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Posted July 12, 2011 to photo album "People in Film | Tom Wilkinson"
While Tom Wilkinson may have originally intended to be a farmer, when he turned to acting, he worked just as hard to cultivate his craft. As such, audiences have reaped the rewards of his performances from stage to TV to films.
Tom Wilkinson | The Actor as Craftsman
In John Madden’s The Debt, Tom Wilkinson plays a man with secrets. The story takes place in two different time frames. In one, three Mossad agents – David Peretz, Rachel Singer and Stephan Gold – embark on a 1960s covert mission to kidnap a Nazi war criminal living in East Berlin. In the second, the same three characters live with the secrets of that mission 30 years later. For Wilkinson, who plays Stephan Gold, that meant absorbing a myriad of factors – the director’s vision, the characters' secrets, the performance of the young Gold (played by Marton Csokas) – to create his character. To make Gold real, he needed first to stay true to the story’s prime question, as Wilkinson puts it, “can one be redeemed after the endless duplicity of being a secret agent?” But he needed not only to layer secret onto secret, but be faithful to another actor’s secrets. Working with his earlier self, played by Csokas, Wilkinson explains, “I later took a look at his scenes and worked further on the character with John. There was a certain continuity I was careful not to break.” With the precision of a watchmaker, Wilkinson built his character, displaying an attention to detail and craft that has been his trademark for decades.
The World's End
We Steal Secrets
Closed Circuit
The Deep
The Place Beyond The Pines
Greetings from Tim Buckley
Admission
Promised Land
Anna Karenina
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brokeback Mountain
Lost in Translation
Pride & Prejudice
The Pianist
Gosford Park