Movies

Ioan Gruffudd on sexism, Weinstein and his distressing new role: ‘I found myself crying’


Before Ioan Gruffudd’s first day at drama school, he had been told to wear something comfortable. He recalls walking towards the entrance of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), where his fellow students were waiting, “looking like Marlon Brando” in white T-shirts, cool jeans and leather jackets. Gruffudd was wearing a shellsuit. A Welsh football association shellsuit. “And I was a very young-looking 18-year-old,” he says. “Very patriotic, very fervently Welsh. I was a virgin as well. All the girls were like: ‘No, we’re not going to be the first, we can’t have this young kid falling in love with us.’” He laughs. “This is who I am.” This was also the unworldly, naive boy who almost joined a fundamentalist church around the same time, but more of that later.

The man who sits opposite me in a central London restaurant – despite being a successful, handsome actor with a much better-developed dress sense – seems to have retained enough of that endearing unaffectedness that I can perfectly picture him rustling through central London in head-to-toe polyester. In fact, there is a rare and touching openness about Gruffudd; he is perhaps the least guarded actor I’ve met.

Gruffudd is nearing the end of the shoot for Liar, the ITV drama that became a bit of a talking point when the first series aired in 2017. He has been away from his family for months, and says filming this has “been probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do”. It is not just that he misses his wife and their two young daughters, who are at home in Los Angeles; playing the serial rapist Andrew Earlham again, in this second series, has had its gruelling moments. “Every day, I’m playing this person who’s unravelling, slowly,” he says. In the first series, Andrew ends up dead after being exposed by one of his victims, Laura (played by Joanne Froggatt); series two explores his past in flashbacks. “It looks great on the page – you read it and go: ‘I can’t wait to get my teeth into this.’ And then the act of doing it …” He pauses. “I find myself in a corner, having a cry during the day sometimes, because you have to numb yourself to … You can’t judge your character, you have to be the character.” It means he has had partly to desensitise himself “to all these horrible things he’s done”.

Joanne Froggatt and Gruffudd in Liar.



Joanne Froggatt and Gruffudd in Liar. Photograph: ITV

Part of the suspense of the first series came from whether or not Laura was lying about being raped. Was Gruffudd concerned about pushing the narrative that women’s testimonies are not to be trusted? “That aspect of it, I hadn’t really considered how it would be perceived,” he admits. “We weren’t trying to present one side over the other, we were just presenting a story that could happen anywhere.” For Gruffudd, who is more likely to be seen in hero mode – he has played a swashbuckling navy admiral in Hornblower and a superhero in Fantastic Four – it was the chance to play someone different. “Because of my past on-screen characters, most of the people in the street who approached me didn’t want to believe that I was that person [a rapist] at all,” he says. “Even though we clearly presented him doing these things. It worked so well that they can’t comprehend somebody like that would have done such a thing. But offenders exist in every walk of life – CEOs of banks, teachers, doctors.”

He insists that presenting the horror of sexual assault, within a drama, “is a subject matter to which we’re all very keen to do justice. Not only do women feel terrified to come forward, if they do come forward, only a third of the cases [result in charges], let alone go to trial.”

The first series coincided with the beginning of the #MeToo movement in the autumn of 2017, and allegations of rape and sexual assault emerged about the film producer Harvey Weinstein. After the initial revelations were made, Gruffudd’s wife, the actor Alice Evans, wrote an article in which she said she met Weinstein at a party, and he had asked her to go to the bathroom with him. “It’s not your average tipsy come-on,” she wrote. “It’s sinister. The sort of thing that makes you want to run away fast.” When she turned him down, she said he made a comment about Gruffudd’s career – her then boyfriend had auditioned for Weinstein the day before. She went on to say that neither she, nor Gruffudd, were ever again considered for one of Weinstein’s films.

“I was very proud of Alice,” says Gruffudd now. “Because women were not being believed. She wanted to say: ‘No, this is definitely his modus operandi. This is how he behaves. I’ve witnessed it.’ So she wanted to present the case, help bolster the case.”

Evans told him what had happened at the time (“I was stunned,” he says). Was there any sense then that she would have gone public? That people already knew all about Weinstein? “It wasn’t something that we spoke about,” he says. “The incident happened, it wasn’t anything physical, it was just the words.” In terms of Weinstein’s behaviour more widely being an open secret, he says, “agents, I guess, certainly sent people to these scenarios, to hotel rooms”.

Does he believe he and Evans were blacklisted by Weinstein? “[Alice] was very careful to say ‘I don’t know’,” he says, adding that he doesn’t know either. What’s his feeling? “I was so young when this happened and the idea of … I don’t know. I mean, just hearing and reading all these stories, it’s so beyond my comprehension, abusing that power.”

Gruffudd and Alice Evans on the set of 102 Dalmatians in 2000. They met during production and married in 2007.



Gruffudd and Alice Evans on the set of 102 Dalmatians in 2000. They met during production and married in 2007. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

I wonder if he has noticed a significant change in the culture in the industry. Gruffudd says he has never witnessed any sexual harassment, but he says behaviour has changed – there aren’t the same “jokes” being made that could be considered offensive.

“I don’t know if all those other abuses of power on the executive side have changed. I’ve not lived a day in a female body.” Evans had told him about her experience of sexual harassment, not just within the industry, but men in general. “Learning what Alice had gone through in her 20s, I can’t comprehend it because that’s not how I behaved.”

He and Evans met 20 years ago – he is touchingly uxorious but he says: “I think we’ve struggled the past four years, making time for each other because physically we’re apart.” But, he says, in terms of work and income “we’re very practical about the whole thing”. Currently, it is Gruffudd who is working more. Has he ever done his turn at full-time parenthood? “No. I think I did it for a week and thought I was really cool.” He expected lots of plaudits? He laughs. “Yes. Alice had come back, she had been away for a week. I was showing off – ‘the kids are in bed’ – and she was ‘Yeah, you’ve done one week Ioan, try six months’.”

Gruffudd’s career took off quickly. He had small roles in Titanic and Wilde straight after drama school, then was cast as the lead in the ITV series Hornblower. He made it to Hollywood, with parts in Black Hawk Down and King Arthur, and then as Reed Richards in two Fantastic Four films.

“I sort of assumed that would be a calling card.” But, he says, he failed to take advantage of his profile, and found that work dried up in his 30s. He has said before that he lost his confidence and started seeing a therapist. Does he ever look at the roles other people get and feel envious? “When you’re not working, in Hollywood, you get presented every week with a new poster going up and you know where you are in the pecking order,” he says. “I’ve managed to not suppress that, but to be aware of it and not take any heed of it, because you can’t compete with another actor as far as I’m concerned. The decision that is taken is not in his hands or my hands.” He says he feels genuinely pleased when he sees his peers doing well. “Because if he can do it, then I can do it – that’s how I look at it.”

It was Evans, heavily pregnant with their first daughter, who, as he puts it, staged “an intervention one day and said: ‘We’re going to have to change things up.’” She encouraged him to change his management team. His new manager said: ‘Give me five months, I’m going to put this back on track.’ And she did.” He started picking up lead roles, mainly in television. Liar marked his return to British TV; he also plays the lead, a forensic pathologist, in the Australian drama Harrow.

When we talk about him being recognised in the street he admits he is thrilled by it, then volunteers, laughing at himself, that he puts makeup on before he leaves the house – “bit of tinted moisturiser, bit of powder” – because when people take selfies with him: “I’m sick of seeing pictures of myself looking like shit.” He grins. “If someone says: ‘Can I take a selfie?’ I’m like: ‘No, let me take it.’ I’ll walk straight up to the window: ‘That light will look great.’ I’m not ashamed to admit that.”

Jessica Alba, Gruffudd, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis as the Fantastic Four.



Jessica Alba, Gruffudd, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis as the Fantastic Four. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Gruffudd grew up in a fairly religious family and must have been fairly easy pickings for a man who approached him on a London street and invited him to his evangelical church. “And I got sucked in. Because I was thinking: ‘Maybe I should get back in touch with this.’ I got really sucked into it, to the point where I was going to be baptised into this church.” He says the “brothers” would have prayer meetings separately from the women, and he was being pressured to give up his place at Rada because they were concerned he was in plays where he’d have to kiss women. Eventually, his mum had to drive up from Wales to rescue him. But he admits he felt “this massive conflict” and was impressed by their conviction, which made his childhood Christianity look a bit lightweight. “Since then, I’ve just never really recovered from it,” he says. “This idea of this all-seeing, all-knowing being watching everything you do is a horrible trick to play on a child and I struggled with that.” Did he really believe it? “Yes. Well, you do. If you imprint that on a young person’s mind, it’s a horrible thing to shake off. I wouldn’t want to impose that on my children.”

At school, growing up in Wales, he did an audition for a character in the Welsh language soap opera Pobol y Cwm. “I wasn’t very good,” he says, but he still loved it, and was determined to get better. Both his parents were teachers and in lots of ways he had a wonderful education at his state school, which took music very seriously (Gruffudd was a talented oboe player and sang in choirs), but he is aware that the arts is a harder place now for students from lower-income families. He was one of the last generation to get a grant: “So you did have a very diverse crowd at Rada then and probably since then, maybe not so much.” Drama school was, he says, a “level playing field,” but also intimidating.

Has he noticed that a surprisingly large number of Britain’s leading actors now come from upper-class backgrounds? He doesn’t really answer the question, but does acknowledge the role of confidence that comes from privilege. “When you look at some of the great actors we have – Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic West, Damian Lewis – these are all friends of mine, and there is such confidence and I’m not sure if that’s upbringing, that’s schooling. But it sort of oozes out of them.”

Gruffudd likes acting, he says, because: “I have, sometimes, a discomfort and unease in being myself, publicly. The characters I play are a lot more interesting than I am, and I think acting gives me a way of satisfying that show-off nature.” He says he has confidence in his talent as an actor, but the rest of it that goes with the job? Talkshows, he says, are “a terrifying experience. It’s a very exposing thing, and you need to be confident because people expect you to be. A lot of it is an act.”

He is about to take “a self-imposed break, just to have that re-entry to the family”. But he is also delighted to be so busy. The prettiness of his youth has given way to something about his face that is a bit darker, more worn, and more “interesting and difficult” roles are coming his way. “I’m meeting all these characters that I’ve always wanted to play,” he says with a smile that suddenly looks a touch wolfish. “I’ve never been more grateful to be working, and working on good things, than I am now.”

Liar returns to ITV on 2 March



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