Since we lasted crossed paths with Mark Strong at the Jameson Empire Awards, he's been shot with an arrow by Robin Hood, blown out of a building by a rocket and pushed off Tower Bridge. Yes, the man deserves a drink - but no, we wouldn’t let him have one until he’d answered a barrage of questions about the intriguing trio of projects he's got lined up.
First up is Martin Campbell's DC superhero extravaganza Green Lantern. “I haven’t seen it yet,” says Strong, “but I’ve seen the artwork and if they can get that right, it’ll be astonishing.” As Sinestro, he’s charged with mentoring Ryan Reynolds’ brash-but-brittle fighter pilot Hal Jordan on the planet Korugar. It’s the first of two roles – John Carter Of Mar****s’ ruler of the Ferns, Matai Shang, being the other - that give him the chance to get his villain on again - and some work with seriously cutting-edge CGI.
“They’re very similar in sense that they’re like trying to make a jigsaw puzzle with two thirds of the pieces missing because so much of it is CGI. As Andrew Stanton says, ‘I’m not in post, I’m in principle digital photography.’” So how much green screen is involved? “On Green Lantern two thirds is on Earth and a third is in space. All my stuff is in space, so all my scenes were in a big green room.”
Unless there's a bit of the Cold War we don't know about that took place on a distant planet, **Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy **should be entirely CGI free. Strong, who plays betrayed M16 spook Jim Prideaux, is keeping schtum about which elements of John Le Carré's source material have been jettisoned to squeeze the spy thriller into movie form: “The book itself is quite elliptical, quite arcane, and you’d need to have that in the film as well."
Prideaux, as played by Ian Bannen, was a bruised loner in the 1979 BBC adaptation. He's shown in flashback being double crossed on an operation behind the Iron Curtain. “I don’t know if that’s going to come across in the film,” Strong says of his character's sense of alienation from the agency. But he was full of praise for director Tomas Alfredson: "I was so happy going to work because he’s so intelligent. Everyday you’d turn up and Tomas would show you his ideas. What we had on the page was just a framework – what we see in the film is something else."