Tom Bateman Plays Both Sides of the Camera

When Tom Bateman got word that the writer-director Nia DaCosta wanted him to play George in her film adaptation of Hedda Gabler, he thought, Man, that is not the coolest character to play. He’s right. As Bateman notes, not only is George something of a buffoon, he also represents the marital cage that Ibsen’s firebrand lead has built for herself. But he read on and realized that this take—simply titled Hedda—was different, moved up from 1890s Norway to 1950s England, and with a Black protagonist (played by Tessa Thompson) dealing with a former sapphic flame. Bateman had played that past love before, in one of his first professional gigs back home in Oxford, but he had no cause for jealousy here: His George would be sexier and more brooding, less stuffy and Why would she ever end up with him?

Meeting DaCosta at the legendary Koko nightclub in Camden clinched the deal for him. He’d watched all her movies, re-read the script and properly over-prepared, only to find out all she wanted to know was, Did we get on? They did, speaking for nearly two hours (in a private room; no screaming Ibsen in the middle of a crowd), and the role was his. Having come up through the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, pretty much immediately booking a role in a BBC drama and joining Kenneth Branagh’s company, Bateman might have had reason to be skeptical of the update.

“I think changing things just for change’s sake is stupid,” he says. “We’re living in this world where people want to reinvent stuff, reboot, redo, remake, and part of me thinks, Why? But Nia told me she’d been studying the text for nearly ten years, and it became apparent that she was passionate about how every little change would affect the story. And changing the lover’s gender, I thought, Okay, that’s a swing.”

Bateman’s been taking some big swings lately, and not too far from the Troubled Marriage playground. Last year saw the release of the neo-noir film Magpie, his first produced screenplay. The taut, ninety-minute thriller follows a writer smitten with a glamorous actress in a movie that his child-actor daughter has booked, to his wife’s intensely raised eyebrow. Noticing how careless he’s gotten in his pining, a psychosexual triangle develops between the married couple and the star—one which Bateman’s script and Sam Yates’s direction cleverly triangulates between reality, fantasy, and an elusive cyberspace of risky texts and imagined conversations. Bateman fleshed the story out of an idea pitched to him by the actor Daisy Ridley, who plays the dismayed partner. She’s also Bateman’s actual wife.

As he puts it, she came to him with “the nugget of a dynamic,” initially about a woman who invades a family unit, with the idea that Ridley would play the interloper. In the three weeks it took Bateman to write the first draft—during which time he’d wake up at 4 AM and write for about six hours before showing Ridley his work—he was pulled toward the woman left at home, and “of the strength she has to have, if it’s continually put under pressure.“ He restructured the narrative around her, now with Ridley in mind to play the wife, scaling back the character’s dialogue so she could carry the narrative’s cryptic journey purely through her performance.

“It’s funny because people ask if this is the kind of thing I like to write, and it’s not, really; it’s the first I’ve made to order, and happens to be the first one to be made,” Bateman says. “Then they ask if it’s based on us, which is maybe good since I’ve definitely taken a lot of aspects of other relationships that I know. There’s a lot in Magpie that I’ve taken verbatim from things I’ve seen that have made me go, Fuck, that’s your life? That’s how you treat each other? I’m putting that in there.”

But the themes of Magpie fit into what Bateman says are the questions he’s typically drawn to: Who we are, who we think we are, and what we’re hiding. All of these play out, in some way, across the slate of films he has in the pipeline, which include a Gothic period horror, a Western, a rom-com, a “teeny-tiny little movie set in Canada, about our fear of the unknown in people,” and a seventeenth-century English story, again written for Ridley. Whichever way those genre experiments wind up evoking these existential queries, they’ve found an ideal first outlet in Magpie, which is an unusually assured first screenplay, almost impressionistic in how inherent visuals are to its story and pacing. It holds its secrets close to its chest (inspired, he says, by classic Hitchcock and early Nolan) without ever cheating its audience with fakeouts to trick the audience or that would cheapen its rewatch value. While Bateman loves the idea of playing with the audience or pushing the trustworthiness of a protagonist, this last bit was important to him. He wants people to know something is wrong during Magpie, while delaying the details of exactly what.

“You know when you’re swimming in the sea and your mind plays tricks and tells you there’s a shark under there?” he asks, elucidating his ambition. “You don’t know, and you can’t ever really know. I want that feeling of knowing there’s something under there, but there probably isn’t, but there might be.”

Unbeknownst to him, something was lurking underneath the surface of The Love Hypothesis, an upcoming rom-com in which he stars opposite Lili Reinhart, when he signed on. Bateman says he knew, in passing, that it was based on a novel by a writer who’d cut her teeth on Star Wars fan fiction, particularly keen on the relationship between Ridley’s character Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren. But to him, it was a chance to play the Mr. Darcy type to whose internal turmoil he’s drawn. Some miscommunication ensued, and it wasn’t until the film was announced that Bateman realized the script had originally been a fantasy about their off-canon romance. He chuckles about the coincidence and shrugs off any possible ick. That he and his wife would be tangled up in unexpected ways is par for the course in this industry.

“I think it’s just an understanding that we’re all connected, and of this sort of collective consciousness of the world,” he says. “We both are aware that in our lives, professionally and personally, the lines blur. Of course, because we met on a movie [Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express in 2017]. We both love film and theater and books; it’s all we do and all we talk about. Food and film is our happy place, so it’s going to blur.”

Bateman is enjoying leaning into his keyboard creativity, even as he jokes that he’d just gotten over his imposter syndrome as an actor and must now deal with that in this new discipline. It’s a good place to take the creativity he says “sits and burns” inside him when he’s between gigs. With acting, he says, “You kind of need to wait for permission to do the thing you love doing, for a project to come up and a director and producers to want you to come on board. The joy of writing is you can do anything as long as you’ve got the time and the willpower.” And while he’s developing projects that will see him write-direct (a good outlet for the completeness of his storytelling vision) and write-star, taking on the triple task of acting, writing, and directing would deprive Bateman of one of his favorite aspects of the process: feedback.

“I think I’d be happy to write and direct, and then just act,” he explains. “I love notes, I love being directed. My least favorite thing is when I play a scene and the director goes, ‘Great, let’s go again.’ Even if the note is wrong, I want to try something else. I want to be be fucked around with. That’s the jet fuel that keeps me going. If I wrote, directed, and starred, there wouldn’t be anyone to check me.”

Hedda is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Magpie is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.