! SPOILER WARNING
Here: David Thewlis as Johnny, possibly his most memorable role. He would win the Best Actor award at Cannes.
Mike Leigh
(centre) marshalls proceedings on set.
DAVID THEWLIS SPENT THE night disappearing down a Mike Leigh rabbit-hole. Mainly because he wanted to revisit Naked, the masterpiece he made with Mike Leigh almost 30 years ago, ahead of reuniting with Leigh over Zoom today. But he couldn’t find a copy, so Leigh pointed him in the general direction of YouTube. “I watched you at various ages last night,” he tells Leigh (who, now 78, looks much like he has for the last 40 years, only whiter of hair). The director chuckles. “Did you find those two Northern guys, discussing Naked at great length?” Thewlis shakes his head. “I did find someone doing my security-guard speech to a tree,” he laughs. The internet, ladies and gentlemen.
Naked is the movie that presented another side of Leigh, moving often violently away from his previous tragicomic explorations of Englishness to present a riveting portrait of one man’s descent into darkness. That man being Thewlis’ Johnny, a charismatic, cruel, fasttalking, paranoid, confident, sexually aggressive, self-taught and deeply problematic scholar of the streets who blows into the lives of various people, including his ex-girlfriend and a lonely security guard, and causes chaos wherever he goes. Johnny may be the single greatest creation to come out of Leigh’s famous improvisatory process, which is saying something. And over the next hour, Empire is privy to, and occasionally participant in, a freewheeling trip down memory lane. When it comes to two Northern guys discussing Naked at great length, we’ve got the market cornered.
Have you kept in touch since Naked? You haven’t worked together since then.
Thewlis: He’s never asked me.
Leigh: I never asked. You never refused.