Ralph Ineson is a Hollywood hit at home in Southfields. Here he talks to Rosanna Greenstreet about goats, Great Danes and how Spielberg made his mind go blank
['Leigh Keily', 'Leigh Keily']
It’s the impossibly low register of Ralph Ineson’s voice that sets him apart, not to mention his considerable height, big nose and swarthy appearance. It is perhaps no surprise that, throughout his acting career, the Yorkshireman has often been the casting director’s go-to alpha male.
A regular in The Office, playing David Brent’s ghastly sexist chum Chris ‘Finchy’ Finch, Ralph went on to appear as a masseur in a 2010 episode of The IT Crowd, the writer/director Graham Linehan giving him a particularly unsavoury task.
“I had to kiss Chris O’Dowd’s arse,” he booms. “I gave his character a massage and then a big kiss on the butt-cheeks which is the impetus for the rest of the episode. I asked Graham why he thought I should do it and he said: ‘I think you are the most heterosexual man on British television!’ I still don’t know how I feel about that.”
Ralph lives in Southfields with his wife Ali and their two children, Luc, 19 and Becky, 14, and is a familiar sight on Wimbledon Common and in Richmond Park, where he is usually attached to a boisterous one-year-old Great Dane named Grayson.
“I was a Scooby-Doo fan as a kid, and I’ve always wanted one,” explains Ralph. “Grayson makes me laugh every day. He has huge jowls that hang three inches below his chin; so, if he does a double take, he leaves his jowls behind and they follow a second later. He falls over: the other day he fell into the lake in Wimbledon Park head first. And he can put his head on the bar in a pub which freaks people out.”
Now 48, Ralph made his film debut in First Knight in 1995 and later, in 2009, played Amycus Carrow in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. A villain in the service of Voldemort, Carrow becomes a cruel teacher at Hogwarts. Curiously, Ineson himself was once a real teacher – of drama and sociology at a York sixth form – before an invitation to perform, in 1992, brought his career as an educator to a halt.
“Ironically, as I’m an atheist, the Bible changed my life,” he explains. “I was offered the chance to do the York Mystery Plays at the city’s Theatre Royal and that led to my becoming an actor.”
Ralph Ineson in The Witch
Aside from three Harry Potter movies, his work since then includes The Damned United, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Game of Thrones. And in 2015 he starred as the patriarch William in The Witch, Robert Eggers’s horror film about a family in 1630s New England torn apart by witchcraft. It is his favourite part to date.
“That role changed my career and I loved every second. Directors know that I can play the dominant alpha bloke, so I tend to get dropped into projects to fulfil that role rather than being offered the lead. Eggers, who is from Brooklyn, had my voice in his head when he was writing the script and, eventually, he persuaded his creative producers that the part was for me. Finally having the chance to be first on the cast list was great.”
The Eggers hunch paid off. Among the film’s accolades were the prestigious Directing Award (Dramatic) at Sundance Festival and the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best First Feature. A gratifying return for all involved, no doubt, given that filming, in Northern Ontario, was gruelling.
“It was a very lonely film in a way,” reflects Ralph. “We were in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and it was very cold when we started. The clothing was made from period materials – hand-stitched, heavy-duty wool – which was great in the snow, but when spring came it was pretty uncomfortable. Dense swarms of black flies turned up too. Working in that was horrible. The kids tried to stay still during takes, but they were jumping around getting bitten.”
Problems also arose with a four-legged co-star.
“This big goat with huge horns turned up on set. There were scenes in which I had to fight with him, but you can’t train a goat, so I had to get him slightly annoyed to make him play. I was weighing 12 stone – I’d lost weight for the part – and he was 15 stone. It was a constant dance of trying to get him aggressive enough without being cruel, but keeping safe as well.
“A couple of times we got it wrong. He got his horns in between my ring and middle fingers on both hands and ripped the tendons, and he also hit me with the serrated outside edge of the horns and detached a bit of tendon from my rib. In all he put me in the ER three times, but as the story was about how hard things were for the first settlers in America, the injuries helped it along in a strange, masochistic sort of way.”
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Since The Witch, the roles have come thick and fast for Ralph and 2018 is looking big. He is in the Amazon Prime Video series Absentia, while March sees the launch of both action movie The Hurricane Heist and Spielberg’s expected new blockbuster Ready Player One, filming for which took Ralph back to the studios in Neasden where he played Amycus Carrow.
“Warner Bros have built a brand spanking new studio on the back of the place where we shot Harry Potter. My scenes are in a caravan with Susan Lynch, who plays Aunt Alice, and Tye Sheridan who plays the lead, Wade Owen Watts. I’m Rick, the aunt’s drunken boyfriend.
“So it was just the three of us with Spielberg in this tiny space. He’s iconic and you get star-struck. Susan and I both found that, when Spielberg speaks, you can’t hear what he says because your internal monologue is screaming: ‘Oh my God, Steven Spielberg is talking to me!’ Then he walks away and you haven’t heard a word. So we’d listen to each other’s notes and relay them after he’d gone!”
Most recently, Ralph has been working in New Mexico with the legendary Coen brothers on their upcoming Netflix series, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
“I play the executioner in a Wild West town. I have a snap taken by the costume director when I was on horseback. If I could get it blown up and put on the side of my house, I would,” he says with one last deep guffaw. “I have never looked as cool in my life!”
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