Dan Stevens responded to the playful ways in which The Guest riffed on film conventions of the 1980s and ’90s.<137>Ursula Coyote<137><137><252><137>
Leading men get the fame, character actors get the variety. For the moment, Dan Stevens is flouting that general rule of stage and screen.
The English actor achieved celebrity during three seasons as the romantic lead in the TV series Downton Abbey, then ran as far as possible from costume drama. The lethally charming ex-GI that Stevens plays in The Guest could not be more remote from Matthew Crawley, the touchy Edwardian swain who won over so many Downton Abbey fans.
"I was looking to diversify a little bit," says Stevens, offering a classic English understatement during an interview in Toronto. "But I wouldn't have said: 'I'd like to do an action-thriller-horror mash-up with a black-comedy element.'"
He laughs at the suggestion that such a drastic move against type could be a sign of deep career strategizing. "I left Downton and genuinely didn't know what I was going to do next."
His very next role was not a huge departure, at least in period setting. In 2013, Stevens starred in a Broadway production of The Heiress, the stage adaptation of Henry James's novella Washington Square, opposite Jessica Chastain. Film director Scott Frank saw a performance and offered Stevens a part in the gritty New York crime thriller, A Walk Among the Tombstones.
While shooting that film, Stevens received the script for The Guest, "which was perfectly possible to see, on the page, as quite a nasty film," he says. "But somehow I got the sense of humour of it."
Stevens studied English at Cambridge, got his first notices in plays by Shakespeare, and was a jury member for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. But he also grew up on American crime and horror movies of the 1980s and 1990s, and responded immediately to the playful ways in which The Guest riffed on the film conventions of that era.
Preparing for the role meant submitting to five weeks of hard daily workouts with a phalanx of personal trainers. The Stevens who steps out of the shower in The Guest is a strikingly leaner and more muscled creature than his Downton Abbey character.
"I was pushing my body to limits I'd previously avoided, and it had very interesting results," he says. "The discipline and rigour of it informed the character that I was looking for. It was fascinating to connect my usual cerebral process with something much more physical."
He also handled a lot of guns, at firing ranges in the desert near Los Angeles, to get handy with weapons that a recent veteran would know. "One thing that surprised me was that not everyone there was training for a movie," he says. "They were there with their guns, just firing 'em off, like you take your dog to the dog park. I was also amused to see English couples on holiday in L.A. who were just having a day of gun tourism."
Being a bookish fellow, he read heavily for the role: tomes about special-operations troops and private military companies, and Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. But that research was a bagatelle compared with the 146 books Stevens had to get through as a Man Booker judge. He fell into that role after opining on British TV about the finalists for the 2011 award.
"I was probably quite rude about one of them," he recalls. "A couple of weeks later, the Booker organizers called and said: 'We love what you said on the show. Come and judge the whole thing next year.'"
The whole thing included Umbrella by Will Self, one of Stevens's favourite contemporary writers. "To have that novel by him pop up in my Booker batch was an extraordinary moment for me, and it was no secret I was quite a champion of it," he says. "But I was also in awe of Hilary Mantel's ability to write a sequel [Wolf Hall follow-up Bring Up the Bodies, which took the prize] that was possibly better than the first book."
There will be no Man Booker sequels for him, nor probably for The Guest, in spite of a playful feint in that direction at the end of the film.
"I'm actively looking for something to do on the stage," Stevens says. "I'd like to do something new, and something funny perhaps. The more I see Chekhov, the more I'd like to have a crack at that." Who knows – he could turn out to be the first Trigorin to have blown away a private special-ops team.