Tom Hollander

Thursday

2 Jun 2016
Tom Hollander

One night in the backwoods

When I was 38, I let a drunk pick me up in a bar. You know, just to see if I still had it. It was raining. It was a November evening, and I was somewhere in the backwoods of the Adirondacks. I was driving from Rhode Island to Toronto, staying in motels. Taking my time. Getting lost. His name was Billy Ray and he was from the south. The land of Spanish moss and blurred boundaries and antique sentences delivered in a languid drawl. Beautifully dressed, an elegantly ruined bachelor of 48, he looked 65. He said he was related to the man who had invented Coca-Cola and had never had to work. ‘I really have had the most wonderful life, you know.’ I had started talking to him because he looked more interesting than the book I was reading.

One night in the backwoods

Thursday

28 Apr 2016

Thursday

10 Dec 2015
Tom Hollander

Sex acts

Poor Eddie Redmayne. Just because he looks quite like a girl, he finds himself a spokesperson for the burgeoning trans movement. Recently, he was forced to explain to those of us watching BBC News that ‘the notion of gender being binary’ is now considered ‘antiquated’. People are very excited about being trans at the moment. Countless TV shows and films depict it, Mark Zuckerberg has just called his daughter Max, and a man called Hilary has just talked us into another war. Being trans is clearly catching: hermaphrodite whelks on the undersides of fishing boats are growing penises, and vast swaths of young people, unable to buy a home or get a job, now realise they are trapped in the wrong body. Well, great. Previously you only noticed trans people when you used a phone booth on the Tottenham Court Road — now they’re on the cover of Time magazine.

Sex acts

Thursday

12 Feb 2015
Tom Hollander

My moment of mortification with Saint Joan Collins

I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I believed her. It was years later that someone explained to me that she really was having a fling with the third assistant director. But I never minded.

My moment of mortification with Saint Joan Collins

Thursday

10 Apr 2014
Tom Hollander

The summer of love

Last time I was allowed to write a story for The Spectator, I managed to get away with a frankly smutty and boastful piece about sex. Well, it’s been a while, so... I do hope nobody minds if I do that again. If I’m honest, when young, one of the reasons I decided to mortgage my life to showbiz was because I thought that if I did, I would get more than my fair share of bedroom action. Hang on. Sorry, not more than my fair share. (I must stop putting myself down.) Firstly, as we all know there is no such thing as fair in these matters; very attractive women regularly confound the rest of us by sleeping with people everyone thinks are ghastly. And secondly, even if they didn’t I am perfectly capable, on a good day, when not overwhelmed by various complexes there isn’t space to describe, of actually being quite reasonably charming.

The summer of love

Thursday

20 Jun 2013
Tom Hollander

Tom Hollander on the late James Gandolfini

This is an extract from a piece from December 2011 on Tony Soprano, depression, and the end of the world. You can read the full piece here. The thing with Tony Soprano is that I actually know him. Well, knew him. Well not him, but I knew James Gandolfini, the actor who played him. Because we did a film together a few years back. At the time, having never seen The Sopranos, I was quite relaxed around him. I noticed others looking nervous and staring at the floor in a half-witted way. But to me he just seemed like a large and quite nervous actor from New York. I offered to show him a slice of west London life. One afternoon we met at the Serpentine. It was June and it was raining. I offered him a small pop-up umbrella but he didn’t want it, and we walked lopsidedly towards Kensington Palace.

Tom Hollander on the late James Gandolfini

Wednesday

3 Oct 2012
Tom Hollander

Strangers on a train

If I subtracted from my life all the time spent either thinking about sex, or engaging in behaviour calculated to achieve it (by which I mean most of my social life and career choices); or dealing with the consequences of having achieved it (by which I mean all of my romantic life), well, I don’t know how much of my life I’d actually have left. Childhood. The useful bit. Fifteen years ago, in August, I boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York.The journey time was 29 hours. What to do? Write postcards? Read a book? Try to have sex with someone? It was a sultry afternoon: Spanish moss dangled in a sensuous manner, the edges of things were blurry in the heat. And we passengers would be packed together for a really long time going in and out of tunnels.

Strangers on a train

Thursday

3 May 2012
Tom Hollander

Diary - 3 May 2012

I am extremely lucky and have a charmed life. But this is a hard-luck story. And like much journalistic endeavour, it’s drawn from a wellspring of bitterness and resentment. Recently I was invited to Mustique. It’s a bland paradise. The beaches are raked each morning, as is the sand underneath the trees just behind the beaches. There is a never-ending rota of parties in beautiful villas hosted by smiling people with globally successful businesses. Teletubbies for billionaires. If, infantilised by your surroundings, you happen to leave your clothes somewhere on the island, before you’ve noticed they will be returned to you, laundered and pressed by the servants of The Mustique Company. If you leave your book hanging open as you dribble into your sun-lounger, unseen fingers will pick it up and put a post-it note marking the spot where you’d given up on the effort of reading.

Saturday

17 Dec 2011
Tom Hollander

I can’t get out of bed

Life is about choices. You can explain your lot away as bad luck, but I face you with the possibility that your lifestyle is the result of choices you have made. Said the therapist I went to see last week. Before leaving I made another appointment to see him so that I wouldn’t appear to have the problem with commitment that he had identified. But I don’t think I’ll go. I went to see him because, with the combination of the end of a relationship and George Osborne’s well-named autumn statement, I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed. I went to see Ruby Wax’s excellent show about mental illness and in it she said that when the black dog descended she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I saw Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and she couldn’t get out of bed.

I can’t get out of bed

Saturday

29 Oct 2011
Tom Hollander

Diary - 29 October 2011

Last week I travelled to New York for an audition. And before you ask, I haven’t heard yet. On the flight I sat next to a retired Hollywood producer from Santa Barbara. She would have been travelling upper class but today, owing to some kind of tier point issue, she had been downgraded to premium economy. Like your entire country, I joked. She talked about the end of the American empire and the inexorable rise of the east. Welcome, I said. Let me embrace you and gather you into the club lounge of second-rate nations. Allow me to ease your sense of shame. Have a drink. We can sit here and bitch about the inferior service and the terrible food.•••At Ground Zero I walked the narrow streets still haunted by that shocking insult, that shroud of dust clouds.

Saturday

15 Oct 2011
Tom Hollander

Top gear | 15 October 2011

The exciting thing about showbiz is, you never quite know where you are. I thought of a good test some weeks ago. I phoned Denee, my agent’s assistant.‘Can you ring Audi and see if they’ll give me a car. But for goodness sake be discreet.’I know it sounds grasping, but I’d been forced to it. Orlando Bloom had a A4 3.0 TDI A4 when we did Pirates, which he let me drive up Regent Street because he was worried about his carbon footprint; Kate Winslet was in a Q7 last year in Cornwall when I got lost following her because I couldn’t understand her directions; and Michael Gambon has an R8, but he probably paid for that. He also has a Ferrari. Fair enough. But when I saw the charming and talented Benedict Cumberbatch filling up what looked like an S5 at a service station near Oxford, something inside me snapped.

Saturday

9 Feb 2008
Tom Hollander

A daunting experience

Tom Hollander’s first meeting with a theatrical agent didn’t turn out quite how he expected It was the late Eighties and it paid to be brash. But I wasn’t brash I was green. Just down from university and wearing a second-hand double-breasted suit I had a meeting with London’s Most Powerful Agent. On Wall Street, Gordon Gekko. In Soho, Michael Foster. A man whose legendary temper had caused him, telephone in hand, to break his own finger while dialling. The extent of his rages were matched only by the size of the deals he got for his actors — deals rumoured to be so huge that other actors binge-drank at the thought of them. A week before, I had received a note while backstage at Richmond Theatre, halfway through a performance of the amusingly titled Sheep Go Bare (the 1988 Cambridge Footlights Revue).

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