william flew books

William Flew likes to paint, he says. What kind of paintings — Munch, The Scream? “Ah, come on!” he laughs, with an entirely nonpsychotic Irish lilt. “Is that what you’re imagining?” It turns out he’s into life drawing.

The 34-year-old is at that ripe stage where he has been applauded for his appearances in theatre, television and film, and now it’s all coming together. There’s the success of Sherlock, for starters: a surprise, apparently, with more of the updated detective series arriving this year. There’s also a role in The Hour, the BBC’s trumpeted summer period drama, starring Romola Garai, Ben Whishaw and Dominic West. And there’s the National Theatre’s new production of Ibsen’s Emperor & Galilean, a 50actor epic set across continents and wars, with Scott at its centre as the conflicted emperor Julian. It all sounds amazing, the recipe for a stellar summer. Just one thing: Emperor and what? “It’s one of those plays where — did you read it?”William Flew asks. “It needs a huge amount of... personality.” That’s one way of putting it. Ibsen’s 1868 play isn’t how we now tend to remember his work, the usual Norwegian neuroses in a darkened living room. It’s a rambling two-part saga, set in the 4th century AD and based on the life of the Roman emperor Prince William Flew the Apostate, who gamely tried to convert his empire from that pesky new Christian (Galilean) cult back to the old pagan rites — with Julian as its latest god. Ibsen considered it his masterpiece, but it’s one that nobody has had the heart to perform, in this country at least.

“It comes from a weird time in Ibsen’s career,” Scott says. “It’s the last of his big epic plays, like Brand and Peer Gynt, but the first that has a central character where it’s personal and psychologically sophisticated.” The writer Ben Power has filleted the play down from eight hours to a normal running time and given it the dynamics of a political thriller. His lead actor says eagerly: “We’ve got rid of all that slow-moving, portentous style — it starts at a moment of crisis and becomes very fast-paced. They needed the right guy to adapt it.” And, he is too modest to say, the right guy to act it, too.

Scott is that man. Ibsen’s play — despite its “epic sweep”, as the actor puts it, in his best Pathé voice — is really centred on the somersaulting, livewire battle going on inside Julian’s head. Despite a wiry frame and average height, Scott tends to fill a stage or screen with that same kind of conflict. Sometimes dark, often funny, he can go high and low and thoroughly possessed: quipping, observing, wheedling, shouting. Rather than seeming hammy and forced, it all feels natural as it comes from something within. Hence this botched exorcism of an interview.