In Skylines, directed by Liam O’Donnell genre veteran Alexander Siddig plays General Radford who persuades Lindsey Morgan’s Rose to join a dangerous mission on an alien world. A few weeks after chatting with the director, Paul Simpson caught up with Siddig to discuss character genesis, and the all-important “ship shake”.

NB There are spoilers in this piece for Skylines and Siddig’s role.

 

The last time our paths crossed was on Primeval…

Oh my goodness, yes that’s a blast from the past.

I was reading through our interview and you said that you based your character on Tony Blair.

(Laughs) Yes

So was there any specific inspiration for the General in Skylines?

No, it was much more archetypal.

There’s a lovely bit when Rose agrees to come on board the mission, and the director just holds on you for a second… and you give half a smile.

Yes… Gotcha! Got her.

Was that scripted?

I don’t think it was; maybe it was. It’s very difficult to recall.

Liam is such a free director, he lets you just go. He winds you up and pushes you in the right direction. I think a lot of it could have been me and a lot of it could have been him. He gives crazy directions, he’s really abstract like ‘Just be more delicious’!

Be a tree!

Yes, which is fantastic for an actor because we go, “OK, I get it, I think I’m on board.”

I think the big hurdle of acting in this sort of movie is to understand what the genre is, where you are, what’s going on. That takes a lot of guts because you don’t want to go up to a director and say “Look, this is a mashup isn’t it? This is a genre piece, this is glam rock. This is not Radiohead, it’s Muse.” You never know, the director might be really offended because maybe he wrote Radiohead and he didn’t realise it was Muse!

I just pitched it like this is more Rocky Horror Picture Show. Liam is like Neil Marshall, at his best with low budgets, and I was just really happy to see that the movie turned out to be exactly that. The lighting and the thrash metal soundtrack and the performances are sincere but of a kind that is really – very weirdly – British for an American director. It’s a very British style dark black comedy.

What was your reaction when you read the script? You’ve done a lot of this stuff and to a certain degree, Star Trek goes down this route as well.

In a weird way Star Trek is more cerebral. This is more early Doctor Who.

I immediately got that – it is a romp, but what is at the heart of it was really what the characters were up to, what the relationships were like. There were a couple of really lovely relationships there, particularly the ones with Lindsey Morgan and Jonathan Howard [as Leon]. That’s just a really touching, lovely old-school movie relationship and I thought that was really cool. I twigged that and I thought, “Alright, I can work with this because now there’s some humanity in here.”

I certainly didn’t arrive as the humanity. I came to play a character for whom the means justify the ends and that’s so now! We’ve got these autocratic leaders around the world who just don’t care what happens as long as they get to where they need to be and they don’t care how many people go down.

I’m in America and we have lost, I think, probably in excess of 150,000 more people than we needed to in this country right now, had things been done properly in the first place.

Had things been done, period.

Things been done, period, yes exactly. So this guy will eat his grandmother if he can get an extra buck at the end of the day. I hope it’s subtle enough that you don’t realise that when you’re watching it until there’s a moment, which you pointed out, where Rose agrees to go with them, and he smiles inwardly to himself. Now, is that a benign smile? He’s a lot more sophisticated than your Trumps and your Johnsons.

I was wondering if you were going to say John Bolton was a guide for him – this war hawk who tried to hide it occasionally, which is what your general is doing.

Yes, Bolton’s a very good example. I think, you’ve got those guys, Bolton and Steve Bannon: these are the snakes. Bolton has in a way been outsnaked by everybody and he now looks like a girl scout leader. Bannon is still operating behind the curtain and won’t stop for a long time.

When I was speaking to Liam I pointed out he’d got the benefit that on one set he’d got you and on the other set he had Rhona, both of you with experience with this genre. He said, ‘Oh it was great because I’d just say to Sid, “Right how do we do this bit?” And you were teaching them “the rock”.

Oh yes, ship shakes! Seven years on Star Trek, you learn how to ship shake because they don’t like to do that in the special effects. They like to tweak it a bit but you’ve got to shake in your chair and everyone’s got to shake at the same time, in the same way (laughs). So I gave everybody a basic 101 lesson on ship shaking.

Back on the Defiant after all these years.

Exactly. Rhona was fantastic, it was really lovely to see her. And of course James Cosmo is always such a pleasure to see that man. He’s such a gentle giant and he just sits there; we had coffees in the square in Vilnius in Lithuania and he’s talking about his kids.

How did you get involved with this?

Well, I never know how it works, I’m not sure if my agent says, ‘Sid needs a job, who’s got one?’ Or whether people go ‘Well, we really like Alexander Siddig to play this role’.

Either which way up it went, I got a call from my agent saying ‘Do you want to do this job? This series called Skylines.’

I hadn’t seen any [of the earlier films] so I said just send me the script. I really enjoy doing this sort of movie, this sort of job because I did, as you said Primeval, I did Atlantis, I did Gotham recently.

This is family entertainment and I spend a lot of time with my head up my you-know-what, doing very heavy political deep stuff. I’m lucky to be able to do the totally two different diametrically-opposed genres. Every now and then I like to let my hair down and go, ‘Right, this is for the kids and this is for everyone else who just wants to turn their brain off and let someone else do all the hard work’. Then I’ll go back and hopefully get to make a deep thoughtful movie like Syriana.

If I can straddle those two careers, I’m a very happy person.

Were there particular challenges with playing the General? Was there an element of having to keep him reined in to an extent, certainly in those early scenes?

Yes and also I had to trust Liam completely. I love to go over the top if I can and if I can, I’ll use ten words where five would do, five gestures where one will do. He was like, ‘Dude, rein it in’ (laughs) so OK, I’d rein it in.

The temptation is always there to give away too much and even at the end when it’s all gone Pete Tong, it’s all unravelled, smaller is better, less is more, because the rest of the stuff is kicking off everywhere. People are smashed against walls, there’s all kinds of martial arts fights happening left right and centre and you just want someone who is just pure evil…

Who says, “Just get the fuck out of my way!”

(Laughs) Yes, exactly. That was one of those lines that luckily I was allowed to make up and it stayed in.

One of the things that came across from talking to Liam was that he was very happy to work this way. It didn’t even feel like he was indulging the actors, it was that he was involving the actors in the process.

Yes.

Were there other bits that went that way?

I think the whole movie is a mismatch of improvised and strict script, and it really was up to Liam to keep a handle on it. Lindsey Morgan had a huge amount of work to do, so for her sake we had to stick to the words, stick to the plot as much as possible. When people are just making shit up left right and centre and you’re the person carrying the movie, you can get lost and go, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is not in the script’. So, for her sake we kept a lid on it, and my goodness she did a good job. She actually pulls off this element of charm and steel at the same time, I think she’s a special talent actually.

And in a weird way, this could hopefully be one of the movies for her that people go ‘Wow, you started in Skylines and now look, you’re this huge action star’ because if anybody can cross over, she can. She’s built like an Olympic athlete and she’s got the charm of some sort of 50s American screen actress. Not many people can pull it off. Lindsey Morgan does it and I was like,  “Wow, game on: we can make a movie here.” If she didn’t do it on that day one, it would have been an “Oh God, alright… maybe this’ll be shown in China.”

I think this film is like Alien – remember how Alien starts off really slow and you’re wondering what the hell is going on here? Is this 2001: A Space Odyssey? And then, it just kicks off.

Have you been able to work during lockdown?

No, I haven’t, I’m kind of going a little bit nuts. I just don’t get a chance to do any of that stuff. I’ve done a little bit of audio work. We produce so I’m busy but unpaid – we’re developing books, developing scripts. We’ve got three different shows with three different companies right now, God knows if they’ll ever be made but at least I’ve got the time to actually do the leg work.

And I convene a kind of club [SidCity] for about four hours a couple of times a week and that keeps me busy. It’s like a social club where anyone who feels like turning up can turn up.

Skylines is screening in select cinemas across the UK and available digitally on demand from today