A Conversation with Colin Firth
(from The Making of Pride and Prejudice, BBC Books, 1995)
How did you first become involved? I was sent all six scripts at a point when I was finding script reading very difficult. Everything seemed unreadable, and so the last thing I thought I needed was six episodes of BBC costume drama, against which I had a prejudice. I was casting my mind back to the 1970s, when it was the last thing in the world I watched on television. I remembered it as stiff — stiff acting, stiff adaptations.
Had you ever read any Jane Austen before? No, not a page. Nineteenth-century literature didn’t seem very sexy to me. I had this prejudice that it would probably be girls’ stuff. I had always been rather attracted to the tormented European novels, partly as a reaction against what you’re served up at school. So, when Pride and Prejudice was offered, I just thought, without even having read it, ‘Oh, that old war horse,’ and I unwrapped the huge envelope with great trepidation. The other anxiety is devoting so much time to something; I think a lot of actors flinch at making such a long commitment. So there were lots of reasons why I didn’t want to open the first page, but I think I was only about five pages in when I was hooked. It was remarkable. I didn’t want to go out until it was finished. I don’t think any script has fired me up quite as much, just in the most basic, romantic-story terms. You have to read on to know what happens next. You fall in love with the characters instantly, and Jane Austen is an amazing tease; she has a capacity to frustrate you in a very positive way. She’ll place a series of possibilities in front of you and then divert you. Also, I hadn’t realized how funny Pride and Prejudice is, how witty and light and how far from ‘homework’ it is to read.
And when I first went to meet Sue Birtwistle I hadn’t had time to read the end of Episode Six. I didn’t know anything about Jane Austen, and I didn’t know that she ended the story happily. Sue actually spoiled it for me because she let slip that Darcy and Elizabeth get married. And
I was rather surprised because, not knowing the story at all, I could easily imagine that something was going to go wrong; it is a very charged situation. You can read that book about three or four times and still wonder each time whether it’s going to work out.
So why did you hesitate? I knew that I had to listen to the voice inside me which said, ‘You enjoyed this. It’s the only script you’ve been able to read for a long time.’ I had to take that seriously. But then the other thing was that I didn’t feel I was right for Darcy. I didn’t feel I would be able to make him what he should be. He seemed too big a figure somehow.
I had never realized that Darcy was such a famous figure in literature. I mean, I didn’t know the book and had never heard anyone really talk about it. But then, when I mentioned it, everyone would tell me how they were devoted to this book, how at school they had been in love with Darcy, and how their sister said, ‘Darcy isn’t he supposed to be sexy?’ So I heard these things and started to think, ‘Oh, God, Olivier was fantastic and no one else could ever play the part.’
But the doubt came from more than that. Darcy’s rather fascinating — he’s terribly exciting on the page — at first I didn’t think he was written from an inner perspective at all. Jane Austen writes from the women’s point of view — in this book, specifically from Elizabeth’s point of view. Darcy is created to be an enigma through much of the story, until near the end, where you get his perspective. I just didn’t feel it was personal to me at all. I did not know how to make it specific to me as an actor. It’s just impossible to play an image because that’s an external thing. So I began to think that it was impossible; that I would let everyone down and frustrate myself because I wouldn’t be able to do enough to turn Colin into Darcy.
And yet the paradox is that you can’t do very much when playing that part anyway; he doesn’t ever do very much, and that felt like a trap. I reasoned: ‘To make myself different enough to play Darcy, I will have to do an awful lot. But doing anything is the last thing that is right for playing Darcy. The only way for it to work is to be Darcy already.’ I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see Darcy. I know one can be brave and try to stretch oneself, but one also has to be sensible about what is realistic. I didn’t feel capable of it, so I thought it best to say ‘no’.
What made you change your mind? Sue’s conviction that I was right for it was so strong that I just had to reconsider. And in reading it again, the script started to weave its spell on me; it insidiously sucked me in — it’s so seductive and intoxicating. I didn’t realize that was happening, but once you start to develop an involvement with something like this, it gets under your skin, and it stops being such a matter of choice. I agonized and imagined myself not doing it, and then tested the notion of not doing it, and it occurred to me that I would feel rather bereaved if I turned it down. I realized that I had begun to appropriate the character and I now owned it. The thought of anyone else doing it made me feel rather jealous.
What was the read-through like? Crispin Bonham-Carter remembers being so nervous he went straight to the gents and found you groaning in there. I knew I had been caught by somebody! It was utterly terrifying and nerve-racking because not only is it a tremendously large number of people to take the plunge with suddenly, and to read it, but the stakes are very high too. It’s a huge shoot. We’re all going to be on this for five months, and you’re worried that you’re being judged. It felt a bit like a great audition for everybody. The other thing that I realized at that point is that you can’t really do Darcy without the physical presence. You can’t really do him on the page, you can’t do him on the radio. The physical dimension is essential. He’s basically a taciturn person, and what he doesn’t say is much more important than what he does a lot of the time. In film, of course, we can cut to his face and see him even when he’s not speaking. But you can’t do that on the radio or at the read-through; you can’t say, ‘Everybody, wait a minute because I’m not going to do this, and it’s going to be — nothing.’ And I was surrounded by all these fantastic characters making everyone laugh, and I was thinking, ‘Well, I was dull, wasn’t I?’
Not a soul came up to me. I knew one or two people and talked to them, but I would say out of a cast of over fifty people, very few seemed willing to talk to me, I think because I was playing Darcy I had to work quite hard to convince people that I would be friendly during filming.
Andrew Davies says that he wanted to convey that there is more to Darcy than we at first think. How did you try to communicate this? You really can’t walk into a room and start acting your socks off, and doing all sorts of ambitious things, because Darcy wouldn’t do that. But not doing anything is one of the most difficult things about acting. I remember thinking before I started that I was going to have to get together a very lively, dynamic, varied performance and then not act it. For example, in that first assembly-room scene I have to go in and be hurt, angry, intimidated, annoyed, irritated, amused, horrified, appalled, and keep all these reactions within this very narrow framework of being Darcy. Inscrutable because nobody ever knows quite what Darcy’s thinking. I’ve played some far more physically energetic parts, but I don’t think that I’ve ever been as physically exhausted at the end of a take as I have with Darcy.
I remember this particularly from the scene where Elizabeth and I have the argument at Netherfield: Darcy’s emotional and doesn’t want her to know it, he hates her because he fancies her, he hates her for being cleverer than he is during this particular conversation, and he’s got the Bingleys as an audience. So there are a million things going on inside him, yet he has to keep himself together and not show that he is in the slightest bit ruffled; he mustn’t reveal his turmoil. So he sits there, as still and calm as his emotions can possibly allow. Technically, you just try to assume all that and then play against it.
What was the most difficult part of the process? The thing I disliked most about the filming was the inevitable fact that Darcy is absent from a lot of it and therefore I was going to have big breaks to deal with. I felt that a wonderful momentum started up in the first month, and the film seemed to be stretching out in front of us to infinity, and everything was possible — and suddenly I was banished for five weeks. It was awful. I had the odd day to do in the middle of that period, and I came down to location, and all these other people were there, whom I didn’t know at all, doing another film that seemed to be about a family of girls. I felt just a bit of an outsider really — and, of course, that’s what Darcy is in that part of the story. I remember saying, ‘I want to come down, even if I’m not filming, so I can keep the part turning over.’
And then when you start filming again there’s the fear that whatever magic spell you wove on yourself isn’t going to happen again this time. These things are so amorphous. Then two weeks would go by and I was sent off again. It did interfere tremendously, I think, with my sense of being part of it. I found keeping the momentum going very difficult, right to the end. It’s a huge cast, and there are all sorts of people I never really connected with simply because I never worked with them, and my character had absolutely no relationship with theirs. The filming schedule sets you slightly apart.
Did Andrew’s scripts help you to understand Darcy’s character? Yes, I think they were a wonderful way into Jane Austen because he doesn’t have that absurd, academic reverence that people sometimes have for a great work of literature. He treated it like a vastly enjoyable story. Had I started with the novel, I might not have become involved.
I think Andrew’s earthiness, and the fact that he sometimes made things a lot more specific than Jane Austen does, were very helpful. He offers very strong suggestions as to what Darcy is thinking when he’s looking, poker-faced, at the people in a crowd scene, and that helps Darcy to become more than simply an image.
What’s interesting when you’re doing a part like this is if you can find fluidity from moment to moment. When something is somehow not truthful, it jars because you’ve got to try to force your imagination to think up justifications for what you’re doing. I never had to do that with Darcy — or very rarely — and it suddenly hit me that Jane Austen really did have an instinctive grasp of Darcy’s inner self, even though she didn’t have the arrogance to write it. But she writes the outer man so logically that the inside ‘plays’.
Can you think of a specific example? I remember thinking that it makes sense when Darcy slights Elizabeth at the Meryton assembly. I agree to go to a party with my friend Bingley. He encourages me: ‘Come on, it’ll be a great party with lots of women.’ I arrive. I’m terribly — terribly — shy in social situations anyway. This is not a place I’d normally go to, and I don’t know how to talk to these people. So I protect myself behind a veneer of snobbishness and rejection. Bingley immediately engages with the most attractive woman in the room, and that makes me feel even less secure. He comes bounding over with a big, enthusiastic smile and tells me I should be dancing. I say, ‘You’ve got the best-looking girl in the room,’ and he replies, ‘Well, never mind — what about the less attractive sister?’ and this exacerbates the position I’ve put myself in. Then I say, ‘She’s okay, but not good enough for me,’ but what I’m really saying is: ‘Look, I’m supposed to be better than you, so don’t give me the plain sister. I’m not even going to consider her.’ By keeping this in mind when filming, I found that the scene actually played itself.
At the end of the story Darcy tells Lizzy that he doesn’t know when he first fell in love with her. But you would have needed to plot his journey more specifically. Yes, it’s very interesting to watch out for the triggers that lead to Darcy’s falling in love. Of course, love often starts with something trivial that attracts your attention. In Darcy’s case, very little had ever attracted his attention. So I think the first trigger is the moment when Elizabeth rejects him so impertinently — when she overhears him saying, ‘She’s tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me.’ When she walks past and gives him a cheeky look, Andrew was very helpful here—
I think, he notices her simply out of bewilderment and curiosity; he becomes intrigued by her, which, I suspect, is the first time he has ever been intrigued by a woman, and he has to know a little bit more about her. It strikes me that you can be on a fatal course from a moment like that whether you know it or not.
Darcy starts to show his interest in Elizabeth during the Lucases’ party, when he asks her to dance and she refuses. What did you feel was happening to him at this stage? Up to this point I don’t think Darcy has ever really looked at a woman — I mean looked with real eyes, with real interest — though he’s admired women in a casual way. The truth is that he’s very bored. He’s one of the richest men in England, and until now that’s always been enough to make him attractive to women. I remember reading a very helpful saying: ‘A man who is obliged to entertain no one.’ For me, that was a great key to understanding Darcy. I thought that if he were charming as well, life could be intolerable for him. So out of both shyness and a lack of necessity he remains aloof. Then Elizabeth comes along and actually gives him a chance to respond, and it’s probably the first opportunity he’s ever had in his life to be the pursuer rather than the pursued: it’s irresistible. That’s when he first notices her eyes. What starts off as intriguing becomes profoundly erotic for him.
And she finally does agree to dance with him at the Netherfield ball… Yes. I think the sequence where they dance together is wonderful because it lays out the whole of their relationship at that point perfectly. We see an honesty and playfulness in Elizabeth, while there’s something slightly comical about Darcy trying to maintain his formal manner while holding up his end of the repartee. She’ll say something that stings him, and he has an entire eight-step circle to do before he is permitted to respond.
Jane Austen offers some clues here as to Darcy’s resolution to hold back and cure himself of this ‘madness’ he’s just contracted, but he’s over his head before he realizes what has happened. To begin with, it was a bit of sport. And then suddenly he’s feeling vulnerable and resents it bitterly. Several times he decides that he is going to pull himself together, and this is when his behavior becomes rather confusing and paradoxical — he’s pursuing and rejecting Elizabeth at the same time.
He’s certain he won’t dance with her, and then he asks her to dance; he waits in places where he knows he’ll find her walking and then doesn’t speak to her; he shows up at Hunsford Parsonage and then acts as if she had called on him.
You had to film Darcy’s first proposal scene in the second week of filming. How did that affect you? It seemed a catastrophe at first. Everybody knows how important the scene is. For scheduling reasons we had to film a lot of Darcy’s later scenes first – where he appears a much nicer person – and then do this scene with him at breaking point. Because it’s so inappropriate to do it early and it’s so nerve-racking, we gave it a tremendous amount of attention and got a degree of adrenalin working up to it, so that perhaps it’s invested with something that it would never have had if we had done it later, when everyone had settled in. It was a case of jumping in at the deep end, and Simon Langton handled it brilliantly.
How did you approach this scene? I asked myself some extremely basic questions about what it was I wanted to do in the scene. I asked, ‘What’s my character trying to get?’ and then, ‘How will he overcome any obstacles that are in the way?’ If you address problems like these, you come up with ways and means that help to make the approach clear.
I felt, for instance, that when Darcy goes into that room and says those shocking things – ‘I’m too good for you, but will you marry me anyway?’ – if I played it as if I knew I were being shocking and arrogant, it would never work. I realized that I had to make it the most reasonable thing in the world to say, but I wondered, ‘How do I do that? How do I turn that extraordinary speech about her family connections being utterly disastrous into something reasonable?’ And I thought, ‘Okay, let’s think ourselves into the time for a moment, into 1813,’ and from Jane Austen’s perspective this business about appropriate and inappropriate marriages made an awful lot of sense. It might be a disaster to cross class barriers; it could lead to all sorts of misery and unhappiness; the social fabric of the time was threatened by it, and so on.
He is also arrogant enough to think he has bestowed an enormous gift on her. Every woman he has ever met would say ‘yes’ to a proposal from him. It would be insane for Lizzy to say ‘no’, not because he assumes she finds him attractive – I don’t think that’s the reason – but because it’s the most practical offer that even someone considerably her social superior could ever hope to receive. I think he assumes, as everybody would at that time, that it would be a Cinderella ending for her.
And so Darcy is coming in with a very imprudent proposal, as he
sees it. He’s saying to her, ‘I’m going to put to you a proposal that may make me seem rash, irresponsible and even, possibly, juvenile, but I don’t want you to believe I’m those things. I have thought through every detail of this; I know that my family will be angry, that people will frown on us and that our social positions are very different. So don’t think that I haven’t dealt with these issues – don’t imagine that I’m just some reckless schoolboy. Nevertheless, having thought it all through, I find that my love for you is so overwhelming that all these objections are rendered insignificant.’ And, from that point of view, it’s a terribly romantic proposal. I was a bit hurt when we filmed it, and everybody thought I was saying something terrible: I had got myself so far into the notion that he had come in with a really charming thing to say. Of course, when you watch it, you don’t see it from his point of view. You see a self-important man entering and expressing these pompous sentiments as if they were the most natural reactions in the world and then having the gall to be astonished by Elizabeth’s rejection – and I think that’s right. But I couldn’t have played that astonishment without approaching it the way I did.
He doesn’t see her again until he unexpectedly runs into her at Pemberley. What’s he trying to do at this stage? Jane Austen is rather vague in her description of Darcy during this period, and I found myself foraging for clues about how he is supposed to come across. There are contradictions. People often ask whether Darcy changes in the course of the story or whether we find out what he is really like. I think it is a mixture of the two. His housekeeper talks affectionately of him and reveals that he has always looked after his sister and taken care of his household in a very kindly way. He hasn’t suddenly turned into a good man; I think that he has always been a good man underneath that stiff exterior.
I realized that when he runs into Elizabeth at Pemberley he needs to prove a great deal to her in a short space of time. He needs to show her in about three minutes flat that he is prepared to be apologetic and tender and amenable and un-snobbish. He’s just got to get a foot in the door and prove that he has tried to change those aspects of his nature that alienated her before. He wants her to love him: but how do you make somebody love you in just a few minutes? And how do you do that while still being true to Darcy’s character?
Does Lizzy’s rejection effect any real changes in Darcy, then? Oh, yes. You cannot think that Darcy is simply going to return to the way he was. The fact that he writes her a letter explaining himself and
disclosing some very personal information — which is ostensibly a tremendously out-of-character thing to do — suggests this. I think he suffers enormously as a result of her rejection because he loves her. I think he endures torment because a lifetime’s behaviour, even his very character, has been thrown into relief by her words.
His real crime, I think, is silliness. I know that’s a terribly undignified way to look at him, but I believe his failing is foolish, superficial, social snobbery, and that’s the bitter lesson he has to learn. And I think in that sense he does change. He actually says in the book that his father instilled in him good values but also taught him to think meanly of the world outside his own social circle. He is rather afraid of anything outside his immediate experience and is quite convinced that he will encounter nothing but barbarianism. People do make assumptions about other areas of civilization, and that’s precisely what Darcy does. It’s ignorance.
He learns his lesson when he falls in love with one of those barbarians and realizes that she’s at least his equal, if not his superior, in terms of intellect, intellectual agility and sense of personal dignity. He is so profoundly challenged by her that his old prejudices cannot be upheld. I think he’ll always have something of the old view — he’ll always be disgusted by ridiculous, boring people who talk too much. I don’t think he’ll ever learn to adore Mrs Bennet or develop an enormous admiration for Sir William Lucas.
And, of course, he hasn’t quite learned to laugh at himself. He’s learned to criticize himself, which is probably the first step, but he doesn’t yet know how to find himself ridiculous and enjoy it. With Lizzy as a partner, however, married life will be a matter of survival, and it’s plain that he’s going to learn that lesson before too long.
