Colin Firth interviewed January 3, 1999 on the US Television channel Arts & Entertainment .

INT: Colin Firth. Welcome to Breakfast with the Arts.

CF: Thank you.

INT: Shakespeare in Love is a fun and funny film and you get to play the villain.

CF: Absolutely.
We have to keep telling people that it's fun, don't we? A film about Shakespeare... You know: "stay way".

INT: How did you first hear about this?

CF: Oh, a long, long time ago. It's been around for many years. They were toying with me - or I was toying with them - in about 1992. Mmmmm. It was a completely different set of people to do it. And it's just been, I suppose, either on a shelf or in and out of production since then.

So it just came back in different form this time. I was Wessex. I would have prefered it had been Shakespeare, but it... um....

[INT. laughts]

CF: .... no, and it was John Madden and it was the most incredible cast. It's just not something I wanted to say no to.

INT: Was it something that you read and right away you said "I'm taking this role".

CF: Well, no. It wasn't quite like that, to be honest. It was something I read and right away said "It's absolutely brilliant and unique". And I didn't have any idea how it could work. I didn't know whether it could work. I thought "We will have to find a convention to this that I've not seen before". You can't.... if you step over into arch Shakespeareanism, you're dead. If you try to modernize it in a kind of ... you know, there's that sort of tacky updating you get. Deliberately try to make something relevant and sellable. I thought we're dead if we do that as well.

INT: You worked with such extraordinary actors. It was one of those films where you're watching it and you're saying "Oh I know that guy, I know him, he was in ..." You may not quite remember the names, but you've seen the faces. What was it like?

CF: That's right ... I'm one of those people!

No it's great. You don't know, you think you might turn up on the set and they're all going to be scratching each other's eyes out and vying for position; competing, climbing on top of each other. It wasn't like that at all. People loved the material and were getting on with it. And treating each other surprisingly respectfully..

INT: And your love interest - Gwyneth Paltrow? What was it like working with her?

CF: It was great working with her. I never thought I had a "love" interest - "financial" interest...

INT: Right.

CF: She's great. I think we would not have been a happy company had Gwyneth & Joe not been great.

INT: Great chemistry between the two.

CF: Isn't there. Absolutely.

It was a very, very positive environment. It's not one where we all were permanently celebrating and having fun. It was a tough job to do, really. I remember just marveling at John Madden, having to deal with 500 people and these 3 or 4 cameras and animals and comedians... (laughts)

It was an extraordinary, unwieldy thing, with a kind of language that we hadn't really seen before in a film, I don't think.

INT: When we spoke with Gwyneth she said that she lost it a few times working with you. She just laughed. It was very unprofessional of her, but ... she just had a good time.

CF: I know, [inspecting his fingernails] I was trying to be serious. I was exploring my menace. I was experimenting with my snarling, fierce and menacing look and I discovered my comedy in doing so. I would come out and think "Right, now I'm going to be dangerous". And everyone would fall about laughing. So I thought :"Keep quiet about that, don't say it on a television interview, and maybe people will think you've got a comic side"....

No, seriously, it was fun, it was just playing someone who's there to spoil everything. You know, the "boo hiss" character.

INT: It's a fun character to play, right? Now Colin, tell me about the Fiennes brothers. In The English Patient , Ralph Fiennes steals the girl. And now in Shakespeare in Love, Ralph Fiennes younger brother -Joseph Fiennes - he's after your girl. What's ...

CF: I know. Well, what's that? If I want my career to go on, I'm going to have to find some more Fiennes brothers! Yeah, I had noticed that... However, any similarity between them basically stops at their last name. I was in no way reminded of Ralph by working with Joe.

INT: Had you worked with Joe before?

CF: No. I got on fantastically with both of them. I have huge admiration for them as actors but I couldn't compare them. Mmmmm...

INT: You've been in a fair number of period pieces. Is that by choice or coincidence?

CF: Coincidence. I don't notice particularly. I think far too much is made of the separation between period and modern. I mean, if you look at it, everything's period, I mean even if it's only last year.

INT: True. The past is...

CF: Yeah. The past is there immediately and.... when does it become period?

I annoyed my mother by calling a 50's drama a period drama. You know, it's Terence Rattigan and I said "I'm doing this period thing".

INT: And she said? What?

CF: "Period? Terence Rattigan? What year?" ("acting" his mother's confusion)

"1952" (answering his mother)

"It's not period. It's just the other day!" ("acting" his mothers irritation)

INT: It depends on who it is.

CF: Yeah. You put on a different costume.

There is an artifice to every single convention and pretending that it's today is just as phony in a way as pretending that it's a 100 years ago. We're still creating a world which is for the purpose of fiction and drama, which is not a real one. So every single one of those examples is just a way of interpreting ourselves in some way, either for entertainment or to understand something, or to manipulate something. But, you know, if it's set 200 years ago it really is sort of... I think, we're interpreting the present in disguise in some way. I don't really feel the past is this other thing to do dramas.

I did a film set in 1989. Is that period? I don't know.

INT: (laughs) Yes. It depends on who's looking at it.

Let's talk a little bit about Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice which aired right here on A&E and did very well, I might add. That series really brought you to America's attention. Would you say that Pride & Prejudice was your big break?

CF: No, I mean, yes and no. I've had a lot of big breaks. And then things go back to normal. And then there's a big break. And it goes back to normal....

I think it's actually quite good that things work that way. You're always filled with expectations and then things either turn out the way you plan......

I didn't think Pride & Prejudice would turn out to be a huge hit and yet it was. And I'm sort of... I just sort of sit back and watch it all happen now really.

INT: It's huge. It's all over the world.

CF: Yeah. Yes it is! I do find it absolutely extraordinary.

Just as always I thought "this is a nice script, let's have a go at this". And as far as you're concerned, you finish the thing, you walk away from it and what happens to it after that is someone else's business. And in this case, everybody took it on. I had to go back and look at it, actually. I didn't feel I had much to do with it. It was like this big party going on where I wasn't there. I had to go and look and say: "What happened? What did I do right?"

There's a huge amount that's always out of your hands, I think.

INT: Great, Colin Firth, thanks for joining us on Breakfast with the Arts

CF (big smile) : Thank you!