David Gyasi on playing Achilles in BBC's Trojan War drama: I feel very good about myself

The actor found parallels with our troubled times starring as Achilles in Troy: Fall of a City, he tells Gabriel Tate
New role: David Gyasi on his turn as Achilles in Troy: Fall of a City
Matt Writtle
Gabriel Tate15 February 2018

If ever there was a role to make a star, it’s the Greek demigod Achilles. His combination of kick-ass fight skills, arrogant serenity and inner turmoil offers a fabulous showcase for any actor on the rise.

On a sunny afternoon last summer outside Cape Town, on the set of BBC One’s eight-part epic retelling of the Trojan Wars, Troy: Fall of a City, David Gyasi has the strut in his step to prove it.

“I feel very good about myself,” he laughs. And so he should — he looks in awe-inspiring shape. “I’ve been going to the gym six days a week, eating every three hours, protein shakes, no rice or bread… Achilles is a graceful, elegant killer, so I was doing my wife’s [Emma, a dance teacher] class in preparation.”

The 37-year-old fields questions with the same good humour and calm confidence of a man whose career is on track. After a series of small but significant roles in big films including Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas and Christopher Nolan’s Intersellar he’s absorbed in discovering the man behind the myth of history’s greatest warrior.

“How does Achilles hold the weight of his deity and humanity in the same body? Sometimes he doesn’t and walks away. What must it be like to suck the life out of hundreds of men, to see the light go out of their eyes? It means nothing for someone seeking self-worth, greatness and legacy. It’s a very lonely existence.”

For Gyasi, the Greek legends remain relevant today. “Achilles has been led to believe he’ll kill some people in battle and put an end to it, but they keep coming and you see him wondering when will it end. Where is the honour? There are no winners here.”

Our meeting on set took place a fortnight after a grim chapter in London’s recent history, when the Grenfell Fire was followed by the attack on Finsbury Park Mosque. While the community response to the former inspired him — “I was in the gym and wanted to go: ‘That’s my city!’ I lifted heavier and ran longer that day” — he followed the social media response to the latter with mounting horror. “This, ‘How dare you do this to me, I’m going to bring this down on you’, was heartbreaking. Everyone saying the same damn thing on different sides? We’re going to have eight episodes of this and no good will come of it.”

Achilles was most recently played on screen by blond, blue-eyed Brad Pitt in 2004’s Troy. Gyasi’s casting was met with lamentable dismay from a tiny, vocal minority, but the actor prefers to ignore the lunatic fringes.

“I’m all for discussion, but it’s hard to change hearts. You do what you can for the next generation — there’s hope there. My son [Nathaniel, 10] wants to be an actor and he said, ‘Dad, what role should I go for: Spider-Man or Black Panther?’ He’s got this gangly thing going on, so I thought he’d make an amazing Spider-Man. He wasn’t sure, but I said, ‘If the President of America can be black, you can be Spider-Man’. It’s cool that youngsters have a hero that looks a bit like them — I was that young person once and didn’t see myself much.”

We resume our conversation some months later at BFI Southbank. If anything, Gyasi is even more chilled out — perhaps because of confidence in the show, but also the simple familiarity of home. Born to a Ghanaian cab driver and cook in Hammersmith, his path was set when a cameo in a school production of Gypsy brought the house down.

His father’s initial resistance — “My choices were lawyer, doctor or engineer” — crumbled after seeing his son play Prospero at college but Gyasi faces a similar dilemma. Aside from his son’s interest, his 18-year-old daughter attends a performing arts school. “It’s interesting to see Elena finding herself, being so enthused about getting up at 5.30am to get the train in [the Gyasis have lived in Buckinghamshire for seven years] then needing to tell us what she’d learnt in tap-dancing when she got home. All I’ve ever asked is that she’s interested in life outside the world of performance art.”

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His interest in people and ease with diversity was nurtured in the capital, so perhaps it’s no surprise that filming in South Africa sometimes felt uncomfortable. “Every person serving looked like me, [and with] every person in authority I saw something else. I found that hard to handle — I wasn’t sure how I would do six months, then I took communion in this amazing church and got talking to a white guy called Henrik. He’d been homeless for eight years but never missed a service — it was the only church where he didn’t feel judged.”

Gyasi’s faith has guided him countless times, not least when he considered giving up acting to become a PE teacher in 2010. “I’d done some good work but I needed to challenge myself,” he explains. After spending half the family’s savings on moving to LA, changing manager and moving in with the in-laws on his return, the outlook was bleak. “I kept getting told I was ‘pencilled in’ for jobs or ‘down to the last two’ but we couldn’t get a mortgage. I wondered whether it was selfish to act when I felt I couldn’t put a roof over my family’s head. I was pushing my son around in a buggy, and had one of those talks with God: ‘I don’t understand what’s going on, you promised such-and-such…’”

His wife and father-in-law both urged him to persevere. “It was very emotional. That was at 3.45pm, and I got the call at 5.10pm saying Christopher Nolan wanted me to do The Dark Knight Rises. The next day I got the offer for [BBC drama] White Heat. Two offers, back-to-back. Things began to roll.”

The experience has made him sanguine about the industry. He laughs at the irony of a ruptured Achilles forcing him out of his first major lead role three years ago (although BBC One’s The Interceptor turned out to be a dud).

When Containment, an American thriller series which he led, wasn’t recommissioned, he flew straight back to London for Alex Garland’s Ex Machina follow-up, Annihilation, feeling positive. “It was nice to have time to breathe on a film set, to allow creativity and text to do the work.”

Next up there’s Amazon’s Carnival Row with Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, a prescient, allegorical fantasia executive-produced by Guillermo del Toro. “It was written 10 years ago and is about mythical creatures fleeing a war-torn homeland. One of the first scenes was with a baby fairy washing up on the beach — I read it just as those images of the Syrian boy on a Turkish beach were in the news. It asks what happens when different communities are forced together.”

On a lighter note, there’s Hunter Killer, a rollicking thriller with Gerard Butler, which allowed him to observe how a movie star operates. Does he covet that status? “I’d say that’s definitely… out there for getting. When I think of the stories I want to tell and responsibility I want to have, I have to acknowledge it’s possible, although I like that I’m still able to walk about and observe.”

With Netflix releasing Troy globally after its BBC One debut, stardom could come his way sooner than he thinks. “We’ll see,” he laughs, before heading off for a stroll along the Thames, unbothered by selfie-hunters. For now, at least.

Troy: Fall of a City begins on Saturday, February 17 on BBC One at 9.10pm.

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