Paterson Joseph’s new film is a twisted horror-action-comedy set in a creepy 1920s hotel, star-studded and fresh from a major Hollywood studio.
Or, as Joseph would simply describe it: ‘A bloody romp.’
He told Metro: ‘From beginning to end, even though it has a sort of emotional and deadly quality to it, you get a little twinkle out of everything.’
So basically, don’t get caught up worrying about how terrifying They Will Kill You may be because that’s not the film’s only agenda.
‘It’s very funny; I don’t watch horror films, so I wasn’t expecting to laugh at it,’ he adds, recalling watching the movie for the first time in a screening with just his agent, ‘who kept grabbing me, every time something scary happened’.
‘I realised if I was in a room full of people, it’d be just immense. It’d be lovely!’ – and that’s exactly what the London-born actor’s plan is, to experience it in a cinema full of fans, now the film is out.
This is Joseph’s first full-on horror role, with the closest he’s come previously, which is ‘more fantasy than horror, to be honest with you’, being Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in 1996 with Sir Lenny Henry’s company, which was pre-Doctor Who revival when ‘the BBC never spent any money on fantasy or sci-fi, because they thought it was for children’.
Joseph appears in Warner Bros-funded They Will Kill You among an enjoyably eclectic cast including Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette, Harry Potter’s Tom Felton, Industry star Myha’la and Heather Graham, whom he describes collectively as ‘just really nice human beings’.
Arquette has perhaps the most established Hollywood career among them, with an Oscar, three Golden Globes and credits that include True Romance, Boyhood and TV phenomenon Severance. But according to Joseph, she was still very much ‘part of the gang’.
I don’t watch horror films, so I wasn’t expecting to laugh
‘I’ve got a lovely picture of her wearing my Gatsby hat, we just got on really well. Tom’s very funny, and we’re both ukulele nuts, so we both brought out our ukuleles, which I found to be totally hilarious. But then Patricia said, “Oh, my daddy used to play the ukulele”, so it became a sort of family group.’
Some may roll their eyes at the term ‘family’, but Joseph also shares that Beetz’s mother visited the set in South Africa and he took her to see the penguins near Cape Town – so it does sound quite cosy.
We talk about the levels of extremity that They Will Kill You hits, which is less ‘flatlined’ than the average film, as Joseph puts it.
‘People really get hurt and they look like they get hurt. It’s not cartoon violence in that there are no consequences, it’s just the aftermath of the consequences are quite funny!’
Beetz’s Asia is our heroine in They Will Kill You, who arrives at the Virgil in New York City for her new job, but finds herself hunted as a human sacrifice for the demonic cult based there, while Joseph’s character Ray is a member of staff.
‘My favourite thing about the whole movie is his first line, because he comes out in a surprising way and we think he’s the janitor, which is all I ever wanted from the scene, in the way that we just do sort of dismiss characters because of their status: they can’t possibly be. But he turns out to be Patricia’s husband,’ he teases.
‘And when she says, “I love you”, he says “F*** off”. And for me, that sums up their relationship and what Ray’s manner is throughout most of the movie. He’s very bitter and very straightforward, but he’s a good guy – I think! Maybe…’
Joseph, 61, is one of those mainstays of the British acting establishment – and surely one of its most recognisable faces – who seems to have been booked and busy for decades, dazzling with an ongoing theatrical career that spanned the RSC before TV stalwarts like Casualty, Peep Show (for which he is still most recognised, he says), Green Wing, Survivors, Noughts + Crosses, Vigil… the list goes on, but let’s not forget the films like In the Name of the Father with Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio and Wonka.
We’re speaking just after the Oscars, where Manchester’s Bafta-winner Wunmi Mosaku was nominated for Sinners, which took home four awards from a record-breaking 16 nominations.
She is one of several prominent Black British stars who have openly been frustrated at the lack of opportunity in the UK for them, Sir Idris Elba being another after his career soared when he headed across the pond for HBO crime classic The Wire.
Joseph has stayed UK-based and largely UK-focused, so I wonder if this is something that chimes with his experience or not.
‘My orthodox view is always every actor, if you ask them now, do you want to work in America? Most of that cohort of drama school leavers will be putting their hands up. And I honestly don’t know that my generation, more than one or two people might have put their hands up,’ he muses.
‘But if Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne and Rosamund Pike want to go and make a name for themselves in America, that’s just seen as the thing, they’re just doing it. Whereas the fact that a Black British actor is making it across there has, at the moment, become quite the novelty thing to notice.’
For Joseph though, America has always been the answer for any actor seeking ‘more work’, even though it’s not all necessarily good quality – but there is just more of it.
‘Your ethnicity plays no part in that. It’s the market here, it’s small. It’s the demographic and the country. It’s who’s got hands on the reins of power. It’s all those things that lead this country to be just a smaller industry altogether.’
However, adding ethnicity into the equation isn’t the issue for Joseph because ‘it’s obvious the world is an unfair place for people whose skin is not white, it’s as clear as day, and has always been’.
‘That’s not the issue to me. The issue is always a class thing: what class of people are being allowed those opportunities even, to do that crossover?
‘I consider myself to be of a working class Caribbean British background, because that describes my family demographic. But I know loads of people who’ve done really well across the Atlantic, Black actors, who don’t come from those poor backgrounds, who come from middle class backgrounds.
[Ethnicity] is not the issue to me. The issue is always a class thing
‘So they have the same confidence as a Cumberbatch or a Redmayne because of that sort of expectation that you have when you’ve been given that education. You’ve seen people around you, doctors and lawyers, and everybody’s looking like this sort of an opportunity for you. Whereas when you come from where I come from, you feel like you’re in a battle all the time. It’s a cultural battle, and the culture is class.’
One of Joseph’s forays over to America includes the NBC time-travelling sci-fi drama Timeless, which ran from 2016 to 2018 and the actor identifies as a project he wished had received more attention before it was cut short ‘because they lost faith in it – but it was going to groundswell into something really great’.
‘A lot of literary people and history people loved it, and that’s not the demographic they’re always going for, is it? So that’s why they pulled it,’ he says.
‘We got loads of students writing to us about their dissertation or about passing their middle grade exams, saying how useful it was and that they were doing Kennedy or the moon landing. I was proud of all the people I worked with on it and thought we did a good job.’
Joseph is already busy filming his next major project, Prime Video’s TV reboot of Lara Croft, led by Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner and co-starring Sigourney Weaver, Jason Isaacs and Celia Imrie.
Obviously, he can say nothing because it’s all under wraps still.
But he does concede: ‘I’m enjoying my time, enjoying building the character, enjoying the world building that’s happening. Phoebe [Waller-Bridge, series creator and writer] is a very live, very dynamic writer, and so it’s a great sort of fun exercise to go, right well I know this is what we’ve written, but what else could we do with it? It’s a fun set to work on, but I think that’s about all I can say!’
They Will Kill You is in cinemas now.
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