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In ITV’s epic wartime drama, the actor plays an uptight colonialist caught in Britain’s biggest ever surrender. He talks about racist rulers, life in lockdown – and why you should never act with cats
There’s a scarcely believable discrepancy between the chilled, hirsute and blue-eyed Luke Treadaway who appears before me in shorts and T-shirt over Zoom from his parents’ house in Devon and the character he plays in his latest show. In The Singapore Grip, ITV’s big-budget costume drama for the autumn, the 35-year-old plays Matthew Webb, an uptight, bespectacled, sexually gauche 1940s colonial Brit. Impeccably outfitted in linen suit and panama hat, he’s everything Treadaway, after months of lockdown, is not.
In Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of JG Farrell’s satire (which takes its title from a sexual technique), we first see our hero crawling injured from the roadside, adjusting his specs after the Japanese have routed western forces, the very emblem of the out-gunned and out-thought Brit. Continue reading...