Photos by Dan Monick

DAVID THEWLIS AND HIS HOPELESS, HILARIOUS FICTION - PART 1

The Vice Interview

Even if he hadn’t been the star of maybe our favorite movie of all time, Mike Leigh’s Naked, David Thewlis would still be one of our favorite actors. Not only that, but he’s a great writer. Thewlis deals in funny, observant rhyming poems and hilarious-but-harsh fiction. Then, every once in a while, he goes and portrays Professor Lupin (clearly the best teacher at Hogwarts) in a Harry Potter movie, just to pay the rent.

This month, Thewlis’s debut novel is being released. It’s called The Late Hector Kipling, and it features one of the most misanthropic, hopeless pricks of a protagonist that’s ever been wrought by a Man With a Typewriter. As Thewlis’s (non)hero makes his way through the London art world, he systematically lays waste to everything good in his life, from friendship to family to love. And just when you think it can’t get darker, it does. But all along, the book is garnished with Thewlis’s ruthless wit and stop-you-in-your-tracks insights, which are like little life buoys in a sea of violence and betrayal.


Vice: Your novel alternates its location between London, where the British art world lives, and Blackpool, where you grew up and which us Americans don’t really know about. What’s it like there? It’s a resort town, right?

David Thewlis: Yeah. From speaking to other Americans, I understand that it mostly resembles Atlantic City or Coney Island. In Britain it’s a very famous resort. As mentioned in the book, there’s a tower there…

Blackpool Tower…

Right, which was built and designed with inspiration from the Eiffel Tower—although it’s not nearly as graceful and elegant as that. [laughs] It’s much more industrial-looking. But it’s very famous in England, the Blackpool Tower.

What sort of people come to Blackpool?

It’s a working-class resort. A lot of people from Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and the Yorkshire towns go there on holiday. In recent years it’s become more of a stag-night place. Do you say that?

Yeah, sure, stag night. Like a bachelor party.

Right. But when I was growing up in Blackpool, there was a great circus in the base of the tower. There were literally clowns walking the streets. It was kind of like living in Disneyland. There was a huge theme park there called the Pleasure Beach. In fact, I grew up in a toy shop next door to a candy store.

Jesus. The perfect boyhood.

I’ve got this really romantic image of my growing up, but it’s true. I really did grow up in a toy shop next to a candy store in the shadow of a huge theme park in a resort town…

With clowns roaming the streets.

Right! And then I became an actor, so now I’ve got no sense of reality at all. Anyway, I sentimentalize Blackpool, but it’s quite a unique town.

To see Atlantic City combined with British culture would be something else…

There’s also a great history of old entertainers there, like in the musical, vaudeville tradition. A lot of British stars got their start and worked in Blackpool.

So you decided to make your novel’s protagonist a native of Blackpool.

I didn’t want to make him from London, even though I live there a lot of the time, or even Manchester or Liverpool, which are near Blackpool. I just thought there was some fun to be had from saying that his childhood was in Blackpool and his parents were still there. Actually, the parents are the closest thing to anything to do with my life in the book. They aren’t a million miles away from my parents.

The mother especially is such a strong character. She has this really endearing naïveté about art, but her son is an artist. Does that have a parallel in your life with your mother?

It does, in terms of my own mother’s attitude toward the film world and some of the more independent films that I might have acted in or been friends with the people involved in. I remember taking her to see Edward Scissorhands and her being totally baffled. She was like, “What’s all that about?” I said, “It’s Tim Burton,” and she was like, “But he’s got scissors on his hands. It makes no sense.” [laughs] So she’s not exactly experimental in her way of thinking.

Has she read the book?

She hasn’t, not yet. My father has, and he liked it a lot apparently, even though he’s not read much in his life. He said to me, “It’s a long time since I’ve read a book.” I was like, “You’ve never read a book, Dad!” I’ve never seen my dad with a book in his hands. But I actually feel a lot closer to him since he’s read it. He’s more affectionate with me and a lot more outgoing now.

A lot of writers can reveal things about themselves emotionally in their work that they might have trouble getting out in their real life.

Yeah, exactly. Even if their characters stray further and further from their real selves as the book goes on, and they start behaving more irrationally.

So are there incidents in the book that are based on real events?

The whole story in the book of my mother buying an ugly, expensive sofa and then my father being so upset about it that he gets ill is true. He didn’t become quite as ill as he does in the book. He wasn’t hospitalized. But he was in bed for a few days.

Because of a hideous sofa that your mother bought?

Yeah! My mother really did buy it. I remember, I had the idea that I could just pay a friend to go and buy it based on an ad I could put in the newspaper, and that might have taken all my parents’ stress away. Then when I was starting to write the book, I thought that story might fit quite nicely into it, so I started to thread it all the way through.


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