Colm Feore: Star's Early Days on the Stage
Stage and Screen Actor on Many Roles From Good Guy to Bad Guy
Colm Feore, who recently turned 50, started at The Stratford Festival in 1984, with one of his first leading roles, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, opposite Seana McKenna. In two interviews, the now internationally renowned stage and screen actor chats about early theatre days from playing Good Guys (the Danish prince and Petruchio) to Bad Guys (Richard the King, Iachimo and Iago).
Part One: The Bad Guys
Colm Feore talks about playing various villains – what he calls The Big Ones: the title role in Richard III, Iachimo in Cymbeline, and Iago in Othello. (During this interview Colm Feore’s toddler son Jack is playing with a toy lawnmower in the back yard, and laughing in the background. )
How did you get involved in the theatre?
Colm Feore: "I guess high school and then by the end of high school, I couldn’t do anything else. Then I went to National Theatre School in Montreal and by the end of that I really couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have much choice… no other skills, no real training for anything else, so I thought well I’ll go and see if I can make a living at this."
Richard III is what you call a Big One. How did you prepare for Richard?
Colm Feore: "Well, for that one show specifically, we had to decide what was wrong with him physically and then figure out how he compensates for it or how he deals with it. I played him as fairly severely handicapped, if you recall, he was pretty twisted but very dangerous. Even though he was twisted, I think I moved faster than almost anybody else on the stage."
Did you hurt yourself at all during the run?
Colm Feore: "No, not at all. We have some great teachers and coaches here. One of them is Kelly McEvenue, an Alexander teacher – a technique by which you can adjust your body and fix all the little squidgy problems in it. Well, if you had all of these problems, how would you survive? And we adjusted it all. I got all bent and twisted and she went over it, all the points that we decided to twist, and said okay, you fix this, that way and he could survive like this and that’s how it worked. I didn’t get hurt at all. There was a little pain afterwards. I spent most of the time between scenes just recovering."
I cannot forget Iachimo in Cymbeline… (a show designed by Britain's Daphne Dare, who was behind the concept for The Daleks in Doctor Who) – that scene with you and Martha Burns! (Slings and Arrows) was electric.
Colm Feore: "Yeah, you don’t see that sort of thing too often, and that was fairly dicey stuff – that bed scene! You could hear people in the audience because I whispered it all into a radio mike as I sort of slipped things off her and I could hear .. “Oh, My God.. he’s not going to… he wouldn’t do … he wouldn’t take that off and … oh … he is!”
There was all this discussion about what was happening so that made it twice as exciting for me. I’d think, well. Let’s go a little farther …"
When you played Iago in Othello, on closing night, Halloween, I have never seen an audience cheer on a villain like that.
Colm Feore: " Well, the way the play is structured, you have the audience's complicity for the first and second parts of it until the very last bit when you think ...Oh My God, this guy’s killing people. But for the first part, Iago seems the most intelligent funniest guy who sees the world straight on. Can you believe these morons? Look at the way these people are behaving. It’s just so easy. I have to do this to these people.
It’s a little bit of Richard III. Aren’t I funny? Aren’t I charming? I’m the best guy here. If you want to have a good time tonight, watch me. Forget all these other guys and then suddenly, you think this is funny, and it’s great, so they play scenes with completely serious people, they look out at you and you go “Can you believe this guy?” How stupid can you get?" And you go think yeah, right on, I know what you mean. That’s because Iago’s involved you and suddenly three or four acts later, you are an accomplice!"
Part Two – Colm Feore waxes on playing the role of Hamlet. What was That Melancholy Dane really thinking?
Actor Colm Feore
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