After a lengthy career making his name in blockbusters such as The Hobbit and BBC’s Robin Hood, multi-award winning actor Richard Armitage has turned to the written word. He visited Bromley House to discuss his latest crime novel The Cut, and how writing and acting converge.
Bromley House Library, that leisure trove of a Georgian townhouse just off the Market Square, is on most days a spot of glacially cool repose - but today it’s getting hot and bothered. Lanyards swish around the spiral staircase, faces dart through the oolong-steam wearing smiles that say, We Must Be British and Not Too Excited about this. But we are failing.
The cause is Richard Armitage: The Hobbit’s Thorin Oakenshield, he of Spooks fame, and of course the unvanquishable Guy of Gisborne in the BBC’s Robin Hood - the man whose Byronic scowl brought living rooms across the nation to the cusp of mass cardiac failure. The Sheriff’s right-hand-man has now changed horses, in a mid-career move which few may have predicted: he is now a writer of crime fiction, and he’s coming here this afternoon.
Richard’s full of bright spirit upon arriving. The first thing he thinks, taking in impressions of the handsome two-hundred-year-old library, is that he’d like to film here “ - but don’t let a crew in - they’d trash the place!” How does this real Nottingham, I ask, compare to the fictional one? “I was really pissed off that we weren’t shooting in Sherwood Forest - I remember we used to come to Nottingham as kids and go to the Major Oak. So, like, why are we shooting this in Budapest? I still feel a slight pang of guilt.”
Richard was raised in Leicester, a Midlander through and through, and although he knows a bread roll as a ‘bap’ rather than ‘cob’ - “That’s Leeds, from my dad” - we’re inclined to let him off.
Up the staircase, we find an audience whose fingers rap on restless legs, late-summer sunlight falling on a room that would put the ‘ire’ in fire brigade if it were any more full. Mixing with his readers, Richard has charisma that’s warm with shyness, like a theatre kid asked to perform an encore as themselves. Elly Griffiths is the interviewer - being herself the multi-award winning crime writer of Ruth Galloway renown, she’s come well-equipped with forensic questions.
As an audience member discusses with Richard his sensitive depiction of dementia, you see less ‘persona’ and more person-revealed; he is a heartthrob still, but the heart is emphasised. His answers are animated with a sense of self-inspection, and a full pencil-case of writerly wit
The beginning of Armitage’s journey as an actor, we learn, was auspicious: “The doorway that opened for me was when our primary school teacher Mrs O’Leary read The Hobbit to us.” She would mimic Gollum’s voice, and at home Richard became consumed by doing the same thing: “I’d go home and open the book, try and copy what she was doing, and I think those are the early seeds of me becoming an actor - it’s rooted in storytelling.”
Years later he would star in the three-part film of The Hobbit, one of two central heroes alongside Martin Freeman’s rabbit-eyed Bilbo - but not before he had made a bid to audition for The Lord of the Rings: “Darling,” his agent responded. “They’re already filming.”
He has come late to writing as well. What, Elly wonders, brought him there? “Not in a million years,” says Richard, would he have had the guts to approach a publisher with a manuscript. But Audible approached him, and asked whether he would sign up to write and star in his own audio book. “Immediately, I said yes.” They asked who he’d like as a ghostwriter - “Absolutely not - I'm going to write every word. Then they got really scared!”
Thankfully the process of reading scripts aloud gave Armitage the inside track. The book was written to be heard, he says, “because I come from music, then musical theatre and Shakespeare” - forms of narrative, in his reckoning, which are designed to be absorbed, not dissected. Once a keen young cellist and flute-player, Richard listens for the melody as he writes.
We discuss his first novel Geneva, which tells the story of a respected scientist who begins to show signs of Alzheimer’s - while booked as the guest of honour at a tech conference, she’s drawn into a net of conniving and misgivings.
The Alpine setting felt right, says Armitage: “I get goosebumps whenever I get close to a mountain, summer or winter - I love the altitude, the isolation, the serenity… nobody can get to me here. And Switzerland was perfect because of the biotech, the medical development that’s happened there… and its secrecy, and the whole notion that legal euthanasia was going to be part of the crime.”
Geneva’s success prompted his new follow-up The Cut: as a rowdy film crew descends on the sleepy village of Barton Mallet, an architect grapples with the bewildering murder of one of his friends thirty years before. Barton Mallet is fed by autobiographical memory, with sections in the early 90s inspired by Richard’s adolescence.
What fastens our attention most, perhaps, is when Richard reflects on the psychology of acting: “I hate using the word false, but acting’s a construct.” In doing this line of work Richard immerses himself in new professions with a sense of real belief: “When I'm playing a surgeon, in my head I can actually perform defibrillation. I know I could resuscitate something.”
So, fresh-faced on the writing scene, is the role of the crime author for him another performance - a role to slip into, don for a while, and then hang back up on the rack? I don’t think so. As an audience member discusses with Richard his sensitive depiction of dementia, you see less ‘persona’ and more person-revealed; he is a heartthrob still, but the heart is emphasised. His answers are animated with a sense of self-inspection, and a full pencil-case of writerly wit.
What does it feel like now to hang out with writers, asks Elly? “It’s a whole new community of people that are weirder than the film community,” says Richard with a mischievous smile. “Actors are so aloof, and… well put together.”
The room laughs. Nottingham’s bookworms have come to be won over, and I’ve watched it happen - Richard Armitage, we are forced to accept, has joined the company of Agatha Christie and Harlan Coben. One imagines that Robin Hood will be having a strop in a hedgerow somewhere. His rival has split the arrow - for one day at least, Guy of Gisborne has come out on top.
Richard Armitage’s book Geneva is in shops now, and The Cut is available on Audible. The Bromley House autumn ‘East Meets West’ events programme continues until December.
We have a favour to ask
LeftLion is Nottingham’s meeting point for information about what’s going on in our city, from the established organisations to the grassroots. We want to keep what we do free to all to access, but increasingly we are relying on revenue from our readers to continue. Can you spare a few quid each month to support us?
