Channing, what was the biggest challenge for you in Foxcatcher?
HAWKE Kicking ***. Beating up Mark Ruffalo.
TATUM Getting my head kicked in every day by Bennett [Miller].
HAWKE Did you really make Mark's nose bleed? I wondered in that scene, it looked like you really popped him in the head.
TATUM I had never done anything like this before and I had no idea how to approach it other than just to talk to Mark Schultz [the real-life wrestler I play]. He's a very interesting person — he's so factual, he knows what move so-and-so did in the '84 Olympics, and he just reels off all these things. And you're trying to sort through them all. I just started to get rid of all the data that he was telling me about his life, and I just clicked into [what he said:] "I never wanted to win. I just didn't want to lose."
HAWKE But what is the difference between not losing and winning? What does that mean?
TATUM For him? It was fear of not being the person that he saw himself as, I think. Dave, his older brother, was this shining example of something he knew he could never be. He was never going to be this charismatic individual that everyone flocked to. So he decided to go the other way, and he wanted everyone to be afraid of him. He didn't want anyone to get close to him. And I think that's a really lonely walk to choose.
CUMBERBATCH Did he have script approval? Did he look at the script at all? And did you feel, "I need something from you, but you might not get anything back except something that's going to upset you."
TATUM That was my fear. Because I knew all these things he was telling me he wanted weren't in the script — you know, the retribution of people that he felt wronged him. I was terribly afraid that he wouldn't —
CUMBERBATCH What was the seduction of getting him to open up?
TATUM It wasn't. He was completely free and open with me, as far as I could tell. Within the first seven seconds of talking, he was welling up with tears. He's a very emotional person, and I think all of it was pretty overwhelming for us both.
KEATON It's not surprising that he remembered every move. Athletes, they're not like the rest of us. It's a different type of mentality. Baseball players, they'll remember the pitch, what the wind was doing, they'll remember everything. And there's something in particular about wrestlers. I come from a large family, and one of my brothers was a wrestler. He's like us and he's totally unlike us. This intense determination.
TATUM Wrestling is very similar in a metaphorical way to acting: You're wrestling; you're literally in a fight with [a role]. Because in wrestling you're not just fighting someone else, you're fighting what's going on with you. You're in a suffocating situation, and there's no resting. You can't take a minute; you're constantly in this uncomfortable state of being attacked. You're dealing with a lot of emotions, a lot of fear — not that I see acting as exactly that, but there are some parallels.
Fear of what?
TATUM Fear of doing it honestly, of giving everything you could have given to it. And not walking away and being like, "God, I didn't do the work for that one.
Is it harder when you're a star? The media picks on every single thing you do.
TATUM They pick on us all. And I'm talking about "us all" meaning pedestrians. Everyone gets picked on. I don't think it's just because we're up on a screen.
Do you like being a star?
TATUM I don't really look at it that way. I've been afforded a lot of opportunity in this world and I've tried to walk through every door that I've been given, and some of them have been great on the other side and other ones haven't.
Which doors weren't great?
TATUM The pressure of what school is projected as, when you're growing up — that going to college is the answer, and to me it wasn't. I went and I didn't get it. And I failed at it miserably. And I felt like a failure for it. And so I went and tried to find another door.
KEATON That's not a failure at all. To me, that's a victory. He said, "I'm going to do what's me."
Benedict, I've always felt you resist fame to some degree.
CUMBERBATCH There's so many strands of it, aren't there? If you mean being scrutinized in your public life, which isn't your work; if you mean requirements of your time which distract your focus and your energy from what actually brought you to that point where you're being distracted, that's a complete Catch-22: The more work you do, the more attention there is. You try to escape by dissolving into work, and it keeps catching up with you every time you stop because it's part of the process of work now, to publicize it. But I feel it's just [about] getting used to it, and knowing how to play with that and have fun, which I do. I really do.
Do you have a role model whose career you emulate?
CUMBERBATCH We talked before the tape was running about Stephen Dillane's Hamlet when I was 17. That had a massive impact on me — the sort of essential, quiet, still truth of what he did. Nobody else was Hamlet but him.
HAWKE And then you saw mine!
REDMAYNE I've never said this to you, Tim, but when I was a kid, one of the first things I saw was A Midsummer Night's Dream at The National Theatre. Tim was playing Bottom, and it was all set in mud and there was a contortionist playing Puck, this woman.
SPALL I had a French-Canadian contortionist on my back when I was trying to do Shakespearean comedy. And it felt like hell. You'd go backstage and there were people wearing verruca socks, which are worn [to prevent] plantar warts, you know? It was in a massive pile of water, and one day somebody came in and said, "You've not heard the latest. Someone's done a poo in the mud." I said, "What are you talking about? I'm lying in that before the audience comes in!" I went to the stage doorkeeper, who had been there for years, wonderful woman. I said, "You'll never guess what I've just heard. You know the fairies who are all diving around in the mud? Someone's done a poo in it." She said, "Oh, we've had a phantom shitter at the Royal National Theatre for years." (Laughs.) Here's a pantheon of the most brilliant classical actors in the world, and someone was dropping a log in the [mud].
CUMBERBATCH I've worked in the National Theatre, but I haven't pooed there. I have peed there.
Peter Copping - Designer, Creative Director of Lanvin