Ahead of production on their first job together, Rhys Ifans and Laura Linney didn’t undergo the standard “chemistry read” to make sure they got on. Which is remarkable, given what their characters would have to do to each other in Onwards and Sideways. In the Norfolk-set BBC film directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), Ifans would have to nearly throttle Linney while in the grip of night terrors, she’d have to collapse in his arms in a weeping mess having bankrupted herself with a gambling addiction; both situations arising from the neurological condition afflicting their characters: Parkinson’s disease.
But despite being thrown into the deep end in this hugely emotional, often hilarious film, both actors acknowledge an immediate feeling of safety around each other as they embarked on a project that would require them to strip themselves bare. I couldn’t tell you what kind of car Laura drives. What her home looks like.
But we both know how we feel about death and dying.” Linney, 62, is a triple-Oscar-nominated star with a diverse array of roles on her CV, from her breakthrough in The Truman Show (1998) onwards through Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River and Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (both 2003), then the TV series Ozark and The Big C. Ifans, 59, frankly burst through in 1997’s Twin Town, AKA the “Welsh Trainspotting”, and went on to play Hugh Grant’s scraggly flatmate Spike in Curtis’s Notting Hill (1999), Daniel Craig’s stalker in Enduring Love (2004) and drug smuggler Howard Marks in Mr Nice (2010). Divergent backgrounds, then.
But equally time-served, too. So the actors were able to dive in, no chemistry read required. They did, though, do dance classes.
They waltzed together in London, and separately nearer their respective homes, the better to understand one popular form of recreational therapy for people with Parkinson’s. In Brooklyn, Linney was introduced to David Leventhal at the Mark Morris Dance Group. He runs a programme there called Dance for PD.
Both are dressed casually and low-key, each clearly easy in the other’s company, their conversation frequently erupting into gales of laughter. It’s incredibly moving what the arts will do,” she says – in this case, how dance and music could relax people grappling with a condition that, among its 40-plus symptoms, causes uncontrollable shaking, stiffness of gait and involuntary freezing in doorways and thresholds. How it opens up the imagination, and then the body follows somehow, when it shouldn’t.
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