Robert Sean Leonard interview: 'If I had my way, I would just do theatre, if it paid better. I love it'

He’s famous for his screen work with Hugh Laurie in House, but Robert Sean Leonard — currently appearing at the Barbican Theatre — is at home on stage, he tells Fiona Mountford
Theatre lover: Robert Sean Leonard (Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd
Fiona Mountford29 June 2015

It’s lucky for London that Robert Sean Leonard, the American film star best known for his role in Dead Poets Society, is indulging in his first love. “If I had my way, I would just do theatre, if it paid better. I love it. The hours are great, I can see my kids all day long, you don’t have to be at the theatre until 7.30pm and you’re home by Letterman,” he says. “I love the writing, I love Shaw, I love O’Neill, I love Stoppard, I love Shakespeare. Love love love in a way that gave me that first glow which brought me to this business.”

Leonard, who is also famous as Hugh Laurie’s stoic sidekick, Wilson, in the long-running TV series House, is about to reprise his role as Atticus Finch in the stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s seminal novel of racial hatred in the Deep South. After a run at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, two years ago (“where we lost only one show to rain!”) the production now transfers to the Barbican, perfectly timed to coincide with the publication next month of Lee’s “lost” novel Go Set a Watchman, reported to be essentially the first draft of Mockingbird.

Leonard, 46, admits that initially he didn’t feel the project was a great idea. “I didn’t see the point of putting it on stage because the movie’s so good and the book’s so good. The first day [of rehearsals] I came home and thought, I’ve made a terrible mistake.” So why did he do it? “My wife wanted a summer in London! Also, it scared me. I never knew what that meant but it is true, the things that make you nervous are usually the things you will grow doing and maybe even enjoy the most. I didn’t think it would work. But I was wrong, it did.”

It most certainly did; in my own review I referred to Leonard’s “wonderfully rumpled humanity”. Yet two years ago, he talked about having to wrestle with the ghost of Gregory Peck, star of the much-loved 1962 film, in front of 1,200 spectators each night. It turned out to be a benign ghost, I presume. “It did,” he says enthusiastically. “I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman pretty well and we talked about this role. Phil was famously the one who searched for the dark underbelly of whatever he was doing and I thought that would be such a funny way to play Atticus, as a secret drunk or whatever.” He pauses. “There’s no reason to search for the dark underbelly of Atticus as there is none. It’s a narrow path to play this role that I walk. You can’t just ignore Gregory Peck’s performance. I think you’re being petulant if you do.”

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Leonard is affable, diffident and highly literate about film and theatre; he is also, I suspect, far too bright to play the Hollywood fame game. I’m initially wary of mentioning that other H-word, as in previous interviews he has been adamant about how very little he enjoyed the rigours of filming the eight-series global juggernaut that was House. I try a different tack: what was it like emerging from what was at one point the most syndicated television show on the planet? “Hold on, what did you call it?” says Leonard. There is, it appears, an issue with the idea of global juggernaut-ery. I offer him the magnet I bought in a street market in Kiev a few years ago, which shows Laurie’s Dr House holding a large sandwich next to the phrase, “The best drugs are Ukrainian ones”. “Holy mama! I should send this to Hugh,” he says.

Ukrainian idiosyncrasy dealt with, he starts to talk. “There’s a line from The Seagull, when Nina asks Trigorin what it’s like to be famous and he says, ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s one of two things: either I’m not as famous as you seem to think I am or it’s something you just don’t feel.’ He’s right. I don’t feel famous, I never have. When I was doing House I was getting up at 3.30am and driving an hour-and-a-half to go talk to Hugh Laurie about Lisa Edelstein’s [Cuddy] ass and then getting back in my car and driving home. I never watched it. When I was younger I never believed it when actors said this, but it’s just not fun.”

No dark underbelly: Leonard as Atticus Finch(Picture: Johan Persson)
Johan Persson

So after eight series it must have been a relief to step off the treadmill? “Look, I was proud of the show. I thought it was good.” I thought you didn’t watch it? “I have to admit I’ve seen a few. I wasn’t embarrassed by it and I have plenty of friends who are on TV series who are, so I knew the difference.” Leonard is also refreshingly frank about the pecuniary rewards of network television. “The money’s great. My wife and I were having children and I really wanted to have security financially, which I’d never had doing theatre. When you do Long Day’s Journey into Night you feel a little selfish because you think, I’m making four dollars a week so I’m clearly doing this for my own jollies. I felt a little noble going to do House because I was earning money for my family, which a good father does.”

Touchingly, the moments when Leonard becomes most animated are when he talks about his great colleagues-cum-friends Laurie (“You can’t mistake my apathy for working on television for a lack of love for Hugh”) and Ethan Hawke. Leonard and Hawke started out together as idealistic schoolboys in Dead Poets Society in 1989. Does he envy Hawke’s Hollywood success — most recently in the awards magnet Boyhood? “No. I’m so proud of him. I’ve always felt a little bit of an older brother. I don’t envy anyone anything. I’m 46 and I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old and a dog who can’t see because he’s so old and I adore my wife and I love Stephen King books and going for walks and Honey Nut Cheerios. I don’t have an aching need to do much of anything, except be with my family. I don’t know if it says much artistically but I’m happy. So, no, I want Ethan to win every award imaginable.”

Leonard starting acting very young, and somewhat unwillingly at first, at the amateur summer repertory theatre in his New Jersey home town. “Someone saw me playing the Artful Dodger, reluctantly,” he says. “They asked me to come to New York and audition. I was surrounded by a bunch of Glee-style kids and I looked at the ground and mumbled, and I think they must have thought I was Marlon Brando, when in fact I was just embarrassed!” From there things progressed quickly; as a stalwart of the New York stage, he has won one Tony Award (for Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love) and been nominated twice more. What advice would he give to a young actor today trembling on the brink of stardom, just as he was 25 years ago? “I wouldn’t,” he says without hesitation. “I can tell you how to get an Oyster card because someone taught me that yesterday. That’s the kind of advice I give and believe in. Beyond that, I can’t help.” Atticus Finch has spoken.

To Kill a Mockingbird is at the Barbican Theatre, EC2, until July 25 (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk); Go Set a Watchman is published by Penguin Random House on July 14

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