FEBRUARY 2014 : TOBY NEWS
February was very much ‘Black Sails’ month for Toby.
Finally after all the brouhaha, ‘Black Sails’ finally aired on Starz on 25 January. The main plot focused on the hunt for the Spanish ship and its riches, and the machinations, alliances and various acts of violence that the search involves. It all unfolds against the broader background of a dying era. What Captain Flint already sees, even if others do not, is that the British government is preparing to wipe out the Caribbean and mid-Atlantic pirate trade. He knows that the only people to escape the noose will be the few who are rich enough to buy a respectable life or some other form of protection.
The San Franciso Chronicle reported that “Stephens, always one of Britain’s most reliable and capable actors, brings seamless credibility to the role of Flint” and gave the show 3/5.
Others commented, “Toby Stephens, playing it ferocious” and “Toby Stephens, who plays Captain Flint, brings a gruff, sullen man to life. There is so much more to the man’s motivations than we know and it goes much deeper than a quest for treasure. He has many secrets, including the lovely Miranda Barlow, a woman many believe is a witch.” Whilst elsewhere his performance was described as “riveting”
A blogger wrote, “Stephens is a mix of Michael Fassbender and Damian Lewis (it’s a deadly combination)”, and John Doyle for the Globe & Mail, wrote, “Toby Stephens is excellent as the main pirate leader, Captain Flint, a man much feared, but a visionary.“
“There are so many cliches and tropes attached to the whole piracy thing. Black Sails gives you a real sense of what the time and the period were actually like. All of these characters are living on the edge, in situations that are extreme, and they’re just struggling to survive. Captain Flint is a scary guy.”
Source: Krista Smith, Vogue
“There’s been a lot of mythologising pirates over the years. ‘Black Sails’ is gnarly, bringing things back nearer to the truth.”
“That’s all public relations. Captains have to create terrifying personas or they’re fresh meat.”
“Pulverising someone’s head isn’t exactly something I enjoy. But now as a n actor I don’t have to go around for the rest of the series posturing as some kind of strong macho man. My work there has already been done.”
“It’s about survival, and if you were a pirate captain, you had to be feared. They had to develop their own PR. You had to be this scary figure because otherwise you would be gobbled up by your crew or the next merchant ship that attacked. There is that underneath. And I think he’s got this anger, and that is driving him as well.”
“I really knew very little, and I knew there was a golden age of piracy in terms of the Caribbean and Bermuda and the Bahamas. That only lasted a very short period of time, and it was initially encouraged by Britain because it interrupted French and Spanish trade. It was in our interest. I didn’t really low the details. I didn’t know beyond that. What I knew was what I had seen in movies or read in books about the mythology, rather like Arthurian mythology, which developed in the 1800s.”
“You know you are going to go into battle as you are catching up with that ship. They know they are going to have to attack the ship and that sense of danger. I had ever seen that before. It was always people swinging on ropes and romanticised, so I didn’t know anything about the nitty gritty about piracy.”
Source: Wilson County News
“Any day of the week, I would prefer to be doing the show that I’m doing right now. I appreciate ‘Downton Abbey’ for what it is, but I have to say I don’t regularly tune in. It’s not really the kind of show that I enjoy. I appreciate what my mum does in it, she’s great in it, but it’s just not really what I enjoy watching. Playing this kind of thing, for me, is like going on an exotic vacation because we just don’t do this kind of stuff in the UK. We do a lot of the kind of stuff like ‘Downton Abbey’, a lot of period drama, a lot of detective stuff. You know, or me, that’s kind of like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve done it. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life.’ This is something that I kind of go, ‘It’s a fantastic character, phenomenal production values, and a fantastic story. And that’s what I want to be involved in.’”
“We put on our pirate clothes, but those are the clothes that we wear. They’re not fancy. They’re not clean. They’re dirty. They smell, we smell, you know? It was very important to us not to kind of pose as these people, we wanted to make them seem like real people. They’re pirates, but you don’t want to have that separation of, like, ‘Oh, they’re from some distant time, and they’re from some mythological world.’ They’re real people in real situations that you can identify with… It wasn’t like some fetish thing where I want to be wearing pirate outfits like Johnny Depp or something. It was, we’re trying to get to a place where you believe these people.”
“It’s not a romanticised version. Piracy wasn’t some adventure these buccaneers went on. It was a means to survive. ‘Sails’ isn’t these campily dressed guys who went around with parrots and peg legs. This is telling stories about real human beings in this desperate kind of world.”
“There’s a sense of Britain over the horizon coming to stomp them at any time. There’s a sense of urgency, especially for Flint and Eleanor, to try and defend themselves.”
“These pirate captains had to a certain extent be politicians. They had to be their own PR people and they had to placate all the constituencies on their ship.”
"He’s a complex, dark person. We’re not trying to paint goodies and baddies. His motives are good, but the way he goes about it is wrong.”
“Well, I think initially ‘Treasure Island’ was read to me as a child. That was really my starting point to this kind of story. I suppose the Naval battles, like Nelson, that’s part of our culture. It’s part of our history. So you grow up knowing about Battle of Trafalgar. I guess I knew about piracy, but it was really a mythologized version of piracy. I didn’t really understand the history of it or the reality of it, which is something that this really brings to the genre."
"I did know that from Elizabeth I to Walter Raleigh the buccaneering kind of thing was tacitly, like, ‘Go ahead. Interfere with Spanish French trade. They’re our enemy. We’ll turn a blind eye to it.’ In fact, they encouraged it. And if it interrupted Spanish interests in South America or the West Indies, then that was good. I did vaguely know about that from history, but I didn’t really know about the details of the golden age of piracy, which ‘Black Sails’ deals with.”
“I think what was important to me – and I think, everyone when we were doing this – was that when we put on our pirate clothes, those are the clothes that we wear. They’re not fancy. They’re not clean. They’re dirty. They smell. We smell. It’s like it’s a real world. Also, it was very important to us not to pose as these people. We wanted to make them seem like real people, like they’re pirates, but one can identify with them as real people. That was really important, because if you’re going to go on a journey with these characters, you don’t want to have that separation of, like, ‘Oh, they’re from some distant time, and they’re from some mythological world’. They’re real people in real situations that you can identify with. So for me, that was important. Initially when you start watching it, it takes a while to tune into that world and go, ‘Oh,’ but then once you have, hopefully, you can identify with these people and go, ‘Oh, they’re real people. And they just happen to be in a different century, wearing these clothes.’ So that was what was important. It wasn’t like some fetish thing where I want to be wearing pirate outfits like Johnny Depp or something. We’re trying to get to a place where you believe these people. I think that was the important thing.”
“Mark [Ryan] and I had a lot of fun, actually. It was nice because we’re a kind of double act in the first series, and he’s my sort of secondhand guy. Because of the subject matter, a lot of the time it’s quite serious stuff – and especially Flint, who’s a very enigmatic, kind of serious guy – so it was great, in between takes, to have a laugh with him. I like to work that way. I like having fun on set, because it helps me focus when I need to do it. But you need to have that outlet; otherwise, it’s just relentlessly kind of serious. So it was serious when it needed to be and fun when it could be.”
“I can tell you now, any day of the week, I would prefer to be doing the show that I’m doing right now. I appreciate ‘Downton Abbey’ for what it is. I have to say I don’t regularly tune in. It’s not really the kind of show that I enjoy. I appreciate what my mum does in it. She’s great in it, but it’s just not really what I enjoy watching.”
“Playing this kind of thing, for me, is like going on an exotic vacation, because we just don’t do this kind of stuff in the UK. We do a lot of the kind of stuff like ‘Downton Abbey’ – a lot of period drama, a lot of detective stuff. For me, that’s kind of like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve done it. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life.’ This is something that I kind of go, ‘It’s a fantastic character, phenomenal production values, and a fantastic story. And that’s what I want to be involved in’”.
“He’s not like any pirate I’d ever seen. He’s not Errol Flynn. He’s not Johnny Depp. We’re telling a different story!”
“It was really arduous because it was incredibly hot and the ship that we were shooting on, there was no wind when we were shooting. Also it was just absorbing the heat of the deck and you were stuck in this kind of pen. It was a really tough few days. But in the end I really enjoyed doing it because that’s part of what I do. I love that physicality of it and for me it was the point where, because we’d already shot episode three and episode four, we then went back to one to film that. So it was me really getting to grips with the character of Flint because the physical side of it is so important with Flint.”
“It’s like why are people fighting with this guy? Why is he the top captain? That fight really stamps why he is feared and why he is what he is. So it was a big part of the jigsaw of the character for me to do that fight. Once you’ve done that fight, you don’t have to work quite so hard at posturing about being scary or anything like that because that’s done all your work for you and the audience. They know after seeing that, okay, you don’t mess with this guy. There is something slightly unhinged about him. Although he seems very urbane at times, there is this side to him that is very frightening.”
“I worked with Bob Anderson on ‘Die Another Day’ who was an amazing fight choreographer with swords. I think he was in his 80s at the time and he was just phenomenal. He’d done all the big sword movies, so that was very detailed, it was very thought out. Not that this one wasn’t, but we had a long time to prep it. It was months of working it out. What we were doing in this, we worked out the fight for a long time. I worked on it, I was choreographing it a lot but we wanted something that was very visceral and very real.”
“So it wasn’t really the same as the Bond film. The Bond film was very stylistic. You know it’s a movie. You know it’s got a place in it, but you know Bond is going to survive. In this, you have a real feeling like you don’t know who’s going to survive. In fact, Flint looks like he’s going to die and we wanted to make the violence very real. There’s no glorification of it. It’s brutal, it’s nasty, it’s totally any means to get your end, any means to survive.”
“That’s what I hope you think because also, I think for the first episode, you’re like, ‘Who is this guy?’ He’s on the back foot for the whole thing, so you’re really not quite sure what he is. Only at the end do you go, ‘Right, okay, I see who this guy is.’ That’s good.”
“Himself probably. I mean, I think it’s really interesting because one of the great things I think about this series is if you think you’re watching a pirate show, it’s going to totally flip you because what it does is, it is a pirate show but these people are real people. They’re real human beings and they’ve got very complex lives, complex motives and Flint is really a very complex, very dark personality. His reasons and motives of why he is the way he is and why he’s doing what he’s doing are revealed very gradually throughout the series.”
“I’m now into filming the second series and we’ve now gone back into his past. You’re revealing who he is gradually and through these flashbacks. It’s great fun for me as an actor, but I think it’s really good fun for an audience as well. I think up until now, pirate shows, pirate movies, the pirates in them have been a sort of generalised wash of people. They all sort of speak the same, they all kind of look the same, they all have the same motives which is basically to get treasure and kill people. This is suddenly a very complex story which gives you a historical context to these people, and real reason, an economic reason for what they’re doing.”
“Also the mechanism by which if you raid a merchant ship, you get the treasure. Well, how do you make money out of that? You’ve got to then fence it. It’s got to then be sold on as legitimate trade to get the money for it. So the mechanism of how that worked, how piracy worked is revealed. It hopefully gives the sense of these are real people in a real world.”
“There’s a lot of politics on “Black Sails” that might be more than people expect if they’re just thinking of pirates and action and sword fights. Yeah, yeah, but also I think that’s what makes it fun. It gives it a feel of it’s dealing with things that we’re dealing with now. I think to do a pirate show, just for it to be some fantasy doesn’t really inform us about anything, why are you doing that? Whereas this is taking things that we’re still wrestling with now and puts them in this context. For example, on the ship, on my ship, I’m like the boss. I’m the CEO of this company and they are all my workers and they all have their own constituencies and they’ve all got their beefs. They’re all disgruntled about various things and they’re all complaining. In many ways, it’s like an office context and people can identify with that, so these people seem very present. They may be wearing these costumes, they may be sailing ships but at the same time you can identify with them.”
“I think the ultimate treasure for him, that’s a really interesting question because it’s also something that as we go on is revealed. I think the ultimate treasure for him is to be loved. Like all of us, we all want to be loved, and I think he wants to be loved. He wants his men to respect him, to love him, to see him as this deliverer, but unfortunately just his character makes that impossible. So he’s constantly alienating, even though he’s doing the right thing for them. He can’t help but alienate because of who he is.”
“Yeah, one of the things about Flint, what makes Flint is he’s a pragmatist and he’s incredibly clinical in the way that he analyses situations and the way that he plans things. He’s a planner and a plotter. He’s political and he can see five steps ahead. That’s what makes him better at these things. It’s an instinctive thing. It’s not something that he’s cultivated. It’s just innate within him, but it’s also his flaw because in the end, it’s quite a peculiar thing to be able to do.”
“It’s like a chess player. Somebody who’s brilliant at chess is normally quite a strange personality. That is what he has, but it makes him lack certain human qualities that would make him a more benign ruler. To get to his ends, he will do whatever it takes because he sees that the end is greater than the means. At the same time, that’s what makes him ruthless and brutal, but his motives are good. There’s that sort of duality to him.”
“Both of them, the boats that they’ve created are just so awesome and visually amazing. What’s weird is that you’ve got a green screen behind you and you’re pretending to be in the middle of the sea. When you see it completed and rendered, you would never know. That was what was amazing for me when I watched it for the first time, because while I was doing it, I was having to make that leap of imagination in my head. I’m in the middle of a raging sea trying to sail this vessel, and then you’re actually 500 meters from a motorway on the backlot of a studio with a green screen, wind machines and water machines spraying you. Because the CGI now is so sophisticated, you can do this kind of show for the budget that we’ve got in the conditions that we’ve got and an audience will never know.”
”There’s the enigmatic Mrs. Barlow and we’re not quite sure what their story is together but they live together in the interior of the island.”
“Most of the show takes place in the island of Nassau which was a real island within the Bahamas, and acted as a hub for pirates where they would fence their stolen goods. I play the most successful of the pirates, and the most terrifying, who is slowly losing a grip on his subordinates. The show will watch my character attempt to survive in this landscape where the currency is fear.”
"He’s not like any pirate I’d ever seen. He’s not Errol Flynn. He’s not Johnny Depp. We’re telling a different story!”
“Deadwood meets The Wire. It’s not just the blood and boobs it’s billed as. It’s more about the mechanism of piracy rather than the fantasy of it.Whatever we’ve seen before has been a mythologised version and what was really good was we got halfway through filming season one and it got such a great reaction at Comic-Con it got recommissioned. Which is just as well as they’ve built three full-sized ships, a water tank and a shanty town on the coast of Cape Town.”
“A brilliant man who amassed a huge amount of treasure, but when we meet him he is on the ropes financially and his crew are very disgruntled. He has the capacity for incredible violence and anger, but if you were a pirate you had to be feared otherwise it wouldn’t work.”
“It was tough, there’s no dodging it. But at the same time it was such a unique job and a great opportunity. There is a point where FaceTime becomes not enough and there are only so many conversations you can have with your kids pulling faces at themselves.”
"We had no budget, we were working horrendous days and I was in every scene. I said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to have time to put myself on tape for this. I’m not interested in a pirate show.’ My agent was saying, 'No, it’s not a normal pirate show, it’s brilliant.’ Anyway, she wore me down and then it was agony, the agony actors have when they fall in love with a character and you think, ’S—, this is cool, I’m probably not going to get this,’ and this was one of the few times I actually did.
“Yeah. It removes some of the neurosis that normally kind of attaches itself to being an actor on a TV show. You can relax and you can just get on with what you’re doing rather than going, 'Ooh! Am I gonna survive?’
“I actually saw most of the episodes… before I saw the credits. … I loved the show anyway as I was watching it, just as an audience member. I was like going, 'This is a great show.’ And then I saw the credits and I just went, 'That is just so cool!’ It’s so understated, but yet totally encapsulates the themes of the series.”
“Captain Flint is a very enigmatic character. He’s the captain of a pirate ship in New Providence Island where there’s a whole bunch of pirates. … Historically, he’s been the prime earner out of all of the pirates. But, at the beginning of the series, when we see him – he’s slightly on the ropes. He’s going after this big prize, which none of his crew know about, which is this treasure galleon – a massive, Spanish treasure galleon, which is heading back from South America to Spain and he knows that it’s coming and he’s trying to track it down… what coordinates it’s going to be at at a certain moment, so it’s like a kind of jigsaw puzzle that he’s figuring out. But, this is unbeknownst to his crew, so they’re going, 'Why aren’t we going after bigger prizes? Why aren’t we earning more money?’ and they’re getting very discontent. Now in those days, on pirate vessels, you voted your captain on and off. These guys all worked on naval ships, merchant ships, they’d all been treated really badly, and when they got a bit of freedom, they were like, 'Well, we wanna run our own show here.’ So, they voted their captain on and off and they’re about to vote me off, so I’m fighting for survival.”
"Any lengths. He’s a complex character. I mean, what’s so great about TV nowadays is you can tell these incredibly complex stories. It doesn’t have the sort of simplicity of film where you’ve got your good guy, you’ve got your bad guy, you’ve got your romantic interest. This is something where you can deal in human complexity. You can go, 'He’s good, but he’s also bad and he’s got these character flaws and they’ve all got their motives that change all the time.’ And these characters challenge an audience – especially Flint. I think they want to like him, but then he does terrible things and they’re like going, 'I don’t know whether I can like you anymore, but why are you doing these things? I want to know.’ And that’s good storytelling, I think.”
“I remember when I got the part, he’d already been cast, and I remember going, 'It’s this guy Tom Hopper. I’m gonna look him up,’ so I IMDB-d him and these photos of this kind of brute came up. I was like, 'Oh my God! I’m supposed to be the frightening guy on this show, so what am I gonna have to do to make myself more frightening than this?’ I mean, he’s huge! But, he plays Billy Bones. … All of these characters, by the way – like Flint, Silver and Billy Bones – are all in 'Treasure Island,’ and in 'Treasure Island,’ Billy Bones, at the beginning, is this embittered alcoholic wash-up of a pirate, so he’s kind of this tragic figure. But yet, in our series, he starts off as this wide-eyed innocent, kind of wanting to do the right thing.”
“'Treasure Island’ had been read to me as a child. I’d seen countless films of it and also Captain Hook was a big figure in my life – like Peter Pan and Captain Hook and all of that stuff. But… it’s strange – when you get to what we’re doing, it seems very remote from that. So I’d had a sort of romanticised version of it, fantasised version of it. This is much more kind of like pragmatic, how it actually worked, but without being boring. At the same time, it’s an adventure story. It’s epic.”
February finally saw the cinema release of ‘The Machine’, an Indie movie from writer/director Caradog James, where Toby plays a scientist who creates a humanoid robot.
“I just loved the ideas that the film was dealing with. They’re ideas about the future we’re heading for where we create consciousness in machines. What that would mean for those machines once they have consciousness? How will they treat us? What does it mean for us as a species if those machines are better than we are? All of these questions are dealt with in the movie.”
“Vincent becomes the audience. He is humanity warts and all, not a good guy, not a bad buy. He’s kind of trying to do the right thing, to save his daughter, and I can empathise with that. But the way he’s doing it is not great. He’s morally compromised, but in the end he’s a human being. I loved the resonances with Frankenstein. He is kind of like the Frankenstein of the piece.”
“It’s taken me about 10 years to get back to a point where I can do other films. I remember when ‘Blade Runner’ came out just being to ally overwhelmed by it. This is an interesting story because we’re forging into a future where these things will be around. it’s quite disturbing.
I really liked the echoes of ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Metropolis’ and Vincent as a character. When he creates this thing, it’s so confusing for him. Initially, it’s treating him like a child would a father, but it’s also Eva, who he liked. So there are all these thing going on for him.”
“The ones I grew up with were 2001, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Alien’. What I love about ‘Alien’ is that a lot was left up to your imagination. When you’re working with a limited budget you can’t just throw money at things, and as a consequence I think it’s a much better film.”
“After Bond I was offered villains. I felt that would be career suicide, to play the same thing over and over again. They create such a huge impact those movies, and once you’ve played that, that’s what you are in people’s heads. So I went away and Ive been doing a lot of other things.”
“I played sports but never excelled. I was an OK student but never a great one. The only area where I felt I had a real talent was in drama.”
Source : Krista Smith, Vogue
"And sometimes you get a script and you think, 'Oh, that’s a good script’, and it comes out rubbish. The other thing which I’ve also experienced is you have three children and a mortgage and you go 'I’ve got to work’ and you do whatever comes along to pay the bills. You can’t polish a turd you know.”
"I’m going to see what happens. I want to settle myself at the moment and I’m quite happy to just be with my family.”
“No. Downton has an amazing following but it wouldn’t be right for me. On the whole I don’t watch television. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of it, but not deliberately. When you have kids you don’t really watch TV any more and when I do I binge-watch box sets of ‘Breaking Bad’.”
On Maggie and Shirley Maclean:
"I didn’t see them, sadly. I would like to work with my mum but it would have to be something else. It would perhaps be one scene. And also it’s not that I’m running away from it, but at this stage I want people to know me. I don’t like what happens when you get mulched together.”
“Exactly, and I’ve struggled with that for a lot of my life, so I try to go, 'This is my mum, this is me.’ We are on totally separate paths and we are separate entities. We are not from some acting dynasty or anything. I don’t want a dynasty. It just so happens that I’m an actor.”
“He said, 'Your mum was an actress? Who?’ And when I told him he said, 'You’re f—— joking. That’s surreal.’ And I thought that was great. What’s nice for me is that she is in my genetic make-up. I embrace that, I love that. But that’s just part of me.”
“Theatre is always something that I go back to as a touchstone.”
Source: Krista Smith, Vogue
“We took the kids to see ‘The Elephantom’ at the National’s Shed at Christmas. It was a great show - very inventive and fun. I think I enjoyed it more than the kids.”
Source: Charlotte Cripps, Rada
On ‘Phedre’ with Diana Rigg:
“She did forgive me, begrudgingly. It wasn’t easy. I thought she’d be more sympathetic.”
“‘American Horror Story: Coven’. I love this series because it’s sexy, original, brilliantly written and totally twisted - like Hammer Horror on acid. It has a great ensemble cast, headed up by a fantastically febrile Jessica Lang. I highly recommend it.”
Source: Charlotte Cripps, Rada
“I really watch American stuff, ‘Breaking Bad,’ I was a great follower of, and I think is extraordinary. I really like ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and and ‘Mad Men’, all of those kind of series because I just feel they are so brilliantly written. I also love ‘House of Cards’. It is brilliantly written, and the original British series is really good, and this has taken it to another level”
Source: Wilson County News
“‘The Richard Burton Diaries’. I’m finding it difficult to put it down, and not just because it’s a big damn book. You can’t deny that he had an interesting life! The booze, the marriages, the Welshness, the Taylor ….. It’s all there. He turns out great copy too. A good read.”
“Keith Jarrett’s ‘The Koln Concert’. I’ve been a big fan of Jarrett for a while now. He’s an amazing pianist and composer; it’s epic, uplifting, humane and dark. He does a lot of extraneous grunting and yelping throughout, which is entertaining.”
“I took my daughter to see the Paul Klee exhibition at the Tate. She’s four years old, so it was a quick viewing. I love taking my kids to The Tate; they get to run around the Turbine Hall while I get to read the paper. Small blessings.”
Source: Charlotte Cripps, Rada
"I’m a pessimist, so I’m never going to be disappointed”.
“I was only seasick once. I went on the QE2 when I was a kid. I went from Southampton to New York and about midway, there was a massive, massive storm and I was doing fine. I was actually doing really fine until I ate this huge breakfast. … we call them a greasy gut buster in England. … It was like eggs, bacon… and I was so sick. I was like really, really sick, but I’ve never been sick since on boats.”
"I was in my twenties and I got very drunk. I don’t remember much about it but I remember waking up and thinking what the f—have you done? I remember it was a guy on the Portobello Road who was covered in tattoos and wore a balaclava. I wish I’d chosen something that was a bit more baroque, but it was a drunken decision and I haven’t had a drink for 13 years now.”
On Anna-Louise & his family:
“They weren’t sure if they wanted a woman’s voice or a man’s voice and I said if I get it I’ll take you out for dinner, if you get it you can take me out. I got it and I took her out and that was that.”
"No, it just happened that way. If we’d planned better there would have been more time in between them. Hard, but great fun. Anna-Louise works and that was always very much understood. I want her to have a career. I want to be able to share responsibilities for the children. In this world women need to work, they need to keep their minds.”
“That play is really about people who chime together. There was absolutely no chemistry at all. Nothing against her but it just wasn’t going to happen. When I met with Anna Chancellor I knew she was a kindred spirit. We got one another.”
"I think it’s one of those things that builds over a period of time and I hit the point where it was the right time for me to stop. I have a switch, it’s off or on. I don’t have anything in between. There are lots of people who say go on, you can have just one. No I can’t, it’s either on or off.”
"There was a moment of clarity where I got a theatre job in NewYork. They put me in a nice apartment. I bought this bottle of vodka on the plane coming over. I remember looking out of the window at New York and going 'I am going to f—this up so badly if I carry on the way I am. I am going to stop for two weeks and get myself together.’ I went through two weeks of not drinking, which was not easy. It was then I realised how sick I was. Nights where I normally drank I couldn’t sleep, I was too wired and felt awful.”
"But after two weeks I felt so good that I didn’t want to go back to the life I was living. I remember reading a book and going to sleep and how nice that had been. I remember thinking, 'When I wake up tomorrow I am not going to feel like s—,’ and that was when the switch went: 'My life is better like this’. Now I don’t even think of it. I used to get a waft of wine and I’d think, 'Oh I’d really love a glass of wine,’ but I don’t even get that any more.”
“I think AA is good for people if they want it but I think there is an addiction to talking about your addiction.”
"He’s definitely in there, Robert. It was good meeting him when I did and getting to know him because then I didn’t have this baggage of being angry with him. I had a fantastic stepfather so I didn’t resent him in any way, although I was unnerved by him. He was not an easy man although he was incredibly charming, gregarious and fun.”
"He was diagnosed with something that at the time they called hyper mania which is now called bipolar. People have euphoric phases and massive crashes. It’s a form of depression. He used to suffer from this quite badly. When I found this out it changed my view of him because, prior to that, I’d thought of him as just a boozer and a womaniser and then suddenly I realised he just wasn’t in control; it was a chemical in his body.”
"I got to know him when he was having a renaissance at the RSC with King Lear and I was doing Coriolanus at the same time. I feel he was conflicted.”
"He was proud of me and at the same time incredibly frustrated it wasn’t him, so it was odd. Then I saw him get very, very ill with alcohol. That was hard on everyone, not just me.”
“And it was all self-inflicted. All those years of abuse. You have done this to yourself.”
“Exactly. That was one of those things where you see how destructive it is. It’s not just affecting one person, it’s affecting everyone around them. It took me a while to figure it out, for it to percolate through my consciousness before I made my decision. I had flirted with sobriety. I had stopped for a year while he was ill to say to him, 'Look if I can do this you can do this.’ It didn’t work. He was still drinking and smoking. When he died I went, 'Oh f—it, I’m going to drink again.’”
“He was a lovely man, very stable. He really looked after my mum and was just great. My mother and him had been lovers before she met my father. My parents split when I was four. My mother just went, quite rightly so, I’ve got two children that I’m responsible for and your life is in total chaos and our life is in total chaos.”
“He has talked about the way he used to get ribbed as a teenager by his mum.”
“Toby and Mark Ryan really get the brunt of that, dealing with the nautical side of things, like how a ship works, the different parts of it, and how to manage a crew. But we took a three mast ship out and we took some of the modern technology off of it, so that we had to raise the sails by hand and tack them, and all that. It was brutal work. It wasn’t a ship that big, but even the little one we had took a lot of work.”
“The whole cast on this show is incredible, but when you get to face off with Toby Stephens in costume, it’s scary and it’s fantastic. One of the greatest acting experiences ever is getting to work with him.”
“It’s kind of interesting, because many years ago, I was visiting Bob Anderson on the set of a James Bond film which costarred Toby Stephens, but I never got to meet Toby. We were probably in the same lunch tent at the time, but I was busy chatting away with Bob, so we never met. But I knew a lot of people – we have a lot of friends in common in the business, and all I’d heard about him was lovely things, so I was very excited to work with Toby. He’s a wonderful actor, absolutely one of the most charismatic characters I’ve ever worked with.“
“We did laugh a lot, from the first thing in the morning – look, if you’re going to be getting dirtied up, tattooed up, and I’m going to go back to ‘Robin of Sherwood’, because there is something about this which reminded me of Robin, simply because of the process of coming in in the morning clean and then being muddied up and this process of being aged in the morning and having the tattoos put on. While you’re sitting and this is all going on, we discovered that the best way to deal with that was just to take the rise out of each other from the moment we arrived to the moment we left. And we did. It was a constant stream of abuse between us, even to the point where I think people were going, ‘Do they mean it?’ So we had this very mad sense, an eccentric British sense of humour, which carried us through a lot of long nights and otherwise gruelling days of filming. But yes, we laughed a lot. We had permission to laugh, because Brad Fuller – we were at three o’clock in the morning, it was raining, we couldn’t shoot and it was a particularly intense scene they were shooting, very emotionally charged, and we were waiting to come into the scene. We went off into a hut and I can’t even remember what we were talking about, but we were laughing like idiots. And Brad came over. And so I’m walking over to him and I gave Toby a look, ‘Uh-oh, shh, we’re in trouble,’ because I thought maybe we were making too much noise or something. Brad said, ‘I have been watching you two for an hour. You have done nothing but giggle like idiots for an hour. What are you laughing at?’ And I just said, ‘I’m not being funny, I don’t think you’d understand this. It’s just British Carry-On humour. It’s just stupid schoolboy humour.’ And he said, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, it’s raining, we can’t shoot and we’re in the middle of this depressing scene. What we need is humour, so you have permission to laugh.’ So we took that as, we were given permission by the producer to laugh. So we did, for five months.”
“Due to Toby Stephen’s brilliant acting and our insane British sense of humour, we got on extremely well…we’d just giggle like schoolgirls most of the time when we weren’t shooting.”
“Toby and I, in later episodes, do quite long scenes together. I think one is almost a record 8 or 9 minutes long, just he and I doing a dialogue scene about the situation we’re in, which is virtually unheard of in TV. I give a two-minute monologue in the middle of one of those scenes where I’m just talking about our spiritual relationship to the ocean. So that kind of thing, I wanted to bring that depth of understanding of the emotional relationship, not just between the men serving on a warship but between them and nature.”
Source: Entertainment Monthly
“Toby was so emotionally committed during the death scene that he almost choked the air out of me and soaked me with his tears.”
“I’ve choreographed sword fights where there are arms and legs flying off, but the savagery in that scene? Watching Toby do that was genuinely disturbing”
Digital Theatre announced the online release of ‘Private Lives’ with the production available to buy online from 27 February to audiences in the United States. To date, it has been screened in over 1,000 cinemas worldwide. And this February saw the first screening in Australia.
The ‘Black Sails’ boardgame, based on the Starz drama series set in the Golden Age of Piracy was announced. at a US Toy Fair. It was expected to be available in 205.
Asked by Entertainment weekly what Toby would choose as ‘sexiest song choice’, he chose ‘Lemon song’ by Led Zeppelin.
Asked by Entertainment Today what Toby’s favourite Winter Olympic sport was he replied, “I love that thing where they go round with the brushes - I would watch that - cos it’s just so ridiculous” (Curling!)
GQ issued its best-dressed list for 2014 and listed Toby at 32, a new entry, with Elisabetta Canali commenting “Toby always looks immaculately debonair. Whether in Hollywood films or on the UK stage, he carries a strong, directional sense of style.” GQ editorial responded with “When your mother is Dame Maggie Smith you were born to be fabulous – and he has certainly fulfilled his potential.”
It was announced that Rupert Penry Jones would join the cast of ‘Black Sails’ for the second series. He had this to say: "It’s great fun, it’s filmed in Cape Town with a very old friend of mine, Toby Stephens, who’s lovely. I love American shows, the TV they make is the best in the world, especially at the moment, when they are having a golden vein of TV and there are so many great shows.” Rupert worked with Toby on the BBC2 drama series ‘Cambridge Spies’ back in 2003.
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