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Tobias Menzies on F1: I don't find racing very gripping. I prefer tennis
Every American alpha in an action flick needs an unmacho British foil, someone who, just through their awkward presence, can make the star look even cooler. In the Indiana Jones films Harrison Ford had Denholm Elliott, in Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise had Simon Pegg, and now, in F1: The Movie, Brad Pitt has Tobias Menzies. While Pitt's Formula 1 driver, Sonny Hayes, is a laconic straight-shooter steeped in racing nous, Menzies's money man, Peter Banning, is a jittery obfuscator who has binge-watched Drive to Survive to get up to speed. Swaggering he is not.
It's a role deftly played in unfamiliar conditions by Menzies, 51, who is known around the world as Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones and for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Prince Philip opposite Olivia Colman's Elizabeth in The Crown. 'I haven't really done these sorts of films before,' he says, talking in a café near his home in northwest London. In a $300 million juggernaut such as F1, seizing the moment is all. 'You've got these tiny little pirouettes of character and story, and then drive, drive, action, action.'
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Physicality, Menzies decided, could convey more than words, so he gave his character a Tim Henman-style fist-pump celebration. Banning, a board member on Hayes's team, was pitched to him as 'a sort of classic English gent, suited and booted, and I was like, that feels in danger of being a cliché'. He left the suits to Javier Bardem, who plays the team boss, and suggested that his character be more of a tech bro, clad in a casual 'but unbelievably expensive' wardrobe à la Succession.
Pitt he found to be 'delightfully straight' and 'very unstatusy — when he's on set, he just likes to play the scene'. Except that some scenes involved him driving an F1 car at 180mph. 'What I love about the film is just how fast it looks,' Menzies says. 'Brad said he found it unbelievably rewarding and my sense was that he'd gotten very good at it.' Over the period of filming Pitt's lap times got a second faster, an eternity in the sport. Menzies didn't get to drive an F1 machine — how fast has he gone in a reasonably priced car? 'I probably haven't even broken 100.'
'The challenge of the movie star is a different thing — he's got to carry the story,' he says of Pitt. 'Clooney, Brad, these guys are bringing something suffused with their own natural charisma and attractiveness.'
Like his character, Menzies wasn't familiar with F1. 'There's a crazy circus quality to it — these teams just land for three days in this place and then move on. It's like theatre on steroids.' They filmed guerrilla-style at real grands prix in the UK, Abu Dhabi, Hungary and Italy. He remembers shooting on the grid at Silverstone ten minutes before the start of a real race. 'All the real drivers were there, the real crowd. We had to run out of there because the cars had to take off for the warm-up lap. That was my first day and I'm like, this is nuts.'
The film was endorsed by the sport's governing body and its authenticity extends to rampant product placement. 'It's an expensive film to make,' he says. 'And the product placement doesn't pop so much because you're used to seeing it in Formula 1.' The movie is full of plugs for Ninja air fryers but he didn't get a free one. 'I obviously wasn't in on those days.'
So is Menzies now an F1 convert or was it just a work thing? 'It might, whisper it, be the latter,' he says. 'It's a very strange world and, if I'm totally honest, as a spectator I didn't find it very gripping. When you're watching the track, sometimes you wouldn't know who had gone past.' He is more of a tennis guy and an all-year swimmer in the Hampstead Heath ponds.
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Born in London to a radio producer father and a teacher mother, Menzies went to a Steiner school in Canterbury and trained at Rada, where his peers included Sally Hawkins and Maxine Peake. 'Maxine was already a bit of a star — when we were there she had a TV documentary made about her,' he says. He politely avoids talking about his private life, having graced gossip columns in the Noughties while dating Kristin Scott Thomas, 14 years his senior.
After breaking through in 2005 as an anguished Brutus in HBO's Rome, these days he generally gets recognised for Game of Thrones, the time-travelling historical fantasy Outlander and The Crown, although fans of the last of those are as restrained as the royals. 'They don't tend to come up to you,' he says.
Many of Menzies's characters are quite buttoned up. 'That's a bit who I am, but not completely. I'm more of a mess than Philip — he's a lot more alpha. I find life a lot more challenging.' Contained acting is also 'what I'm drawn to, where it doesn't show me everything straight away'. Seeing Stephen Dillane in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing at the Donmar Warehouse in 1999 was formative. 'There was an ambivalence about his relationship with the audience — it wasn't necessarily kind or appealing. The inside is bigger than the outside.'
For Menzies that interiority comes with fierce self-criticism. At the F1 premiere he talked to Hans Zimmer, the film's composer. 'He was like, 'I hardly like anything I've written — I ask directors to tell me whether it's shit or not shit.' I'm similar.' So what's the least bad thing he's done? 'The episode in The Crown that juxtaposed Philip's midlife crisis with the moon landings,' he says. Philip would never admit to having a crisis 'so he needs this other thing to communicate it through. My internal critic wasn't too savage on that one.'
Menzies can play lighter, from his deadpan gynaecologist in Catastrophe to Edmure, his hapless nobleman in Game of Thrones, who was the groom at the infamous Red Wedding ('I left the room and everyone died') and had a hilarious scene in the very last episode of the show, where he made a pitch for being king before his niece, Sansa Stark, told him, 'Uncle — sit down.'
'There was a happy little accident there,' Menzies says. 'I turn and my scabbard bangs against the tent pole. That wasn't in the script, it happened in rehearsal.'
His next film, The Entertainment System Is Down, is about as far from F1 as you could get. Co-starring Keanu Reeves and Kirsten Dunst, and directed by Ruben Ostlund, the Swede who made The Square and Triangle of Sadness, it's about a plane en route from London to Sydney whose in-flight entertainment goes kaput. 'It becomes, in a very Ruben Ostlund way, a dark social commentary about what happens when you remove the screens from our society,' Menzies says. 'It's a huge opiate, maybe the biggest drug that we're all consuming.
'I can be obsessive about work but I found my match in Ruben. He's highly demanding — you do a minimum of 25 takes. Often his films have a comedic element but anything that feels acted he can't bear. Which is absolutely my taste as well.' Like Triangle of Sadness, the film shows a spectrum of society: pilots and stewardesses, upper class and economy.
Menzies plays one of a group of Australian cricket fans who have just seen their team beat England in the Ashes. 'We're a source of chaos and entertainment,' he says. 'It came out of Ruben meeting a group of Australian guys at a barbecue and being really taken by a particular kind of Australian masculinity — unapologetic, front-footed, a lot of jokes.'
Ostlund, like many directors, knows that Menzies can be a whole lot more than the token weedy Brit.F1: The Movie is in cinemas from June 25
