Clive Owen on Paying Homage to Humphrey Bogart for Monsieur Spade
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The post Clive Owen on Paying Homage to Humphrey Bogart for Monsieur Spade appeared first on Consequence.
When Clive Owen tells Consequence the story of agreeing to star in Monsieur Spade, it’s a very short one. “I’m a huge Bogart fan, and I got a call from Scott [Frank] and Tom [Fontana] who said, ‘Look, we’re thinking of doing this take on Sam Spade, and we’re setting it in early ’60s France.’ They pitched the whole idea to me, and I just took a picture of my Maltese Falcon poster on the wall and sent it to them both and said, ‘You’ve come to the right guy.’ It was a very quick, ‘I’m in, I’m doing it.'”
Directed by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit), who also wrote the series with Tom Fontana (Oz), Monsieur Spade features Owen as the now-retired private detective as he enjoys the quiet life in the picturesque French countryside — until, that is, a horrific crime drags him back into action.
While multiple actors have played the role of the hard-boiled dick since his initial literary creation by Dashiell Hammett, Humphrey Bogart‘s depiction is largely considered to be the definitive one. So, as a fan, Owen saw the series as almost a sequel to Maltese Falcon, and incorporated it into his performance.
“I really leaned into Bogart and his natural rhythms of speaking,” he says. “I said to Scott [before filming], ‘Look, don’t freak out, but I’m really diving into Bogart a lot. I’m not going to do a bad impersonation, don’t worry. I’m just going to really listen to his intonation, his rhythms, his speed, because I think it could be really helpful.’ And [Frank] said, ‘That’s perfect, because every time I wrote for Spade, I had to hear Bogart saying it.’ So we were both on the same page there, and I saw it very much as time-jumped from that original movie.”
There was never an instance of Owen being given the note “maybe a little less Bogart,” because he “wasn’t really trying to do an impersonation of him. It was just about rhythm. The one thing that we found time and time again is that you think Bogart’s very laid back and cool, but he’s actually super fast with his dialogue, often. He just breezes through it and he does it effortlessly, so it doesn’t feel like it, but he can really talk fast with an ease. So when we really picked up the pace, suddenly everything started to crackle.”
The dialogue overall provided another way for the series to pay homage to film noir, because as Owen says, “that period of writing was like that. Actors were fast and the dialogue was really well-written and it worked best when you played it at that pace. You go back and look at some of those old ’40s and ’50s movies and the speed with which they used to rattle through the dialogue — when you’ve got really good fun, sharp dialogue, it’s super-enjoyable.”
Some of that dialogue, as you might guess from the setting and even the title, is in French — which Sam Spade can barely speak. Owen says that prior to making the series, he didn’t personally speak the language at all, and even while they were in production, he realized that trying to learn the language traditionally wouldn’t make sense. “One, I didn’t really have the time. And two, when you learn it in a classic way, it’s all about passing exams and learning grammar, and that’s not what I needed really. So I very quickly changed tact and began to learn a lot of it phonetically.”
So while Owen doesn’t speak a ton of the language in the series, “even the little that I did, I found it tough. I have nothing now but unbelievable respect for actors who play roles in other languages. I think it’s a really stunning achievement, because I could feel how hard it is.”
Beyond the dialogue, Monsieur Spade is quite conscious of tropes surrounding the classic noir detective, though as Owen notes, “I had a running joke with Scott that he’d taken everything away from me: ‘I’m living this quiet life, you give me no hat, I don’t have any shootouts — what is this? I’ve been duped! This isn’t Sam Spade.'”
That’s just where the series begins, of course, as the man attempts to “leave that Sam Spade behind and move on to this quieter, more peaceful life and this beautiful place.” Unfortunately, peace can only last so long, especially once a character like Sam senses injustice. (The good news is, he does eventually get a hat.)
“I think that’s why [detective stories] stand the test of time, because it’s about their moral compass,” Owen says. “Once Spade gets into a situation and feels something’s wrong, he feels he’s got to do the right thing. And we find that very attractive. That’s why they’re still around these characters, because ultimately, you know, they, they’re, they have great restraint and there’s something very dignified about somebody who goes, ‘Okay, there’s something wrong here and I need to set it right.'”
Like many actors, Owen began his career on television, and like many actors, over the past few years he’s picked up more high-profile roles in series like American Crime Story and A Murder at the End of the World.
Those projects, however, were single-season commitments, and Owen says he’s not that interested in playing the same character for years at a time.
Monsieur Spade (AMC/AMC+)
“That always scares me, the idea of doing something for that long. Because I think you reveal too much and also you reveal the same thing over and over again, it’s a bit exposing. The idea of doing 10 seasons or something… I started in the theater, and the joy was always playing lots of different parts — really mining a part, discovering it, playing it. The idea of just keeping on repeating that, I find that difficult.”
Continues Owen, “I don’t think the approach changes for an actor, really, whether it’s a film or whether it’s TV. Obviously you have longer to explore if you’re doing a series — you can pace the way you reveal things and the way a character develops. But you approach both in the same way, really. When people talk about the difference between film and television, it really makes no difference to me. The joy of television, I suppose, is that you get longer to explore it. But it’s all about who’s directing and who’s writing, really.”
And working with Frank on this series was a particularly good experience, one he hopes to replicate — though it might be tough. As of December 2023, Owen has no specific projects on the horizon. Instead, he says, “I’m getting things sent me and I’m waiting to decide what next to do. It’s gonna be very difficult because, you know, the, the Spade show was for me as good as it gets. I was such a fan of Scott, both as a writer and director, and I love this genre. There were times through that job where I just was like, ‘There is no better place to be, like in terms of acting.’ It’s going to be hard to live up to this one.”
Monsieur Spade premieres January 14th at 9:00 p.m. on AMC, AMC+ and Acorn TV. New episodes will debut weekly on Sundays.
Clive Owen on Paying Homage to Humphrey Bogart for Monsieur Spade
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