Jonathan Pryce has played popes, cardinals and kings – not to mention a High Sparrow in Game of Thrones – and next year he is due to appear as the Duke of Edinburgh in the final two seasons of The Crown. Yet the acclaimed actor is calling for smaller-scale stories to stay at the centre of television entertainment. Big-budget, lavish dramas made by major streaming services could be all that survives the virus crisis, he has warned.
“There is a danger we are going to see more dominance of big companies,” Pryce told the Observer. “I hope it’s only short term.”
A triumph last month at the Welsh Baftas, followed by a long-awaited costume fitting for his part in a new Amazon-made spy thriller, have amounted to a very good autumn so far for Pryce. But the work ahead of him reveals a troubling truth, he fears.
“It has been very frustrating, waiting with nothing to do and watching as several of the independent films I was due to do have been stopped in their tracks,” he said. “Things are starting up again now for me, but it’s those smaller projects that have fallen by the wayside. There’s been such a surge in the importance of the big streaming companies and they are the only ones with the money now.”
As a survivor of Covid-19, the 73-year-old said he was more than ready to work after months of treading water following his recovery.
“I spent eight days in hospital after getting coronavirus in late March. My wife, Kate [Fahy], had it much worse than me really. She was burning up with a fever and had terrible headaches, but didn’t go to hospital,” said Pryce. “I’m being tested all the time now and am negative but still have antibodies, I’m happy to say.”
Pryce has been a leading screen actor since 1985 when he appeared as the hero of Terry Gilliam’s much-loved film Brazil. He recently played Don Quixote for the same director.
In the past two years, he has also been celebrated for appearances opposite Glenn Close in The Wife and as the current pope alongside Anthony Hopkins in Fernando Meirelles’s film The Two Popes, a performance for which he won his best actor award at Bafta Cymru.
But Pryce remains nostalgic for the time he started out in the 1970s and early 1980s: the era of one-off, risk-taking British TV dramas that appeared in the BBC’s recently celebrated Play for Today slot. “I can’t help wondering where those people have gone? Where are those audiences finding that kind of thing now? And the pandemic is going to make it much harder.”
Pryce’s welcome costume fitting is for a role in Janus Metz’s adaptation of Olen Steinhauer’s 2015 bestseller All the Old Knives, which co-stars Chris Pine and Thandie Newton. “It’s a clever script about the CIA and a fictitious incident,” said Pryce.
The Welsh Bafta came as reward for playing a man he admires, Pope Francis. “The things he was saying outside the church are what attracted me to playing him,” he explained, applauding statements about same-sex civil unions that came from the Vatican last month. “I’m speaking, of course, as a Welsh Presbyterian but I think he has played his hand well by biding his time.”
The actor based the character of High Sparrow on Pope Francis before realising he would one day play the real man.
“Rather like [Barack Obama],” Pryce said, “this pope had the hopes of a lot of people riding on him but he was always in there to be a reformer.”
