Coffee with Orson Welles

By Peter Aspden

Christian McKay In Richard Linklater’s charming movie Me and Orson Welles there is a remarkable impersonation of the prodigiously gifted young director by the British actor Christian McKay. So much so that while I waited to meet McKay in Flat White, the Soho café that serves the best coffee in London, I half-expected him to emerge from the twilight accompanied by a strangely familiar melody on the zither.
It wasn’t quite like that, although London’s piercing cold was doing its best Viennese impression, and any watching film aficionado would surely have done a double-take as the tall, floppy-haired figure sat down and started to proclaim volubly on the joys of Shakespeare, the art of acting, and the vile duplicities of golden-era Hollywood.
McKay is having the time of his life. He had just arrived from the US the day before our meeting on promotional duties for the film and said he still felt like a rookie. In New York, a man walked up to him, addressed him by name and shook him warmly by the hand. “My God, I’m such an idiot, I can’t remember who this man is,” McKay thought to himself. But that, he learned quickly, is what perfectly anonymous movie fans do in that part of the world. He is slowly getting used to the intimacy of strangers.
McKay has been living with Orson for a good few years now. A classical pianist by training, and a jobbing actor who “once appeared as a eunuch” with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was at first insulted when asked if he would consider doing a one-man show based on the legendarily rotund figure. “I was furious. I wanted to play Richard Burton.”
But further research into the young Orson – the man routinely labelled a genius from his childhood to his mid-20s, when he made Citizen Kane – tempted him into the role. The show was warmly received at Edinburgh, and transferred to New York. “I shared a double bill with a transvestite,” McKay said crisply, raising an eyebrow and pausing for the line’s effect. It was a spookily Wellesian moment.
There wasn’t a bad word for his performance. Linklater, who had read the book of the film he was about to make, got on a plane from Texas to catch the last performance. “I’d read about actors being in the right place at the right time ...” said McKay, not feeling the need to complete the sentence.
McKay described the making of the movie – his first – as an “adorable experience”, and an introduction to a certain type of Hollywood stardom: his co-star is the High School Musical star Zac Efron. I sheepishly confessed to McKay that I had never heard of him. “Neither had I! And I’m fairly sure he had never heard of me.” But the billing has had nothing but benign consequences on audiences. “My mother went to see the film and the cinema was full of 12-year-olds and 80-year-olds. The old man is going to be introduced to a whole new generation!”
McKay admitted to having become a little obsessed with the old man in the course of his researches, which is something we had in common. But it turned out that he is much harder than me in his assessment of Welles. I said I was possibly blinded by his talent. “That is the trouble. We don’t really love Orson’s films, we are in awe of them. Apart, perhaps, from Chimes at Midnight.”
This is the reference that marks out the true Welles fan. The brilliantly compressed telling of the Falstaff story is not widely known, yet certainly the finest moment in Welles’s acting career. It is his other masterpiece. As for the rest of his lurching career, during which Welles was betrayed by studios and had to live down an unjustified reputation for profligacy, McKay said the old man had to take some responsibility. “He told Ken Tynan that he carried his legend around with him. But he was responsible for that legend.”
How did a man of such palpable vanity become so obese, I asked?
“It was his barrier to the world. After Rita [Hayworth, whom he married and divorced]. He had never heard a bad word against him until then.” McKay met a man in Hollywood who had spotted Welles at the end of his life in “some dive of a bar, looking like a cornered animal”, gorging on a pile of pancakes.
As happens whenever Welles obsessives meet, we started riffing on the fate of The Magnificent Ambersons, the film Welles made after Citizen Kane, which was cruelly butchered by RKO after supposedly negative audience feedback. In Clinton Heylin’s excellent book Despite the System, the author contends that, out of 85 cards collected after its preview at Pasadena, only 18 were unfavourable.
“I was there three days ago!” said McKay. “We had a Q&A and I started by saying that this was not a safe place for a Wellesian representative: I don’t know how many people got that. But I saw the cards. It was heart-breaking. Some of them said this was a greater film than Kane. The destruction of Ambersons was an act of evil.”
I asked McKay if he had finally got Welles out of his system. “He is long gone. I was recently asked if I was worried about being typecast. Give me a break! It is my first film role. But if what that means is I will go on to play Lear, Falstaff, Prospero ... Bring it on. I’d be happy with half of those.”