Irish actor Stephen Rea first got noticed when he received an Oscar nod for playing Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, a film about Irish revolutionaries. After thirteen years and seven more movies with the director, he’s back for Jordan’s latest ode to transvestites and revolutionaries, Breakfast on Pluto, starring Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins) as Irish transvestite “Kitten” Braden.
Rea’s next movie also deals with terrorism and revolutions being fought by guys in outlandish outfits, as he will play Finch, a policeman, in the upcoming adaptation of Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta. While doing press for “Pluto,” Rea told Superhero Hype! about his part in the film.
“He’s a nice policeman,” he told us when asked about where his character stands on the government oppression at the core of the film’s plot. “There comes a point where you stop playing rebels and start playing policemen, and you stop playing madmen and start playing shrinks. I’d much rather be the madman, but this is a very interesting cop in that there’s the government, and there’s the terrorists, and he’s in between them. He doesn’t like the government any more than he likes the terrorists, but he is working for the government.”
“It’s the Wachowski brothers, so how interesting is that?” he continued. “It’s a wonderful, fantastic experience to work with those guys. I read the graphic novel when it became apparent that I was going to do the movie. It’s a very interesting response to Thatcher’s Britain… but it’s really about Bush’s America.”
You can see Rea in action, so to speak, when V For Vendetta opens on March 17, 2006. In the meantime, you can catch him in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, opening in limited release on November 16.
Source: Edward Douglas
