Nothing like what you’d expect, in other words – unless you had watched Landscapers, a new four-part TV drama in which Thewlis stars opposite Olivia Colman.
Landscapers is true crime, in so far as the protagonists are Susan and Christopher Edwards, the so-called Mansfield Murderers convicted in 2014 of killing Susan’s parents and burying them in the garden 15 years before.
“In the end,” says Thewlis, “what we’re asking the audience to decide is not whether they’re guilty, because they clearly are, but whether they deserve sympathy.” It’s very hard, on the bare bones of the events, to see how this sympathy could be generated, yet both Thewlis and Colman, with the sheer range of expressions on their desperate faces, demand the most human response.
It’s as far from being a murder procedural as it could be, and much more like a love story: two damaged, fragile people finding dark sanctuary in one another, told from the moment of their exquisitely awkward first date.
I’m never concerned with making myself look good.” While Colman has done plenty of romantic parts, this is the most intense performance of love I’ve ever seen from Thewlis, as if all the hard edges that defined his early career have been chipped off.
It’s almost 30 years since Thewlis’s seminal performance in Naked, Mike Leigh’s recently reissued masterpiece.
Now, how could you not talk about it? Violence against women – and unreported violence against women – is such a talking point.
It wasn’t even his first Leigh film – and he was eight years into an already successful, if quite different, acting career.
I remember going to the movies and seeing Tim Roth on a big screen and thinking, ‘Wow, that would be incredible.’ It was unimaginable to me.” He’s smiling as he describes how carefree his sitcom years were.
I didn’t know if it was a very interesting part, but I thought, ‘It’s a studio film.’ It’ll get me away from being typecast as this sociopathic rapist.
In Kingdom of Heaven, I’m adorable.” Some projects weren’t as satisfying as others, which would include “big Hollywood things for the money like The Island of Dr Moreau”.
So it was more about my experience on Naked – something cathartic from decades ago was coming out.” As he was writing it, he read it aloud to his wife, Hermine Poitou.
His first novel, The Late Hector Kipling, lampooned the art world and was well received.