Monsieur Spade’s Clive Owen Talks Playing an Iconic Sleuth, Trying to Learn French and His Love of Bogart
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Sam Spade is back on the case.
The iconic private detective famously played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon is coming to AMC in Monsieur Spade (premiering this Sunday at 9/8c), with Clive Owen taking on the role. It’s a responsibility that Owen doesn’t take lightly, he tells TVLine: “I’m actually a huge fan of the genre. I’m a huge fan of Bogart, and I know The Maltese Falcon really well… In some way, Spade is the sort of quintessential Bogart character.” So when executive producers Scott Frank and Tom Fontana called Owen to see if he was interested, “I sent them a picture of my Maltese Falcon poster on my wall. I’ve said, ‘You’ve come to the right guy.’”
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In fact, Owen — who calls Bogart’s Casablanca “my all-time favorite film” — says that “over here in the UK, I’m a patron of a really old cinema in this port town of Harwich, a beautiful 1911 cinema… and when I realized I was doing this [series], I did a double bill of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. It was beautiful watching those old classic films in this beautiful old cinema.”
Aside from getting the chance to fill Bogart’s shoes, Owen was also drawn in by the prospect of working with Frank, the Emmy winner who wrote and directed Monsieur Spade: “I’ve known Scott’s writing work for years now. I’ve read some of his film scripts, and obviously I’d seen and loved The Queen’s Gambit and Godless. I’ve always had him in my head as one of the best writers out there, really. So when he approached me and said, ‘Do you want to come and do this?,’ I just was hugely exciting at the idea of him tackling this genre.”
The Sam Spade that we meet in Monsieur Spade, though, is a couple decades older than the one we know from The Maltese Falcon, with Spade enjoying retirement in the South of France in 1963. “We’ve moved on a number of years,” Owen notes, which he thinks helps liven up the story: “The one thing about noir is you feel like you know it, and as soon as you put people in that genre, people get very familiar with it. So to take a ‘40s private detective and throw him into early ‘60s France… we’re refreshing it because he’s in a totally new environment.”
At first, Spade is living a peaceful existence in the French countryside, but he’s drawn back into the detective game when six nuns are brutally murdered at a local convent. “I think he’s trying to put the old Sam Spade away,” Owen shares. “But at the end of the first episode, he gets pulled back into something pretty serious. You get the feeling that he’s gonna have to dig up the old Sam Spade and start wrestling with this trouble that’s around.” He adds that Spade’s “moral compass” won’t allow him to stand idly by while the crime remains unsolved: “He’s somebody that just, if you believe something’s wrong, has to do something about it.”
Owen’s biggest challenge on set, however, might have been learning French. Spade spends several years there and picks up the language, while the rest of Monsieur Spade’s cast is full of French actors. So how is Owen’s French? “Uh, not good,” he admits with a hearty laugh. The producers asked him if he spoke French, he recalls, and “I said, ‘No, but I will.’” When he started to study, though, “I realized that if I learned it in a very classic traditional way, it would take me a long time… At the end of the day, I don’t need to know the grammar. I need to be able to speak it. So I quickly changed tack and started to learn it all phonetically, a bit like an accent. But even the small amount of French I spoke still took quite a bit of work.”
Looking forward to seeing Clive Owen put on Sam Spade’s fedora and trenchcoat? Hit the comments below to share your thoughts.
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