This project found the perfect Stan Laurel to your Oliver Hardy.
Meeting Steve was another moment of courage. You realize, “I definitely will have someone who’s my equal to work against.” And Steve has been working in comedy so long that he’s really good at sorting out the timing of things. And he’s just really funny to be with. By the process of working together on the film, we found that relationship, because that’s exactly what Laurel and Hardy did. They worked together. They rehearsed. They sang, and they practiced dances, and they made movies.
We had a virtual, more time-compressed version. But they were thrown together out of obscurity by Hal Roach [Danny Huston] and had to find an act. They had to find chemistry and work together. So, that was another little thing that gave us confidence. I thought, “Wow. [We’re] never going to be as good as Stan and Ollie, but this is what they went through, so maybe that’s the secret to finding some of the magic that they had.”
How long did it take you to recreate the “Way Out West” dance?
I was making “Holmes & Watson” right before this movie in London. So, I would come and meet Steve on the weekends to work on this dance. Because we knew, of all the stuff we had to do, that was going to be the hardest because it was an actual recreation of what they did. The other things were inspired by or based on the accounts of their stage show. But we knew that dance was going to have to be spot on. So, we had about three weeks of those weekends over the course of a month, and then about three weeks of rehearsal when I wasn’t working on something else when we could just meet every day.
And then Jon Baird got appendicitis the day before we’re supposed to start shooting. And we had an additional weekend with Steve. And we went up to this sleepy little town called Ulverston, where Stan is from, to the Laurel and Hardy museum. And I got to try on Oliver’s real coat. By the time we started, we had a good amount of time spent together, and we rehearsed a lot.
Could you still do the dance without Toby Sedgwick’s help today?
Yeah. I could. I was doing it without Toby Sedgwick’s help a lot, eventually. Toby helped us learn the dance. But sometimes I’ll go for these Q & As, and then we’ll arrive at the theater as the movie’s ending. And the “Way Out West” dance is happening on stage, and Steve and I will start to do the parts we can remember. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of little details in the thing [that] I may have let go to make room in my brain for other things. But give me a couple hours and I can get that dance back up on its feet.
“Stan & Ollie” captures two distinct time periods: the glitz and glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s, and the gloominess of the 1950s, post-war Britain. What research did you do to mentally inhabit these worlds?
I’ve been watching their [Laurel and Hardy’s] performances since as long as I can remember. But I relied on Steve, and Jon, and some of the other Brits on the movie to understand what post-war England was like. And it’s such a rich environment for them to be operating in. They were a country on the mend, but they weren’t quite back on their feet yet, so it’s interesting telling this elegy story of two older guys moving through that landscape. It gives the movie a richness.
The film opens with a six-minute tracking shot. Does that put added pressure on you, as an actor, when you’re filming a scene like that?
It does. But I love that kind of pressure because it reminds me of doing theater. One of the realities of doing film when you’re an actor is, at any moment, someone will go, “Cut. Let’s start again.” Or things go off the rails. But when you’re doing those big tracking shots, you don’t have that luxury. You’re given this independence that feels a lot like being on stage. You don’t get the feeling like someone’s going to call cut any second. They want me to get to the other end of the studio without stopping. I actually love that. I’ve done stuff like that before. “Boogie Nights” opens with a similar kind of shot, and I’ve been in similar situations on films before.
Speaking of “Boogie Nights,” there’s this great story about you, a mustache, a cop suit, and Paul Thomas Anderson. And this is essentially how you landed the role in “Magnolia.”
Not exactly. I created the role of “Magnolia” by doing that. And Paul used the videotapes that we made as a joke because we were bored and I happened to have a mustache. And he thought I looked like a cop [laughter]. We were obsessed with cops at the time. We made those videotapes just for fun. And then we made “Boogie Nights.” And when we were finished with ‘”Boogie Nights,” when he started to write “Magnolia,” he went back to those videotapes and created my character for “Magnolia” based on [them]. Paul’s one of my closest friends. We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve been through a lot of things together.
Sony Pictures Classics will release “Stan & Ollie” theatrically to limited audiences on December 28, 2018.
