Spy, author, cad, space cowboy – the British actor can do it all. In preparation for his next turn in The Seagull, he subverts some classic roles
When Tom Burke was working on Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir, he found himself growing increasingly irascible. He was playing Anthony, a charismatic, Oxbridge-educated civil servant with a secret heroin habit that drove him to steal from and lie to his girlfriend. He still isn’t sure whether his darkening mood was a result of the character seeping into his subconscious or if it was entirely unrelated. “I might just have been going through some sort of enormously dark, depressing patch anyway,” he says, “and thank God that film was there to give me something to put it into.” He has wondered in the past whether Anthony was, for him, “what Jung calls the shadow, the unconscious personality”. …
In The Seagull, Burke will play the moody novelist Trigorin in a new production directed by German director Thomas Ostermeier. Cate Blanchett will play his lover Arkadina and Emma Corrin is Nina, the young actress who he falls for then discards. “I’ve wanted to play Trigorin for a really long time,” says Burke. “I think he’s got a pretty busy head,” which “appeals to me as an energy”. He enjoys the character’s complicated soul. Trigorin “is sometimes cast as the villain of the piece”, says Burke with a long exhalation, before deciding: “I don’t feel like you get villains in Chekhov. Everyone’s so complex. It’s good to commit to the dark side of it, though, as well.”
There is a thread running through many of his characters. Burke is often cast to play cerebral, charismatic men who occupy the dubious outskirts of moral decency. Likewise, in Black Bag, he will appear as a boyish, philandering secret agent in a murky plot that involves the Russians and a piece of nuclear hardware. The drama unfolds in a world of delicious townhouses with huge glass-walled extensions and unsignposted Japanese restaurants. Blanchett does a lot of slinking around in silk pyjamas. Burke has a raucous monologue during a dinner-party scene where the guests, who all work for the secret intelligence service, have been served a drug-spiked Chana Masala that unleashes their base desires. It was a judicious piece of casting. “[Tom] radiates a raw intelligence,” says Soderbergh, “and he’s got a great voice. So I would argue that he’s best deployed when playing characters who really know how to talk.”…