The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Interview with Martin Freeman—Arthur Dent

Credits include Shaun of the Dead, Love Actually, Ali G Indahouse and “Tim” in The Office.

Robbie Stamp: Had you ever heard of Hitchhiker’s before you were approached about the movie?

Martin Freeman: I certainly had heard of Hitchhiker’s. It was a bit of a favourite in my home growing up, not with me but with one of my brothers and my stepdad. I was very young when the series was on but I do remember watching that. I remember the books being in the house and kind of dipping and delving into those intermittently, but not reading the whole journey from start to end—but yes I was definitely, definitely aware of it, growing up.

RS: And how did you get involved?

MF: By being sent the script and reading the script, thinking I wasn’t right for it and then going to meet Garth and Nick and Dom.^* I was more concerned with the fact that my girlfriend, Amanda, was on a double yellow line waiting for me. I thought, “I’m only going to be in there fifteen, twenty minutes.” But it was fifteen, twenty minutes before I even saw Garth because I’d been speaking to Nick and then Garth came and was very “Garthy” and really welcoming so we just chatted for another twenty, twenty-five minutes, then I went to do the reading. All the time I was thinking, “Christ, Amanda’s going to kill me,” so by the time we got in and read it I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here, I’m not even right for this! I’m not going to get it.”

RS: Why did you think you weren’t right?

MF: Because of my memories of the television series. I’m a very different actor to Simon Jones ^* and I think Simon Jones was Arthur Dent in my mind. And in a lot of people’s minds too— or if not Simon Jones then someone very like him, and that’s just not me. Anyway it transpired that they were very interested but had to see other people and had to work things out because I’m not a name and I always thought, “Why would anyone in Hollywood agree to me being the main part in a film?” Well, the main human, anyway. But after a bit of iffing and umming and other people passing and other people coming into the frame I was screen-tested again with Zooey ^† and that was that.

RS: Your gut instinct that you weren’t right was the complete opposite of mine. From the moment I saw that first read I was convinced. While finding the essence of Hitchhiker’s we’ve all also been keen not to try and re-create what it was like twenty-five years ago.

MF: Part of me would have thought you would go for a recreation of that, and if you didn’t go for that, that the approach would be ultra hip and trendy and cool, that you’d go for the exact opposite of past versions and get a nineteen-year-old kid to play Arthur Dent, and make it just really street or really urban, and I thought, “Well, I’m neither of those things.” That was why I thought at that original read, “I’ve got to get out. Amanda’s parked.” I think Garth picked up on that. We were very nice to each other and very friendly but I think he must have thought, “This guy just doesn’t care, and he’s not interested.” He was aware I was going to get told off, and I was told off! But it all worked out well.

RS: Told off by …?

MF: By Amanda, she did indeed remind me that I had said I was only going to be fifteen minutes but I’m really glad that people took a punt on me and I’m very appreciative of it, because I know there are loads of people who in terms of film sense should’ve been in the queue before me.

RS: So how did you start? When you’re thinking, “Well, I’m not a Simon Jones but I have been asked to play Arthur Dent, and he means a lot to many people,” what starts going through your mind?

MF: Just what I had done in the audition. I thought if they liked that enough to be very interested then that’s what I’m going to do. Just trying to infuse it with reality and not playing Arthur Dent as we think we know him. It requires a bit of playing up because it’s a light kind of comedy, but I didn’t want it to not matter and I didn’t want it to not mean anything. I had to approach him as if I’d never heard of Hitchhiker’s. Because it would be very boring for me and everybody else to try and just do an impression of something that was à la mode twenty-five years ago. If Arthur had been very upper-middle-class with an Uncle Bulgaria dressing gown, if everything had basically been Edwardian, then the contrast with people like Sam and Mos ^* and Zooey, who are all very contemporary current people and although they’re not playing Americans are playing space people with American accents, just would’ve been another one in the long line of movies where the Americans are hip and the Englishman is a bit dull. It’s just not very interesting anymore. Take the dressing gown. There were certain points that they had to hit, in terms of my costume especially, that had to be in the film. I wasn’t going to say, “Can I wear a tracksuit or a suit?” It was always going to be a dressing gown, slippers and pyjamas. It was just a question of what kind and to be honest I wasn’t going to have too many objections. Sammy ^† is a good designer; she knows what she wants, and Garth has got his finger in every single pie, how it looks, how it sounds, everything. He’s got fantastic people working for and with him. My job is to come in and act. If I’d been presented with something I hated I would’ve said no, but as long as Arthur looked contemporary and it didn’t look like a joke, like we were judging him before he even opened his mouth, that was OK by me. From a make-up and hair point of view I just didn’t want him to look like a real mummy’s boy because that’s another thing about lame English men, they’re boring. They’ve got plastered-down hair and look like they’ve been dressed by their spinster mothers, but as long as he looked like a normal person who lived in the normal world that was all I needed to know because then I could play him as a normal person. I just didn’t want to play a caricature.

RS: Very early on in the story we see Arthur lying down in front of a bulldozer: this is a guy who’s got something to him.

MF: He has, he has, and I think it would take an enormous amount of balls for him to lie there … because that doesn’t come easy to him. It doesn’t come easy to most people to lie down in front of a bulldozer, but he gets on with it. It’s funny because to be honest my own jury is still out on whether I’ve got Arthur. I’ll see when the film comes out, because you never really know when you’re doing something, but Christ the world is full of films with people whose instincts are telling them it’s great and it ends up being terrible. I don’t think the film will be anything like that. I think the film will be really good and I’ll be a really feasible Arthur Dent, but we’ll wait and see.

RS: Did the responsibility weigh on you?

MF: To be honest I’ve let other people worry about that because I was never a Hitchhiking anorak. I hope I was respectfully aware that it was a big deal for lots and lots of other people, but they’re not playing it, I am. You can’t take on that responsibility for them and again, because I’m not a rabid Hitchhiker’s fan, it wouldn’t be like playing John Lennon, someone who means more to me in my everyday life. Or playing Jesus Christ or just someone who really, really everybody knows, and you really know the story and you’d better get it right. This is just an interpretation of a screenplay based on a book and a radio series and I’ve got as much warrant to play it as anybody else. We’ll see if I do it well. I’m just trying my best.

RS: What about the relationship with Trillian? We have worked hard to develop her character.

MF: Absolutely, and I think it’s to really good effect. It doesn’t look like it’s tacked on in a Hollywood way. It still has the essence of the original material. And I think without it, it wouldn’t be as good, to be honest.

RS: So the first meeting with Trillian, at the party at the Islington flat; what’s happening, why is there a connection made?

MF: Arthur’s a fairly intelligent bloke and I think a connection is made because Arthur sees someone … well, he sees a woman who is not afraid to come dressed as an old man and who is still physically beautiful. Not only has she come as a scientist, she gets jokes and references, more so than he thinks anyone else would at that party. It’s not as if he’s exactly outgoing. He’s in no position to say these people are idiots. What does he know? He doesn’t speak to anybody. He’s a typical repressed person, who is able to judge everyone from the comfort of knowing that he’s not actually going to find out if he’s right because he’s too shy. But here’s a woman who’s showed an interest in him and what a woman she is, she’s come as fucking Darwin. She’s gorgeous and she’s funny, who wouldn’t want that?

RS: He was there reading a book by himself.

MF: Absolutely, absolutely and she crossed the room to be with him. He was looking at her but she crossed the room. So all this looks very good until this strange person comes along and nicks her. And once he meets up with her again on the Heart of Gold, he goes from being just sad that she’s disappeared to being really jealous that she went off with Zaphod. Not only did she go off with someone else but it’s someone else who’s the total opposite of Arthur, not only not human but just an idiot in Arthur’s eyes, all the things Arthur wouldn’t want to be and all the things that he kind of would want to be. He wouldn’t want to be a moron but he would want to be a bit cooler and he would want to be more confident with women, but he’s intelligent enough to know that he can consider Zaphod beneath him because he treats women like objects, which Arthur would never do. But he blows it with her because of everything—the world is against him, he’s literally lost his planet, he’s lost his girl to an absolute idiot and she’s not giving him any proper attention. I think it’s even worse when you’re in a situation where the object of your desire is being nice to you and liking you, but that’s not enough, they’ve got to hate you or love you; anything in between is really upsetting and Arthur finds that very, very difficult. And he knows he’s overstepped the mark and he goes through different things with Trillian, being dumbfounded by her and apologetic to her, but by the end they have reached an understanding. He’s seen the best in her and she has really seen the best in him because he’s finally become a bit of a hero.

RS: One of the finest lines to tread in developing this whole thing into a movie was to develop Arthur without turning him in to a mega-sword-wielding space hero.

MF: Exactly. I think you only need to see him do a bit and the bit is that he sort of becomes the leader of the group. He doesn’t become an action man by Hollywood standards, but by Arthur Dent’s standards he becomes more of an action man. You see him come into his own. As the film goes on he becomes more his own person and has more authority and more conviction about what he’s doing. I guess there’s a point where he realizes, “I don’t have a home anymore so whatever this is I’ve got now I better start living in it, not trying to get home wishing something hadn’t happened that did happen.” He’s actually starting to take a bit of control and maybe in a way he could only take control in space. He couldn’t have taken control in his Earth job. Talking it all through it is a surprising movie. There aren’t many movies like this about finding the personal and the ridiculous in the universal. It’s not a big epic space adventure. It’s full of really ridiculous aliens and stupid fucking creatures—well, not [John] Malkovich. Humma Kavula is genuinely scary but there aren’t many like that. The Vogons are ridiculous. You can see they’re preposterous and they kill people with poetry, for fuck’s sake!

RS: And there’s bureaucracy in space and a lot of the things that we’ve got on Earth, just a bit larger.

MF: Exactly, and with funny heads. It’s a very human alien movie.

RS: Talking of human aliens, what about your relationship with Ford?

MF: Ford is my guide, my Hitchhiker’s guide. I’m not a hitchhiker, I’m a hostage. Arthur would be nowhere without Ford. He’d still be on Earth. In fact he’d be dead but due to a debt that Ford feels he owes Arthur, he takes Arthur with him and tells Arthur everything about survival in space, about who the strange creatures are and about what happens on this planet and what happens on that spaceship. So Ford really looks after Arthur.

RS: And he’s genuinely affectionate towards him, isn’t he?

MF: He is, as affectionate as Ford can be. It’s still not very recognizable as human affection; it’s slightly odd, and that’s kind of cool because Arthur’s slightly odd and not a particularly gregarious lovey-dovey person. So in that way they’re quite well matched. To begin with, Arthur thinks Ford is just a strange human and when he finds out that he’s actually from somewhere else entirely I suppose it makes a bit more sense to him why Ford’s like he is, but Ford is also totally viable as just an eccentric human being. Arthur certainly hasn’t twigged that Ford’s an alien before he tells him.

RS: Have there been particular moments that stand out for you?

MF: Yes. The Heart of Gold set—it was huge and we all walked round and went, “Fucking hell, we’re in a space movie.” To be honest, without fail, all of the settings have been amazing. It was the attention to detail, that’s what’s really, really impressed me, the design detail and the prop details have blown my mind. To be honest there aren’t particular scenes I’ve enjoyed more; it’s more the settings because I like all the scenes and some of them are fascinating to play from an acting point of view but it’s not like you’re doing Chekhov, it’s not like, “Fuck me, I’ve got a heavy dialogue day today and I’ve got to talk about how I lost my mother.” On the other hand, there are things to deal with, like how you lost the Earth. Those are the bits I found really hard, where Arthur has to be broken that the Earth has gone. They’re hard to play because it’s about pitching it at the right level … you’re not doing a kitchen-sink drama but you also want to make it real, you want to make it real enough that it matters. It’s not a tragedy, it is a comedy but you’ve still got to invest emotion in it. I think you always have to care about the people in films or the fish in films or the Shrek in films, you know? If you don’t really believe Arthur gives a damn then why would you give a damn?

RS: Arthur’s an iconic character and much of your challenge has been about how you bring depth and richness to him without overloading the whole thing.

MF: Exactly, exactly. Yes, it’s very important to me because it mattered to my family and because it was a memory for me and because it’s become part of our popular culture over the last twenty-five years. It would have really angered me if it had been ruined, especially if it had been ruined by America. Maybe if I had been a mad fan maybe I couldn’t play Arthur. You’ve got a team of people, all of us doing our job. If everyone was a mad Hitchhiker’s fan, you’d have a terrible film because actually those people aren’t practitioners of what we’re doing. I really like food but I can’t cook it. So I hope people are going to trust us with it. It seems the more I hear the more they are kind of willing to …

RS: They are, and I think the trust started with the script. What did you think of that when you first saw it?

MF: I liked it, I liked it, and it works. Given that most of the films I’m asked to read I don’t go to the meetings for, there must have been something in it. And as I said before, when I met the boys, I liked them and they seemed to really care about it without being weird—care about bringing it to life as a movie rather than just living in their own little Hitchhiker’s world. And they just looked like people who could do it. Then when I saw their work I just thought how visually it was amazing and I wanted to be a part of it. And fortunately it has worked really well because Garth’s able to communicate with actors and not just his director of photography. Some people are not able to communicate with actors about what your character is doing but Garth is. A lot of people just look through their monitor and wish actors weren’t there. But Garth loves human beings as well as toys and puppets and all of that stuff. He’s aware that if you don’t believe in Arthur and Trillian and Ford and Zaphod their adventures don’t matter and nothing else in the film matters. It just becomes academic. Oh, it’s good effects or whatever, but who gives a damn because there’s nothing carrying you on.

RS: And have you enjoyed working here?

MF: Yes, I really have, I’ve had a fantastic time, it’s been the biggest most sustained thing I’ve done on the camera and obviously it could have gone any way, I could have had a terrible time or I could have had a great time, and fortunately I’ve had a great time.