Tim Roth

Sky Atlantic hadn’t premiered Tin Star yet when it announced it was bringing the show, created by Rowan Joffe, back for a second season. Set in an idyllic Rocky Mountain community, the thriller—which has a U.S. slot on Amazon—stars Tim Roth as Jim Worth, a police chief facing off against a big oil company that has brought an unseemly element to town. When his family is attacked, Worth and his violent alter ego, Jack Devlin, seek revenge. Roth is no stranger to playing dark, complicated characters—he got his start portraying a skinhead in 1982’s Made in Britain, came to international acclaim as Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs and, in the last year alone, has been seen as a serial killer in Rillington Place and a hitman on Twin Peaks.

WS: Why did you say yes to Tin Star? What appealed to you about the project?
ROTH: I wasn’t going to, and I think I was the last person Rowan [Joffe] thought of approaching for it! [Laughs] He thought, Oh, he’ll never want to do it. I’d worked with Rowan’s dad [Roland] before, years and years ago. And then he got his guts up and sent me the script; he sent me three that were kind of ready. I read episode one and thought it was quite bold, and also a bit crazy. It wasn’t fully developed yet, but I could see there could be some real fun to be had, and a lot of anarchy; he constantly keeps twisting the story. You think the show is about one thing, but it keeps changing. So I just fancied it! And then they made the deal in about two seconds, and I was on board, and it was a six-month shoot.

WS: How did you prepare to play Jim and then Jack, his far more dysfunctional alter ego?
ROTH: Rowan and I talked about it a lot. It is a Jekyll and Hyde–type situation. It is a revenge thriller. It is bonkers. But there are rules. [Jim] was, is, a blackout drunk, so my constant worry was, who remembers what? So we made a rule book, pretty simple stuff, and everyone needed to be on the same page, so we knew what we were dealing with. The main rule is, when it’s Jack, he remembers everything. When he wakes up as Jim, he can’t remember a thing he’s done. And it quickly develops into a completely insane world they are in. You bring [Jack] back by drinking. And there are times when his wife wants him back, so she gets him back. It’s an incredibly dangerous and fun character to play.

WS: I imagine it was exhausting.
ROTH: It is pretty tiring. But it was easier for me, I have to say, in that when I did have a couple of days off I could get on a plane and go home, I could get back to L.A. fairly quickly. Genevieve [O’Reilly, who stars as Angela Worth, Jim’s wife] had her husband and kids come out, but then they had to go back. So it was harder for them, I think.

WS: And I understand there was a lot of improvisation on set.
ROTH: Everyone rolls their eyes at me, but I have a red pen, and I start [making notes on] scripts immediately. Change this, flip this around, do this. It’s what I did on Lie to Me [which ran on FOX for three seasons], and it became an easy way to work on a television show. So I was just going about it, and I came up with some ideas. Me and the [on-screen] family developed this shorthand and Rowan loved it. He was up for it. So it kind of became the way that we worked. And you could go to him and say, what about if they did this? And he’d go away and scribble it down. We [filmed] it all in sequence, which really, really helped. The only episodes out of sequence were the last two, nine and ten. The last one we shot was episode nine. With that one, we got the story of it, and then we pushed the script aside and got the actors involved. We improvised the entire episode. It was brilliant fun. Sky was really cool with it. They’re the ones who have to pay you. But they were cool with it!

Now that we’re done and we’re going to do more, it’s kind of the format we’re going to use, a bit. Not all of it, but some of it. We now know that we can trust each other to find our way into [the story] more, and find different ways in, and play around. And the actors I’m working with are lovely. They’re the real deal.

WS: What was it like being part of the new Twin Peaks season? I just watched your bloody demise the other day!
ROTH: Aww! [Laughs] We had such a laugh. The thing about David [Lynch] is, for me anyway—I don’t know about anyone else, there were 230 actors on board—he’s the gentlest soul in the world. It’s the transcendental meditation books he writes. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that me and Jen [Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played opposite Roth in the show] didn’t get to do more.

WS: Do you worry about committing to what could be a long-term project, given all the feature-film work you also do? You’ve become a regular in Quentin Tarantino films. Are you ever worried you might miss out on his next movie if you commit to a TV show?
ROTH: Unfortunately, that did happen to me once! [Laughs] I was doing Lie to Me. In the end, the thing is to not have a plan, and just keep going. You don’t think [a show is] going to get picked up. My experience on Lie to Me taught me that. Don’t assume it. So you just deal with the here and the now of it and then move forward.

WS: Lie to Me was a lot of episodes.
ROTH: We did 58!

WS: Would you do another U.S. broadcast network show that requires a lot of episodes?
ROTH: It would depend. My thing is, truly, that I just don’t have a plan. So if it happened and I thought it was good, I’d find myself in the middle of it. [Lie to Me] was really tiring, but, by the end of it, it got to an interesting place—and that’s when they yanked us! What can you do, right?

WS: You’ve worked with so many phenomenal directors—Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Woody Allen. What has the relationship with Rowan Joffe been like on Tin Star?
ROTH: I didn’t see that much of him! [Laughs] He was always busy. He directed the first episode to set the tone a little bit. And then we had two or three different directors that came in, two different cinematographers. But Rowan was tucked up in his house coming up with the scripts. We were on deck. But it was very easy. We just had a meeting about next season. Some of the directors will come back. And then there will be some new ones. We want more women, definitely—that’s being dealt with now.

WS: In the last year alone, you’ve played a serial killer, an assassin and a violent alcoholic. At the end of your day, how do you disconnect, so you’re not taking those dark characters home with you?
ROTH: With [my character in] Rillington Place, I had to figure out that in his life, he’s the good guy. Get your head around that one! It was tricky with him. The way I dealt with him is that I stole [screenwriter and author] Alan Bennett’s voice. So when I was sometimes saying really cheesy lines—“Cuppa tea?,” “Lovely boy” and all that stuff—it made me laugh. But, in fact, what he’s doing is abominable. At the end of the day, you just go home or back to the hotel. You deal with it. And with Twin Peaks, I thought [my character] was quite sweet, really! He loved Jennifer [laughs].

WS: You directed the acclaimed film The War Zone in 1999. Would you like to direct again?
ROTH: Yes, definitely. That was probably the best job I’ve ever had, in a way. I enjoyed it. Once the kids are done with college—I’ve got two years left on one of them—then I can probably afford to take a couple of years off and not get paid to direct! [Laughs] That is basically what you have to do, unless you’re a super-famous person.

WS: Education is insanely expensive, when it shouldn’t be.
ROTH: It shouldn’t be. And I’m not having them have a mortgage as soon as they come out of school, that’s just not fair. I’ve done crappy movies to do it. And I’ve done good ones to do it. I’ve just got one [kid] left, and he has two years—if he behaves himself—and then it’s over.

WS: Is there anything else you can share with us about Tin Star?
ROTH: It comes out on Amazon in the States. I like that people can watch TV like that now. If they want it, they’ll take it, and they’ll watch it a lot. Or they’ll do it in two sections. There’s an independence to that that’s rather good. And then you don’t have to watch commercials.

WS: Do you binge-watch a lot?
ROTH: Only recently, just because my kids think I’m amusing and they take the piss out of me all the time. We love Walton Goggins in our house, so we watched Vice Principals, and that was just fun, ridiculous fun. And then the boys made me watch Wet Hot American Summer, the movie and two seasons of it. And they just laughed at me laughing. They did it just to take the piss out of me.