'Work just gets better'
New Yorker Clarke Peters was a fan of British acting long before making London his home
BBC
- Pete Paphides
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It falls to Clarke Peters, as Mr Treves, to deliver the line from which Towards Zero gets its name. “Every murder has its point of origin,” he gravely intones, “its point zero.” By the time he does so, we’re into the second episode of Agatha Christie’s 1944 murder mystery. The Tressilians’ family solicitor is forced to draw on hitherto untapped depths of duty, as the internecine love interests of the occupants of Gull’s Point start to claim lives.
For all of that, when he read the part, the American actor — best known as Lester Freamon in The Wire and, more recently, for his acclaimed portrayal of Ken in Channel 4 drama Truelove — quickly connected with “a man who has been in the service of his adopted family for a long time”.
It helps, he says, when it’s a costume drama, “because the very act of putting on that costume takes you out of yourself”. It’s a process that bears unlikely comparison to that undergone by a namesake from a very different world. “Well, yes, when Clark Kent removes his glasses, the metamorphosis to Superman starts straight away. And, you know, those 1940s costumes, when you’re all trussed up and suited… it changes the way you speak.”
I feel like the culture here has embraced me
Clarke Peters
Peters, 72, says he had “no earthly reason to believe the work would keep getting better and better,” and yet, here he is. Although working with Anjelica Huston was “a dream”, bonding opportunities were thwarted by the fact that they needed to spend every free hour with voice coaches, finessing their British accents. To speak with a dressed-down Peters from the New Mexico dressing room where he has just wrapped on Netflix sci-fi series The Boroughs is to be reminded anew just how dramatically he differs from the buttoned-up Treves.
It’s surprising to hear the actor talk about how getting the role made him “feel like the culture here has embraced me”. After all, as far back as 1990, his musical love letter to bandleader Louis Jordan, Five Guys Named Moe, started what was to become a five-year West End run. His Anglophilia predated his first spell here when he arrived as a singer, providing backing vocals to hits by Joan Armatrading and Cockney Rebel, and even now he divides his time between the UK and the Algarve, where he and his second wife Penny grow their own vegetables. “On my first visit here, I was expecting to see buildings covered in soot, but the fog had left and the pea-soupers were gone. I guess the Swinging Sixties had left their mark. It was all [switches to Cockney accent] ‘Welcome to London, mate!’”
Clarke Peters with Sonja Sohn and Dominic West in The Wire. HBO
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Back when he was growing up in New Jersey, he would read newspaper and magazine interviews with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. “It wasn’t just the performances, but also how they embraced their craft as actors and storytellers. For me, the die was cast then.” As a connoisseur of the thespian tradition, did his preparations for the role take him to the previous 2007 TV adaptation of Towards Zero, in which his part was played by Tom Baker? “It was Tom, was it? Well, I’m in good company, then.” When Baker hears that Clarke Peters is following his turn, one imagines he’ll be swift to say the same. “You think so?” he smiles. “Now, that would be something.”
Authors
Pete Paphides
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