Toby Jones: I never wanted to feel desperate about acting

Full Disclosure with James O'Brien

Global

Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From Truman Capote to Mr Bates, Toby Jones has built a career on disappearing- an actor whose transformations are so complete they can seem alchemical. But behind that versatility lies a story of inheritance, self-doubt and quiet rebellion. The son of two actors, Toby grew up watching his father’s unpredictable career and vowing never to feel so exposed to fate. Yet the pull of performance, and the curiosity that drives it, proved impossible to ignore.

In this episode of Full Disclosure, James O’Brien sits down with the actor to trace the path from an Oxford childhood to radical student politics in 1980s Manchester and a life-changing spell at a Paris theatre school that taught him never to wait for permission to create. They talk about class, curiosity, and the discipline of transformation; about how he’s learned to find meaning rather than momentum in his work; and why humility, not ambition, has been his most enduring guide.

It’s a conversation about vocation and value- how an artist keeps searching for truth in an industry built on illusion, and why, for Toby Jones, the work itself has always mattered more than where it leads.

An explosive new production of Othello at the Theatre Royal Haymarket stars David Harewood as Othello, Toby Jones as Iago and Caitlin FitzGerald as Desdemona- a gripping retelling of Shakespeare’s epic story of manipulation, jealousy, power and desire. Find out more about the production here

Transcript

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1:05.1	This is a global player original podcast. Hello and welcome to Full Discl a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio.
1:21.6	Toby Jones, welcome. Thank you. Very nice to be here. It is, I mean, talk about the planets aligning from an actor's point of view.
1:28.7	In the last 10 days, I've watched the conclusion of the hack in which, of course,
1:34.2	you play Alan Rosbridge.
1:35.2	And I've watched you as Yago in Othello at the Haymarket with David Harewood.
1:41.7	And last night I watched Mr Burton beautiful beautiful film about the
1:46.0	the teacher who essentially set Richard Burton upon the path to fame and fortune I think in the
1:53.1	last 10 days I've seen more of you told you goes and I have of my wife yeah sorry about that it's not
1:57.7	it's it's been an unlawed place I'm not in charge of scheduling. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Yeah, for, you know, for civilians, it's weird. It'll be like, how many hours are there in your day? Yeah. I think people think that these things are done consecutively, and you know, you're working all the time to put this stuff out. But you are in a fairly purple patch. yes I mean I mean I don't want to put this stuff out. But you are in a fairly purple patch?
2:23.0	Yes, I mean, I don't want to put the hex on this interview straight away,
2:27.9	but any sense of, I'm kind of superstitious about seeing any kind of,
2:30.9	like a purple patch suggests that there's some,
2:36.7	it's all going very well and it's all, you know, from people to, it'll be fine now.
2:41.7	And I'm not sure that's terribly healthy for an actor to feel ever, you know, you sort of feel,
	...

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