The Times Magazine 7Actor Bertie Carvel, 44, trained at Rada before
winning Olivier awards for performances as Miss
Trunchbull in Matilda and Rupert Murdoch in Ink.
On screen, he is best known as Dr Foster’s husband
and will play Tony Blair in the fifth season of
The Crown. He is currently starring as Donald
Trump in the play The 47th. He is married to the
actress Sally Scott; they have a two-year-old son
and live in London.
It felt really joyous when Tony Blair won. I was
19 and had only ever known Conservative
governments. My political sympathies were
absolutely in tandem with the Labour Party at
that moment. There was a great sense of hope.
In the first term of the Blair administration,
I really felt as though Britain was a better
place to live in. His is a great story to tell.
I am so totally in love with my son. It’s joyous.
He has grounded me and given me a different
centre of gravity. His birth followed pretty
hard on the heels of the death of my mother.
Those two things together have had a
profound impact on my sense of mortality.
Even though she’s dead, I continue to have a
relationship with my mother. I feel her presence
in my life and work. One of the things that’s
so hard about losing someone you love very
deeply is the sense that the relationship is
finished – the things that you might have said,
the things you want to say. But the relationship
continues to exist in the bereaved person. We
spend a lot of time either passively or actively
ignoring death, then suddenly it rushes up
to meet you. My mother’s final months and
the months that followed her death were
absolutely transformational. It wasn’t pleasant,
but it wasn’t all negative, because it was about
growing up. The most helpful thing anyone
has said to me is that grief doesn’t go away,
but you grow around it.
People kept giving me soap and deodorant when
I was 17. Now people give me lots of books
about wild swimming. I’ve lived all my life
next to Hampstead Heath, and there is a
slightly feral person in me. I take great pride
in my difference.
There was a very real fear that my wife would
have to give birth without me there. Of course,
she’d have aced that; she had to do many
of her antenatal appointments alone. The
pandemic was a horrible time, but you realised
the extraordinary resilience of women. I
wouldn’t wish the pandemic on the world,
but I had a pretty good war, because it was
like paternity leave times a million. We were
in this little bubble of love.
I can be obsessive. I work very hard and love
it. I think quickly, a lot and maybe too much.
Trump is very charismatic. He’s an extremely
gifted communicator. Depending on your
What I’ve learnt Bertie Carvel
‘There is a
slightly feral
person in me.
I take great
pride in my
difference’
point of view, that’s something to be celebrated
or abhorred. One of the things that makes him
so fascinating is the many contradictions that
he contains. He’s a very dynamic figure who
has destroyed the world like a colossus and
was massively underestimated.
I try not to get hooked on the drugs social media
platforms are peddling – validation, anger and
adrenaline. I doomscroll a bit and go through
phases of looking at Twitter, then realising
my mistake. Those platforms are addictive
substances and should be treated as such.
I rudely haven’t replied to people for 15 yearson Facebook. I just stopped looking at it.
In acting, you get to exert a high degree of
control over how people look at you – but you
can never control what they see. I’m not
particularly connected to fashion; that’s not
how I express who I am. I look like a dog’s
breakfast most days. My version of that is
dressing up for a living and pretending to be
other people. Through that I can express the
multiplicity of the people inside me. nThe 47th is at the Old Vic until May 28
(oldvictheatre.com)INTERVIEW Georgina Roberts
PORTRAIT Michael Clement