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British
Vogue Interview
- Payne Speaking
Written
by Susan Irvine
Bruce Payne is not a predictable hero. His acting career has its weighing of unsavory characters: Flikker, leader of the bad boys in ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS , Lawrence McNeice in BBC 1's SMART MONEY. Even the good guys he plays are no golden boys: Malcolm Pollard, the undercover policeman in OPERATION JULIE had stringy hair and filthy clothes and the "alternative folk music critic" he plays in next month's ITV series, LOST BELONGINGS, is a "bohemian off-the-road character who never gets his copy in." But his best villains are yet to be seen. He hopes to start work on THE RISE and RISE of JONATHAN WILD, playing the eighteenth-century cut-purse as "a sort of gutter MacBeth", and next month he plays the dreadlocked Dogger to Alexei Sayle's Malice in Mel Brooks's futuristic comedy, SOLARBABIES. " What's interesting is that we turn the old image of an English arch-villain - Boris Karloff, that sort of thing - upside down. We're just a couple of soaks". Bruce looks like a Bruce. He arrives with a deep Moroccan tan, black polo-neck, fringed suede Ralph Lauren jacket ( a present" ) and ancient jeans exhumed from the back of a cupboard. Also stout brown Oxfords - he has a penchant for old fashioned shoes. He pulls various other items from his sports bag: black levis, a bright print shirt, cotton drill trousers ("my dads") and even more venerable pair of jeans with a great rip skirting one buttock. " I wore these for the OPERATION JULIE audition, with a non descript jacket and lank, greasy hair. The director took me aside and asked, "Do you always dress like this?" " He pulls on the older pair of jeans to wear with the pearl dripping Gaultier jacket. Would he ever wear this for his own volition? For several minutes he is laughing too hard to talk. " For its cheeky element - yeah. But you'd have to be brave to wear it on the street." He admires the plainness of Romeo Gigli and is very fond of Ralph Lauren: "I hear he is a bit of a pioneer." His own wardrobe, however, consists mostly of "casual, untidy, sports-related clothes, jeans, T-shirts, trainers..." spiced with a preference for Mexican pieces: " Nah, not sombreros but those traditionally-embroidered shirts - so perfect you only ever need one, " as well as for Japanese looks: " They look so smart and yet easy to wear: they have a clean edge." So why doesn't he go mad in South Molton Street? " They cost an awful lot of money, and I need all I've got right now for air fares - my clothes are just to stop me from getting wet." A week later, true to his word, he is on a plane to Los Angeles for more auditions, and then onto Mexico, perhaps to pick up that perfect, hand-sewen shirt. Copyright British Vogue Magazine March, 1987
The purpose
of "publishing" this interview is to give all Bruce Payne fans the
opportunity to read it because there are a lot of countries where
you simply can't get a hold of the magazine or because it cannot be
found. No violation
of copyright is intended. If
someone feels I'm violating their copyright, just let me know,
I'll take the item down.
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