The perils of finally getting around to installing replacement web stats software – you realise that the top search of the day is for Rufus Sewell, and it’s taking people to this blog to look at a photo from a post written two years ago, presumably because of the mediaevalist miniseries The Pillars of The Earth, in which he stars as a master mason caught up in the politics of grand building schemes, currently being aired in the USA. So much for Aussie politics then! Nonetheless, thank you so much, web searchers, for alerting me to a show starring Rufus Sewell that I can now gleefully anticipate turning up here in Oz in the not too distant future.
Tom Builder | The Pillars of the Earth
Anyway, I can give you better than that two-years-old speculation about the casting of the 11th Doctor Who, a role which Rufus Sewell sadly does not play (although since I’m loving Matt Smith, that is not entirely a horrible result). I am totally in the mood to shamelessly pander to the desire to see pictures of Rufus Sewell, because he is very watchable. And versatile, since he’s especially keen to avoid being typecast:
Portrait of Rufus Sewell
“The big worry of my career has always been not being typecast,” Sewell told the Herald in a telephone interview from Rome, where he is filming a project for PBS and the BBC.
Sewell is perhaps best known for playing villains in such movies as “A Knight’s Tale” and “The Illusionist.”
“Because it has seemed to me whenever I’ve had a success, I’ve always been offered the same kind of role. It’s been a real struggle to work and not play dastardly upper-class villains in period stuff. Because if I wanted to just do the work that was offered to me, then that would be the bulk of my career. So it’s always been a struggle and balancing out deliberate unemployment with the idea of what better thing might be around the corner.”
Now, please find below an embedded slideshow (with captions) of various highlights of Mr Sewell’s fine career (including many of costume villain roles which he loathes but in which he was so very delicious). Enjoy!
Categories: arts & entertainment
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My first exposure to Mr.Sewell was as the protagonists in Dark City,a creepy Australian sci-fi flick.
Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch. Sigh…
I thought his Charles II was magnificent. I’m glad that he hasn’t given up entirely on the costume roles since he’s decided that he won’t play villains.
Thought he was lovely in Tristan and Isolde. Nice (rare) example of a movie doing something a bit more subtle than having a villain keep the lovers apart.
I haven’t seen T&I yet – must search it out on disc. I love a good mediaeval romantic tragedy.
Oh boy, read the novel of Pillars of the Earth when I was sixteen, and mostly I enjoyed it.
I do hope though, that in this mini-series some of the highly eroticised rape scenes from the novel are presented as less, well, erotic. Even when I was sixteen, and not particularly aware as a feminist, that disturbed me.