Colin Firth triumphs with an extraordinarily unique performance in 'A Single Man'

Colin Firth

For many years, Colin Firth has often been described as an "underrated actor." But thanks to his emotionally moving performance in the drama "A Single Man," Firth is getting exactly what he deserves: namely, an avalanche of praise and industry acclaim that have many saying "Oscar nomination" for Firth. In "A Single Man" (based on the Christopher Isherwood novel), Firth is George Falconer, a gay college professor in 1962 Los Angeles who is devastated after he loses the love of his life, Jim (played by Matthew Goode), in a car accident. George is mired in depression, despite having emotional support from his best gal pal, Charley (played by Julianne Moore), another British expatriate living in Los Angeles. The movie follows George during a day when he wakes up and decides to commit suicide that day.

"A Single Man" (directed by fashion designer/photographer Tom Ford) is an acting triumph for Firth, who initially agreed to do the movie with first-time filmmaker Ford on virtually a promise and a handshake. The day after "A Single Man" had its New York premiere, Firth shared his thoughts at a New York City press conference about this career-changing role and how he’s dealing with all the attention he’s getting for it. After the press conference, I couldn’t help but joke a little with Firth about how he’s been wearing Tom Ford suits at media events for "A Single Man." See what Firth had to say about that, as well as why not much scares him as an actor and what history-making event was going on while he was filming his most emotional scene in "A Single Man."

Colin Firth in "A Single Man"

The suit you wear in the movie is almost like armor for George. Did you find it to be that way? How did what you wore in the movie affect your performance?

It definitely played with character, as far as I was concerned. It’s a very important clue to him and a very important sign of how he faces his world. He’s putting up every barrier he can. He desperately needs to mask the chaos that’s going on. He’s a total mess. Everything is completely out of control; hence, the need to create this appearance of perfect control, which is so excessive that it can only be neurotic … It’s not only consistent with the character in the film it’s essential to it …

I think I’ve said this before: "If you take this guy’s cuff links off, he’ll fall apart." And, in fact, the entire film is what penetrates that barrier: the outgoing and incoming. The world starts to encroach — the world he’s given up on and is prepared to leave behind — and so it starts to become more vibrant and powerful. And bit by bit, it starts to get through to him. And they’re all things he sees every day.

The mere fact that he’s chosen this to be his [last] day on Earth, it endows these things with an extraordinary power. His life hasn’t changed because he’s walked on the moon … Smog, the rent boy — these are all things that occurred in his daily life, but that day is different. He’s a contained man but you do see [George] giggling with his friend. You do see moments of joy, explosions of temper, moments of frivolity breaching the barrier.

Colin Firth in "A Single Man"

How did you get into the mind of George? And what made you want to do "A Single Man"?

I’ve never read a script with anything that was presented on the page that was quite persuading. I actually don’t remember how the script read now. But I didn’t see an outline of the guy on this page, particularly. I felt what I was getting from the way Tom [Ford] had written it was much more the world as seen by George rather than what George looks like to the world. Some writers might put, "Middle-aged professor with stiff gait, buttoned-down ties, walks purposely …" None of that. It was very minimal.

This was not writing as a pitch. Often, you get that. It’s given florid language in order to sell a script. [Tom] wasn’t interested in doing that. He wanted to tell a story and basically write a blueprint of what we were going to shoot. And it was very, very basic. "He [Charles] comes in, picks up his mail from his pigeonhole and says what he says to his secretary … Phone call comes, puts the phone down. End." A lot of space to be filled, and I was intrigued by it.

And it gradually dawned on me that I was going to be taking everybody through the entire narrative and just about every human experience you can imagine within a well-contained man. Basically, that’s what Christopher Isherwood is saying. He [George] wakes up and we find him in a state of utter despair. And though the course of this [story], 15 hours or so, he experiences lust, rage, frivolity, serenity, regret. I did know it was quite an adventure to embark on with someone who has the burning imagination that Tom Ford has. He has an extraordinary capacity to communicate.

Nicholas Hoult, Julianne Moore, Tom Ford and Colin Firth at the New York City premiere of "A Single Man," December 2009

And the fact that he had chosen this material was extremely intriguing to me. I knew a little bit about his background. I don’t know much about the fashion world. I knew he had a reputation for brilliance in a lot of areas. He’s a wonderful photographer. His managerial skills are extraordinary, as are his obvious design skills. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be able to direct a film narrative. But certainly, here were a lot of aspects to his personality that were promising. But then to choose a story about a lonely, suicidal college professor in 1962 didn’t feel like a chance to show off his spring collection. So I just thought, "This has got to be more personal than that."

And it wasn’t until about a week into the shoot — because we didn’t rehearse; we went right in on a Saturday, got spray-tanned, and filmed on a Monday — that I realized how much there was to explore. And [Tom Ford] is not an interfering director. For someone who has so much control in so many ways, he sets it up in a very controlled environment, stimuli that’s very potent and strong — whether it’s the set or the clothes or the mood that he establishes — and then he lets you get on with it.

If you’re alone with your character as much as I was, [Tom] just lets you alone with him enough to get there. He doesn’t come in bombarding you with verbal instructions. He doesn’t theorize. [He gives] very helpful little nuggets, reminders sometimes. But on the whole, he just lets you offer it to him. And then if he liked it, he wouldn’t mess with it. I’m so thankful … He kept it very simple.

Colin Firth with his 2009 Venice Film Festival award for best actor (for his performance in "A Single Man") at the 2009 Venice Film Festival

How are you dealing with all the Oscar buzz surrounding your performance in "A Single Man"?

There’s nothing not to like about it. I’m doing my day job at the moment. I’m flying back and going straight on to a film set. I’m halfway through that. It’s a good place to be, generally, I think, and on to the next one. I’m doing my job. It’s a good place to be if things work out and it’s a good place to be if things are disappointing. I think the most important thing is a small film like this thrives on a good response, word of mouth, buzz. It’s not by a huge studio or distributor. It’s not got a massive amount of money behind it in the publicity campaign. So it thrives on its merits. So if it’s getting traction on that basis, then I hope it brings people into the theaters.

Can you talk about the film you’re working on now?

I’m doing "The King’s Speech" with Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi. It’s quite a cast. It’s about [Great Britain’s] King George VI, who had to step up to the throne in the wake of his brother’s abdication [King Edward VIII]. We all know Wallis Simpson. Less is known about the younger brother [King George VI], who did not want to be king, was not ready for it, was not groomed for it, and also had a chronically severe stutter at a time when live radio broadcasts were the king’s only role. And it was also 1937, and the nation was about to go to war.

These adversaries, from a rhetorical point of view, were about as formidable as it gets. Hitler and Mussolini were no slouches in front of the microphone, and this guy [King George VI] could barely speak. And he went to a very unconventional speech therapist and then developed a long, quite complex relationship, which helped him enormously. He was never really cured [of stuttering] but he was a very powerful speaker. It’s actually about the relationship between these two men.

Colin Firth at AFI Fest 2009 premiere of "A Single Man" in Los Angeles, October 2009

Can you talk about filming the scene in "A Single Man" when George tries out different ways of how he’s going to commit suicide with a gun?

I was thinking somewhere, "Isn’t it part of an actor’s skill to be dead? What do you draw on?" … The gun thing, I knew if Tom wasn’t happy about something by the way he said, "That was great." If he said, "That was great" [in a bland tone], it means, "It’s not working and we’ll do it again." And I kind of knew that we were free to move on. And that’s how, in a way, he steered things around. He basically just switched the camera on … Some people think [George] is actually contemplating suicide in that moment. It’s not. It’s a rehearsal. He’s just trying out ways in which he could do it and not leave a mess.

Why did you make those specific choices in the choreography of it?

I don’t know. I think he just wants to know exactly how it’s going to work. "Does it work better this way? Should it be this way up or this way up? Where are the blood and the brains going to go? No, it can’t be here. The cleaning lady’s going to find it. That’s no good. How am I going to fall if I fall?" He has to have all of these things planned out.

And also, this is a man who has no real experience with a gun. It’s an old gun. Why he has it, who knows? It could’ve been his father’s. It could’ve been in the house. I just think it’s a part of his personality to fastidiously keep tweaking things until he feels he’s got it right.

Colin Firth at the BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards in Los Angeles, November 2009

A recent New York Times article about you said that Tom Ford called you "fat" before you started filming "A Single Man." What kind of changes to your diet or fitness regime did you make to get in better shape?

I didn’t do much change to the diet. I just ate less, I guess. I haven’t actually spoken about what version of that is true. The subtext is definitely the thing, but Tom, if he said that, I filtered it out. I didn’t hear it. He tended to handle me with honeyed tones. [He imitates Tom Ford’s voice] "You look great, really great. If you want to get a trainer, he’ll come to your house every day. I’ll pay for it." That means, "You’re fat." Whether Tom remembers literally having said it or having it euphemistically, it’s the same. And I guess he did me a favor: one final push in the war against gravity in my late 40s. It’s probably helpful.

What was the most difficult time in your life and how did you overcome it?

I’m not telling you. I’m not going there at all.

What’s become harder or easier for you as an actor since you’ve been in the business?

I don’t know, really I haven’t stopped to think what’s harder and easier. I think a lot of things just stay hard.

Colin Firth at the 2009 Venice Film Festival

Like what?

Just acting. Film acting, everything conspires against doing a job well. Basically, you are trying to convey spontaneity, convey the illusion that something is happening at a particular moment in someone’s life and it’s really happening. And the things that they’re saying and doing are because of some inevitable impulse that they have. It’s all nonsense. Someone else has written it. You have to pretend that’s happening with that kind of spontaneity, and you inhabit that moment and you have to repeatedly inhabit that moment through the take in shooting. Now, there’s nothing spontaneous about repetition. It’s completely at odds with itself.

There’s nothing spontaneous about waiting, and that’s what filming is. You wait an hour and then be "spontaneous" 20 times. And then wait another hour and you go back to being "spontaneous" again another 20 times from a different angle, until all the life’s gone out of it, and it’s your job to keep making it spontaneous. You’re not looking at another actor in the wall behind you. You’re looking at a bunch of electricians, machines and lights. You might go into work, have your breakfast, kill your wife around 10 o’clock, wait in your trailer for a couple of hours, then marry her at 11 o’clock and then have lunch.

Now, those things, when you first get onto a film set, it can freak you out. It certainly freaked me out. I couldn’t believe all this technical stuff was what film actors did. I couldn’t believe I had to hit a piece of tape mark on the ground when I walked across the room, and then I hit another one, and if I missed it, we’d have a focus problem. And I wasn’t allowed to look at the ground. I couldn’t believe it. My first-ever film set, someone put the tape measure from the camera to my nose, someone put a brush on my face … I said, "Brando couldn’t have done this stuff." I can see him being natural, he’s walking through rooms .... And I suppose that’s all still difficult.

What I feel much, much less now than I did when I was young on a film set is fear. I don’t have that anymore, really. Nothing really scares me on set. I think it did when I started. The opposite is true for theater for a lot of actors. I remember when I first went on stage for a play called "Another Country"— true story — I went on in front of a thousand people and I was the lead. It was my first job, and I felt no fear at all. I was 23. It was just arrogance. "I’m going to be brilliant because it’s my right." I wouldn’t feel that now. The last time I went on stage, I was pretty much in a fetal position and whimpering in the wings before going on.

I think the obstacles just change. I don’t think there’s a steady evolution, really. I might go into work tomorrow and think, "What was I saying that I don’t feel frightened on a film set?" I can’t chart it, really.

Colin Firth at the New York City press conference for "A Single Man," December 2009

How did it feel, having a background in theater, which typically has enough time for rehearsals, to doing a movie like "A Single Man" with almost no time for rehearsals?

There was almost no rehearsal … I sat in a room with a table and I had a script. I read two or three scenes with Nick [Hoult] once, read two or three scenes with Matthew [Goode] once, and the same with Julianne [Moore]. And that was it … I strongly believe that you either have a lot of rehearsal or none. A true, comprehensive theater-rehearsal process enables you to make a journey which allows you time to make a lot of mistakes and road test various ideas and reject them or keep them or compound good things you’ve found — and then have them in place by the time you go on stage.

What often happens is that you listen to the first reading of a play, and that initial instinct, there’s a kind of energy there, sometimes it’s as good as it’s ever going to sound. It’s wonderful. Spontaneity is still full of life; it’s the first time you’ve read it in front of people. In the theater, what often happens is that [spontaneous] part gets killed off when you go through it the first week. And then there’s a kind of dead zone in week two, where there’s no spontaneity left at all. You’ve lost initial impulses. You haven’t really found anything yet. And then you gradually, hopefully, by digging and digging and digging and taking risks and experimenting that by week four, you rediscover where you were when you had that initial spontaneity.

If you’re not careful in a film rehearsal, after a week-and-a-half, you can get stuck in the dead zone. You’ve killed off the spontaneity, you’re not thinking on your feet, you’ve got the nerve endings going. You just suck the air out of the scene. You’ve killed it. In some ways, it’s much better to get on the set and just think on your feet. And that’s what happened in this [movie, "A Single Man."] It was, "Show up and see what happens."

Ginnifer Goodwin, Colin Firth, Ryan Simpkins and Nicholas Hoult at the AFI 2009 premiere of "A Single Man" in Los Angeles, November 2009

Sean Penn won an Oscar for playing the gay-rights activist Harvey Milk. What do you think Harvey Milk and George Falconer have in common, besides being gay men?

Not very much in common. Harvey Milk, to me, is a very, very interesting character. I always loved the documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk." I think Penn did a spectacularly good job of portraying him. But in some ways, [Harvey Milk and George Falconer] couldn’t be more different. It is a different era. Most of what we’re seeing in Harvey Milk. This ["A Single Man" story] is [set in] 1962. I don’t think George Falconer is not particularly interested in the issues surrounding his sexuality. I know he made his own lecture of fear, I think that because it’s about the silent minority its one of a whole list of things that he’s taking issue with.

I don’t think George defines himself by his sexuality any more than Christopher Isherwood did or anything Tom Ford does or anything I did. It’s very interesting to me if a character happens to be gay, it’s all about the person being gay in so many people’s minds. If I could randomly pick a character I played before [in] "When Did You Last See Your Father?" is a about a guy who’s grieving for his dad. Nobody sat there at the junket saying, "Now, you played a heterosexual. How does that affect you?" His sexuality is there somewhere, but it’s not that important. I think that’s true of George. He is struggling with a lot of things, but I don’t think he’s struggling with that. I think he’s very secure in his sexuality. And this [story] is his dealing with feelings of love and isolation.

[His sexuality] is not irrelevant. It’s possible that being gay in 1962 might add, to some extent, his isolation. He’s not invited to the funeral [of Jim]. I think people hear that, and it’s painful to think of that. That could arguable happen to someone who was in a [heterosexual] relationship that’s not approved by the family because they’re not married. I’m not trying to trivialize it. I think that Harvey Milk ends up turning his life into what I think is an incredibly important campaign for gay rights — and that’s the last thing in the world that George would do.

Colin Firth at the New York City premiere of "A Single Man," December 2009

Can you talk about filming that emotional scene when George finds out that Jim has died?

It was pretty straightforward. I just got into the room. It was around 9 o’clock at night. I remember this because Barack Obama had just been declared president. It was that day. And it was also the day that Prop 8 [nullifying a law that had legalized same-sex marriages] got passed in California. And it had even more resonance, given the nature of that phone call: "You’re not invited to the funeral." But basically, I came on the set. I was a little afraid of that scene., because it takes you through the thing that can be the most troublesome for an actor: not just finding an emotion, but starting a scene in one mental state and ending it in another while the camera is rolling.

We love to get on the set and kind of get emotionally ready. You go, "I’ve got the tears coming. Roll the camera. Here we are. I’m in the zone now." Roll camera. Cry. Histrionics. Or whatever emotion they’re trying to conjure. What I find difficult — and I remember we had exercises in this when I was a drama student — come into the room in one condition and be in another by the end of it. Something has to happen to change your mood. You can’t pre-prepare the end. So basically, I have to start the phone call happy, get a series of shocks, allow that to percolate, and end it in a state of complete devastation with the camera rolling. Tom let it go on; he let the magazine roll out, I think, for about 11 minutes.

What was wonderful is that he didn’t push in. He didn’t change the lenses or try to maximize it. He just left it where it was. When we were all done, we did a shot inside. And then he just left it alone. He didn’t do a wide shot. You don’t mess around. It was all in one place most of the time. So I had time to develop it. And, of course, I end the scene with devastation. "That’s great. Let’s do another one." Ok, back to happy place, action, and then go through it again. That was tricky from that point of view.

Apart from that, it was just like any other scene: There was a chair and a camera pointing at it. I sat in the chair and I remember the sound guy took his cans off, and he couldn’t resist, He played [John] McCain’s concession speech. We didn’t know each other very well. We’d only been shooting for about five days. So people were kind of quiet. I have to say, I wasn’t that devastated [at McCain losing], so it gave me a little more of a journey toward that. Yeah, but it’s one of those things where you look at the script and go, "Oh, boy. How do let that kind of news sink in?" But Tom had created an atmosphere where it felt real.

Matthew Goode and Colin Firth in "A Single Man"

How important do you think it was to show how loving a relationship George and Jim had, especially now when same-sex marriage rights have become a big issue?

I think it’s very important. I think because it doesn’t focus on the mechanics of sex. It’s very inclusive to everybody. I think it’s to be reminded that everyone has a right to that kind of love. And it could be a relationship between anybody of any sexual orientation. It’s just love, familiarity.

And I think it’s very well-judged that Tom chose those kind of flashbacks. That’s the kind of comfort level [between lovers] that you earn over 16 years. It’s not something you get in a week or even a year, perhaps: gently mocking each other, clearly creatures of habit. And you know that George doesn’t have a hope in hell of walking out of the door and finding that again. Now, if they had flashed back to a scene of passion, you could hope that he could find passion, but not that level of comfort and familiarity.

One of the things I admire about Isherwood’s writing is the way he completely doesn’t try to underline the sexuality. Love is just love. And it’s placed in the world of the recognizably normal. It’s not marginalized. I think it’s one of the biggest weapons against discrimination. There’s nothing militant about it. This person just happens to be this way, have these preferences or have these people that they love, and they have every right to have it.

Colin Firth in Beverly Hills, November 2009

Do you feel obligated to wear Tom Ford fashion when you go out to promote the movie?

No, but why not do it? The suit is made for us. Why not wear it?

It looks great. What would happen if you wore another designer’s clothes to "A Single Man" event?

[Tom Ford] made it very, very clear he doesn’t care. He’s offering the best clothes you could possibly imagine. I see no reason not to put them on.

And life is not a catwalk all the time.

That’s right. [He laughs.]

Photo credits: Photos #2, 3, 12: The Weinstein Company. Photos #5, 7, 8, 10, 13: Reuters. Photo #6: AP. Photo #9: Carla Hay. All other photos: Getty Images.