Interview: Dominic West

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 13:58

DETECTIVE JIMMY MCNULTY, THE leading character in HBO's critically acclaimed cop show, The Wire, looks and sounds like he was raised in the sort of hardcore Baltimore projects where even drug barons fear to tread.

So it is a great shock – and a great tribute to his performance – to learn that McNulty's alter ego, the actor Dominic West, was reared not in the housing estates of Baltimore but on the playing fields of Eton. The British actor, who attended the elite public school at the same time as David Cameron and Boris Johnson, could scarcely come from a more upmarket background.

And yet you'd never know it. West is a rare chameleon on screen, able to metamorphose from a rampaging, hard-boiled Baltimore cop in The Wire one minute, to the charismatic English Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell in Channel 4's The Devil's Whore the next. To underscore his versatility, West is about to play a brilliant, clinical Australian Nobel Prize-winning scientist in BBC4's Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin.

When we meet in a faceless office in west London he initially seems like an almost stereotypical hail-fellow-well-met hearty, but you should never judge a book by the cover. He soon displays an admirable sense of mischief and a willingness, unusual among his profession, to send himself up something rotten.

West, 39, begins by playing down his achievement in landing the role of McNulty ahead of hundreds of aspiring American actors. He says he sent the producers an audition tape of himself doing "my best Robert De Niro impression" – all the more remarkable given that his girlfriend was laughing uncontrollably in the background.

In spite of the off-camera hilarity, West was handed the role of McNulty, a boozy, out-of-control Baltimore detective with the in-your-face catchphrase: "What the f*** did I do?" The actor pulled it off so successfully that even now, he says, "people mistake me for an American".

"I went to a Wire charity quiz the other night. I came on stage to be greeted by a certain degree of anticipation. But as soon as I opened my mouth, I sensed this deflation in the room – everyone was desperately disappointed that I was this dreary Sloane instead of a hard-bitten Baltimore cop."

All the same, The Wire has catapulted West into the big league. Again, the actor is self-deprecating about the transformation in his fortunes. "I hope The Wire has taken my career onto another level. I suppose I now have a certain profile that I didn't have before. I think I used to be considered a bit of an idiot. But now I'm seen as amazingly streetwise and super-cool, which is rather a different feeling. That's the power of a single role."

His new-found stature no doubt helped West secure his latest role as Professor Howard Florey in Breaking the Mould. This absorbing one-off drama recounts the little-heard story behind one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in modern history.

Everyone knows that the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming (played in the drama by Denis Lawson) discovered the existence of penicillin in 1928, when he noticed that mould was eating away the bacteria in a petri-dish left on his lab bench. But this film explains that a hitherto scarcely known Oxford University team, led by the Australian Florey, actually invented the method by which the drug could be extracted and mass-produced.

Breaking the Mould demonstrates that, in tandem with Ernst Chain (Oliver Dimsdale) and Norman Heatley (Joe Armstrong), the pharmacologist Florey worked tirelessly throughout the Second World War to create a machine that could manufacture penicillin in industrial quantities.

One cannot often assert that a single invention changed the course of the human race, but Florey's discovery did just that. It is reckoned that his work on penicillin helped save the lives of some eighty million people. Florey – in conjunction with Fleming and Chain – was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945. He was made a life peer in 1965, and his face has also graced the $50 bill in his native Australia.

But perhaps the most astounding aspect of the story is that Florey refused to patent his discovery; an incredibly selfless man, he believed that scientists should never benefit materially from their investigations.

It is that sheer altruism which drew West to the character. "Florey and his team worked extremely hard for no reward," he says, clearly impressed. "It never occurred to him to patent his discovery or profit from it or get any fame from it. That is completely amazing given the current climate. My every waking thought is, 'how can I get famous?'" he says, self-mockingly. "Florey's every waking thought was, 'How can I save the world?'

"He was a quite extraordinary man – a classic, diffident, self-effacing 1940s genius. He came up with the most important discovery for the human race in hundreds of years and made absolutely no fuss about it whatsoever."

After appearing in such Hollywood blockbusters as Hannibal Rising, Chicago, 300 and Mona Lisa Smile, West has relished working on British television again. "There is a certain, wonderful no-nonsense approach to making British telly," he declares. "It's guerrilla filmmaking – we just get on with it here. It's great because if I'd had any longer to work on the role, I'm sure I would have messed it up."

"I also love working here because I get the jokes. As much as I adore working in America and had a great time there, you never really feel like you fit in. Over there, you'll always be the quirky, unusual, exotic one. While over here, you're just a dreary workman like everyone else," he says, before adding with a laugh, "That's quite refreshing for a mega-star!"

The actor is keeping his options open about where he will film next. "I'd like to go back to America. I did get quite a lot of offers after The Wire, but they were mainly to play cops. So I turned them down, and now the phone has stopped ringing."

American producers have not stopped calling West to invite him to work on the other side of the camera, however. He made a very respectable job of directing an episode in the final season of The Wire, and now the series' creator David Simon has asked him to helm an instalment of his new show, Treme, about musicians in New Orleans.

"I get a real buzz from telling my fellow actors what to do," West says, mischievously. "You can correct the thing that's annoyed you about their acting for the past five years. 'You know that bit where you linger before my big speech? Do it faster!' "

But before that, West will be taking to the London West End stage. He is starring in a new production of Calderon's Life Is a Dream, which opens at the Donmar Warehouse in October. "Life Is a Dream is a wild, surreal tale about a guy who has been chained for years to a rock in Poland," the actor explains. "Suddenly he is brought to court and told he is a prince. In fact, it's a totally hallucinogenic dream induced by henbane (a psychoactive derivative of the stinking nightshade plant]. I haven't managed to get hold of any henbane yet to help me get into the role, but I'll keep trying." A pause. Another burst of laughter. "I'm rather a thorough craftsman in that respect!"

&#149 Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin is on BBC4 at 9pm on 29 July.