Jason Watkins estimates that he’s acted in about 120 plays over the past 40 years. He graduated from Rada in 1985, in a standout year that included Ralph Fiennes, Jane Horrocks and Iain Glen. Long before he became a familiar face on screen, as prime minister Harold Wilson in The Crown, a BBC bureaucrat in W1A and a prissy music teacher in the Nativity! series, the theatre was his home, not to mention where he met his first and second wives.
His latest play is a big one by any measure. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier (Enemy of the People) and adapted by Duncan Macmillan (People, Places and Things), the Barbican’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull boasts a preposterously stacked cast, including Cate Blanchett, Emma Corrin, Tom Burke and Kodi Smit-McPhee. It is the hottest of tickets.
“It is a good cast, isn’t it?” Watkins considers, as if he’s only just noticed. It’s week five of rehearsals in a south London studio and he’s retreated to the basement lounge to talk. “I think part of that is Cate’s doing it. You want to work with her in any circumstances. She’s incredibly expressive and fluid and inventive. And Thomas is one of the leading European directors. But it’s also the play. There’s a lot to get your teeth into.”
The Seagull is a theatrical landmark. Though its 1896 premiere was a notorious flop, a later production by Konstantin Stanislavski revolutionised the art of acting. It has since been translated by theatrical giants such as Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard, and turned into numerous films, musicals and ballets.
“It’s a wonderfully complex play,” says Watkins. “He’s a brilliant observer of human nature, like Dickens. You really root for the characters. Because it’s recognisable as human nature, you can both laugh and cry in an instant. He illuminates people’s faults but then forgives them.”
Watkins plays Sorin, the thwarted brother of Blanchett’s celebrated actress Arkadina. He’s a retired civil servant, reluctantly exiled to the countryside to run the struggling family estate. “He’s trapped,” says Watkins. “He doesn’t really feel as though he’s lived, in direct contrast to his sister. He wasn’t bold enough or strong enough.”
As he once remarked, Watkins is best known for playing “geeky intellectuals and professors and weirdos”. In person, though, he’s springy and athletic, practically hopping out of the sofa as he speaks. While he is always persuasive on screen, he is unconvincing as a 62-year-old.
As a teenager, he was on course to be a professional footballer. Having dyslexia and (he suspects) undiagnosed ADHD, he struggled at school, so sports and drama were the only fields in which he could excel. When football didn’t pan out, he applied to Rada. “I’d run out of options. I wanted to be a PE teacher but I didn’t have O-Level English or Maths.”
No disrespect to PE teachers, but that was for the best. Throughout his twenties and thirties, Watkins was a hard-working chameleon. While theatre was his bread and butter, he popped up on screen in assorted British institutions: EastEnders, James Bond, Agatha Christie, Bridget Jones.
“I was doing lots of different characters,” he says. “My parents are from the north, I was born in the Midlands, I was brought up in London, so I could do lots of accents. I loved observing people and impersonating them. Now, actually, I’m using my own emotions and voice more than I ever did before.”
It wasn’t until 2009, when Watkins was in his late forties, that roles in Nativity! and the supernatural comedy drama Being Human brought wider recognition. In fact, Nativity! is still the one for younger generations. “If it’s around Christmas, you can’t walk down the street,” he sighs. “It’s part of the culture. It’s good for the fan base because they keep growing up and they know who you are.” The second movie closes with a gut punch dedication: “In memory of the brightest star in the sky, Maude Watkins.”
On New Year’s Day 2011, Watkins’ two-year-old daughter Maude died suddenly from undiagnosed sepsis, turning his family’s life upside down. His first day on set after Maude’s death was surreal (“I was thinking, what is the point of this pretending?”) but his family was skint so he had to keep working. It proved therapeutic. “I think it was being somebody else or having somebody else’s thoughts,” he says. “It was work that was all-consuming.”
Watkins, who has two other children with his wife, the actor Clara Francis, and two from his previous marriage, thinks bereavement made him a different person. “Yes, absolutely. I was very selfish [before]. You have to be thick-skinned in this business.” Now he helps himself by helping others. “The pain you have suffered can be slightly ameliorated. You can’t go into a hole. You keep going forward. It’s opened up a different world for me.”
Watkins and Francis got involved with bereavement and sepsis awareness charities. Two years ago, they made a powerfully moving ITV documentary, Jason & Clara: In Memory of Maudie. It wasn’t easy. “When we were looking through Maude’s things with our friend I was thinking, ‘Is this a good thing to be doing?’ We knew it would be difficult but because we were in charge of telling the story it was bearable.”
His choice of roles reflects his growing activism. He has played men tormented by systemic failures and viciously irresponsible reporting: the retired schoolteacher wrongfully accused of murder in 2014’s Bafta-winning The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, and Phil Jones, the scientist at the heart of the phoney “climategate” scandal, in 2021’s The Trick.
It feels to be able to highlight the correction of untruths he say. “Even more so these days. Donald Trump can say something so outrageously false and because it’s out there, people imagine that there’s some element of truth to it.” The roles stay with him: he recently appeared with Jefferies on a panel for the Press Justice Project. “There’s been no material change really and that could happen again.”
The Crown, too, was an educational experience. “Getting to know [Harold] Wilson a bit more was fascinating,” he says. “I liked him a lot and I liked his politics. You could definitely say Keir Starmer’s the closest we’ve got to Harold Wilson. He’s a sober, sensible, solid, bright person. We’re not on this rollercoaster, this cavalcade of story after story.” He rolls his eyes. “It was like a mad movie, wasn’t it?”
In 2020’s Des, a very unlikely reunion with Nativity 2 co-star David Tennant, Watkins played the biographer of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. “My character wanted to understand – not forgive, not tolerate, but understand – why people do things. That is the fascination whenever we watch a drama: what was going on in their heads?”
Such questions feed into Macmillan’s modernisation of The Seagull, which interrogates the purpose of drama: “People pretending to be people,” as one character snorts. What is the utility of art when the world is falling apart?
Watkins thinks that we have collectively become “more obsessed with ourselves and what we think we deserve. There is this navel gazing when the world is burning. We laugh at that [in the play].”
A more positive answer is that drama can help us understand the world rather than just escape from it. That’s what animates Watkins these days. “They’re the [roles] that are the most interesting,” he says with feeling. “It can’t just be entertainment. It has meaning. We talk a lot about that in this play. You want to move people and maybe change the way they might look at something. Open a door that was closed before.”
‘The Seagull’ is at the Barbican Theatre, London, until 5 April (theseagullplay.co.uk)
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