Toby Jones: ‘Anything that takes Beckett out of the university and puts him in the world is to be encouraged’

It is not altogether surprising to find Toby Jones reading Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the middle of Lough Erne. Over the last few decades, no actor has spread himself more generously – or more productively – over so many diverse modes and genres. Born in 1966, son to admired actor Freddie Jones, he has appeared in such arthouse gems as Berberian Sound Studio, First Cow and By Our Selves. He has also turned up in Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In recent years his work with Mackenzie Crook on the delightful comedy series Detectorists has germinated whole new cults.

Through it all, Jones has remained a tad odd, a tad angular, a tad guarded. Who better to help out at the 10th Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival? Jones will indeed be reading parts of Krapp’s Last Tape on the Kestrel ferry boat in “the vicinity of Devenish Island”. He will also be reading relevant snippets of the great man’s prose in the Breandrum Graveyard.

“I have been enthusiastic about Beckett for a very long time,” he tells me. “I was lucky enough to be in Waiting for Godot at school. It was the unlikely school play. I didn’t know anything about him. I played Vladimir. I remember thinking there’s something so immediate and accessible about this deeply complicated, strange, hermetic piece.”

He uses the word “accessible”. When, 70 years ago, Godot first arrived it was – in Anglophone territories at least – widely regarded as terrifyingly obscure. For decades after, wags enjoyed parodying Beckett’s work as grim and demanding. But it feels as if that has changed in the current century. The barriers to popular acceptance are washing away.

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“Maybe it’s just simply the fact that he’s been so influential,” Jones agrees. “People have discovered him as the source of much more relatable stuff. He’s the source of that very pared down material. There is this strange paradox that things that are very pared down become very open and massive.”

Meanwhile, his quotes have crept into unlikely places. The deceptively pessimistic phrase “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” from his late prose piece Worstward Ho! has become a mantra of the self-help crowd. The tennis player Stan Wawrinka has it tattooed on his arm. It will be on tea towels soon.

“Anything that takes Beckett out of the university and puts him in the world is to be encouraged,” Jones says. “I am just picturing doing the dishes with a tea towel with that written on it. You would be doing the same thing over and over again. The same plates you washed before. A Sisyphean task. That seems a very good location to place Beckett. Ha, ha!”

Jones believes that his father may have encountered Beckett when he was doing the playwright’s Act Without Words II with Patrick Magee in the 1960s.

“Yeah, I think he met him,” he says. “I remember he said he had that experience of being in Act Without Words II.”

Freddie Jones, who died in 2019, was a legend of British stage and screen. He was among the cast of Peter Brook’s famous production of Marat/Sade for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964. He went on – like his son – to feature in material both high and low of brow, eventually ending up as a regular on Emmerdale. Toby was aware that people recognised his dad. They wanted to tell him that he enjoyed his work. “But he wasn’t a star in that sense. Stars weren’t mass produced as they are now,” he says.

I have read that, despite his juvenile triumph in Waiting for Godot, Toby Jones was initially unenthusiastic about joining the family business. But he did opt for drama at the University of Manchester and then went on to study physical theatre at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Somewhere in there his resistance broke down.

“It’s very easy to retro-engineer that decision-making process,” he says. “But I had a feeling, as you imply, that you shouldn’t go into the family business. You should go and cut your own path.

“I always found the world of drama in its widest possible sense so alluring. There was a childlike wonder about my father’s associates. Any child who was around that would think: why would you not want to do that? But I didn’t quite know for a long time whether it would be as an actor – or maybe a writer or a director.

“When I went to Paris it made that decision less pressing. Actors originally were all those things. You could be anything you wanted to be. You didn’t have to define yourself in strict terms. I’m talking about the actors who pulled carts around the place and would be their own producers, directors, writers, and indeed financiers.”

Jones has certainly done a fair bit of that. One of his own plays derived from an embarrassing experience on the set of Notting Hill. He was hired to play Julia Roberts’s idiotic fan, but was eventually cut from the final film. The fact that he got a play out of it suggests he was able to assess the snub in sober fashion. He is not still carrying around a grudge?

“I was fine,” he says. “I was so interested in making my own work at that time. I would go and do these tiny parts in films and that subsidised me making my own theatre for six months. So it wasn’t traumatic. I still got paid. And weirdly, it only became traumatic the more other people talked about it. You’d think: maybe I should care more about that. Growing up in an actor’s family you get used to unpredictability.”

The move to more conspicuous visibility came towards the middle of the 2010s. He was the voice of Dobby the house elf from the first Harry Potter film. In 2006, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn as Truman Capote in Capote slightly overshadowed Jones’s near-simultaneous appearance as the same character in the fine Infamous. He was in the Stephen King adaptation The Mist. He was Karl Rove in Oliver Stone’s W and Swifty Lazar in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon. One day cinemagoers opened their eyes and saw Toby Jones at every point on the horizon. He now feels like an ornament of the industry.

I always wonder if actors who come from Jones’s background – avant garde theatre, independent cinema, Beckett in Fermanagh – feel as if they are doing the same job when they move into franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He first appeared as villain Arnim Zola in Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011.

“In one sense it couldn’t be more different,” he says. “But in another sense it’s just working a different register. You are in a different space, relating to an audience in a different context. They’re very, very, very different things, but the problems are always pretty much the same. How do you bring something identifiably human to even the most unlikely situations? It has to be relatable, even if it seems to be either fantastical in the case of Marvel or seems confusing in the case of Beckett. Or indeed humdrum in the case of Detectorists. There has to be something the audience can relate to.”

I imagine he is able to tell me nothing – read “nothing” – about his role in the upcoming, currently untitled fifth Indiana Jones movie.

“Nothing whatsoever,” he says with a laugh. “I am under 24-hour surveillance. There’s a a camera they’ve installed. If I say anything at all I get an electric shock. Well, you don’t really know anything. If you ask me about anything I’ll say: ‘Well that might have gone by now. They might have re-edited it.’ You can’t really confirm anything but your presence in the film.”

The pandemic did little to halt the advance of Toby Jones. Last summer he spent time in and around Dublin shooting Sebastián Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder for Netflix and Element Pictures. “I have worked several times in Dublin and Ciarán Hinds was there. I always feel at home in Dublin if Ciarán Hinds is at arm’s length,” he says.

Fans of Detectorists will be pleased to hear that a one-off feature-length episode is on the way to commemorate the centenary of the BBC. Before then, he will get to connect with mustier energies at the Happy Days Festival. It feels as if he still enjoys pulling his cart around.

“You don’t know where you’re going to be or what you’re going to be doing,” he muses. “And that does have an equivalent romance to rolling up in a different town in the cart and having to find an audience. There is a modern equivalent to that.”

He is sounding almost wistful.

“It’s a chaotic, crazy job to choose. But if you can stay alert to the romance and be curious about it, those opportunities are there.”

The Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival runs from July 21st until July 25th.