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I just look vaguely worried all the time. When I’m in repose.” That’s Emmy-winner Matthew Macfadyen’s assessment of his resting face and in The Miniature Wife, a new series based on a short story by Manuel Gonzales, Macfadyen has a lot to be concerned about.
The 10-hour comedy-drama tells the tale of a science whiz called Les Littlejohn (Macfadyen) who accidentally shrinks his wife Lindy (Elizabeth Banks) to the size of an iPhone. What starts out as Honey I Shrunk … You soon turns into something closer to The War of the Roses, as Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner’s (Boardwalk Empire, Goliath) scripts mash up physical comedy with a full-blown relationship crisis. Who, after all, hasn’t been made to feel small in a marriage at one time or another?
“Les and Lindy’s marriage is in trouble when we meet them,” is Macfadyen’s description, “because since publishing her smash hit novel, Lindy has been in a terrible writer’s rut. She hasn’t written a thing.”
Meanwhile, Les’ career has gone from strength to strength. Macfadyen describes him as a wonder-nerd whose abilities and discoveries could really make a difference. “He really is a genius. I mean, he’s sort of a deeply clever scientist but actually, he’s not very techie. He’s not very switched on in a business sense, as is revealed throughout.”
Macfadyen watched a lot of Bill “The Science Guy” Nye’s YouTube videos for inspiration. We sing the rhyming theme tune to one another.
“Bill Nye The Science Guy is brilliant,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to emulate or copy him for Les, but I loved his energy. I think there’s a part of Les that would be quite happy just noodling around in his lab and not doing any of the tech messiah stuff, but he gets swept up in a sort of ego spiral. He decides that ‘it’s my turn’, gets obsessed with winning the Nobel Prize and he just … loses himself. He gets corrupted.”
The disparity between Les’ and Lindy’s career paths leads to fissures in the marriage and after one row too many, Les accidentally turns his world-changing technology (he had been hoping to shrink crops, grow huge yields in small spaces and then unshrink them to end world hunger) on his wife. He shrinky-dinks her to about 15 centimetres tall, and The Miniature Wife maps the aftermath.
Macfadyen’s career, like Les’, has gone from strength to strength. Before Succession, he was already an established film and TV lead with acclaimed roles in hit series such as Spooks and Criminal Justice, but he was best known for playing it straight – see those large, concerned eyes and that vaguely worried face.
Thirty-nine episodes as Tom Wambsgans in Succession, a snivelling, power-hungry rat who would do or say anything to elevate himself in the billionaire Roy family, and Macfadyen was reinvented as a brilliant comedy player. He won two Primetime Emmys for best supporting actor. Like Succession, The Miniature Wife is a black comedy drama and Macfadyen is now the perfect lead – an established master of cold, hard laughs.
“It’s about Les and Lindy’s egos and their lack of appreciation of one another and their professional vanity,” he says, “But there are moments of real darkness. I mean, it gets quite violent and horrible. But it’s also very tender and sweet. And doesn’t feel syrupy either. Hopefully, it’s a very successful portrait of a relationship in this ridiculous predicament.”
The ridiculous predicament was repeated in reality – how do you film scenes of caustic marital breakdown when one of the sparring partners is meant to be 15 centimetres high?
“Elizabeth, we would say she’s got her own soundstage, and she sort of did,” he says. “It was like the Elizabeth Banks stage in Toronto, where she was wrapped in green screen for long periods of time on her own.”
Many of the scenes in The Miniature Wife feature Banks holed up in a doll’s house doing two-handers with Macfadyen’s giant left eye looming through the front door like the BFG. Macfadyen was never actually there.
“When the scenes were with Elizabeth, I would be on my own sort of whispering manically … to a cross on a carpet or pretending I’m carrying her around. It was mad but also an imaginative exercise — challenging but also quite satisfying to get right.”
Macfadyen spent most of his filming time working closely with what he calls “the Elizabeth doll”.
“They’d bring it in to the scene, and then they would line up on it,” he says. “And then we’d have to take it away because special effects would put ‘Elizabeth’ in there later. I would have to find out where her head would be, which would be different from where her feet were. So it’s sort of a technical piece of work. We’d put a mark down, and you’re trying to work out where to put your eyes … then your hands go in a different place. Sort of strange.”
There were also times Macfadyen – who is just a tick over 190 centimetres tall – wished he was a bit shorter. To signify his tech success, the writers gave Les a statement vehicle, a red AC Cobra that he drives between the office and his McMansion. It sits about five centimetres from the ground.
“I couldn’t get in it,” he says. “It’s a very nice car … once you’re in. But they couldn’t shoot me getting out of that f---ing car because I literally had to crawl out of it. It was really undignified. So whenever I pull up, they have to cut somewhere else, and then I stumble out. And then they cut back and I sort of do a last move as if everything was normal.”
Having the fancy car but being unable to get in and out of it is, I proffer, quite a Tom Wambsgans moment. Wambsgans is a character that has brought Macfadyen his choice of scripts, but he says he doesn’t strategise over roles or map out his career.
“It’s always the way; there’s no plan,” he says. “In fact I’ve never met an actor who’s gone, ‘Yeah, this is going exactly how I wanted it to’. You’re just muddling along.”
He does now get sent scripts for him to mull over, such as The Miniature Wife, rather than having to audition to get scripts at all, but there’s still no Bill Nye-style science to picking a winner.
“Even if you’re very fortunate and you’re getting scripts sent, you still just sort of jump at the thing that speaks to you,” he says. “You’re never sure it’s the right thing to do … and that’s part of the fun, I suppose. Certainly, I try and do something that’s a little bit different from what I’ve done before but sometimes the script is so good and fun I just want to do it.
“And then there are other considerations, like you think it’d be nice to be at home or, you know, nice to go away. [Macfadyen and his wife the actress Keeley Hawes have two children together, daughter Maggie and son Ralph; they also co-parent Hawes’ son from her first marriage, Myles.] So it’s a melange of stuff. I think the trick is to just keep going. Keep working.”
Much of Macfadyen’s recent work – much of his last decade, in fact — has been spent doing an American accent. Macfadyen is British and lives in London. His normal accent is Brit plum perfection. But he says he likes the US drawl because it works against the British default of nervous self-deprecation.
“It’s terribly liberating playing an American because it’s a manufactured confidence that comes with the vowels being long,” he says. “You feel physically more confident because you’re like, ‘Good maaaaaah-ning!’, and it’s all like that. There’s no British diffidence.”
In short, playing American helps counter that face that looks slightly worried most of the time. And with forthcoming roles in Tomas Alfredson’s film of the ’60s thriller Seance on a Wet Afternoon with Rachel Weisz and then the lead role of spymaster George Smiley in the landmark BBC/MGM+ John Le Carre adaptation Legacy of Spies, Macfadyen has nothing to worry about.
The Miniature Wife streams on Stan (which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead) from April 9.
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