CALGARY HERALD: Robert Carlyle finds golden opportunity in Once Upon a Time
By Alex Strachan
October 20, 2011
Robert Carlyle bared his soul in Trainspotting, bared his soul and then some in The Full Monty, and even played Adolf Hitler once, in the 2003 miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil. He has appeared in films as disparate as Angela's Ashes, 28 Days Later and the James Bond thriller, The World Is Not Enough.
Playing cryptic, mysterious characters comes as naturally to him as a chameleon blending into a field of tall grass. Carlyle is an instinctual actor, and when he first saw the script for Once Upon a Time, the new, filmed-in-Vancouver fairy-tale series that debuts Sunday, he was struck by its mysticism and the moral ambivalence of his dual character, Rumpelstiltskin and Mr. Gold.
Once Upon a Time shifts back and forth in time, from a mystical fairy-tale world in which Rumpelstiltskin is a key character, to the modern-day version, where Mr. Gold is just one more enigmatic eccentric in a town of eccentrics...
... "I don't see the characters I play as being necessarily that complicated," Carlyle said, in a soft-spoken Glasgow lilt. "I suppose it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. . . . My job is to piece it all together.
"Most actors would say the same thing, I think. These are the more interesting parts to play, when you're playing someone whom the plots kind of bounce off. It's not quite as exciting, somehow, when you're playing the person who's pushing the plot through. To be honest, I think people are always asking me to do these parts, because they think I can do that, and do it well..."
Once Upon A Time premieres Sunday, October 23, 2011 at 8/7C on ABC.
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