. There was a feeling of, ‘Don’t f*** this up.’"

After Pride and Prejudice, Macfadyen was offered a “slew of romantic comedies, sort of B-movies."

"You think, ‘I’ve just done this, I can’t just do a crappier version.’ So I sat at home with the baby, being Mr Darcy, getting fatter and fatter and fatter.”

He approves of introducing intimacy co-ordinators “I wish we’d had them. Because then you’re not afraid to go, ‘I don’t want to do that’

It sounds OTT, but it’s a healthy overcorrection. It takes away the pressure to take off all your clothes, or do stuff you didn’t want to do”

Will he be sad to say goodbye to that villain-victim Tom Wambsgans?

“The thing is, as with all of them to varying degrees, he thinks he’s doing his best. Tom’s not totally inept. And he’s quite sweet in some ways.”

Read the full interview here: thetimes.co.uk/article/matthe…