Britsh-born actor Mark Strong has been winning plaudits ever since he starred in the groundbreaking television series Our Friends in the North. That show didn’t exactly thrust him into the spotlight, though. Instead, Strong has taken a slow, steady route to global recognition, establishing himself as a go-to character actor after impressive work in the likes of Syriana, Stardust and Sunshine, It won’t be long before he hits leading man paydirt, but for now you’ll have to be content in catching him as a shadowy Jordanian intelligence agent in the new Ridley Scott thriller, Body of Lies, which is released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 30.
LWLies: How long did it take to perfect Hani’s accent?
Strong: That was a case of ringing up an actor friend I know who’s a Jordanian and has lived here for years. We had a couple of phone conversations. There was an Arab voice coach on set all the time, but he wasn’t Jordanian so it became slightly complicated because there then would be a debate about what certain sounds were meant to be like, because I had to speak some Arabic as well. It was really a conglomeration of hearing and reproducing what I thought it was. I’ve had some great feedback from it actually, people tend to think I’m Iranian, rather than Jordanian, so that’s good I think.”
LWLies: You famously tortured George Clooney in Syriana, now Leonardo DiCaprio is being menaced by you here; are you working your way through the Hollywood ‘A’ list?
Strong: They’re going to soon be asking for ‘that guy,’ they’re going to be asking to be menaced by ‘that British guy, who is he?’. The character in Syriana certainly led to the possibility of doing this one. He was a Lebanese Muslim, and the idea was that he was second or third generation and had grown up in the States and went to university there. So he had an American accent and had gone back to the Middle East and become radicalised, which was quite unusual to play in the first place. The fact that it’s happened again is perhaps something to do with my Mediterranean background that lends itself to Arabic parts.”
LWLies: You got your break in British television, but your film career seems to be taking off now, doesn’t it?
Strong: I don’t really know. When I started I did theatre for a long time, I did eight years of that, then I did eight years of television. Then I did a couple of films. I think it was around the time of Syriana and [Roman] Polanski’s Oliver Twist, which came out at the same time. It always seems to create a bit of a kerfuffle if you’re in a couple of things at once – I think people notice you. That kind of got me into the film world, and it is like a club. That’s why you see the same people involved in it all the time.”
LWLies: How was the experience of working with a film veteran like Ridley Scott?
Strong: Ridley’s the master in the sense that he’s been doing it so long and he knows exactly what he wants. I was fascinated when we were shooting; he would have four, sometimes six cameras on a scene and these weren’t just action scenes, these were dialogue scenes. It was hysterical watching the various camera crews vying for position without getting another camera crew in the back of their shot. But when he watched the monitors as the scene played back I noticed he would tap the screens at moments. Annie, the script supervisor, was standing over his shoulder jotting down what he was doing. I realised he was editing as he went along, which is phenomenal. You’ve got that many cameras, it’s all happening there and he’s going, ‘I think I’ll use that moment and that moment and that moment’. He’s so in control of his game that you just feel in safe hands.”
LWLies: Did you notice a rapport in the relationships between Ridley and Russell Crowe, and indeed Russell and Leonardo?
Strong: It was amazing, the day after the birth of my son I was sitting around a table in Rabat, Morocco with Ridley, Leo and Russell, my bags next to me, having just got off the plane thinking ‘life is strange’. And the bond between them was phenomenal. I came into the film at a time when they’d already been shooting, and the way that they were dealing with the script and the banter they had with each other, I was very outside it when I first arrived. But the minute they found I’d had a baby boy we went out for a drink and that was that. Russell was mixing cocktails behind the bar. I was filming the next day, it was the only scene I did with Russell in the film. I turned up bleary eyed but he was fine.”
LWLies: Hani is a very dapper man, what can you tell us about his wardrobe?
Strong: We went to this really exclusive Savile Row tailor called Hunstman, the idea being to get something off the peg. While we were there the manager said ‘hold on a second,’ and ran downstairs and came back with these six suits and a blazer and asked me to try them on. I tried them on and they fitted perfectly. Not only that the costume designer noticed that they weren’t quite English in the way that tailor normally makes his suits. They had slanted pockets, slightly wider lapels, tailored, and this Arab billionaire who orders suits from them had ordered 30, paid for them then passed away.”
LWLies: Do you know who that was?
Strong: They wouldn’t tell me, they’re famously discreet. But the suits were sitting downstairs, and they said if they fit me I could borrow them. They were incredible, I don’t know how much they cost but suits there start at something like £4,000. These must have been ten grand a piece, extraordinary. The fabric was amazing and the cut was incredible. And as we were walking out the door he said ‘hold on,’ he had to check the buttons to make sure they weren’t solid gold. They weren’t on these six, but some of the 30 certainly had solid gold buttons because that’s what the client had asked for.”
LWLies: As far as you know does Body of Lies paint a realistic picture of the intelligence activity on the ground?
Strong: I asked Ridley how true all this surveillance stuff was, and he thinks not only is it pretty accurate, it’s probably developed even more than we show in the movie. What I thought was interesting about it was the immediacy of some guy on the ground, in the desert, trying to make decisions on the basis of advice from somebody [Russell’s character] pointing his small son in the direction of the toilet. I imagine there’s a lot of truth in that. Certainly what I think he’s trying to point out is the implication of the reality of this conflict, that it’s being run by people who aren’t there, which is absurd.”
LWLies: Did you get to meet any officers from Jordanian intelligence?
Strong: I didn’t, the main person I talked to about it was David Ignatius who wrote the novel the film is based on. I don’t know the dark world of journalism and where it crosses over with informers and things like that, but he certainly knew people in the Secret Service over in Jordan, so I talked to him about it. I think his main issue was that Hani shouldn’t just be a classic, Middle Eastern nasty bad guy. It doesn’t really help the debate to paint everything black and white, and of course the truth is that it isn’t. It’s ironic that Hani, who certainly is menacing and as head of the Mukhabarat would have done terrible things, is curiously likeable. He’s honest, at least, in one respect. He draws a line in the sand and says ‘you go beyond this, I won’t help you any more but up until this point I’m your friend’. That was more what David was trying to impress upon me. There’s a line Hani says, ‘What’s the point of torture? Anyone will say anything under torture,’ which is true. So he just wanted to make not an obviously evil, bad secret service Middle Eastern man.”
