Scoop's Ian McShane
By Sara Brady
Despite his forty-plus-year career on stage and screen, Ian McShane is best known this side of the pond for his portrayal of the foul-mouthed, merciless frontiersman Al Swearengen in HBO's Deadwood. This July he steps into a lighter role for Woody Allen's comedic murder mystery, Scoop. As journalist Joe Strombel, McShane does just about everything and anything to nail down that last, juicy story.
Premiere: After Match Point, this is Allen's second film shot in London. What was the set like?
Ian McShane: There were a lot of English character actors there, because obviously the idea of working with Woody Allen appeals to most actors because of his body of work. There's not a lot that goes on in England now, besides a lot of bad musicals on stage, or rather indifferent television. We used to lead the way in so-called progressive television, and great shows and writing, but now we've started that reality craze. It's sort of dying out now, we hope, but it still dominates television. But when I talk about character actors, we had some who were doing, literally, one line for Woody, you know, 'cause everybody wants to be in a Woody Allen movie.
We hear Allen runs a tight set, no twelve-hour workdays. What's he like when he's working?
It's a very simple process. We were finished by mid-afternoon most days, so we could go back and have cucumber sandwiches and tea. He's very charming, and the way he directs—half the time you don't know he's there—he's very low-key, easy, gentle. He expects you to know your lines and do what you do. There's very little after that, very little “directing.”
Most of your scenes were with Scarlett Johansson, making her second movie in a row with Allen. How did you like working with her?
She's delicious. That's the word for Scarlett, absolutely delicious. She and Woody had a very good rapport, which is always nice on a set. She's a delightful girl, very smart, down to earth. So it was a very easy, relaxed set, seven weeks in London, and mostly an eight-hour day. It was civilized. I do think that she's been very smart with her choices, that she hasn't decided she needs to do a franchise picture, put her name above the title in some terrible movie. She's been smart about what she's chosen to do, people she's worked with.
Since you play a journalist, did you base your character on any that you've met during your career?
There's a wonderful English character, Ross Benson, who's a reporter married to a great friend of mine. He died a year and a half ago, sadly. But he'd done everything. He'd practically been in like three wars; he was in Vietnam, in Iraq in the first gulf war, and he wrote about the West End show business. I modeled my look slightly after the enfant terrible, Christopher Hitchens, with the slight stubble. The old British hack who you tolerate in this country. As John Ford used to say, if you can print the truth or the myth, print the myth. So I played the myth.
Your character will do anything for a scoop. Has there been a time in your career when—
Would I do anything for a job?
Well, yeah.
I think every actor, when you come to the end of a gig, no matter what you do, how successful you are, you think you'll never work again. Even though you say, “I don't want to work for awhile,” the next day you say, “What's coming up? What's happening?” 'cause it's what you do. Deadwood's an example. Why the hell they couldn't cast it in America, we'll never know. They didn't. So they came to England. They didn't just come to me, they came a few of us, and they said, “Would you have a chat on video camera?” When I read that, I thought, “Yeah, this is the part that's got my name on it,” in a way. Whether it comes true or not, you never know.
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