Mark Rylance

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2015

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actor, Mark Rylance.

Born in Kent and brought up in America where his father was a teacher, Mark played Hamlet for the first time while he was still at school. Since then he has become particularly well known for his acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearean stage roles. He won an Olivier and a Tony award for his portrayal of Johnny 'Rooster' Byron in Jez Butterworth's 'Jerusalem' onstage in both Britain and the United States. He has also appeared in a number of film roles, was the first artistic director of The Globe Theatre - a post he held for a decade - and his portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in the BBC Television adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has now brought him to a wider audience.

Producer: Isabel Sargent.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My customer My castaway this week is the actor Mark Rylance, getting a ticket to see him perform is widely regarded as a guarantee you witness theatrical magic. He can barely set foot on stage or set
0:45.3	these days without winning an award, Olivier's, Tony's, A Bafter, he has got the lot
0:49.9	and he's come to the attention of a new and highly appreciative audience
0:54.0	through his role as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall.
0:58.0	So where did it all begin?
1:00.0	Well, his father's deep love of literature and poems, he was an English teacher, and his mother's
1:05.3	rebellious streak and love of ritual, seem like the perfect creative compost to feed a youngster
1:11.2	who would go on to become one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation.
1:15.0	Odds though that as a child he was cripplingly shy, not speaking till he was six.
1:21.0	He says, I learned to speak and it made me very appreciative of words and speaking.
1:26.4	It also meant that from the early part of my life I had listened and watched a lot and so listening and watching a lot do you think that's at the very heart of
1:35.7	good acting yeah listening particularly I like having my parents described
1:41.6	as compost creative compost of course that I was trying to be nice
1:48.7	so you've been well very well known to theater audiences for many many years now but I think it would be fair to say much less well known to TV viewers.
1:57.0	Well that's all changed of course with the success of Wolf Hall and with you will have a couple of big films coming out soon. You are
2:04.6	suddenly going to be much much more recognizable. Have you thought about how that
2:09.5	is going to materially change your life? I think I feel happy to be coming to it at 54 or 55 rather than
2:17.0	at 20 21. I feel like I've dodged a bullet there. That that's quite a difficult fate to hit this kind of
2:25.4	um this kind of world where there's a lot of risk and so there's a lot of people
	...

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