Dominic West on Coming Home to London's Butley After TV Success in The Wire
Dominic West came to prominence in the U.S. playing the American working-class cop McNulty in TV’s much-lauded The Wire. The dashing actor has since forsaken the Baltimore climes of that series to return to the London stage, where he is starring in a revival of Simon Gray’s bilious 1971 comedy Butley. West, 41, plays the bisexual English department lecturer of the title, a part originated by the late Alan Bates and revived several seasons ago on Broadway by Nathan Lane. Broadway.com caught up with the engaging West prior to a midweek performance at the Duchess Theatre, where director Lindsey Posner’s excellent revival is playing through August 27.
Ben Butley is both a charming and scathing character. Is that a challenging combination to live with eight times a week?
Well, I’m very fond of him, and that hasn’t diminished. If anything has changed as the run has gone on, it’s that I’ve found myself becoming not so much more verbally adroit as more prone to vitriol [laughs]. Butley is great at vitriol, which is something I was never very good at and shied away from. Now, I actively seek it out!
So, you’re all of a sudden rude to waiters. Is that it?
No, no, I think I’ll always be very English about that! [Laughs.] In fact, I’m afraid to say, my newfound vitriol has been in regards to a journalist. Long live the great art of vitriol!
What’s wonderful about both the play and your performance is how clear it is that Butley saves his most scabrous barbs for himself.
Yes, it’s interesting that you put it like that. It is quite a balancing act to make [the character] as acerbic as he has been written and yet lovable. I think Alan Bates didn’t have much trouble because he was such a lovable guy, and I’m sure the final scene would have got fairly unreserved gales of laughter in 1971. Now, I think, the audience is much more inclined to take as it more the cry of a lonely man than a comic tour de force, and that’s the challenge of the part: to make Ben Butley as hateful as he is and lovable at the same time.
Does the milieu of Butley resonate with you personally, since you went to Eton [the tony English boarding school]?
There’s no doubt that I did know the world of this play very well. We had several very colorful and charismatic teachers like Butley around at Eton, and quite a few of my old schoolmasters from that time have come and lapped the play up [laughs]. But what’s interesting is that Butley realizes at the end of the play that he has to get the hell away from the kids if he’s ever going to write anything, whereas what’s most exciting about the university environment—or so you would think—is having young people around, the aspect that Butley feels to be a drain on his energies.
What’s it like playing someone with such a singular command of language? You had a taste of that when you took over from Rufus Sewell in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll.
You do just get an extra thrill when you’re speaking words that are wonderfully eloquent and that spring from such a rich resource of vocabulary and the imagination, and the two plays share an articulate [quality]. But they’re completely different: Jan [the Czech dissident in Stoppard’s play] is much more instantly sympathetic, and that’s also a much more emotional part. The thing about these sorts of plays from great writers is that they remind me of what someone once said about Shakespeare: If you play these parts, you become a better actor and perhaps a better human being. They get the synapses buzzing.
Did you make a decision to come back to London theatre? You could have stayed in America after The Wire and furthered your Hollywood career.
I suppose I could have done, and maybe am still hoping to—I’m still holding out for a glittering Hollywood career [laughs]. What happened was that I fell in love with an Irish girl [Catherine Fitzgerald] and married her, and so it was family that brought me back. Now we have three children; the oldest is four. What’s great in career terms is that thanks to The Wire, I have a certain profile which gets me good parts in the theater. I’ve always done theater, and hopefully always will; it’s a muscle one wants to keep using.
Your oldest daughter [Martha West, from a previous relationship] is doing well, having appeared alongside Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly in the Darwin-themed movie Creation.
I know! She’s 12 and has done a film and it turns out that she’s brilliant at it. She missed a lot of school to do the movie and it was clear that she could go on doing this, but I think we all agreed that she should take [acting] up later, after school. That said, I find myself thinking about things I could do with Marth. That would be really lovely.
Do you feel like an honorary American, having played one so convincingly on The Wire?
Well, I’ve certainly benefited from American generosity, which exists to a degree that I haven’t found equalled anywhere else. Occasionally, I find myself grousing at Australians and Americans coming to this country playing our heroes—Robin Hood, and people like that. And then I have to remind myself to what extent I’ve been the beneficiary of America’s generosity. Baltimore, for instance, is an extraordinary place, and as a result commands great loyalty from its natives. I can understand why.
You’re joining your former Wire co-star, Clarke Peters, to play Iago to his Othello at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in Yorkshire in the fall. Was that project simmering while you were in the U.S.?
I don’t think we discussed it during The Wire; all I remember is Clarke saying that he would play Othello when Dominic does Iago, and so here we are [laughs]. I’m looking forward to it because I’m from Sheffield, so for me, the play will be like going home. But we start rehearsals at the beginning of August, which means I will be rehearsing Iago by day and playing Butley in the evening. I imagine that will have a bit of an effect!