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      Brett Goldstein Faces Life After ‘Ted Lasso’

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      LONDON — A few minutes into coffee last spring, Brett Goldstein wanted to show me something on his phone.I leaned over and saw puppeteers sitting on skateboards while they hid behind a table, rolling into one another in apparent bliss as their hands animated a clowder of felt cats above their heads. For Goldstein this represented a kind of creative ideal, as pure an expression of fun, craft and unbridled glee as any human is likely to encounter.“Imagine this is your actual job,” he said, his breathtaking eyebrows raised in wonder.Goldstein shot this behind-the-scenes video during his time as a guest star on “Sesame Street,” an experience this Emmy-winning, Marvel-starring comic actor and writer still describes as the single best day of his life.The clip is inarguably delightful, but Goldstein hardly has to imagine such a job. As the breakout star of “Ted Lasso,” the hit comedy about a tormented but terminally sunny American coach winning hearts, minds and the occasional football match in England, he is part of an ensemble that brought as much bonhomie, optimism and warmth to the set as Ted himself, played by the show’s mastermind, Jason Sudeikis, brought to the screen.“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Goldstein said last year. “I think we all will.”And now it has ended. Or maybe it hasn’t. What is certain is that the new season of “Ted Lasso,” which starts on Wednesday, will conclude the three-act story the creators conceived in the beginning and there are no plans for more. Whether and how more tales from the Lassoverse arrive is up to Sudeikis, who told me he hadn’t even begun to ponder such things. “It’s been a wonderful labor of love, but a labor nonetheless,” he said.So even if the new season isn’t the end, it represents an end, one that hit Goldstein hard. In a video call last month, he confirmed that while shooting the finale in November, he kept sneaking off to “have a cry.”But even if “Lasso” is over for good, it is also inarguable that Goldstein has made the most of it. Chances are you had never heard of him three years ago, when he was a journeyman performer working on a TV show based on an NBC Sports promo for a service, Apple TV+, that few people had. (Humanity had plenty else to think about in March 2020.)Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in the third and final season of “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+But things have moved fast for him since “Ted Lasso” became the pre-eminent feel-good story of the streaming era, both in form — as an underdog sports tale about the importance of kindness — and function, as a surprise hit and career boost for a bunch of lovable, previously unheralded actors who have now amassed 14 Emmy nominations for their performances.None of them have turned “Ted Lasso” into quite the launchpad that Goldstein has. His Roy Kent, a gruff, floridly profane retired player turned coach, was an immediate fan favorite, and Goldstein won Emmys for best supporting actor in a comedy both seasons. He was also one of the show’s writers and parlayed that into a new series: “Shrinking,” a comedy about grief and friendship. Goldstein developed it with Bill Lawrence, another “Lasso” creator, and Jason Segel, who stars along with Harrison Ford. (It is Ford’s first regular TV comedy role.)Thanks to “Shrinking,” which came out in January and was just renewed for another season, you might have encountered Goldstein on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” “The Today Show,” “CBS Saturday Morning” or some podcast or another.Thanks to his surprise debut as Hercules — Hercules! — in a post-credits scene in Marvel’s 2022 blockbuster “Thor: Love and Thunder,” you will soon see him everywhere.Brett Goldstein in a scene from “Thor: Love and Thunder.”MarvelNone of this had come out when we met last year. Back then, he was still struggling to make sense of the ways “Ted Lasso” had changed his life after two decades of working in comparative obscurity in London’s theater and comedy trenches. Whatever the hassles of losing his anonymity, he said, they were more than offset by the benefits — the visit to “Sesame Street,” the opportunity to work with a childhood hero like Ford, the chance to work on “Lasso” itself.“I would happily do it for 25 more years,” he said, but that’s out of his hands.What Goldstein can control is what he does with his new Hollywood juice, which currently includes a second season of “Shrinking,” other TV concepts in development and whatever emerges from the whole Hercules thing. (He’s already mastered Marvel’s signature superpower: the non-comment.)No matter how long this window of opportunity stays open, he’s still chasing the same simple thing: a slightly coarser version of what he captured in that “Sesame Street” video.“It’s a bunch of grown people having the time of their [expletive] lives being very, very silly but also creating something that’s meaningful,” Goldstein said. “And it’s [expletive] joyous.”OK, a significantly coarser version. But to understand why, it helps to know a little about how he got here.‘I very much relate to the anger.’Goldstein, 42, grew up in Sutton, England, as a soccer nut by birthright — his father is a Tottenham Hotspur fanatic — who became just as obsessed with performing and movies, spending hours as a boy recreating Indiana Jones stunts in his front yard.Improbably, all of the above contributed to his current circumstances: It was his performing and soccer fandom that led to “Ted Lasso,” and he is now writing lines for Indiana Jones himself in “Shrinking” — lines Ford says while playing a character inspired by Goldstein’s father.But it took Goldstein a few decades to arrive at such an exalted position. After a childhood spent acting in little plays and his own crude horror shorts, he studied film and literature at the University of Warwick. He continued writing and performing through college and beyond, in shorts and “loads of plays at Edinburgh Fringe and off, off, off, off West End,” he said. A short film called “SuperBob,” about a melancholy lo-fi superhero played by a beardless Goldstein, eventually led to a cult feature of the same name.More important, it caught the eye of the casting director for “Derek” (2012-14), Ricky Gervais’s mawkish comedy about a kindly simpleton (played by Gervais) working at a senior care facility. Goldstein played a nice boyfriend. “That was my first proper TV job, and then it was slightly easier,” he said.Along the way he tried standup and it became an abiding obsession — even now he tries to perform several nights a week. “He’s always been the sexy, hunky dude in, like, really tiny comedic circles,” said Phil Dunster, who plays the reformed prima donna Jamie Tartt in “Lasso” and first met Goldstein roughly a decade ago, when he performed in one of Goldstein’s plays. (Dunster remembers being dazzled and intimidated by his eyebrows.)At some point a fan of Goldstein’s standup mentioned him to Lawrence, a creator of network hits like “Spin City” and “Scrubs,” who checked out Goldstein in a failed pilot and was impressed enough to cast him in his own new sitcom in 2017.That one also never made it to air. By then Goldstein was in his late 30s. “I had a sort of epiphany of, ‘I’ve missed my window,’” he said.Then came “Ted Lasso.”“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Brett Goldstein said of “Ted Lasso.” “I think we all will.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe show’s creators, who also included Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly, wanted some English soccer fans on staff, and Lawrence thought of Goldstein. He was hired as a writer but soon became convinced that he was the person to play the surly, fading pro Roy Kent. As scripting on the first season wrapped up, he made a video of himself performing several Roy scenes and sent it to the creators, stipulating that if he was terrible, all involved would never speak of it again. He was not terrible.It’s a story he has told many times. But it hits different in person, as the gentle fellow in a fitted black T-shirt recounts how he felt a bone-deep connection to the irascible Roy. The face is essentially the same, but the eyes are too friendly and the voice is smooth and mellifluous where Roy’s is a clipped growl.“I get that you would be confused by this,” Goldstein said, setting his coffee cup neatly into its saucer. “But I very much relate to the anger. I used to be very, very miserable and had a quite dark brain, and I’ve worked very hard at changing that. But it’s there.”Lawrence said that “of all the shows I’ve ever done, Brett is one of the top two people in terms of how different he is from his character.” (The other: Ken Jenkins, the friendly actor who played the caustic Dr. Kelso in “Scrubs.”)In some ways the connection between actor and character is clear. Both are prolific swearers, for one thing, and Goldstein lives by the chant that defines his famous alter-ego: He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.Colleagues and friends are stupefied by how much he does. While shooting the first season of “Lasso,” he was also flying to Madrid to shoot “Soulmates,” the sci-fi anthology series he created with Will Bridges. During filming for Season 3, he acted in “Lasso” by day and joined the “Shrinking” writers’ room on video calls by night. He found time to interview comics, actors, filmmakers and friends for his long-running movie podcast, “Films to be Buried With.” He regularly squeezed in standup sets.“I’m not sure when he sleeps,” Dunster said. “But I know he gets it in, because he looks so young.”Goldstein said his workaholism predates his newfound Hollywood clout. “Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” he said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”He acknowledged that both could be true. But then if “Ted Lasso” has taught us anything, it’s that nobody is just one thing.‘We joke our way through this.’“Ted Lasso” is a sprawling comic tapestry woven from characters — a wounded team owner (played by Hannah Waddingham), an insecure publicist (Juno Temple), a spiteful former protégé (Nick Mohammed) — threading their way toward better selves. The new season finds the AFC Richmond squad at its underdoggiest yet, back in England’s mighty Premier League and destined for an uncertain but sure to be uplifting fate.“Shrinking” is more intimate, a show about hard emotions and hanging out that happens to star a screen legend whose presence still astounds everyone. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Harrison Ford is one of the stars of “Shrinking,” an Apple TV+ series Goldstein helped create. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Apple TV+Ford’s character is an esteemed psychologist who has received a Parkinson’s diagnosis. He was inspired by several real-life figures, including Lawrence’s grandfather, who also had Parkinson’s disease; his father, who has Lewy body dementia; and his old friend from “Spin City,” Michael J. Fox. The character was also based on Goldstein’s father, another Parkinson’s survivor.“Brett and I share this thing with our families that we joke our way through this,” Lawrence said.Goldstein is exceedingly private about his personal life, but his father gave him permission to discuss the link — his reasoning was that he wasn’t ashamed of the condition and couldn’t hide it anyway. “And also,” he told his son, “the fact that I can tell people Harrison Ford is based on me is a pretty cool thing.”Goldstein joked that this gift he has given his father has expanded their conversational canvas by roughly 100 percent: “Football is still all me and my dad talk about,” he said. “That and the fact that he’s Harrison Ford.”The former, at least, is the way it’s always been. “I think that’s why sport exists,” he said. “It’s a way of saying ‘I love you’ while never saying ‘I love you.’”Such Trojan-horsing of human emotion has become Goldstein’s default mode, whether it’s using his podcast guests’ favorite films to get at their real fears and desires, portraying the discomfort of vulnerability via a clenched soccer star, or writing Parkinson’s jokes to work through the painful fact of his parents’ mortality.“Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” Goldstein said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesSegel said that Goldstein is always the one on “Shrinking” insisting that no matter how punchy the punch lines, the feelings must be pure and true. This wasn’t surprising, he added, because Goldstein is a Muppets fan.“It sounds like a joke,” said Segel, who as a writer and star of “The Muppets” (2011) does not joke about such things. “But it speaks to a lack of fear around earnest expression of emotion.”Which brings us back to the cat video and Goldstein’s other Muppet-related fascinations. (“The Muppet Christmas Carol” might be his favorite move ever, he said, and he’s been known to perform an abridged version on standup stages.)Those looking for a felt skeleton key to unlock his various idiosyncrasies aren’t likely to find one. But his Muppet affection does offer a glimpse at what motivates him as a performer, creator and workaholic, which is less about opportunities, franchises or scale than the vulnerability and risks of trying to reach someone and the openness required to take it in. The thing he’s always looking for, he told me over and over — to the point that he started apologizing for it — is a bit of human connection in a world that can seem designed to thwart it.“They put up this Muppet and I’m gone,” he said. “But that requires from both of us a leap of faith, like, ‘We’re doing this, and I’m all in and you’re all in.’ And if one of us did not commit to this thing then it’s [expletive] stupid — it’s just a [expletive] felt thing on your hand, and I’m an idiot for talking to it and you’re an idiot for holding it.“Do you know what I mean?” More

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      in Television

      Samuel West Takes Comfort in D&D, Mendelssohn and Ron Swanson’s Whiskey

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      The British actor, who appears in “All Creatures Great and Small” and “Slow Horses,” talks about bird-watching, history podcasts and why he stands up for rats.In the first episode of the current season of “All Creatures Great and Small,” Siegfried Farnon wins a rat in a drinking contest.The actor who plays him, Samuel West, felt victorious, too. He’d been angling for a rat to make its way into the PBS series — about a rural veterinary practice in England in the late 1930s — and has been a fan of them for even longer.“I’ve had five rats in my life, but they were sort of baby substitutes,” West said in a video interview last month from his family’s home in North London, which they share with a pair of kittens but no rats. “I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to have them again.”In addition to “All Creatures,” whose third season began in the United States this month, West can also be seen in Apple TV+’s spy thriller, “Slow Horses.” He spoke to us about the days he looks for 100 birds, the years he’s spent on a single stamp and why chamber music can feel more like acting than acting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Dungeons & Dragons I was a very early adopter of Dungeons & Dragons. I started around Christmas of 1977, when I was 11, playing on the floor of the boy’s loos at school, literally sitting down with paper and rolling dice before school. Now, I play every week online. The game has evolved so much over the years. The new edition has completely transformed the game: It’s much simpler, it’s full of mechanics that are easy to learn, and it’s very inclusive.2. Tom Phillips He painted, wrote books, made art for album covers, wrote an opera called “Irma.” I met him when I was 16. I’d never really met an artist before, and I didn’t really know what an artist’s life was like. Tom showed me that it didn’t really have to be like anything, or it could be like as many things as you wanted, because it was only really limited by his skill and his curiosity, both of which seemed to be infinite.3. Darcy Clothing This clothing retailer in the United Kingdom used to be a very well-kept secret among costume designers who needed to buy a large number of period shirts dating as far back as the 16th century. Anyone can shop there and it’s all very good quality. Siegfried Farnon and I both get shirts there. I particularly like shirts with long, pointed, soft collars without stiffeners, like men wore in the 1930s.4. Stamp Collecting At a party 20 years ago, a woman was trying to pretend to be interested in the fact that I collect stamps and asked me how many I had. It’s not a question that anybody who collects stamps would ask somebody else. I realized that what she was asking about was an accumulation. And I thought, What’s the difference between an accumulation and a collection? I suddenly realized that a collection is defined by what it leaves out. That was incredibly enabling.5. Bird-watching If we’ve got a full day to go birding, we almost always go to Norfolk, which is the best bird-watching county in Britain, bar none. And we try and do what’s called a Big Day, which means we start just before sunrise — usually in a wood on the Norfolk/Suffolk border — and we drive through Norfolk maybe with one stop. Then we go along the A149, which I call the birding Silk Road, and we finish just after sunset listening for owls. We try and get to 100 species.6. Gem There’s a great restaurant in our neighborhood called Gem that serves Greek, Kurdish and Turkish food. Twenty years ago, I went in and they said, Before you order, do you want this? Because we’ve made too many and it’s really nice. So, I sat down and I had this sort of chopped-up kebab with tomato sauce and bread and butter. It was absolutely delicious. I had nothing else for about eight years.7. Lagavulin 16-Year-Old I have about 15 different whiskeys upstairs on a shelf. It takes quite a long time to get through because I don’t drink quickly. But it’s very warming and lovely in the winter. The darker, the peatier, the smokier, the better. My favorite whiskey is probably Lagavulin 16-year-old, which is the Scotch that Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson drank on “Parks and Recreation.”8. Sleeper Train to Penzance The train leaves Paddington at five minutes to midnight, but if you have a sleeper, you can get on at 10:30 p.m., check into your room, and go to the buffet car for a whiskey — crisps for the children — before wandering back to your berth. In the morning, they knock on your door and bring you coffee and croissants or bacon rolls. If you’re lucky, when you lift your curtain, you can see the sun rising behind St. Michael’s Mount, and you get to Penzance at about five past 8. We just took our children and they adored it.9. “The Rest Is History” Sometimes when you’re looking out of the window or reading the paper and thinking, “God, everything’s a bit of a bin fire,” it helps to go back and look at other times in history where things were also a bit of a bin fire or to just get a bit more perspective on the fact that things change and even terrible things pass. That’s one of the reasons I like the podcast “The Rest Is History,” hosted by the British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. They have a wonderful series on the American Civil War.10. Mendelssohn Octet Felix Mendelssohn wrote the first version when he was 16. The piece is so brilliant, so joyous, so full of energy, tunes, life and vivacity. When I was a teenager playing cello, it was my gateway drug to chamber music. The chamber music repertoire actually reminds me more of acting than acting does sometimes — the togetherness between a string quartet and the way you have to really listen to each other. I love working with musicians because, in addition to being talented, they also practice. Actors, on the whole, don’t practice. More

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      in Movies

      Mike Hodges, Director Acclaimed for ‘Get Carter,’ Dies at 90

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      He was best known for complex crime dramas like “Croupier.” But he also made the big-budget 1980 science-fiction yarn “Flash Gordon.”Mike Hodges, a director whose visceral feature-film debut, “Get Carter” (1971), is regarded as one of Britain’s best gangster movies, died on Saturday at his home in Dorset, England. He was 90.Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and a producer of Mr. Hodges’s 2004 film, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Hodges wasn’t prolific — writing about him in The New York Times in 2004, the critic Terrence Rafferty said, “The English director Mike Hodges has made so few films he should be legendary,” like Stanley Kubrick and other limited-output directors. But he had successes, none bigger than his feature debut.Mr. Hodges had directed for a handful of British television series when he stepped up in class with “Get Carter,” a movie he wrote based on a novel by Ted Lewis. Michael Caine starred as a criminal out to avenge his brother, who had died under suspicious circumstances.“Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Times when the movie came out. “Yet it is so finely acted and crafted — and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre — that as a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises.”After “Pulp” (1972), a crime comedy that also starred Mr. Caine, and “The Terminal Man” (1974), a blend of science fiction and horror based on a Michael Crichton novel, Mr. Hodges took on a high-profile assignment, the big-budget sci-fi yarn “Flash Gordon.” Released in 1980, the movie divided critics.“It means to be escapist entertainment,” Vincent Canby of The Times wrote, “but it’s all so extravagantly witless that it stirs the social conscience, if not too deeply. It reminds you that there are people in India who would be glad to eat the spinach you leave on your plate.”But Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times admired Mr. Hodges’s campy take on the story, which was based on the popular comic strip of the same name.“At a time when ‘Star Wars’ and its spinoffs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, ‘Flash Gordon’ is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” he wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Michael Caine in “Get Carter” (1971). “As a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New York Times.Everett CollectionLater in the 1980s Mr. Hodges made some flops, including the sci-fi comedy “Morons From Outer Space” (1985) and the crime drama “A Prayer for the Dying” (1987), which he disowned because he objected to the editing. But “Croupier” (1998), a crime drama about a writer (Clive Owen) who goes to work in a casino, brought him a burst of new attention.The movie didn’t get much notice when it had a limited release in Europe, but then a friend found an American distributor willing to give it a two-week run in some markets in the United States, and critics hailed a comeback.“‘Croupier,’ filmed by Mr. Hodges from a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, shows that the director hasn’t lost his knack for whip-smart, tongue-in-cheek suspense,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 2000.Mr. Hodges said that until those American reviews, his disappointment over the original lack of attention to “Croupier” had him considering quitting the business.“I was sitting at home in Dorset, getting over a hip replacement,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2001, “and these amazing notices from America started pouring from my fax machine. I couldn’t believe it. It was like some crazy fairy tale.”Yet he directed only one more feature, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which also starred Mr. Owen, as a gangster who investigates his brother’s suicide. With a plot not unlike that of “Get Carter,” it seemed like completing a circle.“It’s hard not to see ‘I’ll Sleep’ as a kind of unofficial sequel to ‘Get Carter,’” Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian in 2003. “The film plays as a wearied elegy to the gangster life, full of characters slightly past their sell-by dates, angry and outmoded as they nurse their ancient feuds and clamber in and out of their E-type Jags. Hodges watches their decline with a cool, clinical eye.”Mr. Hodges, center, directing “Flash Gordon” (1980). The movie “is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” Roger Ebert wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionMichael Tommy Hodges was born on July 29, 1932, in Bristol, England, to Sandy and Norah Hodges. His father was a cigarette salesman, his mother a homemaker. He grew up watching the westerns and musicals of the 1940s and set his sights on becoming a director, though at his father’s urging he studied accounting for a time.He had grown up in Salisbury and Bath — “cities with soft centers,” as he put it — but in the mid-1950s, two years of national service in the Royal Navy, which sent him to “every fishing port in the U.K,” opened his eyes to a rugged, saltier side of life, an experience later reflected in his films.After the Navy he got a job as a teleprompter operator for the BBC in London, which introduced him to television. He began writing advertising copy and was eventually producing and directing.In 1999, when a retrospective of Mr. Hodges’s movies was showing in Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times said that the crime films stood out for their complexity and ambiguity.“Just when you think Hodges is building to a payoff that will clear everything up,” he wrote, “he may leave you to sort things out for yourself.”Mr. Hodges’s first marriage, to Jean Alexandrov, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Carol Laws; two sons from his first marriage, Ben and Jake; and five grandchildren.Mr. Hodges reflected on his career in an interview with The Evening Standard of Britain in 1999.“I’m always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all,” he said. “Astonished, but very happy too.” More

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      in Music

      Wilko Johnson, Scorching Guitarist and Punk Pioneer, Dies at 75

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      Known later as an actor on “Game of Thrones,” he helped lay the foundation for a 1970s rock revolution on England’s pub circuit.Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr. Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. He was 75.His death was announced on his social media channels.In 2013, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor — Mr. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” — and removed it in an 11-hour operation.He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who.His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow.In performance, he cut a wild-eyed figure. Often clad in a black suit, Mr. Johnson, who was prone to amphetamine use in his early days, appeared equal parts robotic and manic onstage, glaring murderously at the audience while pacing the stage frantically.His staccato guitar phrasing formed a sound all his own. Mr. Johnson, who was born left-handed and learned to play right-handed, avoided basic rock staples like barre chords and even picks, relying instead on quick, aggressive finger strums — he called them “stabs” — on his black Fender Telecaster. His playing was explosive, as percussive as it was melodic.Mr. Johnson in what was billed as a farewell concert in North London in 2013, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had only 10 months to live. Joel Ryan/Invision, via Associated Press“Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk,” the British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg said on Twitter after Mr. Johnson’s death. “His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence — twitchy, confrontational, out of control — was something we’d never beheld before in U.K. pop.”Mr. Bragg added that John Lydon (otherwise known as Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul Weller of the Jam “learned a lot from his edgy demeanor.”The volcanic approach of Mr. Johnson and his bandmates — the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin — helped make Dr. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s.The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. 17 on the British album chart. The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.”While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry.“My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. “There weren’t any in Canvey. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.”Mr. Johnson in 1981. He often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said were “certainly rooted in my childhood.”David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesWilko Johnson was born John Peter Wilkinson on Canvey Island on July 12, 1947. His father, a gas fitter, was violent and abusive, Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the British music magazine Mojo.“I hated him,” he said. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. The older I get the more I look like him. Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.”Mr. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.”“But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”By the time his father died, when Mr. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.”He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. Mr. Heylin said he once found Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. “So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.After a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson changed his name and joined with the other three musicians to form Dr. Feelgood in 1971. By the middle of the decade, the band was rolling in Britain but had failed to make a mark with record buyers in the United States.Yet the band was not unknown across the Atlantic. In a phone interview, the guitarist Chris Stein of Blondie recalled a party in 1975 at his band’s de facto headquarters, a loft on the Bowery near CBGB, the seminal New York punk club, before any of the major bands from that scene had made an album.Mr. Johnson, at left, performing in 1976 with the other members of Dr. Feelgood: the singer Lee Brilleaux, the drummer John Martin and the bassist John B. Sparks.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“We were having a huge party, and everyone in the scene was there — the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, probably some of the Talking Heads,” he said. “It went on all night.”Halfway through, Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, showed up after returning from a trip to London. He was enthusiastically waving a copy of Dr. Feelgood’s new album, “Malpractice.”“We put that on and played it repeatedly,” Mr. Stein said. “Everyone was transfixed. It was so simple and raw. I remember people saying, ‘This is what the Ramones are going to sound like when they make a record.’”Dr. Feelgood would not last long enough to ride the new wave it helped inspire. Rifts between Mr. Johnson and the other members came to a boiling point in 1977.“I think they lost it, they threw me out,” Mr. Johnson told Mojo. “The final argument that split the band came just after they had all my new songs in the can.” He added, “I was in a terrible state for months.”Mr. Johnson formed a new band, the Solid Senders, which released an album in 1978. He served a stint in Ian Dury’s band, the Blockheads, appearing on the group’s 1980 album, “Laughter.” He released “Ice on the Motorway,” the first of several albums under his own name, the next year, and he performed for decades with the Wilko Johnson Band.In 2009, the director Julien Temple released a documentary about Dr. Feelgood, “Oil City Confidential,” which “promotes Wilko Johnson as a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in a review in The Guardian.Mr. Johnson and Roger Daltrey of the Who, performing in 2014. The two released an album that year.Associated PressMr. Johnson’s survivors include his sons, Matthew and Simon, and a grandson. His wife, Irene Knight, died in 2004.While his pub-rock legacy became something of an obsession for rock connoisseurs and historians, Mr. Johnson experienced an unlikely career renaissance after his 2013 cancer scare. The album he made the next year with Mr. Daltrey, “Going Back Home,” which included songs from his Dr. Feelgood days as well as later compositions, reached No. 3 in Britain.“He’s one of those British guitarists that only the Brits make,” Mr. Daltrey said in a 2014 British television interview. “Wilko is a one-off, he really is.”By that point Mr. Johnson had found an unlikely home on premium cable, earning a role on “Game of Thrones” despite having no acting experience.“I got offered this part and it was a brilliant part, because the character that I play has had his tongue cut out, so I’ve got no lines to learn, right?” Mr. Johnson he said in a 2011 interview with the entertainment website Geeks of Doom. “I say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Just go around giving everyone dirty looks.’ I go, ‘I’m very good at that!’” More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

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      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

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      in Movies

      Nicholas Evans, Author of ‘The Horse Whisperer,’ Dies at 72

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      He was a first-time novelist whose tale of a manly vocation and family trauma broke publishing and then movie rights records when Robert Redford bought them.Nicholas Evans, the British journalist turned author whose novel-turned-film, “The Horse Whisperer,” broke publishing and movie records, along with the hearts of readers who made the book a best seller in 20 countries, died on Aug. 9 at his home in London. He was 72.The cause was a heart attack, said his longtime agent, Caradoc King.In 1993, Mr. Evans, at 43, was broke and adrift. He had been working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, and had spent two years on a film project that ultimately collapsed, when he began casting about for an idea for a novel. It was perhaps not the most winning formula for worldly success, as he noted in retrospect on his website: “Why would a debut novel from an unknown author have any more chance of getting off the ground than a movie?”Yet he had found an intriguing subject: the mystical, manly art of horse whispering. His source was a farrier, and Mr. Evans soon learned that the vocation of calming horses had a long history stretching back centuries.In England, however, horse-y matters have too much class baggage, as he put it, so he looked to the American West for his story. He came up trumps when he met Tom Dorrance, a terse cowboy then in his 80s, and watched him soothe a frenzied mare in California. He then found two other cowboys who practiced the same compelling magic, and began to craft a character inspired by these three men.Mr. Evans sat down and wrote some 150 pages of what would become “The Horse Whisperer,” a soapy drama about a young girl and her horse who are hit by a truck, and what happens when her hard-driving East Coast magazine editor mother finds a horse whisperer in Montana to heal their trauma.The healing that ensues involved more than the horse. Mr. Evans showed his draft to Mr. King, who sent the partial manuscript to a number of publishers on their way to the Frankfurt book fair that year. Suddenly, Mr. Evans was in the middle of a bidding maelstrom, juggling offers from Hollywood as well as from book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.When Bob Bookman, the agent at the Creative Artists Agency negotiating the sale of the film rights, asked Mr. Evans what he wanted, Mr. Evans proposed a modest $50,000. “I think we can get $3 million,” said Mr. Bookman, as Sarah Lyall of The New York Times reported. And they did. Hollywood Pictures and Robert Redford’s film studio, Wildwood Pictures, won the bid, at the time the largest amount ever paid for the rights to a first novel (almost $6 million in today’s money). Mr. Evans’s North American book advance, of $3.15 million from Dell Publishing, set another record.Mr. Evans had only written 150 pages of his novel when publishers began bidding for it. His advance, of $3 million, was a record for a first time novelist. no creditThen Mr. Evans had to finish the book. He told Ms. Lyall he had become morbidly superstitious: He stopped riding his bicycle, and took the slow lane when driving. What he did not disclose, not even to his agent, was that he had been diagnosed with melanoma. Nonetheless, he survived, and thrived. The book, which was published in 1995, was a global best seller that was translated into 40 languages, though critics slammed it for its melodrama. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, called it “a sappy romance novel, gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional life of animals and lots of Walleresque hooey about men and women.”“About the only thing missing,” she added, “is a picture of Fabio on the cover.”The movie, which came out in 1998, was more favorably reviewed and a modest box office success, thanks to Mr. Redford’s star power and firm hand as director. He delivered a more restrained version of Mr. Evans’s tale, playing Tom Brooker, the horse whisperer. Kristin Scott Thomas was Annie MacLean, the mother, and Scarlett Johansson played Grace, the daughter. Sam Neill was Annie’s cuckolded husband. Mr. Redford’s version ended rather ambiguously; Mr. Evans had chosen a more confrontational route, and he was initially upset by the change.Robert Redford as the star in the film “The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed.TouchstoneFor better or worse, Mr. Evans had unknowingly introduced the word “whisperer” into the popular lexicon as a catchall term for experts who can tame complicated creatures, like babies.“It was an extraordinary event,” said Mr. King, remembering the frenzy surrounding Mr. Evans’s novel. “It was just the magic of the story. That was the thing.”Nicholas Evans was born on July 26, 1950, in Worcestershire, in England’s West Midlands. He studied law at Oxford University, graduating with a First, the highest honors. He worked as a journalist for newspapers and television and produced a weekly current affairs show. In the 1980s, he made documentary films about the artists David Hockney and Francis Bacon, the writer Patricia Highsmith and the filmmaker David Lean, among others.He followed “The Horse Whisperer” with three more novels, all best sellers. “The Divide” (2005), explores what led to the death of a young woman whose body is found in a frozen mountain creek. The story was inspired, he told The Associated Press, by his own interrogations into what causes rifts in a marriage — a marriage come asunder is the book’s back story. His own 25-year marriage had recently ended, he said.Like his characters, Mr. Evans was an avid outdoorsman, a charming Bill Nighy look-alike who skied and hiked. And in August of 2008 he seemed to fall into the plot of one of his own stories, a family idyll turned into a near tragedy.He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.Mr. Evans’s survivors include his wife and four children, Finlay, Lauren, Max and Harry.His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.“The book business is such a strange one — and the very definition of literary versus commercial fiction has always seemed to me to be bizarre,” Mr. Evans told The Guardian in 2011. “One is defined by how many it sells, and the other by its ideas and so-called literary merit. And there are all kinds of assumptions brought to bear on this. So for example, if you sell tons of books you can’t possibly have any interesting ideas or themes or things to say. And on the other hand, if nobody buys the book, it’s considered a mark of its esteem because nobody is bright enough to understand it.” More

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      in Television

      In ‘House of the Dragon,’ Paddy Considine Claims the Crown

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      A string of critically acclaimed roles has made him many British actors’ favorite actor. It has also lifted him from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.WINSHILL, England — On a blindingly sunny June afternoon, Paddy Considine whipped his sedan through a working-class neighborhood in this suburb in the West Midlands, pointing out the stolid taverns, churches and council houses that combine to cast the long shadows of his childhood.There was the gospel hall where he and his friends sang hymns when they weren’t “getting kicked out for fighting about.” The pub where men from his estate pursued nightly oblivion. The post office where his tempestuous father “tossed a wheelie bin through the front window” during one of his frequent swerves into rage, a moment Considine memorialized in his bleakly beautiful 2011 film, “Tyrannosaur.”He pulled to a stop in front of a pale gray two-family house and pointed to an upstairs window. It was his old bedroom, and he told a story about a kid desperate to show the world he had more to offer than it might think.“I’d run home after school and then put the music on and stand in the window, dancing to Adam and the Ants, so the parents would see me and look up,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was a show-off. I just wanted to be seen.”He looked at me with a grin that was equal parts affable and intense. “There’s a difference, you know,” he said.Over a two-decade career in film, TV and the occasional blockbuster play, Considine has thrived within that difference. He has crafted performances that demand to be seen, partly because they forgo performative pyrotechnics in favor of a palpable, at times unsettling sense of the real. The fact that he hasn’t had what you might call a signature role hasn’t kept him from becoming many British actors’ favorite actor.“I just believe him,” said Olivia Colman, a longtime admirer. “You sort of look into his eyes, and he’s feeling it all, and he means it all.”Considine’s profile is more modest in America, but it might not stay that way: Beginning on Aug. 21, he will be dancing in his largest window yet. That’s when “House of the Dragon,” the long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series, lands on HBO. A family melodrama with all the violence, sex and power-lust one would expect from a tale set in Westeros, the series seeks to recapture the magic that made the original a global phenomenon before it stumbled to its polarizing conclusion in 2019.The story, based on “Fire & Blood,” a spinoff novel by the saga’s mastermind, George R.R. Martin, is set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” It involves an earlier battle for the Iron Throne, one that threatens to crater the Targaryen clan long before their combustible descendant Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) arrives in the original series.At the heart of it all is Considine, who stars as King Viserys, the ruler whose decisions and frailties set into motion much of the conflict and carnage to come.Paddy Considine, who plays King Viserys Targaryen, in a scene from “House of the Dragon.”Ollie Upton/HBOIt is a surprising bit of casting, at first glance. After arriving as an eccentric thug in the 1999 film “A Room for Romeo Brass,” Considine has made his name mostly in small-bore dramas playing emotionally conflicted men who feel it all, and then some: a grieving immigrant father in “In America”; a religious zealot ex-con in “My Summer of Love”; a murderously vengeful veteran in “Dead Man’s Shoes.”While he has appeared in franchises (“The Bourne Ultimatum”), genre series (the Stephen King adaptation “The Outsider”) and surprising detours before (the goofball cop comedy “Hot Fuzz”), a dragon epic did not seem like the most natural fit.“If you look at the body of his work and the type of movies that he does, it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a big HBO franchise like this,” said Matt Smith, who stars in “House of the Dragon” as Viserys’s belligerent brother, Daemon. “But I think he’s got good taste, and I think he realized the part was really interesting.”Considine, 48, is a man of multitudes and paradoxes. An acclaimed actor, he nonetheless struggles with attacks of insecurity to the point that he considered leaving projects like “Hot Fuzz” because he felt he was flailing. He has an unmistakable toughness, but what makes it captivating is the sensitivity that bleeds through.Ryan Condal, one of the “House of the Dragon” showrunners, said that Considine imbued Viserys, a relatively passive character in the script, “with a bit of Paddy’s working class background.”“What Paddy brought to it was Targaryen-ness, this fierceness,” he said. But as the other showrunner, Miguel Sapochnik, noted: “He wears his insecurities on his sleeve.”Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” spinoff will debut on Aug. 21.A Primer: Though it is the successor to the groundbreaking fantasy drama, “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Here’s what else you need to know.The Stakes: Can the new series save the future of the “Game of Thrones” franchise? George R.R. Martin and HBO are about to find out.Wearing the Crown: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen in the show, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.‘Thrones’ Guide: Want to take a deep dive into past episodes and plot twists? Check out our obsessive compendium to the original series.This combination has already won over the toughest “Thrones” fan of all: Martin, who said Considine’s Viserys surpasses the one in the book.“Every once in a while, an actor or the writers will take a character in a somewhat different direction that is better,” Martin said. “And I look at it and I say, ‘Damn, I wish I had written it that way.’”Considine admits that he was flattered to be asked to lead such an enormous undertaking, which will almost certainly result in more people seeing him than ever before. But what drew him in were the same things he seeks in all his roles, qualities that his past and predisposition help him depict with rare delicacy.“There was just conflicts in him; there was pain in him,” he said. “There was stuff for me to do.”CONSIDINE SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME far from the show-business fray. He lives with his wife of 20 years, Shelley, and their three children in the town of Burton-on-Trent, near where he grew up, located roughly 110 miles northwest of London. It helps him avoid having to glad-hand industry types or audition for roles, which he loathes because he’s terrible at it, he said.While Considine is generally immune to Hollywood cliché, he certainly looked the part when we first met. Sitting inside a coffee shop in a posh village near his home, he was wearing black on black with dark glasses, and he spent the first 20 minutes talking about his rock band, called Riding the Low. He knew how it all came across.“I know … an actor with a band,” he said.But the reality is, he has been playing music for longer than he’s been acting, and the band is no mere vanity project: In June, they played Glastonbury Festival, and their latest record included a cameo by Considine’s musical hero, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices.As for the glasses, they contain special lenses to treat Irlen syndrome, a disorder that is believed to affect the brain’s ability to process visual information. (Much of the science and medical community is skeptical about the affliction, but Considine and many others say the lenses changed their lives.) Generally funny and easygoing in conversation, Considine said this condition, along with a mild form of Asperger’s he was diagnosed with in his 30s, contributed to a reputation for aloofness as a young actor.“I couldn’t concentrate or focus on you, so I’d have to look away,” he said. “It led to this behavior of me going within myself and being slightly unapproachable.”But he is used to being misunderstood — even as a boy in Winshill, Considine had a reputation that preceded him. But it wasn’t his own.Considine’s father was known as a brawler with a quick temper. “I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” the actor said.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesHe grew up with a brother and four sisters in one of the few two-parent households in his social circle. His mother, Pauline, was a natural nurturer who temporarily took in kids from around the council estate when things got rough at their own homes. “I’d go downstairs and there’d be, like, a six-foot punk lying on the sofa under a blanket, with a big red mohawk,” Considine said.His father was another matter. An Irish alcoholic with a depressive streak, Martin Considine was known as a brawler with a quick temper, and was given to staying in bed until the afternoon, “watching ‘Raging Bull’ over and over again,” Considine said.“I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” he said.For a while, he lived up to them, alienating his teachers by being an uninterested student and a class clown. But when he signed on to a school production of “Grease,” it was transformative in more ways than one. When he opened his mouth to sing “Greased Lightning” in the first rehearsal, he discovered a robust voice he didn’t know he had. On opening night, everyone else discovered something, too.“It changed the entire school’s perception of me,” he said. “The teachers perceived me differently, the students. And I thought, this is powerful.”At 16, Considine began a drama program but “didn’t really learn that much, and I just left,” he said. (He eventually got a photography degree.) But he struck up a fortuitous friendship there with Shane Meadows, a fellow Midlander with similar tastes in music and film. Several years later, Meadows cast Considine in “Romeo Brass,” which won both men acclaim.Higher-profile roles followed in films like the Factory Records chronicle “24 Hour Party People” (2002) and the melancholy immigrant tale “In America” (2003). Then came “Dead Man’s Shoes,” a nervy, lo-fi riff on a slasher picture that stars Considine, in a frightening but grounded performance, as an ex-soldier stalking his brother’s former tormentors.The film is still revered in Britain — nearly everyone I talked to about Considine mentioned it — though the actor long ago tired of discussing it. (“Part of me wants to die” when people bring it up, he said, but he has made his peace with it.)That indelible performance indirectly enabled Considine to subvert it, to change perceptions again. He met Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright on the awards circuit for “Dead Man’s Shoes” — it and their film “Shaun of the Dead” were both released in Britain in 2004 — and the result was a part as a doofus detective in “Hot Fuzz.”“Meeting Paddy in person was a revelation; he was incredibly warm and funny,” Wright wrote in an email. “We knew he had a comic presence that hadn’t been fully unleashed yet.”Considine (center, with Rafe Spall, left, and Simon Pegg) tried to quit “Hot Fuzz” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” said Edgar Wright, the film’s director.Rogue Pictures, via Alamy“Hot Fuzz” was where Considine met Colman, a co-star, who went on to lead his first feature as a director, “Tyrannosaur.” The film, which he also wrote, tells a grueling but powerful story about a splenetic widower (Peter Mullan) who befriends a devout woman (Colman) trapped in an abusive marriage.For Colman, then known primarily for comedy and TV, the wrenching performance opened new dramatic opportunities that eventually led to an Oscar for the 2018 film “The Favourite.”“He sort of directly changed the trajectory of my career,” she said.For Considine, it offered a chance to revisit his upbringing via the means that had allowed him to escape it. As we drove around Winshill, he pointed out landmarks that had inspired scenes in the film.“I think ‘Tyrannosaur’ was just a love letter and an apology to my parents,” he told me. “It was me just trying to make sense of some of the things I grew up with.”CONSIDINE STARTED ACTING long before he became an actor.As an insecure kid cowed by a chaotic home and by other parents who “shut doors in my face” because of the sins of his father, he learned to perform confidence and swagger. “I had to create a sort of carapace to be able to protect myself,” he said.That armor never entirely went away — he still dusts it off for premieres and red carpets. Neither did the insecurity. As his career blossomed, it became both the thing that made acting a misery, at times, as well as a force pushing him to go deeper into performances that dazzled his contemporaries.“In England, I think a lot of actors feel the same way about Paddy,” Smith said. “We hold him in very high regard.”Tony Pitts (“All Creatures Great and Small”), a friend of Considine’s and past co-star, called him “the male actor that most male actors want to be.”Considine is choosy about his parts — it’s hard to find an outright stinker on his IMDb page. Friends say this derives from the fact that acting can take a profound psychic toll on him, so he has to be invested in a role to accept it.“Paddy’s not one to just pitch up and say the lines,” Pitts said. “I’ve seen him when he’s been at the point where he said, ‘I don’t think I want to act again.’”Wright calls Considine “Mr. 11th Hour” because that’s when he “had to be talked out of leaving” both “Hot Fuzz” and a later comedy, “The World’s End,” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” Wright said. “It just shows me he cares, maybe too much.”From left, Glenn Speers, Considine, Stuart Graham and Genevieve O’Reilly in “The Ferryman,” Considine’s first performance in a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesConsidine went through something similar in “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s 2017 drama set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was Considine’s first play, and he took it on as a kind of trial-by-fire apprenticeship because he felt limited by his lack of formal acting training, even after numerous series and films. “I was running out of places to hide, and I was running out of enthusiasm for it, too,” he said.He found stage acting terrifying. His self-doubt reached a crisis point during the initial run, at London’s Royal Court Theater, and then again when “The Ferryman” moved to Broadway — both times Sam Mendes, the director, helped him through it. (Reviewing the Broadway production, The Times said Considine gave “a superb, anchoring performance.”) The actor now says “The Ferryman” was “a game-changer,” in terms of his comfort with his craft.That comfort wasn’t always apparent on “House of the Dragon,” however. Considine said he based the physically ailing Viserys partly on his mother, who went through multiple amputations resulting from diabetes before dying of a heart attack. Colleagues said watching him inhabit the role sometimes bordered on concerning.“He turns himself inside out in his performance, and that metamorphosis is sometimes really painful to watch,” said Olivia Cooke, who stars as Alicent Hightower, a woman close to Viserys. “We spoke about it, and the only way he can access his performance, sometimes, is to go to such a horrid and painful place.”Sapochnik said that when Considine struggles with material or anything else, “his default is anger.” Directing him involved “helping to work through that, being patient about it, sometimes saying to him, ‘Mate, calm down,’” he explained. “But also then seeing how he brought that into Viserys.”Considine brought fierceness to Viserys, but he also “wears his insecurities on his sleeve,” said Miguel Sapochnik (right, with Considine and the actress Milly Alcock), a “House of the Dragon” showrunner.Ollie Upton/HBOAt the same time, his co-stars, from old hands like Smith to relative newcomers like Emily Carey, who plays a younger version of Alicent, roundly praised Considine as a funny, warm and supportive colleague and collaborator. The person he is hardest on is himself.“It sounds like I’m a miserable sod, but I have a good time doing these things, as well,” Considine said. “It’s just that when I perform in any way, I have these challenges in front of me again.”What keeps him going are the flashes of transcendence. He mentioned one late-season monologue Viserys gives before his family that “touched a bit of old Hopkins,” as in Sir Anthony, one of his acting heroes.“The moments where you are fully in it, all that goes — all that awareness, all that self-observation, all that stuff, that inner critic,” Considine said. “That horrible stuff just falls off you. And that’s ultimately what I’m searching for.”And to the extent that any of that horrible stuff is linked to his past, he’s learning to let some of that fall off him, too, as achievements mount and the passing years bring distance and perspective.“That kid in the window, he hasn’t got to die, but it can’t keep dominating your life,” he said. “You’ve got to explore other things, and ‘Game of Thrones’ is part of that.”“Who would’ve thought that kid would end up playing a [expletive] king?” he added. “Who would’ve ever conceived that I would be a king in anything?” More