The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (13 page)

What is it that makes Holmes so alluring? Why does Watson keep going back to him?

‘He’s a pretty magnetic bloke. He’s very intelligent and there is something mesmeric about his obsessiveness as well. He’s the cleverest bloke that John has ever met and he likes that challenge and the share of the danger as well. Because John is ultimately into danger as well, he is a soldier and a doctor so he is around situations that are perilous and a bit tasty, so he responds to that in Sherlock and he just wants to be around him – I sometimes don’t even know why!’

Freeman had a busy schedule, but the release of a film is often dictated by the market. A small film will often sink if it is released in the summer, for example, because of its competition with Hollywood blockbusters. Thus, a film could be made one month before another film but only get a release six months later. It’s the nature of the industry: some films take months – or even years – to get made; others less so.

‘It honestly doesn’t feel like an increased workload as I’ve always worked a lot,’ Freeman admitted to the
University Observer
’s Steven Balbirnie. ‘I mean when I was twenty-three,
twenty-four I worked a lot, but obviously not in things that were ever famous. At the moment I’m lucky enough to have
Sherlock
and
The Hobbit
going on, and to have those things sort of dually going on, that’s a big gig, that’s a great combination.’

2010 also saw the release of
Wild Target
, on 18 June, a film which saw Freeman star as Dixon. Directed by Jonathan Lynn of
My Cousin Vinny
and
The Whole Nine Yards
fame,
Wild Target
is a loose remake of the French film from 1993,
Cible émouvante
. Filming began in September 2008 in London and the Isle Of Man and stars Bill Nighy as Victor Maynard, a middle-aged hit man who is hired by Rupert Everett’s character, Ferguson, to kill Rose (Emily Blunt) after she cons Ferguson out of £900,000. Freeman’s character is a sadistic assassin who is Maynard’s henchman. However, the story takes a turn when Ferguson asks Dixon to dispose of Maynard, the greatest hit man ever known. The film opened in June in the UK and was met with mixed reviews. It was a box-office failure and, with a budget of £5 million, it grossed half of its budget in box office takings.

The New York Times
’s A.O. Scott said, ‘The body count is high, but the murders are presented with neither the slapstick of a Blake Edwards
Pink Panther
caper nor the grisly shock of Quentin Tarantino pastiche. Acts of violence occur like punchlines to familiar jokes, bringing tedium rather than surprise.’

Simon Crook wrote in
Empire
, ‘Lumbered with tame action and carbon-dated gags (honestly, have dead parrots been funny since
Monty Python
?), the cast just about charm their way out of it. Nighy’s value, but it’s a bit like watching an ITV sitcom spin-off of
A Fish Called Wanda.
’

Time
Out
’s David Jenkins was unenthused: ‘The actors do the best with what they’re given – it’s just a shame they’ve been given so little. The script is free of either zingers or insight, the inertia of the story is constantly stalled by deviation (including a superfluous homoerotic vignette which appears to be a cheap excuse to show Grint in the nude) and entire characters – including the “baddie” of the piece, Rupert Everett – are left to fade into the background.’

Freeman’s career veered back to the theatre, which is in many ways his natural habitat, between 26 August and 2 October 2010, when he starred in the Royal Court theatre production of
Clybourne Park
, written by Bruce Norris (
The Pain and the Itch
) and directed by Dominic Cooke (
Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, Seven Jewish Children, Wig Out!, Now Or Later
and
The Pain and the Itch
).

Freeman adopted a Chicago accent for the role. ‘It was just so well-written,’ he elaborated to
The Guardian
’s Euan Ferguson at the time. ‘I started to read it not necessarily expecting to think of doing it – it’s a while out of your life, and most things I don’t want to do – but, within pages, such wit, and a real nice nastiness to it. It’s also got people of different colours, different classes, echoing things that were said by people 50 years before but about a different colour or sex or power or class – it shows how things shift, and it’s magnificent. It’s about prejudice – literally, to prejudge a situation.’

The story tackles racism, politics and property and is set in the 1950s in contemporary America. Russ and Bev sell their two-bedroom house at a desirable, affordable price to the neighbourhood’s first black family. This creates discontent
amongst the white urbanities of Chicago’s Clybourne Park. In 2009 the same house is up for sale and is bought by white couple Lindsey and Steve, who face a similar response from the locals in a mostly black area.

The production received rave reviews. Georgina Brown wrote in the
Mail On Sunday
, ‘Dominic Cooke’s flawlessly performed production culminates in a contest between Freeman’s slick, white, liberal man and the super-cool, glamorous Lena (Lorna Brown, who had played the maid) to prove their total absence of prejudice by cracking the most offensively racist, sexist jokes imaginable, which, of course, only succeeds in proving the reverse. Outrageously, shockingly entertaining.’

Caroline McGinn wrote in
Time Out
, ‘Above all, “Clybourne Park” makes racism personal: one reason why it walks the notoriously hard line between funny and offensive. Also, a touch of tragedy exalts and humanises the hilariously awful property rows.’

Sarah Hemming enthused in the
Financial Times
, ‘The same cast play similar types in both acts and the performances would be hard to better. Martin Freeman, in particular, excels twice as the decent face of uptight white resentment, with Sarah Goldberg as his horrified wife. Provocative, troubling comedy.’

The Times
’s Libby Purves described Freeman as ‘pleasingly unrecognisable as a terrible prat in a sports jacket’.

He also played a character named Clive Buckle in the short film
The Girl is Mime
, which, with an estimated production cost of £2,000, was released on 12 March 2011. Freeman’s character is questioned by the police over the murder of his
wife. Buckle says he didn’t do it but the police are convinced he is the murderer – they just haven’t got any evidence to prove it.

Martin then cropped up as Alvin Finkel in the film
Swinging with the Finkels
, released on 17 June 2011 in the UK and on 26 August in the States. Written and directed by Jonathan Newman, the film is about a couple – Alvin and Ellie, played by Freeman and Mandy Moore – who decide to shake up their marriage by ‘swinging’ with another couple. The film is part of a sub-genre of films known as ‘sex comedy’. It’s as British as tea, beans on toast and Cadbury’s chocolate. These types of comedies go back to the 1960s and 1970s with the
Carry On
films that involve double-entendres, naughty one-liners and slapstick comedy. The early 2000s produced a few other risible films of this sort – notably,
Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Lesbian Vampire Killers
and
Three and Out
.

The film was poorly received. It was one of those silly British comedies that failed to hit the right buttons and engage with audiences.

Time Out
’s Tim Huddleston said, ‘From the opening shot of Martin Freeman wandering through Borough Market to the strains of some tedious sub-Richard Curtis soul-lite, we’re squarely in unambitious British romcom territory. But it’s still remarkable how lazy and lacklustre
Swinging with the Finkels
manages to be.’

Total Film
’s Emma Didbin said, ‘Thank God for Freeman, a reliably wry, likeable and emotionally truthful totem around which the rest of proceedings messily revolve. But he’s saddled with a script that descends from misjudged raunch-com into mawkish sap come act three.’

Gabe Toro put the boot in with an extensive review on
IndieWire.com
: ‘There’s no way around this, there’s no kind way to preface this, there’s no purpose to side-step it:
Swinging with the Finkels
is one of the worst, cheapest, dumbest and most dishonest films of the year. The film has the same tin-ear for its material that student films usually sport, often when they’re about retirement, hit men, or a litany of subjects young people tackle despite clearly having no experience in the field. “Swinging,” in theory, would be a film oblivious to the matters of sex and intimacy, but, in fact, it’s merely alien to any and all human behaviour.’

In 2011 Freeman took part in a charity cricket match to raise money for victims of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. He also played Simon in
What’s Your Number
? based on the book
20 Times a Lady
by Karyn Bosnak.
What’s Your Number
? was a box office and critical failure after its 30 September 2011 release. It stars Ann Faris as a twenty-something woman who looks back at the men in her life and wonders if one of them was her true love.

The
Daily Telegraph
’s Tim Robey wrote, ‘Faris, who has deserved exactly this lead role since her 2008 cult hit
The House Bunny
, proves once again that she has the bubblegum likeability and comic chops of peak Goldie Hawn. There are sequences here that deserve a round of applause – particularly when she tries to impress an ex (Martin Freeman) by posing as a Brit, strangled accent sliding from Eliza Doolittle to (somehow) Borat. She plays someone called Ally Darling and pulls it off, which is fairly impressive in itself.’

A.V. Club
’s Nathan Rabin wrote, ‘There’s a smart, funny,
observant comedy-drama to be made about the role our romantic pasts play in determining our futures, but director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Jennifer Crittenden (a Simpsons veteran who really should know better) and Gabrielle Allan are less interested in making that movie than in cycling Faris through a series of non-starting encounters with one-note-joke ex-flings, like the terminally British Martin Freeman or closeted gay Republican Anthony Mackie.’

Total Film
’s Ellen E. Jones said, ‘Martin Freeman’s friendly face pops up as her charming English ex, but doesn’t get to do much, instead flanking Faris while she performs a bad British accent tour de force that provides the film’s largest laugh.’

Freeman continued to remain dubious about Hollywood. He’s never seen himself as an actor sitting by a pool in LA with a cocktail in one hand and his mobile phone in the other as he chats to his agent about movie deals. He has never allowed money to be the guiding force behind his career. Of course, he wants to make enough cash to have a comfortable life and to support his family but he’s never picked a role specifically for the aid of his bank account.

‘I certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to say that I wouldn’t do anything Hollywoody,’ he said to Olly Grant of the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘It’s just that I’m more of an Englishman, really, than a Hollywood man.’

What matters to Freeman is the story and the characters, whether it is a funny production or an emotional one. Everyone has been affected by a film, especially in childhood, and it’s those films that have longevity.

‘I’m not in a hurry to go to Hollywood, because there are
so many British actors who go “Hollywood! Hollywood! Hollywood!” and they end up doing jack-shit there. Or just nonsense. And not doing their best stuff,’ he admitted to
IGN Filmforce
’s Ken P. ‘But Christ, if a good director and good people wanted to work with me, I’d be over the moon! Of course, I’d sweep the floor on
The Sopranos
. But as for the idea of equating Hollywood or America with success, I find it quite abhorrent.’

He has a modest outlook on fame and his priorities are his family, his home and his health. He enjoys his life the way it is.

‘There are still plenty of people who don’t know who I am,’ he told Steven Balbirnie of the
University Observer
. ‘That hasn’t changed in that way, really. It’s not like everywhere I go I’m mobbed, you know, certainly not in non-English speaking places… I think your world changes as much as you want it to change. I think if you go out there and court everything, it depends on how much you embrace, how much you want it and there are some things I don’t particularly want. I want work and I want to be doing good work but I don’t necessarily need everything that goes with it.’

Freeman is not overly ambitious, as some actors are, but, then again, he’s never been out of work. If he does not like a script, he will not audition for it but he also likes to know why actors have turned down the roles he has been offered. He is interested in good projects, regardless of nationality.

Acting is his main passion in life outside of his family and it’s something he is getting better at with every passing day. His lifelong ambition is to simply refine and progress in his profession; to be a great thespian. He has little interest in much else.

He spoke to
BBC Movies
’ Rob Carnevale about the possibility of one day directing a feature film: ‘I’m not sure that I could. I don’t know that I’d be great at that. I think the only directing I’d be any good at is theatre directing. It’s the only thing I can see myself doing. But I don’t feel confident enough delegating that much work on a film set. There are still things technically about films that I think are a mystery to me and I want to remain a mystery. I don’t particularly want to know what everyone’s job is because I’ve got lines to learn.’

Fame had certainly not gone to his head. He wasn’t a household name – well, perhaps in Britain to a certain extent, but certainly not in America. He didn’t crave Hollywood success early in his career. He doesn’t really crave Hollywood success in 2015. He loves London. He always has. He’s a home bird.

‘It would be easy to get carried away thinking how big you are, but I’m sure the vast majority of people don’t even know who I am – I’m not Robbie Williams,’ he admitted to journalist Siobhan Synnot of
Douban.com
.
‘Even though people come up to me in the street and say things, they still don’t know my name. In America they come up to me and say, “You were in my favourite film.” And it turns out their favourite film is
Love Actually.
Or
Ali G.
And they tend to assume I have been unemployed since then. So I’m not about to be Tom Cruise.’