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It was a good script although I must say that it wasn't the one that eventually ended up on the screen

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It was a good script, although I must say that it wasn't the one that eventually ended up on the screen."This explains the weaving – and, to the outsider, sometimes inexplicable – path of his career: a love of the words, regardless of the medium in which he's going to deliver them And a love of challenges. "They've all been script-driven really, with – I'm sure – an eye to 'what have I recently done, what would be radically different?' Because I think that has been a kind of game that I've played with myself, whether consciously or subconsciously: where's the next stretch?"Postlethwaite's strength lies in suggesting the depths that underlie the character. Even as Roland Tembo in The Lost World, he gave the impression that his character had about 10 times as much back story as all the others put together. "One of the things that I want to do is make sure that the person is a complete person, and that no matter what kind of areas they go into, what kind of situations they have to face, somehow or other they're rooted, their feet are firmly on the ground, even if they are going to be taken off the ground for some reason or other." Postlethwaite gleefully quotes The New York Times review of Kobayashi, the deadpan lawyer he played in The Usual Suspects: "'This guy: he's got a false accent, he's got a false tan, he's got a false name, he wears false suits – and still we believe him' – that's what you want to hear."Kobayashi, like many of Postlethwaite's characters, has a magnetic stillness about him. He seems to relish parts that offer the opportunity to do nothing, and to do it beautifully This is no accident. He is dismissive of actors who desperately try to draw attention to themselves It's not necessary.

"If you've got somebody who is just thinking thoughts, the camera automatically wants to go and see what those thoughts are."He stretched himself in a different direction when he took to the stage as Macbeth to widespread acclaim four years ago. It gave Postlethwaite a chance to apply his philosophy of finding the "person within" to a character who is often portrayed as pure evil. "Even with these extraordinary villains, more often than not Shakespeare will give you a little window that just goes right down, and you see the incredibly human soul of the man inside. Macbeth wasn't a villain: he was just swept along on this tide of ambition and it took him far beyond where he imagined he could go." Postlethwaite's Macbeth had the air of a lottery winner who couldn't believe his luck, and ended up writhing in agony as he was broken on fortune's wheel. "I don't know of many Macbeths with whom the audience have sympathised. Somehow or other people have got to be able to say, 'I recognise aspects of that character'.

You could feel the audience going 'oh, poor bastard'."And now he is back on stage again with a new play by Justin Butcher, Scaramouche Jones. It is a 90-minute one-man show, in which the eponymous 100-year-old clown recounts his life story on Millennium Eve According to Postlethwaite, "It's a wonderful journey. He goes through the most extraordinary episodes in his life, but he always seems to bounce back. There is something tremendously endearing and enduring about somebody like that. And on a practical level, it's the distillation of theatre: storytelling.

It's what all theatre is, all film, all TV."He's taking the show on tour across the UK, including four nights at the 1,000-seater Belfast Grand Opera House. It will be a challenge, trying to fill a space such as that all on one's own, even for Postlethwaite. "My thought on that one is that if you take a photograph that's really sharp and focused, no matter how big you blow it up, it should still repeat, and still be all right. That's the theory."He actually seems to be looking forward to finding out whether the theory works (and not apparently worried that it may not). But then, it is the thrill and challenge of the new that keeps him going, and keeps him fresh as he moves smoothly from Holly- wood trailer to shabby dressing room and back again. "What is the point of repeating something you know you can do? If it's not fraught with some kind of danger, I wouldn't really see the point." He pauses.

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