When Tom Hollander took on the role of Truman Capote in Season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s Anthology Series, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, it wasn’t the first time he’d contemplated playing the famously acerbic New York writer—some years ago he had auditioned for a different version of the role. Now, in portraying Capote’s complex and self-destructive spiral into alcoholism and isolation, written by Jon Robin Baitz, Hollander describes an experience so profoundly immersive that he himself has not yet been able to watch it. Speaking from Rome where he is currently shooting Iris—the upcoming drama series from Luther creator Neil Cross—Hollander explains his process for Feud and the impact of embodying a gay man with the courage to live out and proud in an unaccepting society.
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DEADLINE: You’re in the middle of a shoot right now. What can you tell me about it?
TOM HOLLANDER: It’s called Iris. It stars Niamh Algar, who plays a very brilliant nerdy tech wizard who gets employed by somebody that’s created a supercomputer, which has started to metastasize and think for itself.
DEADLINE: Creepy AI!
HOLLANDER: Yes. Except it’s a quantum computer, which makes AI seem like geriatric Zimmer-framing.Quantum means quantum mechanics, quantum physics, quantum… I don’t really understand how to explain…
DEADLINE: I don’t know either. This is why neither one of us are quantum physicists.
HOLLANDER: It’s a technology thriller. So, my character believes in it and thinks that it’s a force for good. But she thinks it’s a force for bad, and she runs off with the codes. She runs off with the activation sequence, and thereafter, it’s a chase. It’s a very, very long chase spread over the whole of Italy and seven episodes. She’s brilliant. And it’s written by Neil Cross, who writes Luther, so it’s zappy and witty and sassy and fun. It’s funny, but also very dark, so I don’t know if it’s dramedy. I think it read funnier than it’s going to be. Once you’ve seen the sets, it’s actually quite dark and it’s very violent.
DEADLINE: Congratulations on the Emmy nomination for Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
HOLLANDER: Thanks very much. It’s a lovely thing. I’m absolutely thrilled.
DEADLINE: Tell me what you knew about Truman before this? I mean, I know you auditioned for the role of Capote years ago. But this is obviously a very different project.
HOLLANDER: It was maybe 15 years ago. I can’t remember the date. So, I did some research then, and so I watched him, I’d watched a bit of [his guest appearance] on The Dick Cavett Show and things. I think for some reason, I never really believed I was going to get it, and I didn’t. So, it didn’t get under my skin in a way, obviously, so that was the right thing. That was the way it was meant to be, because 20 years later, however many years later, this time, I don’t know why I was more focused, or I thought, I felt I knew how to play this version of him. He was older. I could do the degradation. This was about the decline, and I found that easier to get into. I relished that.
But the other answer to your question is I had read him, so I did know of him as a writer. I didn’t know of him so much as the character of Truman, as the personality and the celeb, as I should have done because of that previous audition. But this time I really became aware, because I got deep into it after I’d got the part, is the truth. So, that’s the simple answer.
Then Robbie Baitz and Ryan and Gus Van Sant, I learned from them how important he was to them as a young man, as a figure. And that figure was mostly projected through those TV interviews, which he did a lot of. And it wasn’t just Robbie and Gus and Ryan were watching him—partly as young gay men going, “This is a gay man who is out there not hiding and not scared apparently,”—but there were also, Larry Moore, the guy who drove me to the set every day, who’s a Teamster. He had also watched Truman Capote on the TV [back then]. He left quite a large, long shadow in the popular life of America then, it seems, and not just the literary one.
Ryan and Robbie and Gus, for them, he’s held a bit like Oscar Wilde is held in British history as a martyr. As someone who was living out there when it was very, very hard, and he wasn’t apologizing for it. And he suffered for it. He paid a price for it. And they were able, those three, Ryan, Robbie, Gus, were able to express themselves through the story. So, the person that got to play this part, this iteration of Truman Capote, was very, very fortunate, because of the power of those three and their collective vision.
DEADLINE: Whenever I talk to people who have played a real person, we always address the fact that you don’t want to do an impression. It’s a version of the person, never an impression. But Capote put on an act in his real life, so you had to play the real man as a person who is also knowingly using these affectations—real Truman doing the Public Truman act.
HOLLANDER: You might then be about to ask me how I did that, and I can’t explain it.
DEADLINE: Well, that’s acting. You can’t necessarily describe the ‘how’, I guess.
HOLLANDER: No. And if I did what you’re describing, if I did, that’s a wonderful thing. It sounds amazing.
DEADLINE: That was my perception of your performance, yes.
HOLLANDER: I’m not quite sure. I mean, it’s in the writing, but I also did watch… You could see him putting it on sometimes, because you could see the gaps, you could see the cracks, is what I mean.
When he went on the shows drunk, you could see the mask drooping a bit, and sometimes you could him gathering himself as he came on… There were wide shots where you could see the performance, you could see the wide stuff. It allows you to do all the hands and the feet, and then the close-ups allow you to do something else. The close-ups allow you to rest and to find stillness, and I did think… had I got the part all those years ago, I would not have not been in control of this to the extent that I am now. In that I understand much better the vernacular of the technical aspects of working in front of a camera, so I now know, I understand the importance of stillness.
To be honest, something happened in the playing of this part, in how it all came together. And I don’t know exactly why, but it just did. And I don’t even know if I could do it again. I can’t really do the voice anymore, and I choose not to try anyway, because I don’t want to disappoint myself. We were living in it when we were making it. So, it was everywhere. It was in the sets, it was every day, everyone’s collective effort to make this reality, to make this world a real place.
I mean, when I was playing Corky in The Night Manager, there were moments there where I thought, ‘Oh, I know exactly who this is now.’ I think the longer you act possibly, the more you use it or the more I use it to escape. I feel the privilege of being able to escape reality into the characters that I’m playing. It’s a bit like what one hopes to get from going on holiday—escaping the reality of one’s existence. Actors can get that going to work, lucky them if they’re in it. And it’s a better holiday than actually going to Rome, for instance, because you you are someone else. I think the older you get, the more of a relief that is. Because the older you get, I mean, of course, I don’t mean I’m terribly unhappy, but you do perhaps understand the privilege of being able to disappear into someone else. And what’s an opportunity that is, particularly because the people that you are playing, they’re generally cleverer and more interesting and more sensitive and more brilliant than you are.
DEADLINE: How do you feel about his decision to effectively betray the swans? It seems like they saw him as a toy, so, it feels like he was just going, “Hey, look, I can play this game too.”
HOLLANDER: I think you’re right. The anger of, ‘They think of me as an adornment to their table.’ But he forgot himself because he forgot in his vanity perhaps that how much he needed them, and in particular how much he needed Babe Paley. He forgot that he deeply needed their friendship and their affirmation, I think.
But I also think he didn’t actually think he was betraying them. When he wrote that story, I think he thought he was describing a world, his pretensions to follow in the steps of Proust and be writing a contemporary A lá Recherche du Temps Perdu. He thought he was, but actually he wasn’t. What he was writing was not as good as that. And because I think at this point he’d lost it bit. He was too drunk. In a way, he was acting out in La Côte Basque [the 1975 article in Esquire magazine]. As a piece of writing, I don’t think it’s as good as his best writing, and he’s expressing his contempt for himself and for them, it’s quite crude and nasty.
Some of it’s brilliant. The last sentence is completely brilliant. But the actual social satire of it is nasty in a way that he’s never nasty in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or In Cold Blood… His best writing is actually about outsiders, if you think about it. Other Voices, Other Rooms is about realizing you are gay in a world that doesn’t want people to be gay. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is about someone who’s just about scraping a living as a hooker. Whereas La Côte Basque is about deeply privileged women and gossiping, so maybe he doesn’t really like that. Even though that’s how he personally lived his life, sitting around with them, being at their houses, going on fancy holidays, but he was addicted to that. He was getting affirmation out of that stuff. Castle creeping, it’s called in England. Actually, he should have been at his desk writing, and he got too into being famous and too into celebs.
DEADLINE: How did Gus Van Sant’s direction help inform your presentation of alcoholism? Because he has a history of having worked with these topics. What was his approach?
I know, you’re absolutely right, and I want to give you a really good answer, because obviously Gus is a master of this stuff. Unfortunately, because I can’t really watch myself in things because I find it just doesn’t ever go very well, I can’t…
DEADLINE: Really? You haven’t watched any of this?
HOLLANDER: I haven’t, no. But I knew while he was doing it, that if anyone knew and understood this deeply, it was Gus, so there was a great feeling of confidence knowing this is Gus’s area. He knows this, from Drugstore Cowboy, and he’s had his own struggles.As a director, he’s a man of few words. He’s very interior, Gus. He’s very shy, but he’s very, very watchful. But I can tell you one day we were doing the rehab sequence, which is in episode 4 or 5. I’m there, and Molly Ringwald comes to visit him. Molly as Joanne Carson and Chloë [Sevigny] as C.Z. Guest. I was showing them around the craft section of the rehab that I was in, and we played a scene in which I showed them what I’d been making some collages. Anyway, Gus gave a very rare and big note. And the big note was, “While you’re in rehab, you are very up. You’re not very down. You are playing it down. You’re playing it, ‘Look at me, I’ve ended up here.’ It’s up.” And he said it with total authority.