“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” which opened in theaters this weekend, is a beguiling film about a collection of elderly English who decide to outsource their retirement to India. Much of the credit for its charm must go to its cast, which includes a number of the best British actors working today.
It’s fun to watch these vets interact, so one imagines it must have been fun to be one of those vets playing alongside very talented colleagues. Tom Wilkinson, one of the stars, confirms that it was. Well, sort of.
“We did enjoy each other’s company. You’re working with actors that you like, so why not have a good time?” he tells me by telephone. He’d worked with co-stars Bill Nighy and Judi Dench in the past, so he had familiar faces to explore the unfamiliar terrain with: The actor had never been to India before.
“Oh, that must have been a fun experience in itself,” I suggest.
“A traumatic experience,” he counters, with some emphasis. Life imitated art here, it seems. Many of the movie’s characters have trouble adjusting to life in the crowded country.
Wilkinson said it was the culture that shocked him: “You’re not prepared for that huge contrast between what you understand to be how the world works and how it works in India.”
The 64-year-old London-based actor is a familiar presence in films these days. But it took a purposeful decision to change his path — something of a risk for a man who had spent decades establishing a successful career on the stage and on the small screen. In the second half of the 1990s, he decided to give up theater and television work to focus on film.
“It was never a financial decision. I was doing all right at the time,” he says, contradicting some published theories that he shifted direction in pursuit of bigger paychecks.
“I just thought there was one area of my acting life that I hadn’t explored, and that was doing films. And I wanted to make films in the United States because the United States has got that cachet, hasn’t it?” As he notes, it tells the world, “You want to sit down and play with the big boys.”
And so he has. He received his first Oscar nomination when he was past 50, for the 2001 drama “In the Bedroom.” He snagged another six years later, for the legal drama “Michael Clayton.”
Then he returned to television, but doing very different work from the British series with which he made his name. He won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Benjamin Franklin in HBO’s miniseries “John Adams” and a Globe nomination for playing James Baker in another HBO project, “Recount.”
How did a man that so embodies the elegant English spirit win acclaim for portraying iconic Americans? (He also played Joseph Kennedy Sr. in the miniseries “The Kennedys.”)
He laughs immediately on hearing the question.
“I know. Sometimes I feel like a terrible fraud,” he says. “They just were good scripts with good roles in them.”
And that’s how the in-demand Oscar nominee chooses his projects. “You’d do anything for a great script, and there really aren’t that many of them around,” he reports. “That’s the central thing, that is the rock on which any decent movie is built: the screenplay.”
Wilkinson, unlike some of his compatriots, doesn’t do a lot of research into roles beforehand. “No amount of character acting, ‘don’t call me by my name on the set,’ is going to make up for a bad script. A bad script is a bad script. The fact that you’re the perfect drug addict is not going to make up for the fact that no one cares.”
He says he responds to “a script that’s just got a bit of spark about it.” But sometimes that might only mean one line. Last year, he starred in the moral drama “The Debt” — and also had a cameo role in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.”
Tom Cruise, the movie’s star and one of its producers, is “a bit of a friend of mine,” says Wilkinson, who worked with Cruise in “Valkyrie” and the actor’s wife, Katie Holmes, in “The Kennedys.” Cruise gave the choosy actor an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Cruise, Wilkinson reports, asked him, “Do you want to do it? It’s only a day, but you get to say, ‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it…’ ”
Kelly Jane Torrance is The Washington Examiner movie critic. Her reviews appear weekly, and she can be reached at [email protected].
