ScreenWize

When Christian McKay auditioned for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), he decided to overcome his nerves by pretending to be Richard Burton. McKay, the British actor currently wowing critics and audiences in the title role of the feature film Me and Orson Welles, had a perfectly good career as a concert pianist before trying out for a professional life on the stage. “Doing the audition for RADA was a kind of test, “ he says, “to see whether I had any talent for acting. I remember thinking that they wouldn’t like my voice, so I decided to do Burton. And then I panicked because I was sure that they would find me out. I went in with this deep Welsh voice and they looked at me and said, ‘so, you’re from Lancashire?’

The Burton impersonation obviously did McKay no harm, as three years later he graduated and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. But it was at RADA that his fellow students spotted McKay’s likeness to another actor famous for his deeply resonant voice - Orson Welles. “People said that I resembled him a little bit,” says McKay with a firm and genuine modesty. Then he laughs. “I only remember Orson as this big, gargantuan iceberg of a man and at drama school, whenever they said ‘you look a bit like Harry Lime’ [the character Welles plays in the film The Third Man], I really thought they were having a go at my weight! So I’d be very anti-Orson – I used to think ‘I’m not that big….’ Mind you, I must be the only actor who had to lose weight to play Orson Welles!”

In Me & Orson Welles, McKay plays the famous radio, theatre and film director as a young man, when he had just started The Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937. Directed by Richard Linklater, the film tells the story of a young acting student (played by Zac Efron) who gets a bit part in Welles now legendary production of Julius Caesar. Whilst Efron gets to play out a fairly standard coming-of–age tale, McKay does the film’s heavy lifting in a stunning performance as the charismatic, egotistical and difficult man who challenged the conventions of every art form he touched.

The film is not the first time McKay has portrayed Orson Welles. He appeared in the highly successful stage production Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004, a production that then toured to London, Toronto and New York. Yet McKay maintains that in many ways, performing in the play was a disadvantage when it came to the film role. “I had to forget all the work I had done in the stage play. In that production I played Welles up to the age of 70 with a fat suit and a beard, and so I had to unlearn him. In the film he’s right at the beginning of his career. It all lies ahead of him, and because it’s his own theatre, his neck’s on the line. He’s only 22 years old and it’s really the start of his independence. So it was like playing two different characters.”

It was the play, however, that got McKay noticed by the film’s director Richard Linklater, the Texan filmmaker best known for his movies Before Sunrise and School of Rock. Linklater had just started his search for a leading Hollywood actor to play Orson Welles when he received an email from a friend alerting him to McKay’s performance in the stage production, then touring in New York. Linklater immediately jumped on a plane and watched McKay perform in a tiny 50-seat theatre. It was worth the trip, and Linklater was convinced enough to invite McKay to Austin to do a screen test.

“We did three scenes from the movie,” says Linklater. “I cast some people, did period wardrobe, we had an old car and we did a scene in the back; Christian came in and we worked together and hung out for a couple of days. After that, I didn’t even need to look at the footage. I just knew the kind of guy he was and thought the film gods were making a very special offering, as they sometimes do. But one of the stumbling blocks we had was a Welles who was unknown. ‘Can you get a bigger name to play Welles?’ Ours was always the same argument: no, this is Welles!”

McKay was also aware of the casting conundrum he had presented Linklater. “Rick had a difficult job because I was cast first,” says McKay, “and he decided to make the movie because he had found his Orson. This was a problem for Hollywood and they wanted to get rid of me. Producers - who have subsequently said I did a great job of course - really wanted me out. But I could see I was a problem, and I kept giving Rick the names of other Hollywood stars who could play the part. I told him that I didn’t mind not having the role, that he shouldn’t worry about me, that he should go and make the film without me because I had my little theatre company.”

Linklater stuck with his decision, fighting hard against Hollywood’s hard-nosed, box-office focused approach to casting lead roles and, despite the concerns, managed to convince names like Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes and Eddie Marsan to join the cast. But the pressure didn’t ease up on McKay, whose next challenge was making the transition from stage to screen, not an easy task for many theatre actors. “When I saw the screen test, I was horrified,” says McKay. “ It was two months before we were to shoot the film, and I rang Rick up and I told him it was terribly theatrical, that all the gestures were fake. Rick said ‘don’t worry we’ll get there’, and he had to teach me how to act on film.”

Probably the greatest decision that Linklater and McKay had to make for the film was just how to portray the legend himself. For some Welles was the “boy wonder,” a creative genius and an utterly charming an inspirational figure. For others, he was brash and insufferable, using cruelty to humiliate and alienate even those closest to him.

“Luckily, Rick and I agreed how Orson was to be portrayed,” says McKay. “I didn’t want to be an apologist, and I told Rick that. But I also wanted to wind down the window every now and then and show the vulnerability that I thought was there.” The resulting portrayal – of an upbeat and thoroughly charming Welles who is concerned about his art above all else - including friends and his first wife Virginia, then heavily pregnant with their first child - didn’t please everyone. McKay met both Welles’ daughter Christopher (who wrote a biography of her father) and Norman Lloyd, the veteran actor who was in the Mercury Theatre troupe and who played Cinna the Poet in that famous first production of Julius Caesar. “I adored Christopher, says McKay, “and I got on well with her when she came to the New York premiere of the film. But she hated the way I portrayed her father. But then I spoke to Norman Lloyd, and he said I didn’t go far enough. And I believe him. He told me some stories about Welles that made my toes curl.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon