Between Takes
HERE AND NOW Midlander Considine was first cast by his mate and mentor Shane Meadows as the damaged Morell in 1999's A Room For Romeo Brass. Since the, he;s tackled intense, volatile characters for Jim Sheridan (In America) Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love) and made two more film with Meadows - Once Upon A Time in The Midlands and the magnificent Dead Man's Shoes. Recently, he's been a sarky bobby in Hot Fuzz and British hack in The Bourne Ultimatum. He's just made a HBO one-off with Uma Thurman. My Zinc Bed and will soon reunite with Meadows for a TV project ("I play a roadie called Donk")
How are ya, then? I'm good mate! Relaxing. I'm playing with my band, Riding the Low, so we've been rehearsing.
You've just finished filming The Bourne Ultimatum. How good was it, hanging with Matt Damon? Good, yeah! We did a lot of shooting in England, at Waterloo Station, and the way Paul [Greengrass] shoots, there's always three or four cameras on the go and you don't even know where they are, half the time. I was just there, walking around with Matt, shooting among real people. It was very hectic and on the hoof.
Didn't you get slowed down by the 'real' people asking for Matt's autograph? Ha! Yeah!. We'd actually have to shut down shooting for 20-minute periods to let Matt fans disperse. But he's a great bloke, a good boy. He's lovely with people who do stop him and ask for photos. When I get gigs like Bourne, I always wish I was around more and had more time to get to know people like Matt. I'd love to work with Paul again, with a charachter I have more time with.
You've been mates with Shane Meadows for a long time now. How good is he? And how good can he be? Oh, Shane can be as good as he want's to be. If he continues to push himself. I've just been through a massive cange in the way I approach acting 'cos I found myself in a load of films where I was just coasting through 'em. I felt that people were'nt getting the best out of me because I just wasn't pushing myself enough. I can't sleepwalk through anything. I need directors to push me, challenge me, throw me curveballs. Shane is like that - I need it and he knows I need it.
Do you find acting easy? I don't, man! I'm sort of in love-hate with it. But I do learn from the tough stuff. I can be a bit of an akward bugger on-set. I sometimes have to just go into a corner and, er, find myself a bit. When I did A Room For Romeo Brass, Shane gave me absolte freedom to really go for it and that was exciting. I need to work with directors - like Shane and Paul - Who I respect enough to want to really show 'em what I've got. Otherwise, I tend to do the minimum. After A Room For Romeo Brass, I thought all films would be the same; that I'd be given a lot of freedom with the performance. They're not, of course...
How are you with being hyped? A lot of people see you as a bit of a Briish De Niro... Fucking Hell! That makes me cringe! I do get a lot of this, 'The next this and the next that...' And they say it about Shane - thta e's the new Martin Scorsese or whatever. But Scorsese, De Niro...They wrote the book, man! 'The new Robert De Niro!' Who the fuck wants that around their neck?
You don't do the Method thing, then? I don't, no A lot of people seem to think I'm a Method actor, but I hardly know what it means! When I did Hot Fuzz, we went down to the West Country and met some coppers and sat around eating cakes and looking at photosfrom murder scenes and...it was just really grim. I'm not sure it helped my charachter much -who's just a bit of a piss-taking twat, really. I've just done a telly thing with Uma Thurman and my charachter's an alcoholic, so I did go to a couple of AA meetings...
De Niro would probably have gone a bit furthur... Yeah. Fuck that! I'm not going to try and 'become' an alcoholic or something...A little bit of preperation does help, though.
Have you seen This Is England? Were you nearly in it? I'd have thought Shane must have considered you for the Combo role... Yeah, he did. This Is England is amazing, and I did have alook at Combo, but I had to be honest with Shane. I told him that I didn't think it was for me. Stephen Graham is brilliant, anyway. He bought elements to that charachter that I would have never even though of.
So, did Bourne give you a hunger for the bigger time, for Hollywood? I dunno. It frightens me a bit. I like walking down the street relatively unscathed, not being hassled every two minuites. I've stopped giving a shit about 'career' and all that. A slong as I've got a good life and m kids have got food in their stomachs...I just wanna do the things that please me and push me. I might succeed, I might fucking fail, but... one thing's for sure - I can't keep turning up and playing fucking psychopaths all the time! I'm getting a bit bored with that...
Words: Andy Lowe, Pictures: Trevor Ray Hart/Gettty Images/Rex
