BILLY HOWLE | INTERVIEW
Billy Howle – The Stoke-born actor’s latest role is Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg, in BBC One/Netflix true-life 1970s murder drama The Serpent. You may also have seen him in movies Dunkirk, On Chesil Beach and Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, as Rey’s father. Carl Marsh got some inside intel.
I lived just over the Dutch border for two years, spending lots of time in the Netherlands, and your accent for Herman Knippenberg is so good! How did you perfect it?
Thanks very much! A longstanding family friend is Dutch, and I’ve known him since I was a kid. I guess I was around that accent quite a lot of the time, so it was always in the back of my head – but I had [a contact for] the real Herman Knippenberg. The offer was there for me to call him up on the phone, and I was a little bit reluctant to do that – I felt like I wasn’t quite ready, and a bit like an interviewer. And that’s not my profession [laughs].
I wanted to ask the right questions, and that sort of thing, but primarily just wanted to hear Herman speak and get a feel for what he was like as a person. I watched lots of recorded videos of him talking about that period in Thailand, and wanted to make sure I didn’t put the emphasis on mimicking Herman – I’m not an impressionist.
You speak some Dutch in the role too. It’s not the most straightforward language to grasp, is it?
It’s not! It felt a little bit overwhelming. I’ve never spoken a word of Dutch, but was working with a dialect coach: they were having real trouble getting a native speaker, and this coach wasn’t Dutch, just good at accents.
So how was your eventual chat with the real Herman Knippenberg? Daunting?
I called Herman on Skype when I arrived in Bangkok. He’s very forthcoming with information – which I think is a polite way of saying he does talk a lot! He speaks in this forensic way about anything people ask him, you know, so I said to him, “What was it like when you got off the plane in Bangkok?” And he just regaled me with this huge story about what it was like, where he was in his life [at that point] and all that stuff; by listening to all of that, something clicked, and I found myself noticing certain mannerisms in his voice and specific traits.
Then it started to come together, and by the time we started shooting, probably two weeks after that, I felt like I had a good handle on Herman as a person and a voice. This is true for any character – once you’ve got their voice, many other things start to fall into place.
Working in Bangkok must have been bloody hard: when it rains, it rains and the humidity is a killer.
I’d never been to East Asia before, so never experienced heat like when I got off the plane. It must have been nearly 40 degrees, but when I was talking to the Thai film crew they were like, “This is winter!” I think it was the rainy season’s tail end when we got there – still raining, but not as heavy as it had been – and I couldn’t wait for it to rain, purely because of the heat. And then all the actors are in 1970s clothing, unbreathable polyester. My build really isn’t meant for the 1970s…
I remember the first day of shooting: a scene where I’m in the back of the car, stuck in a traffic jam. There was very little acting required: I was in this polyester suit, couldn’t breathe, it was so stifling hot and the car was full of smoke because I had to chainsmoke the whole time. So when I get angry in that scene, I think it’s real. I need to get out this bloody car [laughs]!
Herman is continuously smoking, isn’t he. I’m guessing you don’t smoke that severely in real life?
No – before then, I think on a good day I’d smoke maybe five cigarettes. And then we started that job, and of course cigarettes are so cheap over there! And at that time I did quite enjoy smoking… but nowhere near as much as that.
On a bad day, if we were shooting, I’d be smoking between 30 and 40 cigarettes. That took its toll. When I got home I felt pretty ill – and then I stopped soon after that.
A curious thing about The Serpent is that Herman is never onscreen with his adversary, the Serpent himself – Charles Sobhraj, played by Tahar Rahim. This is faithful to the actual events, though, correct? Herman and Charles never actually met, but knew of one another’s existence…
I suppose it is a true cat and mouse story, but you never see the cat and mouse together! In this case, there’s always a degree of separation which builds the tension because, as you know, this happened in reality. While Herman and his wife were living in a particular place in Bangkok, unbeknownst to them all of this stuff was happening just around the corner; that was going on for months before the Xerox letter even landed on his desk, before he was even aware that any of this stuff was going on.
In terms of shooting, it was funny – obviously, I would have loved the opportunity to have a big scene near the end where they face off or something, and I think Tahar agrees. But it wouldn’t be true to what happened. We both realised that we’ve got to honour the story – they’re real people and it’s vital we get the facts right.
The Serpent is available on BBC iPlayer now. Info: here
words CARL MARSH photos ROLAND NEVEU
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