Article on Times Online
The Sunday Times published a two-page article about Elliot Cowan earlier today. It discusses his current stage role as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (his dream role) and also talks about his career and growing up in Colchester. An insightful read for those of you who are itching to learn more about Mr. Cowan.
Photo by Francesco Guidicini
Elliot Cowan plays Stanley Kowalski
In Donmar Warehouse's production of A Streetcar Named Desire, a former Mr Darcy takes Brando role opposite Rachel Weisz
by Lesley White
In a rehearsal studio in Southwark are a beautiful film star, a crumpled single bed, a strapping young man with swimmer’s shoulders and an atmosphere of rapidly abandoned passion. Steamy New Orleans looks tame by comparison. In the Donmar’s new A Streetcar Named Desire, Elliot Cowan is playing Stanley Kowalski, with Rachel Weisz as a sultry Blanche, and their violent final encounter is a source of concern to the young actor. “My God, she gets knocked around,” he says protectively. “We’re just going to have to keep an eye on her.” Somewhere off stage, you can hear the swooning of his female fan club, smitten since his appearance as Darcy in Lost in Austen, the spoofy pastiche of the immortal Jane that did nothing to quell the heaving bosoms still begging him to visit “if he is in the area”.
If Darcy was spectacularly disdainful, Stanley - whom Tennessee Williams described as being in his physical prime - is a brute in pursuit of the American dream, sexually fused to his wife, Stella, but also drawn to her older, more refined sister. Cowan, who in real life is 6ft 2in, with all of Stanley’s physical power and none of his menace, has a history with the play. He first played the Polish-American as a 16-year-old at Uppingham school, in Rutland. At the time, he watched the Elia Kazan movie starring Marlon Brando carefully, but never sought to copy. One housemaster, who had thought him “wooden” in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, said that, as Stanley, he was freeing up as an actor, and the thrill of that early compliment, a little nugget of encouragement, a spur towards his future, has never been forgotten.
At 32, Cowan is much preoccupied with the details of his craft, a quiet striver for improvement, a dutiful learner from senior talents such as Tim Pigott-Smith, Iain Glen and Anthony Hopkins, all of whom he has worked with and observed. He is his own tough career coach, describing his role in Lost in Austen as having “supported my profile, supported my progress”. Though handsome, he is not an industry schmoozer or a back-waxed matinée idol waiting for a ticket to Hollywood, but a painstaking perfectionist in his campaign to reach the top of a profession where too many young actors end up regretting the easy, dollar-strewn path to celebrity. He stays on track with a regime of total immersion in character, and personal discipline: as we talk, he sips vitamin water and picks at a grape, the chocolate mini rolls set out for him never even a remote possibility.
For his 2007 Henry V, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, he cycled the route of the young king’s army to Agincourt. “It gave me first-hand experience of the distance and some of the loneliness he might have felt,” he says. “I did it on my own, and while I wasn’t having to look after several thousand soldiers, I understood Henry’s isolation.” When he reached the site of the battlefield, he recited the Eve of St Crispin’s Day speech. “I felt moved by the achievement of getting there, but also by the people who died on that plain.”
As a result of this dedication, his personal life sounds almost monastic; despite queues of admirers, there is no girlfriend. “I’m unencumbered,” he smiles, choosing an oddly telling word. “I’m single-minded about work. I need to enter into another chapter, but I’m not going to force anything.” He lives with his brother (“who is also pretty into his work”), eats healthily, stays sober and trains for the London triathlon, which he has completed for the past four years, pleased that its punishing training regime keeps him in tiptop shape for his work. “This year, it’s particularly helpful, as everything I do is going into Stanley, which is very physical. Every night, I’m swimming or cycling. I’ve stripped everything from around my life. It’s exercise and the play. There’s not a lot of partying, I’ve knocked the booze on the head, I’m watching my diet… I want to focus on this opportunity.”
He is not a man to rely on casting agents, let alone the kindness of strangers, for his luck. A couple of years ago, he was basking on a beach in Santorini with his then girlfriend, composing a wish list of parts, which he dispatched from the local internet cafe to the Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Grandage. He had worked for Grandage alongside Derek Jacobi in Schiller’s Don Carlos and Frost/Nixon, in which he played the American journalist Jim Reston. “[Grandage] said that if I had ideas, I should run them by him, so I wrote saying that Stanley Kowalski would be top of my list.” Perhaps reassuringly, it wasn’t quite that easy. Grandage suggested that he do it elsewhere “or look for other opportunities”. Two years later, he heard that the Donmar was auditioning for his dream role.
“I was incensed that I hadn’t been brought in. I thought, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ But I had to be patient. I got in line, basically.”
At least waiting for the audition gave him time to prepare, coaching his accent, recording his reading of his lines. “If I hadn’t been working in South Africa, I would have flown to New Orleans. That’s how much I wanted it.” Cowan is cool about the looming presence of Brando, saying simply that “every generation should have their chance to see the play. I haven’t watched the movie again, because I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t in the room with me”. A more meaningful hero is the great Shakespearian actor Robert Stephens, whose Lear he saw at Stratford as a schoolboy, shortly before Stephens’s death. “When he came on for his curtain call, he was physically drained by the experience. I know now that he was ill at that time of his life, but when he took his bow, I burst into tears. I was so affected by this man who had given his soul that night. I couldn’t really speak on the way home, and I remember my girlfriend not understanding why I was hiding under my baseball cap. I recognised the power of the theatre that night, and I wanted it in my life.”
Cowan’s background is comfortably conventional, a privilege of which he once felt slightly “ashamed”. The son of a consultant physician and a charity worker, he enjoyed the security of a loving, cultured home in Colchester, the eldest of three children. His brother is a television producer, his sister designs jewellery. Yet there was never any question that he would not be educated away from home, an absence that he found painful and that partly determined his future career.
“I would say that being at boarding school contributed to my need to be on stage,” he says. “There’s something in that absence of a mother or father that encourages a need for validation. It’s not that I bask in the limelight; in fact, my middle-class Englishness makes me feel self-conscious. But when I first got to boarding school, I was really unhappy. I was often rehearsing a play or swimming to keep my mind off missing my family.” Was he bullied? “I’m not going to say I was a victim of bullying... but there were bigger chaps than me, and there was more than one.”
The shock of that early loneliness means that he relates far more easily to the pitifully fragile Blanche Dubois than he does to the “wilfully violent” Stanley, with whom I think he struggles to empathise. “Blanche finds herself in a dark and distant land, and she feels that it’s full of people more brash and boisterous than she is. When I arrived at boarding school, I had just that feeling.”
Having completed a drama degree at Birmingham University, by the time he graduated from Rada, Cowan had been studying theatre for six years (“I could have been a doctor in that time,” he laughs).
Yet he was easy to cast, with his strapping physical presence a natural for soldiers and action men. “Men who use their bodies to achieve and dominate,” he agrees, quite unlike himself. He played a tough soldier in the ITV SAS drama Ultimate Force, and his first film role was as Ptolemy in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, starring Colin Farrell - not always a smooth ride.
One day, the famously mercurial Stone challenged him during a fight scene with Farrell on top of the Atlas Mountains. “He came up to me and said, ‘What’s happened to you? I don’t believe a word you’re saying. This is shit.’ My stomach shrank and I thought, “F***ing hell, I’m screwing this up.’ Part of me thought, ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’ But I was old enough not to take it personally. And his judgment was good. The next time we did it, I was completely on edge, with every emotion buzzing in my body, and I nailed it.”
To perfect Stanley, he has been working with a boxing trainer, “finding bridges” between boxing and acting, and pondering the changing nature of masculinity. The other day, he was cycling on the towpath of the Regent’s Canal and politely overtook a man who took offence, lost his temper and asked if Cowan wanted to make something of it. “I backed away and cycled on. But I was livid to have been put in that situation. A middle-class guy like me is brought up to appease. I just had to walk away and bite my tongue. But I’m sick of doing that. Isn’t it time that a man should grab somebody else by the scruff of the neck and define himself as a man?”
Even in that potentially dangerous moment, his thoughts were partly with his character: how different was the brooding masculinity of Kowalski, a template of the immigrant alpha male, from his own professionally enhanced sensitivity.
Cowan’s quiet but resolute ambition continues to make its lists. Coriolanus is near the top. “And Macbeth... And Hamlet goes without saying.” The cast of his teenage Streetcar, meanwhile, will be coming to see the Donmar’s starry production. The girl who played his Blanche now writes children’s books; another actor was Jamie Oliver’s assistant. They will love it, I tell him, and hate him at the same time.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he laughs, then pauses. “Well, maybe a bit.”
A Streetcar Named Desire is currently playing at Donmar Warehouse through October 3.
Source: Times Online
Photo by Francesco Guidicini
Elliot Cowan plays Stanley Kowalski
In Donmar Warehouse's production of A Streetcar Named Desire, a former Mr Darcy takes Brando role opposite Rachel Weisz
by Lesley White
In a rehearsal studio in Southwark are a beautiful film star, a crumpled single bed, a strapping young man with swimmer’s shoulders and an atmosphere of rapidly abandoned passion. Steamy New Orleans looks tame by comparison. In the Donmar’s new A Streetcar Named Desire, Elliot Cowan is playing Stanley Kowalski, with Rachel Weisz as a sultry Blanche, and their violent final encounter is a source of concern to the young actor. “My God, she gets knocked around,” he says protectively. “We’re just going to have to keep an eye on her.” Somewhere off stage, you can hear the swooning of his female fan club, smitten since his appearance as Darcy in Lost in Austen, the spoofy pastiche of the immortal Jane that did nothing to quell the heaving bosoms still begging him to visit “if he is in the area”.
If Darcy was spectacularly disdainful, Stanley - whom Tennessee Williams described as being in his physical prime - is a brute in pursuit of the American dream, sexually fused to his wife, Stella, but also drawn to her older, more refined sister. Cowan, who in real life is 6ft 2in, with all of Stanley’s physical power and none of his menace, has a history with the play. He first played the Polish-American as a 16-year-old at Uppingham school, in Rutland. At the time, he watched the Elia Kazan movie starring Marlon Brando carefully, but never sought to copy. One housemaster, who had thought him “wooden” in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, said that, as Stanley, he was freeing up as an actor, and the thrill of that early compliment, a little nugget of encouragement, a spur towards his future, has never been forgotten.
At 32, Cowan is much preoccupied with the details of his craft, a quiet striver for improvement, a dutiful learner from senior talents such as Tim Pigott-Smith, Iain Glen and Anthony Hopkins, all of whom he has worked with and observed. He is his own tough career coach, describing his role in Lost in Austen as having “supported my profile, supported my progress”. Though handsome, he is not an industry schmoozer or a back-waxed matinée idol waiting for a ticket to Hollywood, but a painstaking perfectionist in his campaign to reach the top of a profession where too many young actors end up regretting the easy, dollar-strewn path to celebrity. He stays on track with a regime of total immersion in character, and personal discipline: as we talk, he sips vitamin water and picks at a grape, the chocolate mini rolls set out for him never even a remote possibility.
For his 2007 Henry V, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, he cycled the route of the young king’s army to Agincourt. “It gave me first-hand experience of the distance and some of the loneliness he might have felt,” he says. “I did it on my own, and while I wasn’t having to look after several thousand soldiers, I understood Henry’s isolation.” When he reached the site of the battlefield, he recited the Eve of St Crispin’s Day speech. “I felt moved by the achievement of getting there, but also by the people who died on that plain.”
As a result of this dedication, his personal life sounds almost monastic; despite queues of admirers, there is no girlfriend. “I’m unencumbered,” he smiles, choosing an oddly telling word. “I’m single-minded about work. I need to enter into another chapter, but I’m not going to force anything.” He lives with his brother (“who is also pretty into his work”), eats healthily, stays sober and trains for the London triathlon, which he has completed for the past four years, pleased that its punishing training regime keeps him in tiptop shape for his work. “This year, it’s particularly helpful, as everything I do is going into Stanley, which is very physical. Every night, I’m swimming or cycling. I’ve stripped everything from around my life. It’s exercise and the play. There’s not a lot of partying, I’ve knocked the booze on the head, I’m watching my diet… I want to focus on this opportunity.”
He is not a man to rely on casting agents, let alone the kindness of strangers, for his luck. A couple of years ago, he was basking on a beach in Santorini with his then girlfriend, composing a wish list of parts, which he dispatched from the local internet cafe to the Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Grandage. He had worked for Grandage alongside Derek Jacobi in Schiller’s Don Carlos and Frost/Nixon, in which he played the American journalist Jim Reston. “[Grandage] said that if I had ideas, I should run them by him, so I wrote saying that Stanley Kowalski would be top of my list.” Perhaps reassuringly, it wasn’t quite that easy. Grandage suggested that he do it elsewhere “or look for other opportunities”. Two years later, he heard that the Donmar was auditioning for his dream role.
“I was incensed that I hadn’t been brought in. I thought, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ But I had to be patient. I got in line, basically.”
At least waiting for the audition gave him time to prepare, coaching his accent, recording his reading of his lines. “If I hadn’t been working in South Africa, I would have flown to New Orleans. That’s how much I wanted it.” Cowan is cool about the looming presence of Brando, saying simply that “every generation should have their chance to see the play. I haven’t watched the movie again, because I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t in the room with me”. A more meaningful hero is the great Shakespearian actor Robert Stephens, whose Lear he saw at Stratford as a schoolboy, shortly before Stephens’s death. “When he came on for his curtain call, he was physically drained by the experience. I know now that he was ill at that time of his life, but when he took his bow, I burst into tears. I was so affected by this man who had given his soul that night. I couldn’t really speak on the way home, and I remember my girlfriend not understanding why I was hiding under my baseball cap. I recognised the power of the theatre that night, and I wanted it in my life.”
Cowan’s background is comfortably conventional, a privilege of which he once felt slightly “ashamed”. The son of a consultant physician and a charity worker, he enjoyed the security of a loving, cultured home in Colchester, the eldest of three children. His brother is a television producer, his sister designs jewellery. Yet there was never any question that he would not be educated away from home, an absence that he found painful and that partly determined his future career.
“I would say that being at boarding school contributed to my need to be on stage,” he says. “There’s something in that absence of a mother or father that encourages a need for validation. It’s not that I bask in the limelight; in fact, my middle-class Englishness makes me feel self-conscious. But when I first got to boarding school, I was really unhappy. I was often rehearsing a play or swimming to keep my mind off missing my family.” Was he bullied? “I’m not going to say I was a victim of bullying... but there were bigger chaps than me, and there was more than one.”
The shock of that early loneliness means that he relates far more easily to the pitifully fragile Blanche Dubois than he does to the “wilfully violent” Stanley, with whom I think he struggles to empathise. “Blanche finds herself in a dark and distant land, and she feels that it’s full of people more brash and boisterous than she is. When I arrived at boarding school, I had just that feeling.”
Having completed a drama degree at Birmingham University, by the time he graduated from Rada, Cowan had been studying theatre for six years (“I could have been a doctor in that time,” he laughs).
Yet he was easy to cast, with his strapping physical presence a natural for soldiers and action men. “Men who use their bodies to achieve and dominate,” he agrees, quite unlike himself. He played a tough soldier in the ITV SAS drama Ultimate Force, and his first film role was as Ptolemy in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, starring Colin Farrell - not always a smooth ride.
One day, the famously mercurial Stone challenged him during a fight scene with Farrell on top of the Atlas Mountains. “He came up to me and said, ‘What’s happened to you? I don’t believe a word you’re saying. This is shit.’ My stomach shrank and I thought, “F***ing hell, I’m screwing this up.’ Part of me thought, ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’ But I was old enough not to take it personally. And his judgment was good. The next time we did it, I was completely on edge, with every emotion buzzing in my body, and I nailed it.”
To perfect Stanley, he has been working with a boxing trainer, “finding bridges” between boxing and acting, and pondering the changing nature of masculinity. The other day, he was cycling on the towpath of the Regent’s Canal and politely overtook a man who took offence, lost his temper and asked if Cowan wanted to make something of it. “I backed away and cycled on. But I was livid to have been put in that situation. A middle-class guy like me is brought up to appease. I just had to walk away and bite my tongue. But I’m sick of doing that. Isn’t it time that a man should grab somebody else by the scruff of the neck and define himself as a man?”
Even in that potentially dangerous moment, his thoughts were partly with his character: how different was the brooding masculinity of Kowalski, a template of the immigrant alpha male, from his own professionally enhanced sensitivity.
Cowan’s quiet but resolute ambition continues to make its lists. Coriolanus is near the top. “And Macbeth... And Hamlet goes without saying.” The cast of his teenage Streetcar, meanwhile, will be coming to see the Donmar’s starry production. The girl who played his Blanche now writes children’s books; another actor was Jamie Oliver’s assistant. They will love it, I tell him, and hate him at the same time.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he laughs, then pauses. “Well, maybe a bit.”
A Streetcar Named Desire is currently playing at Donmar Warehouse through October 3.
Source: Times Online