Jonathan Pryce names his most overlooked movie: “We’ve made the wrong kind of film”
We’re bombarded with content all day, every day, and committing to a TV series is a sign of real intent that you’re going to spend six to eight hours with these characters, so you better make it a good choice.
Fortunately, we are in a golden age for crime drama, with countless fine examples featuring top-name actors on a monthly basis, think Task, Mare of Easttown, True Detective, and now Sky’s Under Salt Marsh starring Jonathan Pryce.
Also featuring Kelly Reilly and Rafe Spall, the show takes the tried and trusted back story route of kids going missing then turning up dead, transplants it to rural, windswept Wales (albeit in a fictional town), and adds a determined detective and a village full of people who don’t all want the truth about what’s going on to be discovered.
Pryce plays a bereaved grandfather and is another example of a storied, Oscar-nominated movie actor taking his place in a major TV show, although he’s no stranger to the big-budget small screen world, having worked extensively on hits like Game of Thrones, Slow Horses, The Crown and Wolf Hall.
But after a successful career in the theatre, Pryce made his name in film with a breakthrough role in Terry Gilliam’s subversive, prophetic sci-fi comedy Brazil, on which he shared lead billing with Robert De Niro. Although the film was widely released in Europe, it had a runtime of well over two hours, and American execs wanted the ending recut, leading to an argument playing out in the national press between the studios and Gilliam, who wanted it in US cinemas as originally intended.
It meant that Pryce would have to wait for his big break into Hollywood, but two years earlier, he had a taste of it when he appeared in the Disney-backed fantasy horror Something Wicked This Way Comes from director Jack Clayton, who, back in 1961, had helmed the seminal, Guillermo del Toro-inspiring psychological shocker The Innocents.
Pryce recalled making Clayton’s later movie and how it struggled with audiences on release in 1983, despite several excellent reviews, telling Coming Soon, “Yeah, well, it prepared me for the disappointment of Brazil not getting a proper release. It was a time of, it’s not quite turmoil, with Disney, but they didn’t have anyone in charge of production. By the time it was made and about to be released, things were changing in the movie world, and lots of special effects were in other films, very dramatic special effects. And they thought, ‘Oh my god, we’ve made the wrong kind of film’.”
That resulted in Something Wicked This Way Comes being subject to severe delays, plus Disney spending $4million in order to reshoot, recut and rescore the film. They were also concerned about Pryce, who was something of a budget hire opposed to actors like Christopher Lee and Peter O’Toole, who were favoured by Fahrenheit 451’s Ray Bradbury, the writer of the screenplay.
Test screenings were disastrous, leading to more cuts and more changes and by the time the film eventually came out, some two years later, it tanked at the box office, barely scraping less than half of its $20m budget. Luckily, it didn’t dent Pryce’s prospects too badly, and he would go on to have a 40-year career so far, including an Oscar nomination for 2019’s The Two Popes, a role in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, a Bond film with Tomorrow Never Dies, and many more besides.
