Conleth Hill: ‘It’s very liberating to play a person with no conscience’

You might expect him to appear in golden robes, his bald pate glowing, but actor Conleth Hill, most recognisable as the spider Lord Varys, Master of Whisperers, from the runaway HBO hit Game of Thrones, is in business mode. On a quick lunch break from rehearsals at the Gate Theatre, he appears in black casuals, a fringe of floppy silver hair pushed back from his face. For this new production of Arthur Miller’s 1963 play The Price, Hill is taking a break from the limelight, stepping into the role of director, a relatively new string to the well-polished bow of his career in entertainment. “Though let’s be clear,” he says wryly, “I’m not pretending; I really am directing, and it’s brilliant. I love it: you don’t have to change your clothes or learn lines.”

The Ballycastle, Co Antrim, native has been acting professionally for more than 30 years. After a short spell in art college, he trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the 1980s, before a role in Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pockets in 1996 catapulted him from relative obscurity to Broadway. After a low-key premiere in west Belfast, Jones’s dark comedy toured to Edinburgh and London, before hitting New York.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” remembers Hill. “And it definitely changed [the trajectory of] my career. I started getting theatre offers that I wouldn’t have had before. All of a sudden I wasn’t going in unknown to meetings any more.” When the run finished, he went on to star in six different plays back to back at the National Theatre in London. “It was when I finally started making a good living.”

Hill says it took a certain tenacity to keep going as an actor in leaner years, but “honestly”, he says, “I didn’t feel I had a choice. I felt like I had to [be an actor]. And if anyone came up to me and said ‘My son or daughter wants to be an actor’, I would say ‘If they really want to do it, they will.’ I do still think it has that vocational stamp to it. I understand why parents worry, because it is still very precarious, and I probably didn’t make a good living until my 30s, after 15 years of work, but I would also say to a young actor: do anything and everything you can to enrich your discernment of different types of plays, what’s good and what’s bad. That’s where you’ll do all the real learning.”

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Game of Thrones, which Hill calls “the best experience of my life”, was the actor’s big break on TV. “I remember when I was [working] on Broadway with Stones in his Pockets, someone gave me a DVD of The Sopranos to watch and thinking ‘God. I would really love to do that kind of work, but I’d have to leave home.’ Well. Where was Games of Thrones shot? Down the road, which just goes to show, if you wait long enough they will come to you.”

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Hill loved playing the complex role of the contradictory Lord Varys. Indeed, Hill relishes the opportunity to play a good villain; he can currently be seen in Magpie Murders on BBC1, where he plays a nasty, terminally ill writer, who uses the lives of his friends as material for his novels, “Look, as human beings we are mercurial and multifaceted,” he says, “and there is a danger, I think, of hero playing. But [as an actor] your job is to tell the story, not make a judgment about your character.” Hill credits this “unbiased journalistic approach to the work” to the influence of his father, a news cameraman. “You have a responsibility to tell that story, not your own, and sometimes that means surrendering your own beliefs to [your character’s].” Also: “it’s just a lot of fun. It’s very liberating to play a person with no conscience.”

Never be dictatorial. You should be nudging, rather than demanding ... and keep the work day short: you aren’t going to discover anything new when you are tired

—  Hill on directing

Hill first came to the role of director by accident when his co-star in a production of a Marie Jones adaptation of The Government Inspector wrote a one-man show and asked Hill to have a look at it. The actor was surprised but he wasn’t fazed. “The thing about theatre is it’s a bit like football. When you are directing, you are still on the same team as you would be if you were an actor, you’ve just changed position. You’re not a striker any more, you’re a goalie. It’s the same principle, just a different position: you are just at a different end of the pitch. The fact that you are a team: that’s the secret.”

Hill conducts rehearsals with an awareness of his own experiences as an actor. The rules are simple, he says. “Never be dictatorial. You should be nudging, rather than demanding. Everybody works in different ways, different paces, different methods. Keep a loose rein so you can discover things as you go. Stay open, and keep the work day short: you aren’t going to discover anything new when you are tired.” In his experience both on the stage and behind the scenes “the biggest secret to [a show’s success] is casting.”

For this new production at the Gate Theatre – the third production of Miller’s play at the theatre in 30 years – Hill has assembled a team of familiar collaborators, including Sean Campion, who starred in the Broadway production of Stones in His Pockets with him 25 years ago (“though we haven’t worked together since”), and Abigail McGibbon, who he has directed in several new plays by David Ireland. Although Hill has never performed in the play himself, he says he feels a deep identification with the main characters in The Price, two brothers (played by Campion and SImon Delaney) who find themselves returning to their family home after years of estrangement to deal with their late parents’ estate. “It’s a play about getting older,” says Hill. “About running out of time, when you come to the end of a working life and think ‘Where’d all that time go?”

Although the play centres on a conflict between the brothers – one sacrificed his own career to look after his parents, the other went on to great success as a doctor – Hill says it has the hallmark of all great writing. “You can identify with all of [the characters.] What you have is all the different aspects of humanity, being human, playing out on stage.” The play’s atmosphere and conflict is shaped by the shadow of the Great Depression, and Hill cites the films of Tom McCarthy and the paintings of Edward Hopper as an inspiration for his production. “We were thinking about Edward Hopper,” he says, “who was painting through the Great Depression: individuals in rooms. And [the production] should feel like a Tom McCarthy film: where you feel ‘we are lucky to be getting a slice of this life’. Unusually, [the play is] set in real time. There are no jump cuts. It starts where it starts and finishes. That’s the intensity of feeling.”

Hill interrupts himself before he goes any further. “Look, there’s too much analysis of plays altogether,” he concludes, eager to get back to the rehearsal room. “I’m with Oscar Wilde on that one. What’s that he says? ‘Reveal the art and hide the artist.’ The reason to come is to watch it happen. So all I really want to say is come see the show.”

The Price runs at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, April 13th-June 3rd