British actor Christian McKay digs deep into Me and Orson Welles

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      When British stage actor Christian McKay hit Broadway to star in Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, a one-man play about a key figure in North American arts, he couldn’t have known it would lead directly to a motion-picture breakthrough playing the same person.


      Watch the trailer for Me and Orson Welles.

      In Richard Linklater’s latest film, a lovingly crafted period piece called Me and Orson Welles, the 36-year-old performer plays a young Welles in the midst of staging his 1937 update of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This was before Welles became infamous for the nation-scaring War of the Worlds incident on radio, or was the celebrated (and berated) auteur of Citizen Kane—let alone a latter-day B-movie mugger and corpulent shill for bad California wine. McKay was less familiar with the hungry, energetic Welles of the movie, which opens here on Friday (December 11).

      “They are utterly different characters,” the actor says, calling from a publicity stop in Kentucky. “In the play, I did him up to the age of 70, with a fat suit and a beard, trying to come to terms with the failures of his life. I was great pals with the writer and director, and eventually got the rights myself”¦ I had a lot of Wellesian experiences in microcosm,” he says with a sigh.

      “The good thing is that I got to use all this in the play. Actually, I wanted to play Churchill, or maybe Alec Guinness, not Orson Welles. I suppose the play gave me a head start in terms of research, but not with the voice. You know, the older voice is a different musical instrument: wheezy, basso profundo, and weary.”

      Linklater—the director of such high-personality fare as Dazed and Confused, The School of Rock, and Before Sunset—saw past the fat suit and knew he had half his title taken care of.

      “It’s incredible, really,” McKay sums up. “I got the right role at the right time and place, and so got to meet one of my cinematic heroes, Richard Linklater. Of course, then he had to teach me how to act on film. This was, after all, my first movie. Theatrical gestures are anathema on camera, I’m afraid.”¦But Richard very patiently introduced me to a working relationship with the camera.”

      So far, that affair is sailing along. Critics are singling out McKay for his stunning impersonation of the enfant terrible, already an oversized tyrant by the age of 22.

      “The great thing about Welles is that everyone has his own take on the man. You know, I don’t really look or sound like Orson Welles. But if you say you are playing him, people immediately think of their Orson Welles and start projecting that onto you. Pretty soon, they think you look exactly like him.”

      With the film, teen heartthrob Zac Efron goes indie as a high schooler caught up in the excitement of Welles’s anarchic Mercury Theater. Claire Danes is the sultry “older woman” who helps run the show, and Zoe Kazan is a young writer who dreams of being published in the New Yorker. Aside from these Yanks, and Canadian James Tupper as Mercury mainstay Joseph Cotten, the cast is “all limeys”, as McKay puts it. That has something to do with the movie’s odd evolution.

      Despite the deep American feel of the project, Linklater skipped Hollywood and got his finances in Europe. The director moved the whole shoot to the U.K., dividing the time between sound stages at Pinewood Studios and a dead-on art-deco theatre he found on the windblown Isle of Man.

      “The Isle of Man has been very lucky for me,” McKay explains. “We all had a wonderful time shooting there, hitting the pubs”¦And then, after we wrapped the movie, my mother confided that I had been conceived on the Isle of Man, on her honeymoon.”

      McKay didn’t set out to be an actor. Born in Bury, Lancashire, in England’s north, he was a musical prodigy who studied concert-level piano at the Royal College of Music. Although he eventually switched to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he still keeps up with his Chopin. It’s always good to have a Plan B, but it’s doubtful that McKay will need it. And he effusively thanks you-know-who for getting him here.

      “I just have to say that the old man is full of fate and always worth the wait. That is, Orson Welles—even though you do occasionally want to put his head through a television screen.”

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