And when I’m on set with him, I feel like I can do anything. My wife is friends with him and his wife, so I knew him socially, but I later discovered that he had watched all of “Homeland.” I said it would be really interesting to collaborate on something, and he invited me to do this part in “The French Dispatch.” It was extraordinary, because I was filming in Los Angeles and when I got to France after two flights, a train ride and what felt like a boat, an airplane and a motorcycle to get to the middle of nowhere, they’d finished filming some two weeks before and were just waiting for me to be available! Our relationship developed through our mutual love of literature and movies and art and storytelling. How did you start working with Wes Anderson? I actually had his obituary on my bedroom door. My two are “The Ratcatcher” and “The Swan.” I grew up completely obsessed with Dahl. We each play in around two of the stories and kind of change roles. Wes took four of them and put together a smaller troupe of actors: myself, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, and Richard Ayoade. It could change, but when we made it, there were four stories drawn from a Roald Dahl, which are his slightly darker, twisted ones that he wrote for adults. Tell me a bit about “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” I love working with Wes, because he’ll just casually say, “Oh, you could play the song live, right?” Of course, I said yes, and then I get to Spain where we filmed it and the other band members include Jarvis Cocker, who I grew up listening to in Pulp! It has two necks lying on your lap, there’s more strings and it is a finger picking nightmare, but the sound of it is completely beautiful. So I had some work to do! I played guitar in bands as a teenager, but I had to learn the lap steel for this role. My group professional musicians, except me. I’m playing the leader of a troupe of singing cowboys who pass through this small town and, for certain reasons, can’t leave. Suffice to say it has all the whimsy, playfulness and inventiveness that you’d expect from a Wes Anderson picture, and probably the most star-studded cast that I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is interrupted by a very surreal series of events. It’s set in a fictional American town in the middle of a desert landscape, centered around a convention of junior stargazers and their slightly eccentric parents who’ve come together to celebrate juvenile geniuses.
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