Dear John

There is absolutely no point to this article. I just want to talk about how cool John Hurt is.

I saw The Elephant Man when I was 10 years old. I probably should not have seen The Elephant Man when I was 10 years old, but my mother saw no reason to censor her children and, even at that young age, I knew I was different from the other kids. I was drawn to the dark, the morbid, the misunderstood. I'm actually surprised I didn't see Alien before I saw The Elephant Man considering how much of a horror nut I was, am and always have been. But nope. Elephant showed up on Showtime or HBO or something, and I wanted to watch it.

I never fully recovered. I suffered so poignantly through the entirety of that film. It ended and I sobbed for the rest of the day. And the next time it was on, I watched it again. I don't know why. It wasn't exactly an enjoyable film. I've never heard anyone say they enjoyed the experience of watching The Elephant Man anymore than any sane person would enjoy watching a batch of newborn kittens lowered into an acid vat.

I wanted to talk about the film at school the next day, but none of my 10 year old classmates knew what the fuck I was talking about and thought I was weird. As per usual.

I had no idea what John Hurt really looked like until I saw Alien about two years later. It didn't matter. I was already in love with him. I'd fallen in love with the fucking Elephant Man. Despite being buried under a shit-ton of horrifying make-up, face totally obliterated except for his eyes Hurt managed to channel a man who was simultaneously a bright, innocent child and a bottomless abyss of devastating sorrow. Never wrathful, not even when he turns upon the crowd who have torn away his hood and yells: "I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!" He's a lost child, begging for help, hoping to God that an appeal to the common core of decency that he honestly believes all people possess will awaken in someone a human response: an extended hand, guiding him to safety. But he doesn't get one. Adding weight to the suspicion that I already had, even at age 10: "Life doesn't care about us. Life is a merciless bitch."

"You're not an elephant man at all. You're a Romeo."

Anyway, roughly two years later, Alien came on TV. I wasn't thinking: "Oh my god, John Hurt is in this movie." I was thinking: "Yeah! Alien monster crab-baby explody guts and gore all over the space place!" And I saw his name in the opening credits and thought: "Oh cool, score, Elephant Man!" And then his face on the screen, Ridley Scott's camera lingering long on that long, drawn, mournful face, like a peninsula of sadness jutting out into an indifferent universe. Even smiling, his eyes were achingly, endlessly melancholy, blacker than the space glimpsed between an open door and the interior of a long abandoned and certainly haunted house. It was his goddamned face, I realized. No wonder he always played the victim - he looks like a man who has been expecting a sad, untimely end and is slightly shocked that it hasn't shown up yet.

Around the same time in my sad, isolated, totally drama-emo childhood, I also watched Watership Down and The Lord of the Rings on repeat. No, not the new LOTR, the original feature length cartoon by Ralph Bakshi, starring C3PO as Legolas and John Fucking Hurt as Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Heir of Isildur and all that shit. Tolkein himself described Aragorn as "often grim and sad, with unexpected

moments of levity." Perfect. And as the rabbit leader Hazel in Watership Down, Hurt actually manages to give integrity, rationality and sense of beleaguered acceptance to a common rabbit. Hazel was a prince of rabbits, not because he sought to be, but because he had the best interests of his fellow rabbits at heart, so much so that his own survival was always a secondary consideration.

I got older, became a huge movie freak. I don't say "film buff" because that makes it sound as though I have an education on the subject. I don't. I just consume films the way others breathe air. And I learned that Hurt didn't always play a victim. Sometimes, he played absolute bloody bastards. He was "versatile." That was a new word for me at age 12, on a list of multi-syllabic words that I did not use in front of my friends...well, the few that I had anyway.

1984

He was always turning up where I least expected to find him, and often when I hadn't even gone looking. I wasn't expecting to see him as Jesus in a Mel Brooks flick. Holy shit, he's in The Osterman Weekend and he's naked! 1984, and the final shot of the film - that goddamned face! so broken and crevassed with sorrow and What-Could-Have-Beens! - my heart melted like a popsicle on the equator. Fucking Space Balls. How many A-listers are so cool that they play themselves in a parody of a role that got them famous? Shit, not even famous - fucking immortal! The chestburster scene in Alien is mandatory knowledge these days, apt to appear as regularly in any American household as beer and cheese flavored products.

Okay. I think I've kowtowed enough. And I haven't even touched upon his new career as That Kinda Weird Old Eccentric Guy in films such as Hellboy, Harry Potter and Snowpiercer. (on a side note, I was a curmudgeonly attendee at the first Harry Potter film - my mom made me go see it. And when Mr. Ollivander slid out onto the screen, I was immediately grateful and smiling like a goony fangirl in the darkness). He was actually my favorite part of Lars von Triers Melancholia, with his affected doddering and his admiring Betty's, each one willing to bang him despite the fact that he's old enough to be their dads, granddads or dirty old uncles. Shit, I would. I'm still in love with him. He doesn't age. He'll never die.

And, as I always say: "I have friends in weird places." I really do. I don't really know how I've lucked out over the years - being a complete nobody with no connections, no money and no marketable skills - somehow making friends with people who I spent my childhood idolizing. No, I've never met John Hurt, but a friend of mine - the incredibly talented and nonstop, shameless punner John Mosby of Impact Magazine and Leftwingers for Kermit & Piggy fame - interviewed Sir John several years ago for The Leeds Guide. The article is nowhere to be found online...until now, bitches.

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Interview with John Hurt

by John Mosby

2010

There are certain actors that are no less than British institutions. Their faces may be chiselled and weathered but each of those lines marks out a distinguished role or familiar project. John Hurt is clearly one of those men. Over the years he’s managed to accomplish a whole slew of roles that mark him out to several generations. To some he’ll be the face behind The Elephant Man and The Naked Civil Servant, to others the first - and very memorable - victim in Alien, to younger audiences his appearances in the latest Indiana Jones outing, the Hellboy movies and more upcoming Harry Potter keep him clearly in the public eye.

It’s that diverse body of work that recently brought him to Bradford’s National Media Museum to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the city’s film festival and introduce a retrospective of his work.

“I first saw the award earlier. It says ‘Gives new meaning to diverse…’ which I think is lovely. Though I wasn’t heavily involved in picking out the films in the retrospective, they came to me and asked me my thoughts. I know some of the prints are quite hard to get hold of, so I’m rather glad they’re showing the less usual ones,” Hurt explains. “ They’ve included The Field, Scandal…  I suggested Shooting Dogs - that plays very well at festivals, but hasn’t been one that people say ‘I must go out and see tonight…’. It’s a challenging film.  I think that’s one of the reasons I’m here. The more film  festivals there are, the more chance there is that we’ll have a properly educated audience who understands our culture and cares to fan the flames.”

There’s a wry twinkle in the actor’s eye as he explains that he’s always had the acting bug. His father might well have preferred him to go into the church and his mother may have disapproved of the movies, but from an early age it was in his blood.

“My parents didn’t like me going to the Saturday Morning pictures because they felt they were… common.  Coming from a clergyman, that was a bit rich,” he arches an eyebrow. “ But it was probably my mother that didn’t like it, she was suspicious of film. She loved the theater, but I loved Jerry Lewis. I’d plead to go and see that because he made me howl with laughter…”

After moving from Derbyshire to Grimsby with his family, he turned his creative flair to treading the boards and was able to land a place at RADA, making his stage debut in 1962.  He might not have been traditional ‘leading man’ material, but he quickly showed an aptitude for the more interesting character parts. Such roles, he has always maintained, are the ones which prove far more challenging.

“If you take a film such as…say, The Proposition, that wasn’t a big part, but I thought ‘Wow, he’s got so much character about him’ that it was real fun for me to do. Sometimes roles are longer, but generally speaking the leading roles don’t have the opportunity to be so audacious as other roles because a story can’t take that - it gets too much. But you can come on and do the most extraordinary things for a supporting role or cameo.  So, that’s huge fun for an actor.” 

He also says that he’s been very fortunate to work with some great directors and, even more so, in films where such directors were in the ascendant.  He worked with ’newcomers’ such as  David Lynch, Alan Parker and Ridley Scott.

“I loved working with David Lynch. He taught me something about the business of making film. He’d tell me where to be and where to go physically… because what he saw on screen was vastly more important than where I found myself motivationally. You can motivate yourself to do anything, really. As long as you can make a fool of yourself - that’s the most important thing an actor has to learn!” Hurt smiles.