麻豆社

Actor Mark Strong first came to prominence 25 years ago for his role in the 麻豆社 TV drama Our Friends in the North, appearing alongside Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. Since then he has appeared in films as diverse as Stardust, Sherlock Holmes, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Zero Dark Thirty. On stage, he won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in 2015 for his role in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. He lives in London with his family and supports Arsenal FC. These are the things we learned from his Desert Island Discs...

1. He has an Austrian mother and an Italian father

Mark was born Marco Giuseppe Salussolia in London. His mother “was a girl in Vienna. And at 18 I think she decided she wanted to come and just check London out because it was the centre of the universe at that time,” explains Mark. “She'd been in convent school and been running away a lot, didn't want to be there, and she just got on a train and came over to London and got a job as an au pair and reinvented herself.” And his father? “He left when I was a baby so I didn't really have an awful lot to do with him. I'm not sure where he is now. The thing perhaps that we have in common is that neither of us seem to have needed each other particularly, which is sad on one hand, but on the other… what he managed to do was make me incredibly independent.”

2. He grew up speaking German and English

Thanks to his mother, the German language was very much part of Mark’s life from the start: “I spoke a German word before I did an English word,” he says. The word was ‘Auto’ – the German for car. One of his music choices is David Bowie’s German-language version of his 1977 song “Heroes”, which was recorded in Berlin. And Mark’s verdict on Bowie’s German accent? “It’s pretty damn good!”

3. Punk played a hugely influential role in his teenage years

“When punk arrived,” says Mark, “it was ‘Okay, what the hell is this?’- this can be for me, not for the adult generation and this is something that I can own.” He and his school friends formed a punk band and even caused some controversy: someone found an exercise book filled with their lyrics, and complained to the school about what Mark calls – with a laugh – “this terrible filth”.

For the island he chooses The Clash covering Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves, because “there was a fascinating synergy between reggae and punk at that time. I think they were both a kind of protest music, and there was the sense that punks and guys that like reggae could be on the same side.”

4. He almost became a lawyer – in Germany

Why? “I think I was conforming… I didn't really know where I was headed or what to do,” says Mark. “I spoke German, so there was talk about going to university to study German. I wasn't really enamoured of that but I couldn't really get the teachers off my back at school… We discovered, my mother and I, that you could enter Munich University if you lived there and the A levels that I had were enough to get me in there. I randomly chose law because I thought it would be a great thing to do. I thought it was grown up and it would stand me in good stead. But I think I realised in retrospect, I just wanted to act being a lawyer. You know, I saw myself in a suit, with a briefcase, in a BMW with a raincoat, saving people or whatever. And it was just fiendishly difficult, and not for me!” Mark gave up the course, and returned to the UK, to study English, drama and acting.

5. He’s played a New York role to a New York audience, accent and all

In 2014 Mark won huge acclaim playing the Brooklyn docker Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge on stage in London. The show then transferred to Broadway. “I was terrified initially,” says Mark, “because I thought we're taking an American play not only to the States, but to New York and a lot of the lines in the play are about Nostrand Avenue... or Times Square - literally just a stone's throw from where we were performing. So I knew that we would have an audience full of people who knew exactly what we were talking about. But I have to say there's an incredibly kind aspect to the New York theatre community. They're very inclusive, they all come and see your show then invite you out for dinner. And the audiences are really non-judgmental. You know the amazing people that came backstage Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver. Everybody who was there at the time would come and see the show and they were incredibly kind.”

6. Earlier in his career, Mark rehearsed with Arthur Miller himself

Mark played Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre in 1996: “We were doing the play and the director at the time said did we want to go and meet [Arthur Miller] over in Salzburg? And in one small room, we’d drag Arthur Miller away [from a conference he was chairing] and do the play with him. He would sit and read it with us, and listen to us read it with him. And it was unbelievable.” Mark still recalls Miller’s relaxed attitude to the experience: “I absorbed his ease with us. There was no panic. He wasn't fretting about his play. He just was enjoying the fact that we were all in this creative endeavour together”.

7. The great success of Our Friends in the North came as a surprise

The 1996 series won three BAFTAs, numerous other awards and regularly appears on lists of the greatest British TV dramas - so did Mark have any inkling of this at the time? “No, none whatsoever. I didn't realise that at all. I remember Daniel [Craig] and I walking through the streets of Newcastle going, ‘Is this going to be any good?’. I'd been in the theatre, doing plays. To do a long shoot like that - I think it was nearly a year probably of shooting, and ageing from my 20s up to my 50s - was no big deal for me, because that's kind of what I've been doing in the theatre. I just did it thinking ‘Great, this is a good piece of writing and they're great actors’. And I just hoped it would do all right.”

8. A recent role demanded a hospital visit

Mark currently plays a rogue surgeon, Daniel Milton, in the TV drama series Temple, and he decided he needed to research the part: “I watched a surgeon performing some sort of terrible procedure on somebody's lung, while I wondered whether I'd be able to not faint!” And how did he get on? “That wasn't too bad,” he adds. “I find it really fascinating because what [the surgeon] was doing, he was watching it on a screen and he had the instruments through two holes in the person's chest. He was basically manipulating everything inside the body while watching a screen. He found a particularly gruesome looking piece of the lung, cut it with a particular instrument that seemed to cauterise it at the same time, and then pulled it out through the hole! The person who was assisting came over, showed it to me and went ‘Look at that!’ It was like a bit of old boot-leather!”

9. His choice of book is to remind him of the urban life he’d miss on a desert island

“I thought long and hard about this,” says Mark. “It's difficult to find a book that you've read that you want to keep reading although people obviously will have chosen books like that. I wanted a book of street photography or a book of cities, photographs taken of cities… Just to basically remind me of home, I just want images from back home that weren't sun, sea sand and coconut palms…”