Ian McShane

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

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At the ripe age of 63, it seems that Ian McShane is just now hitting his prime. The imposing Brit has been an actor of the stage and screen since the early '60s, acting alongside everyone from Richard Burton to Frankie Muniz, playing everyone from Judas Iscariot to Christopher Marlowe to the roguish Lovejoy on the '80s-'90s British television series. But it seems that only now has stardom fully arrived, thanks to his turn as Al Swearengen on HBO's Deadwood. McShane's award-winning portrayal opened the eyes of the film industry, and opened the doors for many upcoming movie roles. First up is Woody Allen's latest comedy, Scoop.

"It literally was this one and a half minute meeting," McShane says of meeting Woody Allen for the first time. "He looks at you, he says hi'and then the next day he offered me the script, and six weeks later we were doing it. And that's the way it cast, I mean, Hugh [Jackman] was the same way I think. Hugh met him, for like, two minutes. And that was it, then he makes up his mind. And he trusts what you do."

Landing the part seemed simple, but McShane still wasn't prepared for the smooth efficiency Allen brought to the shoot. "When you're on the set, I mean, he literally sets the whole thing up while you're in makeup or whatever. And then you come on, and you're supposed to know your lines, which you are, and then he lets you do your thing and you do it. It's very easy'I mean you were home for cucumber sandwiches and tea every day by four o'clock. Very civilized, eight hour days, not like any other film I've ever worked on."

In the film, McShane plays Joe Strombel, a dead reporter who appears, as a ghost, to Sondra, a clumsy college journalist played by Scarlett Johansson. Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), Strombel says, is actually a serial killer, and Johansson must expose him, giving both of them the biggest scoop of their careers.

"He probably wrote this for Scarlett, after Match Point," he says of Allen's previous film, a rare foray into a straight suspense drama. "This was a kind of daffier cap to Match Point. Match Point seemed to me when I saw it as kind of this Hitchcockian movie. You know, it was this very formalized murder mystery. And this is if you like taking the piss out of the formalized murder mystery, making it a comedy."

His initial interest in the film was the prospect of working with Allen himself, who also appears in the film as a stage magician who teams up with Johansson's character. "I wanted to do it because he was in it, I got to work with him, you know, doing his crazy nebbishy crap. Which is so far away from Woody as a person, you know. Everybody assumes that Woody Allen is this Woody Allen that you see on the screen, sort of like Charlie Chaplin, who couldn't be more different from the Tramp."

The eight hour days and the comedic plot must have been a radical departure from the world of Deadwood. The David Milch-created show brought McShane the first major award of his career in 2005, when he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Drama.

McShane says the success of Deadwood lies in the intricate storylines overseen by Milch. "Basically, he's a novelist on television, and that's his great gift, I think. Deadwood is the novel that he never wrote, as a saga for television."

It is also known for its notoriously obscene language. "Somehow the character sort of gives people a license to swear," McShane says of fans that approach him. "I don't quite know why. They come up, they feel liberated." He laughs. "Whether they swore [in the Old West] as much as much as David says they did, who knows' The truth is somewhere in between, as it always is."

The show also made headlines a few months ago with the news that its current third season would be its last, which came as a shock to Deadwood fans. Reportedly, HBO was only willing to green-light six more episodes (as opposed to the usual twelve) for the fourth season, and Milch, fearing the show would be cancelled without any resolution, balked. Eventually, HBO and Milch came to a compromise: instead of a fourth season, Deadwood would end its run with two two-hour TV movies, happening next May.

"Whatever happened at the end, I mean whatever happened with HBO, you'll never know the true story, it's like Rashomon, there'll be three stories of the same thing," McShane says. "You know, who said what, who did what, did they offer six episodes, well, could've been, did they do this, was it too much money, you'll never really know what David and the suits got up to in the room."

He does, however, think the final result will work. "He couldn't finish it in six episodes'because every single episode is a day in Deadwood. A day. And he couldn't do that to finish it. So two two-hour movies will let him maybe cross a couple years, or whatever, because Deadwood burned down in 1899. Well, it burned down a couple of times, but in 1899, that was sort of the end of the gold rush town as it was known."

Luckily, McShane won't be leaving the spotlight anytime soon, because after Deadwood and Scoop, he has a host of other projects lined up. "Actually, it's kind of nice in a way, because I'm doing a couple of movies now that I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd had to be back on Deadwood in a month."

First up is We Are Marshall. "That's with Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox, and David Strathairn. It's this true story of this university in West Virginia, Marshall University'the football team was playing a team away, and they went down in a plane crash, and it's the story of, does the athletic program go ahead, or does it die'...It's one of those stories, you know. Tragedy, sentiment, football, college, America -- it'll have a huge opening weekend."

The filming for Marshall has already wrapped, but he just committed to two more projects as well. "I'm doing a movie with [SNL's] Andy Samberg, for Lorne Michaels," he says of 2007's comedy Hot Rod. Then comes a movie co-starring Renee Zellweger. "That's Case 39; it's a psychological thriller which we're doing later in the year."

Luckily, it seems that the end of Deadwood is hardly stopping McShane. And somehow, between all the work, McShane has maintained another passion: the World Cup. "For that one month, you can be as xenophobic and insanely macho as you like. You know, all those English guys out there, getting drunk and throwing up over Germans. It's very funny."