Time Out’s London Film Festival cover star is happily running through his favourite hometown movies, and Mike Leigh features prominently. Naked and Happy-Go-Lucky sit at the top of writer-director-actor Will Sharpe’s picks on a tasty list that also boasts Mary Poppins, A Clockwork Orange and Notting Hill.
Those two Leigh classics – one funny in a dark, spiky way, the other in an unquenchably hopeful one – might even offer a gateway to Sharpe’s own work. Flowers, his beloved Channel 4 comedy-drama, put a blackly funny prism on mental health and relationships, while HBO’s Landscapers reunited him with Olivia Colman for a true crime drama that was all sharp edges. That playful streak was there, too, in 2021’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a delightfully offbeat period biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch as a 19th century cat painter.
His LFF film, A Real Pain, showcases Sharpe the actor. Directed by Jesse Eisenberg, it sees him playing a well-meaning English tour guide, James, who shepherds Succession’s Kieran Culkin and Eisenberg around Poland’s historical sites as estranged American cousins reconnecting with their Jewish grandma’s pre-Holocaust homeland.
The film is Time Out’s LFF gala – so we would say this – but it’s a gem: bittersweet, funny in a waspish way, and full of truths, big and small, about family, heritage and the power of a good rooftop spliff to really take the edge off. It’s already garnering Oscar buzz. ‘It’s surprisingly rare to read scripts that feel that complete,’ says Sharpe, leaning back in one The Cinema in the Power Station’s plush seats. ‘It was a very funny, tender story.’
Sharpe has a supporting role but it’s another feather in his cap, to follow a breakthrough turn as The White Lotus season 2’s diffident tech wizz Ethan. 2019’s Giri/Haji, a Netflix thriller set in London and Tokyo, Sharpe’s two hometowns, and was eerily tailor-made for an adopted Londoner who moved from Japan to Surrey as an eight-year-old. His portrayal of drug-addict sex worker Rodney Yamaguchi won him a BAFTA.
He and his partner, fellow actor Sophia Di Martino (Loki) live in north-west London, but he’s just back from a summer in Budapest filming a new TV version of playwright Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, suffering 40-degree heat in full 18th century garb. It’s quite minor key in places, he explains, running a hand through his mop of semi-ruly hair (‘It’s a version of my Mozart hair,’ he says). Amadeus, the man, doesn’t have an easy ride in it, he notes.
An actor in demand, the 37-year-old is here to chat about another trip to eastern Europe – his work on the Poland-set A Real Pain – and cast an eye back over a 15-year career that seems poised to go stratospheric.
What connected you to A Real Pain?
It was beautifully written and Jesse (Eisenberg) was very inspiring about it when I met him. I could completely see Kieran (Culkin) and him in those roles – the chemistry between them is crackly and infectious. It was quite fun to try to imagine how my character James ended up [guiding Jewish-Americans around Poland]. I was thinking about Brian Cox’s enthusiasm when he’s talking about the universe; someone with an infectious eagerness and sincerity.
Did Jesse Eisenberg give you films to watch beforehand as prep?
There wasn’t any homework per se. There was one day where Jesse wanted to get an extra shot and he said: ‘Maybe you could talk about the architecture?’ I said: ‘I can’t improvise about Polish history!’ From then on, any time we went anywhere, I’d research it in advance. Kieran would ask me why I knew so much about Polish history (laughs).
So they’d be like: ‘Where’s Will? Oh, he’s over there on Wikipedia.’
A few times Jesse did say: ‘Oh, let’s get a couple of extra shots,’ and I had something in my pocket ready to go.
It must have been like life imitating art, with the cast all travelling around together on the shoot. Was there a special bond?
You do have to be quite vulnerable with each other on shoots – and people are usually quick to open up with each other. The most powerful experience was going to Majdanek, the concentration camp we visit in the film. That was very sobering.
That day must stand apart from all your other acting experiences.
It was the day that I found the most challenging, because my character had been to this place many times before, whereas I hadn’t. So I had to try to control my own quite visceral reaction to it.
You did classics at uni. If you took a tour party to, say, Ephesus or Rome, would you be as enthusiastic as your character?
I’m quite different from James, and I’ve probably forgotten everything for a start. I like walking around cities. As soon as I arrive somewhere, I like to walk in a spiral out from where I’m staying, just to get a sense of it. I’m not somebody who’s like: ‘I need to have gone to that museum or see a concert in that place…’
Is that how you’ve come to know London?
Yeah, probably. One thing I really enjoy is when different areas start to join: you’ve got to know one area and then one day, you’re in a different area and you sort of glide back into it and you’re like, ‘Oohhh! That’s how these two places join up.’ It’s like a magic trick.
As a tour guide, where are you taking London newcomers?
They’d need to see the South Bank, probably in the evening. Brick Lane is quite good. Portobello Market, Broadway Market.