Peter Egan--Perfecting the ‘Perfect Spy’ : Actor Excels in the Art of ‘Doing Nothing’ as a Le Carre Character in PBS Series

I once asked Alfred Hitchcock what he thought of a certain actor, a man he had used in one of his films. In his splendid oracular way Hitchcock said, “He does nothing well,” and waited for me to be satisfactorily startled, as I was indeed.

The actor, Hitchcock explained, was wonderful in reaction. He listened and you could see what he was feeling; he was a fine actor when the lines were his but also when they belonged to someone else. Leave it to Hitchcock to pay a compliment that did not initially sound like one.

I thought of Hitchcock and of John Vernon (from his “Topaz”), who was the actor he was so mischievously praising, as I watched Peter Egan in the John le Carre espionage drama, “A Perfect Spy.” The seven-part series, on “Masterpiece Theatre,” begins its run tonight at 9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28.

Egan is Magnus Pym, the perfect spy, and seldom has an actor in a major part been asked to be so eloquently reactive, so acted-upon by the forces that made him a spy.

‘A Hard Thing to Act’

“It was a hard thing to act,” Egan said with nice Anglo-Irish understatement when he was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. “He was such a receiver. You had to hold on to your nerve and do as little as possible.” Had , in Hitchcockian terms, to hope to do nothing well.

The intricate time frame of Le Carre’s novel, essentially a long flashback to changing points in the past, has been simplified to straight chronology so that the full-grown Magnus does not appear until the third episode. It was still a year’s work for Egan, in Vienna, on the Czech border, in Switzerland, Wales, the English Midlands and on Corfu.

Le Carre had casting approval on the two major roles: Ray McAnally, who plays Magnus’ con-man father, Rick (and who played the cardinal in “The Mission”), and on Egan as the son. Egan was particularly flattered because “A Perfect Spy” is quite autobiographical and Egan is to some extent an alter ego of Le Carre himself.

Rick Pym, the McAnally character, is based on Le Carre’s own father, Ronald, who like Pym once stood for Parliament and who also did time in prison for his financial misdeeds.

Over dinner before the shooting began, Egan says, Le Carre confessed that he had invented George Smiley, who runs through “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and several other Le Carre novels, as a kind of surrogate father.

“He told me he actually wrote ‘Tinker, Tailor’ all the way through without Smiley but realized it didn’t work. He tore it up and went back to the beginning and wrote it all again, putting Smiley in.”

Le Carre was astonished, Egan says, by how much McAnally’s performance reminded him of his father, in voice, bearing and even mannerisms. It is in fact one of those dazzling and charismatic performances that is irresistible--the charmer you hate not to love, even when the character is defrauding the weak and crippled and ruining lives right and left.

It is also a hard performance to play against quietly, thus Egan’s need for nerves of steel. Yet the mixture of love and hate, the emotional emptiness that the father’s betrayals created in the son, are all somehow revealed on Egan’s boyishly handsome face and in his expressive eyes.

If Le Carre found a surrogate father in Smiley, Pym found his in the spy Axel, who is the final influence in the creation of the perfect spy.

Egan himself was, as the English say, a school-leaver at 15, with no idea at all of what he wanted to do for a living and no gift he could see except a small talent for drawing. The drawing led him into an amateur theater company where he helped to design and make sets.

When he was still only 16 the company pressed him into service as an actor, playing Teddy Brewster, the mad brother in “Arsenic and Old Lace” who imagines he is Teddy Roosevelt and bounds up the stairs yelling, “Charge!”

“It gave me a complete direction,” Egan says. He won a scholarship to RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)in 1964 and after two years there spent three years working for Sir John Clements at the Chichester Theater Festival.

He went on to Stratford, where he did a variety of supporting parts, like Osric in “Hamlet” and Richmond in “Richard III.” He had a West End success in a revival of “Journey’s End.” In 1974 he won a most-promising-newcomer award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “The Hireling,” the filming of the L. P. Hartley novel, but then did no film for six years. Most of his career for a decade has been in television.

He played Oscar Wilde in “Lillie” and the title role in “Prince Regent” on BBC. With his youthful face, he tended to play foppish roles and was most recently seen on television here as Henry Simcox in the John Mortimer series, “Paradise Postponed.”

Until he became Magnus Pym, his choicest part and most conspicuous part to date, he had been one of those actors, male and female, who seem to abound in England and who work constantly, happily and very expertly, and who may or may not inherit that one incandescent role that leads to wider fame. It may be that even this role is too overshadowed by McAnally’s larger-than-life dimensions to make it the break-out for him.

Yet it is a remarkable and subtle characterization of the spy as actor who finally has no “real” relationships in his life, or in Pym’s case, only one.

Preserving an Image

“His marriages are emotionally unnecessary,” Egan says. In the novel there is a major and serious affair, one that had to be dropped from the series for reasons of time. There are lesser couplings as well as the marriages but, in Egan’s view, Pym “needs them just to keep the image going. Pym is so much like an actor. Actors always say, ‘One day I’m going to tell the real truth.’ His friend Jack Brotherhood is the image of what Pym would like to be. But his life is all images.

“It’s odd that he can be truest in a clandestine way,” to a spy who can be seen as Pym’s only close friend but also as a father figure who is not a lot more reliable than Rick Pym. “It’s a significant part of Pym’s character. It makes him human. We all suffer from having to be 100% of who we are all the time.”

Pym is certainly not the traditional spy of fiction. He is neither heroically noble nor meanly villainous but only curiously uncentered and adrift, both sympathetic and unsympathetic, somehow suggesting a man who can only reach out between the invisible bars of his private captivity and who has decided at an early age that even this is hopeless and that there is only loneliness or a dangerous and intermittent friendship.

Le Carre’s original title for “A Perfect Spy,” Egan says, was “The Love Thief.”

“I thought the thief was Rick, the father, but it was Magnus.” It is a revealing perception about the story. If a thief is someone who takes and does not reimburse, Magnus can be said to qualify as a thief, if perhaps as a thief who has also been a victim. The sadness lies in a certain kind of remorse that recognizes the theft and the pain but for reasons buried deep in childhood can do nothing about it. Faced with a character like Magnus to portray, the actor must rely not simply on words but on a power of implication. How loud are the silences?

“A Perfect Spy” is, as Egan says, a very emotional piece of writing, more so than Le Carre’s earlier works, which are notable for the muting of most of the major emotions. But this one, with its resonances from Le Carre’s own life, can be read as an expunging of the early anguish and disappointments that led to the creation of a surrogate father in George Smiley.

Then again, that is heavy stuff to load on a television series and it may be, Egan thinks, more demanding on its audiences than “Tinker, Tailor, Sailor, Spy.” The making of a perfect spy is laid out in incidents from infancy forward, and while they are clear they are not necessarily explicit. The clues are there, but they take a little deciphering.

“It isn’t bubble-gum time,” Egan said.

That’s fine with him. He takes his acting seriously whether the material is light or heavy, the characters obvious or as shaded with ambiguity as Magnus Pym. Great acting, he thinks, holds “emotional danger, verbal dexterity and energy.”

There were those in the Pym part, which is why it was one that actors would pay to do. Egan, fortunately, didn’t have to.