Alfred Molina is part of England’s grand tradition of theater-trained actors. His skills have paid off in dividends in Hollywood with diverse roles in films ranging from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Species, Chocolat, Frida, Spider-Man 2, and The Da Vinci Code.
Molina’s latest role returns the actor to his homeland in the drama An Education, which premiered to critical acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. He plays Jack, whose teenage daughter Jenny, played by Carey Mulligan, is smitten with the much older David, played by Peter Saarsgaard.
In the film, Jenny wrestles with whether or not she wants to attend prestigious University of Oxford. The 56 year-old actor shared whether his own undergraduate education ultimately benefited his career.
“I had three fantastic years at drama school,” Alfred recalls, “I went to the Guildhall School in London which, at the time, was one of the top classical schools. I had a great, great three years. I loved it! I had three years of doing what I love doing most, which is talking, thinking, eating, sleeping plays and acting. Having said that, it made not an ounce of difference, in terms of how I got work or whether I got work. I was never asked once in any interview or audition, ‘Tell me, Alfred, where did you train?’”
“It never came up,” he continues, “I’ve been acting for 35 years and not once, except out of curiosity. If someone said, "Oh, my daughter’s in drama school. Which one did you go to?" And it turns out it wasn’t the same one. And that was the end of the conversation. No, I’m being flippant. But the truth is, it’s beneficial for some people. It’s no matter for others. I don’t think you can learn how to act. I think all that training gives you is it perhaps might give you the knack of learning to think twice.
Alfred also discussed his own personal take on the risqué relationship that emerges between Jenny and David in the film.
“I’m not qualified to talk about that, because I married an older woman,” he says, “I was in my 30s when I married her. We met and fell in love. I don’t think age has anything to do with it. I think when the law is broken, that’s a whole other issue. I don’t think this movie is really about that. I think Peter [Sarsgaard] put it very nicely when he said that the movie is less about an older man falling in love with a 16-year-old girl than it is about a man trying to rediscover what it’s like to be 16.”
“Someone said to me, ‘Isn’t it the film where the guy has sex with a 16-year-old girl?’” Molina adds, “Well, actually, no, because they don’t. They don’t have sex. They get close but something else happens. But whether audiences have a problem with, it may be a cultural thing.”
Molina discussed the father-daughter relationship in the film with co-star Carey Mulligan. He goes into how he and Mulligan did a particularly tense scene between Jack and Jenny.
“Carey and I got on very, very well over filming,” he claims, “Lots of giggles, lots of laughing, a lot of joking around. We were doing scenes around the table; we found a lot of common ground. The day we shot that scene, we didn’t say a word to each other outside the scene. We didn’t hang out, we didn’t talk, we didn’t have cups of tea.”
“All the rapport, all the chit-chat, all the fun we were having [was gone], not deliberately,” Alfred continues, “It wasn’t like, ‘I think it would be better if we didn’t communicate today,’ It would be like if we were doing this at drama school. It just happened; it was really strange. But that whole day, we didn’t talk. Something takes over in a funny sort of way. The energy that the scene needed was being encouraged somehow. I was aware of it at the end of the day. A weird alchemy happens. I’m tempted to say ‘chemistry,’ but that’s too scientific. It’s an odd energy that takes over, and I think it works.”
Another actress the actor said he enjoyed working with in the film was Emma Thompson.
“She’s quite lovely,” Molina says.
Alfred also shared with us his approach in playing a paternal role.
“Whenever I play a father to a daughter, I always give the actress lots of money, pay for her education, stay up all night and wonder where the hell she is,” Molina says jokingly, “I find that very helpful, but that’s just my way of working, my preference. I think it’s that alchemy thing again. It’s a strange way to live your life, and it’s a strange job to have. There’s no doubt about it. So what happens is you create the environment that’s required. And everyone knows it’s fake. Everyone who’s implicit in the contract knows this isn’t the real thing. But for the time and space that it occupies, Carey was my daughter and I was her dad, for better or for worse.”
“That’s what you create: You create a kind of fantasy,” he continues, “And you create something, as fake as it is, hopefully doesn’t have to be real, it just merely has to be authentic — and authentic enough that the audience will relax and go, "OK, I’ll buy that. Alfred Molina is Carey Mulligan’s father. I’ll buy that for the two hours that I’m sitting here." That’s really that is going on. And if you’re fortunate, you have actors who are willing to jump into that game as you are. We were very lucky that was the case here. There was a group of actors that were together for a very limited amount of time, given the amount of time that some films can take, and we all just dived in. There was a certain amount of luck involved in that. It tends to happen. It tends to be the way it goes.”
We wondered if Molina had his own life-changing experience as a teen like Jenny goes through in An Education.
“I had someone very specific, actually.” Alfred remembers, “I was very fortunate. I went to a very conservative school. It was a parochial, Roman Catholic school, and it was in the middle of a not-very-good area. But the day I started that school, when I was 11, a guy named Martyn Corbett joined the English department, and he was my English teacher right from my first day at school to the day I left. When I was about 12, he started a drama club, and it was an extracurricular thing. And all the geeky, nerdy kids like me who weren’t good at sports and who academically weren’t high fliers, who weren’t popular with the girls’ school next door, we all ended up in the drama club. And three of us actually suddenly went, ‘This is it!’ And the three of us went on to become actors, although I’m the only one now who’s still acting. And Martyn was the first person in my life, when I was 13 or 14, when I had the courage to say what was on my mind, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I want to be an actor.’ He was the first person to actually take me seriously.”
“And he said, ‘Well, OK. If that’s what you want to do, you’ve got to do this, this and this,’” he adds, “‘You’ve got to read this, this and this. You’ve got to start thinking of this, this and this. And if you let me down, if you drop the ball at any point, I’m going to give up on you.’ And it was what I needed. I can remember the feeling when he gave me all these plays to read. And how he just laid it out about how hard it can be. And I remember the feeling. It was like stepping into a beautiful, hot bath. I owe him everything, actually. He coached me when I applied for drama school. He coached me when I applied for the National Youth Theatre. I was denied a grant to go to drama school, and he wrote letters to the local MP and the local educational board to say, ‘You’ve got to give this kid a grant. He’s serious. He’s committed.’ He was fantastic. And we’re still friends.”
One of the most memorable lines from Jack in the film is "Being a great writer isn’t the same as knowing one". Alfred says that the notion applies to acting as well.
“It’s a great line. And it’s true!” he believes, “I’ve actually got a favorite. The first time I went to Hollywood, when I was still living in England, before I moved to America. I went for this screen test and I met this casting director, whose name mercifully escapes me. He came away with two beautiful things that I kept and I thought, ‘One day, I’m going to do a one-man show.’ He said, ‘You know, you English actors, you’ve got a problem. You come over here and you think show business is one word. It’s not. It’s show and business — and not necessarily in that order!’”
“And the other thing he said was, ‘You know, Alfred, you’ve got a face. It ain’t no 8 x 10 glossy, but it’s a face!’” Molina continues, “And he was serious. He wasn’t joking. And I remember thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ But he wasn’t typical, I have to say in all fairness. He was not typical. But you hear that stuff all the time. I remember I once turned down a job, and an agent said he thought I was mad. "Are you kidding me?" I said, "I’m sorry but I just don’t feel it. I can’t relate to this material." He said, "Alfred, you’re in danger of becoming the architect of your own obliviality!’ I send them Christmas cards. I like to keep in touch, but they never call back.”
