Matthew Macfadyen names the two greatest acting performances he’s ever seen
Currently getting lots of rave reviews on that Netflix thing is Death by Lightning starring Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Shannon, a drama telling the story of James Garfield, which is disappointingly about the 20th US President and not about a stripey orange cat who loves lasagna.
Most people know Macfadyen from the HBO behemoth that was Succession, all four high-powered, family-feuding seasons of it, in which he played Tom Wambsgans, the dismissive, nasty CEO who is desperate to win Logan Roy’s approval.
The role brought him a Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actor in 2024, but Macfadyen had put the hard yards in for many, many years prior to that, in British TV shows like Spooks and Howards End and several movies, including 2008’s Frost/Nixon, Frank Oz’s comedy Death at a Funeral and even last year’s Deadpool and Wolverine.
Macfadyen has spent more than 20 years now working on stage and screen, and recalls some desperate measures he took in order to find paid jobs in the earlier days. He told Backstage: “I remember sending a drunken fax to a director demanding he give me the part—but I knew him quite well, and he did give me the part.”
Like many actors, Macfadyen studied the greats while honing his craft, and two actors stood out for him in movies from years gone by. Asked to name a performance every actor should see, he replied: “I think Q & A with Nick Nolte – it’s like there’s no camera there. (It’s) this living, breathing, messy man.”
Q & A is a little-known crime thriller from 1990 in which Nolte plays Mike Brennan, a tough NYPD detective with ties to organised crime. Directed by the great Sidney Lumet, it featured a role for his daughter, Jenny, who would go on to write screenplays, and Nolte received high praise for his performance from critics.
And Macfadyen’s second pick comes from another Lumet-directed film, this time a 1975 heist movie with a generational central character from one of the best to ever do it. Again asked to pick out a performance that stands above all others, he said:
“Oh, God, that’s a killer question. I want to say… That’s a terrible question. That’s so hard. That’s breaking my heart. Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon is my answer. But I could keep going.”
If you haven’t seen Dog Day Afternoon, it stands as one of a pair of astonishing films that Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino made in the 1970s, the first being Serpico two years previously. The later film is based on a real life story of a man who holds up a bank and takes hostages in order to raise funds for his friend’s gender reassignment surgery – the initial crime becoming the subject of countless people watching on TV and many supporting him.
One of the most acclaimed films in the New Hollywood movement, the movie was nominated for countless awards and Pacino scooped a Bafta for Best Actor, while it won Best Screenplay from a total of six Oscar nominations. Lumet would revisit the idea of a duo committing a heist in the often overlooked but utterly fantastic Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007 starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, which would prove to be his final movie.
