5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021
The actor, who worked with the Notting Hill director on 2019’s Blackbird, recalls a warm and egoless man who always knew how to get the best out of his cast
Being a director was so secondary to who Roger was as a man in the world. He was just such a grounding, warm, extraordinary presence. I say this with affection, but some directors make it known that they’ve just walked into the room. Roger wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to be needed. He didn’t have an ego. He just wanted to be part of a team – creating little families, little families of people working together.
I had known Roger for a long time before we worked together on a film – Blackbird, in 2019. We’d worked together once before, in 2005, on an American Express commercial. A few years prior to that, The Mother [his 2003 film with Daniel Craig and Anne Reid] had completely taken my breath away. It was so natural, so crushingly real. It felt like the first time in a long time that any of us had seen actors in a film appearing not be “acting” at all. That was one of Roger’s most impressive skills: his capacity to get actors to just be. To just be and not act.
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