Tom Burke: ‘Things got a bit weird with Alan Rickman – for reasons I'll never tell'

Telegraph

01-03-2025

'How do I know you're telling the truth? That's a question people like to ask actors,' says Tom Burke. The 43-year-old, best known as the star of Strike – the BBC detective series based on the novels written by J K Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith – shakes his head. While he reckons he's 'actually not a bad liar', he insists that, 'in general', actors are no better at real-life ­deception than the rest of us. 'We need quite a bit of infrastructure around us to make a fiction convincing.' Like spies, I suggest? 'Ha! I suppose so...'
Burke finds himself playing a spy in Steven Soderbergh's deliciously twisty new thriller, Black Bag. Set in London, it begins when an MI6 power couple (played by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender) invite two other couples from the ser­vice to a dinner party at their exquisite home in the hope of expos­ing a traitor. The result, as Burke puts it, is 'a cross between Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a John le Carré story'.
In a witty piece of casting, Pierce Brosnan, a former James Bond, plays the head of MI6, and Burke chuckles that 'the scene I shot with him felt like being in the head­master's office'. Meanwhile, he says that Fassbender came to work every day with a fresh and very American zeal for some new lifestyle trend – 'ice baths, inter­mittent fasting, you name it' – while Blanchett cracked the jokes. 'She's mesmerising, mercurial, magical,' he alliterates, in praise of the ­Australian Oscar-­winner. 'Very, very funny and not afraid of flirting with antipathy in performance.' Often, he explains, actors 'want the audience to just love them the whole time. But it's always more interesting if you can pull them up short, make them think, 'Ooh, I don't think I like you!''
On the day we meet over tea at one of his favourite London cafés, near Waterloo station, Burke has been working with Blanchett again. They've been rehearsing for Thomas Ostermeier's Barbican production of Chekhov's The Seagull, in which Burke plays ­Trigorin, the arrogant novelist and lover of Blanchett's grand, great actress Arkadina.
Flipping through Burke's battered script while he pops to the loo, I notice stage directions ref­er­ring to characters vaping. So it's a modern production? 'Yeah,' he nods, amused to catch me snooping. He hopes the German ­dir­ector's 21st-century take will shake off 'some of the baggage we've collected around Chekhov. In this country, we fall into the trap of being overly consistent about who these characters are, when they're really incredibly protean. They change almost every moment, each reacting every second. If you ­honour the jaggedness of that, it should be thrilling to watch and also very funny.'
I first noticed Burke in the BBC's 2016 adaptation of War & Peace, and wonder if there isn't something vaguely Russian in his soul. 'My mum thinks there is,' he chuckles. 'There may be something a bit ­Russian in my tendency to go all the way to the end of a feeling before pinging back again...'
Sipping his rooibos tea, Burke reminds me that Chekhov wrote The Seagull in 1895, a decade after being diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would kill him, and having spent three months carrying out a census in a Siberian penal colony. 'He'd seen hell on earth: forced pros­ti­tution, death every­where,' says Burke. 'He wrote this play having seen how precious life is and how easily we torture ourselves, even if we appear to have most of what we need. He has enormous compassion for the privileged people who are going through these dilemmas. He understands that whatever the problem is, it always feels real to the person going through it. That's why the pain is so real, but it's also a comedy.'
And that humour, he believes, is 'absolutely' key. 'I can be very emotionally open about stuff I'm going through if I know there is a punchline at the end. Laughter helps me to be more honest. If a joke gives you the structure to tell people what's going on, that's a good thing, isn't it? Otherwise you just scream, you know?'
Burke is an intriguingly ursine character with a fizz of ideas buzzing like bees beneath his beard, and there's a cuddly kindness to his demeanour. But the warmth and dry wit are matched by wary silences and the occasional warning growl – 'How dare you!' – when I stray into territory he ­considers off limits.
He will talk ­neither about politics, 'no matter how often the soapbox is pushed at me', nor his personal life. He tells me that while he never cringes about his performances on stage and screen, he has winced over the way he's come across in interviews. 'You mention things in an interview which are of minimal consequence, but because they're in print, you're then eternally asked about them.'
As the son of two actors, Burke knew what he was getting into. His father, David Burke, played Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes on British TV in the 1980s. His mother, Anna Calder-Marshall was in Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970). And, growing up, Burke knew he'd become an actor, too.
'I think I always just thought, I'm one of those guys,' he says. 'That was my mum and dad's gang, and I liked the vibe. For whatever reason, actors tend to talk to children in a different way to doctors or lawyers or whatever. Just like you're another person. It's a very nice thing to feel.' They assume less hierarchy between adults and children? 'Yes, maybe that's it.'
Burke was born with a cleft lip, but – now widely cast as a heartthrob – he says that the scar from corrective surgery has never felt like an impediment. 'I don't think I was that aware of it, as a boy. My parents always said I looked lovely. I can only remember one kid at school who kept sneering his lip at me and I genuinely didn't know what he was doing! Although there were moments later in my career it was an issue for some people...'
Helping guide him through such moments was his godfather, Alan Rickman. Today, he laughs about the Shakespeare tour on which Rickman first bonded with his father. 'They went to Germany, doing Measure for Measure, I think. Alan didn't have a great experience at some hotel in Munich, so he stole a spoon. After they got back, my dad – who had a naughty side – phoned him up pretending to be from the German embassy in London, following up on a report of some missing cutlery. Alan totally fell for it.'
Burke worked with his godfather on several occasions, the last of which saw him star in a production of Strindberg's Creditors, directed by Rickman, first at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, in 2008, and then, two years later, when it transferred to Brooklyn. 'Things got a bit funny after we went to New York,' Burke reveals now. 'Weird. For reasons I prob­ably won't ever want to talk about. Then there was a bit of space for a year or two, which I didn't know were two very important years.' (In that time, Rickman's health worsened, before his eventual death from pancreatic cancer in 2016, aged 69.)
When I tell Burke I'm sorry to hear this, he bats me away. 'It's OK. You hit a funny point after you turn 40,' he shrugs. 'You know as many people who are dead as those who are alive. And there are some people still alive who you are starting to slightly slip away from.' Even now, he says, 'there's an Alan bit of my brain that's always there'. He gives an example from when he appeared in an episode of The Crown, playing the priest Derek 'Dazzle' Jennings opposite Helena Bonham Carter's Princess Mar­garet. 'There's a bit where Helena first sees me down the corridor. The director said, 'I'd like to see you improvise a bit.' Then I heard Alan's voice in my head, saying, 'Dancing should be the first thing they do.' And they did dance down that corridor. I thought it really set the mood of that relationship.'
I assumed Burke was a ­sci-fi fan, given his appearances in George Miller's female-led blockbuster Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) – the disappointing box-office perf­or­mance of which Burke blames on audiences who were 'either sexist or didn't understand the singular vision' – and in the forthcoming series Blade Runner 2099 (due next year on Amazon). But he tells me he's often struggled to engage with either ­sci-fi or fantasy. However, there are excep­tions: 'If a show has pathos, I'm hooked,' he says. 'I loved James Callis in Battlestar Galactica because he was a villain who's a coward and a sex addict while every­­body else was running around being beautiful and heroic. In reality, most of us would run away from the explosions.'
When it comes to upping his action-hero game, Burke sighs over the fact that, sooner or later, Cormoran Strike 'is going to have to start looking after himself. So many crime shows start with the hero out for a run, don't they? It's become a trope. Yet because he only has one leg, I realised Strike can't do that. So I thought, I bet they'll have him doing chin-ups. Then I realised, I will have to do chin-ups.' He groans. 'Keeping in shape is not natural to me, but I suppose the job makes me do it.'
While he'll do the heavy lifting for his character, Burke won't be drawn on the debate surrounding Rowling's stance on trans issues. 'I don't think the media attention helps anything,' is all he will say today. But he's chuffed that playing the part of the one-legged veteran 'earns me about one extra handshake on the high street each day'. We say goodbye outside the café, and Burke ambles, bearishly, off to get his beard trimmed. 'I think I'm going to ask them to make it less Brian Blessed,' he says.