To try to understand Hitler, Robert Carlyle immersed himself in the mythic agendas of Richard Wagner's operas.The moment he stepped into his trailer each morning on the movie set in Prague, the Glasgow-born actor would blast Tristan und Isolde. Through the day, he'd crank variations of the German composer's Ring Cycle. At night, he'd lie in the bath, lapping up the musical genius of Wagner, a raging anti-Semite. And a man whom Hitler adored.
Prior to working on the upcoming CBS film, Hitler: The Rise of Evil, Carlyle admits he'd never heard an opera. Now he's something of a Wagner devotee. The music, says Carlyle in his thick Scottish burr, was the only way he could figure out a connection to history's epic villain."[The music] was on all day," explains Carlyle, a small, ferret-like man known for memorable turns in such films as The Full Monty and Trainspotting. "I used it to get to the guy, and I used it to get away from him. It's a strange thing. At night, I'd go up and have a bath, sit and listen to it. And I'd hear this beautiful music and voice in its own right. The only thing I could really grasp in terms of understanding him as a human being was his love for opera.
"So I listened to everything Wagner had ever written. Several times. And I slowly began to understand the heartbeat that was behind it. And once I felt that, it kind of opened up. There was no way I could humanize Hitler, but [the operas] did give me hints about what made him tick."
Of his varied acting roles, the intense 42-year-old says Hitler was by far the most challenging and exhausting he's ever taken on. In Toronto this week with his wife, Anastasia, and baby daughter, Ava, to premiere and promote the four-hour TV movie (which airs in two parts, on May 18 and 20 on CBS at 9 p.m.; and on CH Hamilton and Vancouver on May 18 and 21 at 9 p.m.). Carlyle says he still feels slightly battered from the ordeal -- emotionally banged up from trying to portray the beady-eyed sociopath. A man seemingly programmed to hate. A person who unblinkingly revelled in the genocide of millions of Jews, and the death of millions of others across the face of Europe.
Robert Carlyle portrays the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in a new CBS miniseries (Cliff Lipson/AP)
"I couldn't empathize with him," says Carlyle. "I couldn't humanize him. I mean, how can you? He's the fucking biggest monster that's ever been played,' says Carlyle, sucking on a Halls for a sore throat, in between sips of cold tea and a tomato juice. "All I could do was try to understand the time in which he came to power, understand what was happening in Germany between the two world wars. I just tried to play each scene honestly.
"But it was tough," adds Carlyle, raking a hand through his thinnish, unkempt hair. "All the speeches were tough. Spewing that shit was, you know, hard. It's hard talking 'Jewish vermin.' It's really hard to say that, to stand up and make the Munich beer-hall speeches, and shout out like that. It's really quite distressing."
But if the film was hard on its lead actor, it was also a challenge for Toronto-based producers Alliance Atlantis Communications, and the film's director, French-Canadian Christian Duguay (Joan of Arc). From the moment the project was green-lit by CBS and Alliance Atlantis, critics began to circle.
Initially proposed as Hitler: The Early Years, and based on the work of acclaimed British historian Ian Kershaw's scholarly book, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, the miniseries immediately drew flak from various groups who denounced it for potentially humanizing the pre-Fuhrer Hitler, as say, a misunderstood, maligned youth gone bad.
Then CBS head Les Moonves criticized the project as being too scholarly, basically lacking dramatic oomph. So out went the first draft (and writer G. Ross Parker). A second draft was more gussied up. That, in turn, resulted in the abrupt departure last March of Kershaw, who asked to have his name removed from the credits of the miniseries, which also stars Peter O'Toole, Matthew Modine, Stockard Channing, Jena Malone, Julianna Margulies, Liev Schreiber and Peter Stormare.
Then in mid-April, Alliance Atlantis producer Ed Gernon was abruptly fired after comparing the contemporary United States (in the full throes of the Iraq war) with early Nazi Germany.
In interviews at Toronto's Park Hyatt Hotel, Duguay admits the TV movie has been a long journey, fraught with many headaches and hurdles. At times, he considered it all too much. "I kept on telling [Alliance Atlantis executive] Peter [Sussman] this is a no-win situation," says the director. "But he kept on saying, 'No you guys are doing it all right. Stay focused.' I look at the film now, and I was wrong. I think the film is an important historical piece that no one has done before -- that no one has been daring enough, like Bobby, to play the character and try to feel the pulse of the man, try to figure out why so many people rallied behind Hitler and let him do what he did."
Duguay still bristles at the early criticism from folks who condemned the project sight unseen. "Look, we did what we set out to do," the director insists. "You watch this movie and you never forget here's a man who is demonic. He was cunning. He had the intelligence to manipulate his way through. But he was always something really, really sick."
The program, which airs just before the May ratings sweeps, has already been seen by many Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, which has since lined up in support of the four-hour movie, saying it does portray Hitler in the appropriate monstrous light.
Duguay refused to comment on Gernon's firing. Carlyle says he ignored the politics. "It's not my job, I don't think, to get involved in that," he says. "I was just trying to keep my mind clear to play the part."
Each day, Carlyle would sit through three hours of makeup, and then stare, transfixed, at his reflection with the infamous mustache. "It was amazing when I'd come out of the makeup trailer, and see the reactions from people on the set or just in the street," he says. "They'd say, 'Oh my God, that's Hitler.' And I'd go, 'Jesus,' because that's when I realized the power of that image."
For reasons he can't explain, Carlyle's been offered the role of the Fuhrer several times before. In fact, he took the CBS role only eight weeks after protests from Jewish activists in the United States squashed a BBC production of a young Hitler. (At the eleventh hour, BBC's partner, Fox, pulled out.)
Carlyle takes a deep drag on a Silk Cut and attempts to fathom why people think he's such a suitable Hitler. "In a way, this role seems almost inevitable because I've been offered to play it so many times," he says with a lopsided grin. "Why me? I'm not sure. Look at me. I don't look like him, and I'm such a quiet guy. I hope it's because they see me as a character actor who can go to these kind of places. I hope it's not because they think I'm fucking crazy, you know?"
For his part, Duguay says Carlyle was the ideal actor to play the crazed leader because "he's got that edge." Carlyle, adds the director, "was not afraid to go into that character. And it takes a lot of guts to be able to, psychologically, put yourself inside that head."
In his 20-year career, Carlyle's done his fair share of bad guys. He was a Bond villain, a disturbed football fan in ITV's Cracker and the head-butting psychopath Begbie in Trainspotting. Hitler, though, represented an entirely new level of evil, and, on a career level, a challenge that Carlyle admits he "perversely kind of enjoyed, I suppose, in the end."
Why? "Because in the end, I felt I had him, if you know what I mean?" says the actor, squinting off into the distance, as smoke from his cigarette curls around his head.
"I never really 100-per-cent had him. I mean how can you figure a guy like this?"
Says Carlyle, "He was lucky he didn't get blown up in the First World War a couple of times. And it was circumstance that Hitler didn't get into art school in Vienna when he applied." Shaking his head, the actor adds, "If he had, the world might have been a very different place."
