The landed gentry (and their friends) stepped on to the red carpet to celebrate the UK premiere of Brideshead Revisited, the new adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of suppressed love, religious zeal and ruffled teddy bears.
Following in the footsteps of the beloved TV mini-series of the early 80s, director Julian Jarrold hopes for an equally huge smash hit success with his truncated movie version. Was he worried about taking on the challenge?
“Well fortunately I had great scriptwriters to help me adapt it,” says Jarrold. “I was daunted but when I went back to the novel, there were so many interesting things in it and so many contemporary resonances.”
How did he approach the adaptation?
“You choose the themes and the characters that you want to explore,” continues Jarrold. “It’s actually only a 300-page novel so it’s the same if you adapt any novel and that obviously means that you have to make certain difficult choices and some minor characters do unfortunately do miss out. But obviously the love story of Charles and Sebastian and Charles and Julia became the lynchpin and the way that Lady Marchmain, even when she’s not there that, casts a shadow over the whole affair.”
For star Emma Thompson, who plays the overbearing matriarch Lady Marchmain, there were never any worries.
“I’m not nervous, I think the director and the producer might be nervous though,” says Thompson. “I was a very young woman when the original series came out and I was a punk rocker. I was walking around wearing a lot of black eye shadow not being interested in Evelyn Waugh at all. Brideshead was not on my radar, so I was delighted when I was told that they were making it again because I loved the book when I eventually read it and because it was such a great script.”
The film also stars Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the young Oxfordite who falls in with the enigmatic Marchmain clan and become rather close friends with brother and sister Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) and Julia (Hayley Atwell). Goode will soon be starring as Ozymandias in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a role that couldn’t be further removed from his current character.
“In some ways, they are poles apart but they’re both ambiguous homosexuals so there are similarities,” jokes Goode. “No, honestly they’re very different characters.”
One of Whishaw’s prime reasons for signing up to his morally complex role was that it gave him the chance to work with an icon – a little teddy bear named Aloysius, who is Sebastian’s constant companion.
“I chose Aloysius from a table of teddy bears,” says Whishaw. “I think there were about four teddy bears and Julian asked which one I liked the best and I chose the little one because it looked a bit beaten up and sad and kind of sweet.”
Brideshead Revisited is released on October 3.