What excited you about this film?
Well, when I first read the script I couldn't quite work out which character Sam [Mendes] intended for me, so I was thrilled when I discovered it was Maguire. I knew the character would be a lot of fun to play and it would require a lot of playing on my own. The backdrop is the very much recognizable 30s gangster movie set in Chicago at a time when it was being run by Al Capone. It quickly develops into a road movie and a film about a father and a son... how the father gets the son out of the lifestyle in which he's become embroiled, and also about how he's going to wreak revenge on the people who have put him on the road.
Tell us about playing Maguire...
A lot of him is actually in the way he looks. And Sam and I wanted to achieve a new look. We wanted to work out how to make this guy threatening but also able to melt into the background and seem unthreatening. The idea was that this guy is kind of rodent-like and he can hunt people down, no matter what little evidence or trail he has to go on. So we wanted to give him a rat-like look. We played with the teeth, the fingernails, the hair.... well, the hair's receding anyway, but they took that receding hairline way back. It took ten hours to do it. The hairdresser wore microscopic glasses so she could see each individual follicle, and she cut out individual hairs so it didn't become a bald pate but had weasily strands left to stick to my head!
What about being part of such a great ensemble cast?
When you're in fantastic company it's incredibly exciting, because you get the opportunity to watch people you admire at work, and you can learn so much from that. The mood on the set with that kind of talent is usually tremendously rewarding because it's a good atmosphere. Good actors don't create tension. Everyone is there to work and work hard. And a lot of it boils down to Sam Mendes. He's an incredible leader. He has an amazing ability to reign everyone in to focus on the job in hand and to focus on the vision he has of the film.
