The character that Charles Dickens is thought to have based Fagin on in his Oliver Twist, ended up transported to Tasmania. So for English actor David Thewlis, taking the fictitious character to penal colony Australia for a reunion with the Artful Dodger, felt plausible. Here he talks about playing yet another villain and why his Fagin isn’t the scoundrel — or the Jewish figure — of the Dickens novel.
Judging by the episodes, it would appear your Fagin is possibly the most tanned Fagin in screen history.
I think most of that’s dirt. I’ve got the dirtiest head in TV history.
What’s your connection to Dickens? You were in a movie of Little Dorrit many years ago … were you a reader before that?
Not as a child. Little Dorrit was the first one I ever read because I did do that early in my career. Although if you watch that movie, I will challenge you to spot me. It wasn’t on my school curriculum, but it’s ubiquitous in TV drama in England and you’re sort of raised with it. Of course, the musical was around when I was growing up. So, most of my education came from drama because I think it was so saturated by the dramas that you didn’t actually want to go read the books. It wasn’t until I started reading for a purpose to do with acting that I started reading Dickens more and Oliver Twist is one of the ones I had read before and obviously I went back to for this.
Like this, the screen musical Oliver! was a fairly broad interpretation of the story ...
It still stands up. Obviously, I watched it again for this – I had not seen it since I was a kid – and it’s delightfully bonkers. I forgot how absolutely ridiculous it is and brilliant. Ron Moody, who plays Fagin in that, does an incredible job and it meant a lot to play this part, taking on the legacy of what Moody had made so memorable.
Interesting that Ikey Solomon, on whom Dickens based Fagin, was transported to Tasmania ...
Indeed, I had no idea about that. The writers told me that to add to the plausibility of this story when it was first pitched to me, and no, I didn’t know it was based on someone real. But where I live in London is two streets away from Saffron Hill, which is where Fagin lives and where I believe the original lkey Solomon lived, opposite Clerkenwell Green, where Dodger first meets Oliver in the book. So, I sort of live in the location of Oliver Twist.
The original Fagin is a problematic character because of the antisemitism that was in the book. Did that come up in discussions for this?
It did, in so much as “let’s really not bring that into the portrayal.” So, there’s no mention of it. It didn’t seem to be relevant any more. I certainly didn’t find the book helpful for this portrayal because it was more a direct bloodline down from the musical where Fagin and Dodger are turned into the heroes of the show and the ending of that film is Dodger and Fagin dancing off into the sunset. I thought, “This is what I’m going to draw from.” So, we didn’t discuss it because it wasn’t relevant to this characterisation. For obvious reasons, we didn’t want to go there.
You’ve played a few scoundrels in your time. Do you have a unified theory of playing the villain?
It’s a funny thing in my career, I’ve been cast either as psychopathic villains or unusually saintly, good, honest men – literally priests or saints or beautiful teachers or people who are too nice – and I never find that quite as interesting. In terms of a theory, I think one has to come at it from villains not realising they are the villains … they’re thinking that they have their own motivations which they believe to be right, or they don’t realise their own immorality, or that they’re narcissists or they’re just lacking in empathy and don’t care. Some are more caricature than others and some require enormous depth and investigation in the characterisation. I don’t even think of Fagin in this regard as the villain – he’s not the villain of this show, by any means. I think he serves a different purpose.
It’s funny that the show is coming out at this time of year as it’s got a certain pantomime energy to it.
Yeah, this is what I really like about it – there’s such a beautiful mixture of the serious, the heartbreaking and the kind of farcical nuttiness of it. I can go from one to the other in seconds. It’s like there’s little bits of restoration comedy, little bits of farce, little bits of Jacobean tragedy, comédie de l’arte … all these things mixed together and indeed, pantomime when it gets very, very silly and very, very slapstick. Then it will suddenly hit you with the blood and guts, the gallows humour and the constant threat of execution and death and suffering. It’s a comedy.
The Artful Dodger is screening now on DisneyPlus.
