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This is the same for the audience of course, and the play is written so that gradually, you find out who these characters are, each of the jurors, though some more than others. This important infor- mation slowly reveals itself in the run up to the trial in the court- room.
What we know from the script is that the character I play, Juror Eight, is an architect, and he has two children. As an actor, you then have to build your character based on that background, but the great thing about this play is that it leaves the space for you develop your role yourself, so there is room to make the character your own too, which is the absolute lifeblood of acting.
WHY DO YOU THINK YOUR CHARACTER ‘JUROR EIGHT’ HAS NO NAME? I think this is very much on purpose because Juror Eight has to be seen as an everyman, the voice of reason. In theatre, when the announcer comes on, it's like the voice of God and similarly, Juror Eight has those functions; he's the conscience. He tries to trigger the conscience of the other eleven people in the room.
The premise of Twelve Angry Men is that it is eleven ‘guilty’ votes to one ‘innocent’ vote and the process of the play is in resolving that conundrum. I won’t give away any spoilers (even though the play has been around since 1957) but it isn’t a secret that it is a hung jury.
YOU HAVE WORKED AS AN ACTOR IN FILM, TV, AND THEATRE, SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEDIUMS? I try to view it that playing roles is the same no matter what the venue is, the main difference is the interaction between yourself and the audience if it’s a live performance. If you do anything pre-recorded for film or TV, your audience is the crew, and you look to the crew for that response to your performance. That if you are trying to make the audience watching happy, then you aim to make the crew laugh at whatever you want them to laugh at, and then cry whenever you want them to be sad, and you look to their reactions to see whether they believe it or not.
When you get on stage. It feels a little like warfare. It's more of a challenge. You go out there in front of thousands of people and you give it your all. Hopefully, you get the response that you aimed for, but if you don't, you then have to change horses midstream. You have to recalibrate yourself, and that's the energising thing that draws people to do theatre. I think I am inherently lazy, so the predominance of television versus theatre in my career is testament to that!
TWELVE ANGRY MEN HAS A STAR-STUDDED ENSEMBLE CAST, HAVE YOU WORKED WITH ANY OF THESE ACTORS BEFORE? Well, the nice thing is that three of the actors playing the jurors are people that I performed Catch Me If You Can with when I was here in the UK a year and a half ago, which makes it wonderful to come
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CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW PATRICK DUF FY
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