“We were the best things in the movie”: The movie Ian McShane wants to delete from history
One of the most surprising ‘UK TV to Hollywood’ journeys in recent history has got to be the one made by Ian McShane, who went from the slightly hunky antiques dealer in a leather jacket your mum fancied on a Sunday night to a very cool, if quite intimidating, owner of a hotel for deadly assassins, seemingly overnight.
I’m still not quite sure how it happened: one minute McShane was swanning about rural England hawking old tat in a classic convertible being caddish with a mullet and an eccentric elderly sidekick, and the next he was either helping Keanu Reeves hide somewhere after shooting loads of baddies in the face, or using incredibly bad language in the Wild West in the HBO series Deadwood.
There didn’t seem to be a transitional period whatsoever, but it seems there was indeed something of a crossover a few years earlier, when McShane swapped the delights of East Anglia for the bright lights of Los Angeles, and it came thanks to his appearance in the Ray Winstone (more on him later) and Ben Kingsley classic Sexy Beast in 2000. He played London crime boss Teddy Bass in the Jonathan Glazer black comedy, which was a hit in the US too, and within a couple of years was cast in HBO’s political juggernaut The West Wing.
Two years after that came the role that really brought him to the attention of American audiences, as the take-no-prisoners owner of the Gem Saloon, Al Swearengen, in HBO’s Western drama Deadwood, a leading part opposite Timothy Olyphant that brought him rave reviews and even a Golden Globe win in 2005 for ‘Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama’.
That led to a fantastic display in the hidden comedy gem that is Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod in 2007, before he dipped back out of the spotlight for a few years.
When Hollywood came calling again in 2011, it was for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but the spectacular success of that was contrasted by a film the following year that saw McShane partnering with his old pal Ray Winstone, that, rather embarrassingly for two actors of that stature, saw them play two of the seven dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman alongside Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron.
While they weren’t the only established talent signing up for the film, it was Bob Hoskins’ last role, for instance, McShane especially doesn’t have particularly fond memories, telling The Guardian, “The less said about that the better. We were the best things in the movie. But by the time we’d spent six hours getting fake asses and prosthetics, we only had three hours to shoot in. These people pay you a lot of money, and you want it to be good. But sometimes you want to say, ‘Hey guys, you know, get it together’.”
Somehow, the twisted fairytale was actually something of a box office success, even collecting two Oscar nominations, albeit for ‘Best Costume Design’ and ‘Visual Effects’, but elsewhere, Kristen Stewart was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for ‘Worst Actress’ and a 2016 sequel, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, absolutely bombed at the box office.
McShane, meanwhile, is more than likely to reprise his role as the manager of the Continental Hotel after a turn in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina last year with Ana de Armas.
