The on-set energy is crackling away as the actors sit down for their interview in the studio’s brightly lit café. Varma, an Olivier-award-winning powerhouse, originally from Somerset, is synonymous with gold-standard theater. She has done it all: Shakespeare to Shaw; Pinter to Coward. With the straight-backed poise of a dancer, the 51-year-old is wearing a loose blue knit sweater dropping off a shoulder to reveal a strap of white tank, untamed curls continually swept over her head with her hand. Malek—a best-actor Oscar winner, for Bohemian Rhapsody, and presiding Bond villain—is Hollywood incarnate in a close-fitting white T-shirt and black jeans, recumbent in his chair (later, he catches himself quoting Marlon Brando—“Forgive me,” the 43-year-old says, “I’m not that guy”). Both nurse green teas in takeaway cups.
With rehearsals yet to begin, the two have largely been getting to know one another over the phone. “We established a camaraderie almost immediately,” says Malek, as their conversation ricochets from the play to where they studied: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for her; for him the University of Evansville, Indiana. Indira, best known on screen for playing Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones, is warm and at ease; Rami is serious, thoughtful, with a spikiness softened by a face (large pleading eyes, impossibly smooth complexion) that seems to have childlike innocence perpetually etched upon it. In Warchus’s mind, Oedipus sits somewhere between “a rock star and a lost boy.” In Malek, he points out, you get both.
His intensity can be pretty thrilling. “I’m not a math person,” says Malek at one point, “but I say, if you ask 80% of the world what Oedipus is about, I don’t think they would know the exact details.” And so, despite Western society’s foundational tale of fate, religion, and humanity being around 2,500 years old, he asks if we can keep our discussion of its plot “off the record.”
