The night before I met Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a friend read me his horrified Wikipedia page. “He’s 32!” she says. “It can not be!” The waitress at the cafeteria in central London makes a similar noise when she looks at Brodie-Sangster, noting that she has barely changed since she arrived at the party in 2003. When she was 20, the bars they were still refusing. to serve you unless you show ID. In 2019, a viral tweet highlighted the young man he looked like, with a picture of him next to Keira Knightley, who is only five years older.
That film that catapulted the baby-faced actor to fame in the early ’00s was, of course, Love Actually, Richard Curtis’ apologetic Christmas romance. Brodie-Sangster played Sam, who learns to play drums to impress his classmate in love, along with Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth. Brodie-Sangster was 13 at the time. Does it bother you to still be labeled “the Love Boy Actually”? He shakes his head. “If I got angry every time, I would spend much of my life like that,” he says. “It simply came to our notice then. It’s great to be in a movie that is somehow still gaining momentum. It did pretty well, but it wasn’t a big blockbuster. But over the years he has gained this cult. She saw it for the first time this year since the premiere, and says it was “pretty good, brilliant writing,” before adding with a laugh, “And a great performance everywhere.”
Dressed in an elegant blazer and a plaid shirt, Brodie-Sangster is a modest and thoughtful interviewee. “Tom has always been a professional,” Thompson tells me in an email. “I was fully trained at 10 … a joy to work and a growing wonder to see.”
“I’d say he was a real genius” … Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Malcolm McLaren at Pistol. Photography: Rebecca Brenneman / FX
He has gone here from his home in Hertfordshire to talk about a show and a role that are apparently the opposite of his measured and well-founded existence. In Pistol, a six-episode series based on the memoirs of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, Lonely Boy, Brodie-Sangster makes fake gingerbread curls like the band’s megalomaniac manager Malcolm McLaren, who shot to fame on group of working class men. He was later described by leader John Lydon as “the most evil man in the world.” Directed by Danny Boyle and adapted by Craig Pearce (Moulin Rouge!), It is dotted with archival footage and thick recreations of the band’s hits. Unsurprisingly, given the confrontations and conflicts over the details of the series, she did not have the blessing of Lydon, who called her “disrespectful” and went unsuccessfully to court to prevent her former bandmates from licensing. the rights to their music.
The first reactions to the series, based on the trailer, have focused on the lack of physical resemblance between the cast and its characters, especially Anson Boon as Lydon and Brodie-Sangster as McLaren. Aside from the creative license, it’s surprisingly good and brave, and will appeal to both those who lived through the ’70s and those who experienced the birth of punk for the first time. In any case, Brodie-Sangster was keen not to turn his Malcolm into a caricature. “This series is full of such crazy, exaggerated characters,” he says. “One of the key things was to make it still credible. I didn’t want to make any impression.”
Brodie-Sangster is, of course, too young to have experienced first-hand pistols. Born in south London more than a decade after his heyday, he was 10 years old when his acting parents sent his head photos to friends who were starting a talent agency. This led to his first audition, for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He has previously described his “anger and frustration” at not getting the role of Ron Weasley; today he says stoically that “you never regret any decision that happens … 90% of the time you don’t get the role, so you have to find a way to get along with it.”
“It’s great to be in a movie that’s somehow still gaining momentum” … Brodie-Sangster with Liam Neeson in Love Actually. Photo: Job title / Allstar
Along with Love Actually and the children’s fantasy film Nanny McPhee – working again with Thompson – she appeared in a CBBC series, Feather Boy, the name her classmates would call her in the hallways of her public school. Pimlico. He didn’t find much jealousy, he says, and when he did, he cringed. “What happened at school didn’t really affect me,” he says. “Because I was thinking, I’ll probably get another job and get angry.” He has been working almost continuously since then, including voice acting on the American animation Phineas and Ferb, playing a young Paul McCartney in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy and appearing as the chess prodigy Benny Watts in the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series. He also appeared in the Maze Runner teen movie franchise, and had a small role in Game three Thrones series three and four as Jojen Reed, which helped Bran Stark take advantage of his ability to see the past, the present and the future.
These last two projects led him to close contact with young people and mostly “stan” women who follow him on the Internet. “I thought that after a couple of years they would grow and something else would replace me,” he says. Fandom and standom, he adds, can be fantastic, unless they reach “an unhealthy level: with an obsession with celebrity culture, idolizing people for doing nothing.” Isn’t it healthy for someone to sell a candle on Etsy that says it smells good? (Odor notes include lavender, citrus and vetiver). He laughs. “Very healthy. I don’t know where they got water from Thomas. I also saw sheets with me on top, ”he says.
Before The Queen’s Gambit, there was a two-year break. “There was nothing else I wanted to do day after day,” he says. “I just liked to slow down a little bit, figure out how to move forward. I didn’t want acting to become a habit.” In the meantime, I wasn’t too worried about being forgotten. , “he says.” But it could definitely happen. People forget and things move forward; cultures are changing in the film industry. “
A spectacular chess prodigy … Brodie-Sangster (right) with Anya Taylor-Joy on Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit. Photo courtesy of Netflix / AP
When The Queen’s Gambit aired in late 2020, it became Netflix’s biggest hit and one of the most talked about TV shows. US chess game sales rose 87%. Brodie-Sangster was as surprised as anyone. “I don’t think anyone would have said that a chess show would have the legs it had,” he says. “That’s why he went to Netflix: it was supposed to be a movie, but nobody wanted to make it. It’s chess. Nobody’s going to watch it. Finally, they said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it, but She is admired by Anya Taylor-Joy, who played the troubled prodigy Beth Harmon. But it was strong, plowing it without signs of weakness. Although I’m sure he needed a break later. “
Chess was a world that Brodie-Sangster knew a little about; 70’s punk, not so much. When he thought of designer Vivienne Westwood, who had a relationship with McLaren during the Pistol era, had a child with him, and ran the SEX store with him at Chelsea in London, he thought of “inflated dresses from Edwardian, wavy fabrics and stuff. ” I didn’t know she was behind the punk movement. “As for McLaren, even after some research, it was hard to figure out who exactly he was.” I watched videos of him: it had that very British accent and sometimes it sounded pretty London, “says Brodie-Sangster.” There were a lot of mannerisms. [to study] also, and how he held his mouth. His field would go everywhere; his hands would come out strong. There were all these details. It’s like creating a book in my head about all this stuff, and then trying to put it all together and do it justice. “
You realize that Sex Pistols are just lost little kids. They are young and angry, and you understand where this evil is coming from
If McLaren were still alive, what would you ask? “Where is the [Sex Pistols’] money!” he laughs. “I would ask him about his background and his childhood. What made him want to wake up England, to destroy things to get a reaction? And I would like to know how it felt for the boys? How much did he feel he needed to take care of them or was it all an act? I’m not sure if he would give me a direct answer to any of them. ” He’s also fascinated by what McLaren did next: weird ideas like his 1983 single Double Dutch, with a New York jumping troupe, The Ebonettes, an album of opera adaptations, and a foray into hip-hop. United States. “I’d say he was a real genius, and maybe a little idiot.”
Although Malcolm gets a lot of funny jokes, he is often shown in “ass” mode with his acid tongue towards the band and Vivienne (played by Talulah Riley), at one point referring to her as “the girl who sews “. (“This one is destined to bleed,” says Brodie-Sangster.) What was it like to direct your strongest comments to Riley, the star of St Trinian, Elon Musk’s ex-wife and now Brodie-Sangster’s girlfriend? “I wasn’t dating her at the time,” she says. Riley recently said the couple “hadn’t really recognized each other as a romantic possibility until the moment we both did.” Despite its difficult relationship on the screen, …