Interview: Hugh Dancy

In romcom land, a man who can’t say “I love you” usually never gets the girl. Yet recent indie film ‘Adam’ breaks all the obvious rules, for starters by having a leading man who has no idea what love is.

Adam (Hugh Dancy) is a charming, kind and humblingly straight-forward man, but his Asperger’s Syndrome means he’s unable to relate to human emotions. “I did think of it as the ‘anti-acting’ role,” explains Dancy, who was last seen opposite Isla Fisher in ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’. “Everything you usually bring to a role, like empathy and connection and communication and reaction were denied me.”

In the film, Adam embarks on a relationship with Beth, played by Rose Byrne (from hit American TV show ‘Damages’). While Adam’s future love is challenged by his impairment, the film does show that he lives a genuinely free life.

“There’s no agenda to Adam, no dishonesty, no duplicity and he consistently says the things that we all wish we could say but are barred by social conventions,” says Hugh.  Clearly such innocent, disaster-prone behaviour could lend itself nicely to a romantic comedy, but Hugh says the team were careful to avoid ridiculing Adam’s behaviour.

“It shares the structure of romcom but it’s also subverting it,” says Hugh. “Adam is at times a very funny character but one of the keys was never stepping outside the character for the sake of a joke.”

Hugh’s the archetypal English gent loved by Hollywood; charming, well spoken and articulate, he’s a regular in those ‘Most Beautiful’ polls – no wonder British fashion house Burberry chose him to front one of their campaigns.

“There aren’t many scripts like this,” Huge adds. “I started reading it and had no idea what the story was and just thought, ‘What’s up with this guy?’ I was intrigued when Adam announces he has the condition. First of all there was some justification for all the questions I’d had and, secondly, I thought – what a brave, intelligent way to tell that story, to not announce up front but to let the audience, through Rose’s character, get to know him as a human being.”

Knowing nothing about Asperger’s Syndrome, Hugh realised he had a lot of work ahead of him if he was to do justice to the role. “I was nervous, daunted – and rightly so,” he says, adding that his concerns were eased after meeting the film’s writer/director, New York playwright Max Mayer. “I think I had a sense, which turned out to be true, that it would be a very solitary experience. Basically, the guy operates in a bubble most of the time. Although the finished product is ‘Rose and Adam’, the experience was much more self-contained than that.”

As part of his research Hugh visited people who live with Asperger’s Syndrome. “I had to do a lot of ground work to get to the point where that would be helpful,” he explains. “Plus you don’t want to sit there knowing nothing, it’s not exactly going to inspire confidence,” he says. “But the ones who agreed to sit and talk to me were incredibly generous and open and frank about their lives and their own obstacles.

“One of the first things I realised was that the range of behaviour and symptoms is vast and that freed me up in away, because I’m not trying to play every person with Asperger’s.”

Filmed in just 22 days on location in New York, Hugh admits that, while they were filming, he feared that no one would see it. “I know when you make a movie on this scale, on this tiny budget, you’re just swimming up river,” he says. His worries proved unfounded, however; ‘Adam’ was a hit at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, and was subsequently acclaimed after its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Filming ‘Adam’ was quite different from ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’, produced by Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer. “It’s a lot more comfortable on Bruckheimer sets,” he admits. “Physically. On big budget movies not only do you have a crew watching but a lot of people behind the camera and a lot of voices go into the mix. In ‘Confessions…’ everything was up for grabs, all the time, and it would occasionally become like bedlam.” he adds. “‘Adam’ was wholly different, the script was the script and that’s why I signed to it.”

As for what he thinks of the director’s belief that his turn as Adam is worthy of an Oscar, Hugh laughs nervously. “It was honestly done without any sense of a career move,” he says, “because I never stopped to step outside think how it might look. I just really like to take roles that scare me and this scared the pants off me.”

Written and directed by noted New York theatre director and playwright Max Mayer, ‘Adam’ put a thought-provoking new spin on the conventional romcom set-up. Chosen as the closing night film at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival in May, ‘Adam’ was praised for allowing “Asperger’s Syndorme to evolve not as a tragic blight on the developing romance, but as a challenge to all Beth’s assumptions about what it means to be normal, and what language and gesture can indicate to different individuals… Tender, but never sentimental, and blessed with an irreverent and subtle sense of humour, ‘Adam’ provides its two up-and-coming stars with nuanced and intelligent character roles that bring out their very best work.”