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Andy Nyman |
Underdog turns into a barking megalomaniac
Once the ineffectual loser, Andy Nyman tells Simon Wroe about his Tricycle Theatre role as tyrant
GENTLE underdogs” are the roles traditionally reserved for Andy Nyman. The 42-year-old actor, probably best known as the disempowered boss with a lot of blood to lose in the 2006 British horror film Severance, confesses he is used to “being put through the ringer”.
But beneath his long-suffering exterior, Nyman is no wallflower: on top of acting, he also co-writes all of Derren Brown’s mind-melting TV and theatre shows, pens plays, and performs as a magician in his own right. He is set to star in two Hollywood films, alongside Adrian Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz and Ving Rhames.
And his success is beginning to rub off on his stage personas. This month he reprises his role as David O Selznick, the omnipotent 1930s Hollywood producer who famously orchestrated the writing of the Gone With the Wind screenplay in a matter of hours. Moonlight and Magnolias, which returns to the Tricycle Theatre after enjoying great success last year, is the true story of that potboiler insanity.
“It’s a remarkable play. The level of madness and control that Selznick exercised in Hollywood at the time is just staggering,” Nyman explains. “There’s something very appealing about seeing people of that stature and how they behave.”
His time in LA working on The Brothers Bloom – a conman film directed by Ryan Johnson (Brick, 2005) – and hitman film Tournament, both due to be released later this year, has helped him construct the part.
“There are a few people I’ve met over there and worked with who are sort of joke characters; people whose” – he raises his voice to an abrasive American bellow – “volume control is broken.”
Nyman will next be on our screens as another formidable producer figure, in Charlie Brooker’s highly anticipated sitcom Dead Set.
There’s more magic malarkey in the works with Derren Brown too. “In our heads it’s not just a magician doing tricks,” he says. “We think of them absolutely as pieces of theatre. A massive amount of the show is written. It has to be with the type of effects you are doing language is everything.”
Acting, though, has always been Nyman’s “primary love”.
“I knew from 12 that I wanted to act. The rest is just a brilliant hobby, even the Derren stuff.”
His different disciplines don’t cross-fertilise as much as he would hope, he says, though there are uses for sleight-of-hand or the psychological profiling necessary for his and Brown’s famous mind-control trick.
“These are quite useful areas of knowledge when you are creating a character,” he adds. “Every actor tries to make the words on the page come to life. I automatically start imbuing it with behavioural patterns to try and make it work.”
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