Jonathan Pryce didn’t want to be in
Game of Thrones . “I’m not a big fan of, of, whatever they call it – magic, fantasy, all those swords and dragons, the silly names,” says the Welsh actor. So when showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff first asked him to be in their high-fantasy series, he turned them down outright. Five years later though, the show was a cultural phenomenon. When they approached him again, this time to play The High Sparrow, “I took it.” The same thing happened when Weiss and Benioff – “two very clever people” – asked Pryce to be in their new show, Netflix’s splashy new drama 3 Body Problem. Anyone else would have jumped at the chance. Not Pryce. “When they told me that this was science fiction, my heart sank.” Eventually, once again, he capitulated. “Well, I couldn’t see any reason not to do it.” The 77-year-old, a vision in corduroy in a
London hotel suite, allows a sly smile to unfold slowly across his face. “I like Dan and David,” he says. “They know what they’re doing.” To suggest that 3 Body Problem is a little high concept is an understatement of epic proportions. Adapted from the novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, it essentially revolves around some clever people on Earth attempting to make contact with faraway extraterrestrials, and then succeeding. But it’s more convoluted than that. There are frantic references to the ongoing production of nanofibres; a next-level VR computer game that allows its participants to interact with the (mostly unfriendly) aliens; and over a quiet pint discussing interstellar communication one night, a character says: “It’s not a good time to be a theoretical physicist.” Yep. Benioff, Weiss, and co-creator Alexander Woo ( True Blood ) know precisely how to play the algorithm ubergeek content plus existential calamity to their advantage. It debuted on
Netflix last week, and is already number one around the world. Pryce plays shady billionaire businessman Mike Evans. He spends much of his screen time sitting in a darkened room talking to someone who sounds like the aliens’ head of HR on speakerphone. It hardly constitutes a stretch for an
Actor of his calibre. One can perhaps understand his initial reluctance. Although he has dabbled in the world of blockbusters, notching up appearances in Tomorrow Never Dies and Pirates of the Caribbean , Pryce most excels in gritty, talky roles that take place very much on terra firma. He’d started out on stage before his breakthrough performance in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian masterpiece
Brazil , in which he played a bureaucrat in search, literally, for the woman in his dreams. He was mesmerising – and Oscar-nominated – in The Two Popes alongside Anthony Hopkins in 2019, in which the pair played papal types trying to manage a scandal at the Vatican, and was brilliant as a self-involved writer in 2017’s The Wife with Glenn Close. Pryce always did do self-involved terribly well. He also, increasingly, specialises in men of a certain age grappling with mortality – not least in the Apple+ TV drama Slow Horses , in which he plays a former MI5 agent whose occasional wayward behaviour might just be an indication of dementia. Read Next Bernard Butler on Suede: 'My dad died and no one cared' “Hm,” he sighs. “I do suddenly seem to be getting an awful lot of dementia stories coming my way, or else men who’ve lost their wives and go off on a journey, that kind of stuff. Personally, I don’t really think about my age, except when I look in the mirror.” Born into a working-class family in Wales, his father a shopkeeper, the young Pryce thought he might become a painter at first, before going on to study at the
Liverpool Everyman Theatre and, later, at RADA. Despite his notionally humble beginnings, however, he always felt entirely assured of his own abilities. “Oh, I’ve always been arrogant,” he says, “always known my own worth. When I first started acting, all the directors and producers were from Oxbridge, while I’d merely trained to be a teacher. But I did well.” As with anyone who has worked as much as he has, though, his CV does contain films that make him wonder, now, what on earth possessed him. He’s not made any obvious turkeys, but not all of them were box-office gold, either. Few people, for example, remember his turn in the 1989 adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers , while Man on
fire from two years previously was the most routine of crime thrillers. “I am sometimes surprised at some of my choices, yes, but I had bills to pay, a family to provide for.” Pryce is married to the actor Kate Fahy; they have three children. And were there many roles he was overlooked for, or else unwisely turned down? Suddenly, he bristles. “There are certain actors,” he begins, “who like to boast about all the things they turned down.” Then, honing in on one particular actor, adds: “He’s Scottish, and is in the papers all the time.” A brief internet search will lead you to the revelation that Brian Cox , latterly of Succession , turned down the short-lived role of Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones . “Can’t bear that,” Pryce says. “Who knows who turned it down before he turned it down? I just don’t think this sort of thing is fair to other actors.” Nevertheless, he happily tells now of the time in the early 80s when Martin Scorsese was keen for him to play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ . “I was flown out to meet him, first class, and Harvey Keitel was there, and there was lots of talk about what to do with our respective roles. Harvey was saying that we were going to go into the desert for six months, eight months, to learn how to wear the robes. I said to him, ‘I went to RADA, mate. I’m not going to the f**king desert with you!’” Read Next The Taskmaster effect: How a gameshow became the comedian's golden ticket Ultimately, he turned down Scorsese: “I told him that the film was clearly important to him, and I didn’t want to spoil it by being in it.” Willem Defoe played Jesus instead, and Pryce returned to the
UK, where he starred in Brazil . If his performances of late have been more sedentary, they’ve continued to give him much to chew on. He was terrifically tart, for example, as the ninety-something Prince Philip in the final two series of The Crown . “Yes,” he says, “and I’d have liked to have had a bit more fun with it, to be honest, a bit more of his bad temper, and some of those slips of the tongue.” The Crown being an ensemble piece, Prince Philip was but a minor part. “But the side of him that we did focus on, I enjoyed.” There are creative types you meet, at particular points in their career, who radiate the quiet satisfaction of a life well lived, ambitions achieved. Jonathan Pryce is one such person. Given how well he has done as an actor, does he ever lament that other path, as a painter, not taken? The sly smile returns. “More people said they liked my acting than my paintings, and I’m a praise whore,” he says. “And people are always nice when they recognise me in the street, which I like, though they tend to be a little too reserved in London. Sometimes I feel like saying, ‘Come on, guys! It’s me!’ “It’s my
Job,” he points out, “to be recognised.” ‘3 Body Problem’ is streaming on Netflix.