New Matthew Macfadyen Inteview

Ian Wylie, an entertainment and freelance journalist and former London and TV Editor for the Manchester Evening News, has posted his interview with Matthew Macfadyen on his personal blog.

Here are parts of MM's interview...

Was Matthew a Blyton fan as a child?
“I read The Famous Five, primarily, and I read The Magic Faraway Tree. I didn’t really get into The Secret Seven. I sort of graduated from The Famous Five into Roald Dahl, I suppose.”
What does he think is the appeal of Blyton?
“There’s lots of absolutes and certainties in her writing, which is very reassuring for children. There’s the moral certainties, the good and bad, there’s a bit of danger in there and there’s a sort of continuity and a sameness about her stories which children like. They enjoy that repetition. And she wrote masses, didn’t she?”
Matthew has a moustache in Enid. Was it his own?
“It was not,” he laughed. “No, we made friends every morning. Helena kept making me laugh. Lots of giggles.”
Why did he take this role? “It just came along. It’s quite bleak out there at the moment. There’s not a lot happening. I was going to do A Passage To India and that was pulled. It’s a strange time. So it was a nice day when my agent rang with this.”
Would he work in America?
“Well, the family, we live here. There’s enough work. I don’t have any ambitions to live there, really. I don’t mind going where the work is, I don’t mind going to wherever, but…if there was nothing going on here, I’d probably go to LA for the pilot season. But there’s plenty of good stuff here.
“I’m doing a little bit with the Robin Hood film. I’m the Sheriff of Nottingham. It’s a very incidental character. It’s not the Alan Rickman Prince of Thieves. I just get humiliated. He’s a local bureaucratic idiot who’s after taxes. The bigger the movie, the more impersonal it is, the less you know.”

Continue Reading...

[Source: Ian Wylie | May - Matthew Macfadyen Topix Forum]