The 'World Is Not Enough' actor explains he is fine playing bad guys on screen but there are limits to what kind of villainous characters he is willing to play.
- Oct 14, 2023
AceShowbiz - Robert Carlyle was fuming to be offered the "most vile, disgusting" role he'd ever come across. The "World Is Not Enough" actor said he still gets offered a number of villainous roles but there are limits to what he is willing to do on screen, and he was left particularly horrified by a recent script he was asked to look over.
"I still get offered my fair share of [villains]. A couple of days ago a script came in and it was the most vile, disgusting character I've ever read. I said to my agent, 'How dare they send that to me!' " he told The Guardian newspaper.
Asked if it was to play a serial killer, he added, "No, it was worse - to do with kids. There's certain things that you just don't want to do."
The 62-year-old actor recalled sitting next to Ray Winstone at the premiere of his pal's movie "The War Zone" and told of his friend's unease when it came to a "terrible incest scene" with his on-screen daughter. He said, "I could feel he was dying."
But Robert insisted playing Adolf Hitler in 2003 mini-series "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" was "different." He said, "That's a different kind of thing, a historical thing. That was just six months of mentalness."
The "Trainspotting" star had a brief role in Danny Boyle's 2019 movie "Yesterday" - in which a struggling singer becomes the only person to remember the music of The Beatles - as an older John Lennon and he admitted it wasn't the first time he'd been asked to play the late "Imagine" singer.
He said, "I love John. I'd actually been asked to play him three times as a younger man and I always turned it down because it was just too much. But that notion of bringing him back, just for a couple of minutes. Danny gave me the script and said, 'I'm not going to tell you what it is. Just read it all the way through.' "
