EXCLUSIVE: Robert Aramayo, the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power star, curses for a cause that’s close to his heart in filmmaker Kirk Jones’ movie I Swear.
The movie is based on the life of John Davidson, a Scot who was diagnosed with the neurological disorder known as Tourette syndrome, whereby an impulse in his brain makes him say outlandish things. The verbal tics, unless handled, can have a devastating psychological effect. Also, members of the public who aren’t educated on the syndrome can often be dismissive.
The film, playing as a Centerpiece selection at this month’s Toronto Film Festival, is a breakthrough in a sense because it shows how Davidson, with the help of close friends, used his condition as a force for good. He has become an ambassador who has met royalty — the late Queen Elizabeth II gave him an honor — and politicians, although most importantly he has gone around his native Scotland and up and down the British isles talking about Tourette and taking the fear factor out of it.
The film’s works because of Aramayo’s enormously empathetic performance and the tone of the script by Jones (Waking Ned Devine).
The actor says that “everyone’s different and there’s celebration in that.”
I Swear, produced by Georgia Bayliff, Jones, Davidson and Piers Tempest, is such an unmissable delight. It also stars Maxine Peake and Peter Mullen as two of the people who helped Davidson when he was at his lowest point.
Aramayo, who plays Elrond in The Rings of Power, knew that the role would be a real challenge but he wasn’t daunted. He knew that “I wanted to pursue as much as I could in terms of authenticity in portraying him. And as soon as I started researching Tourette’s I became really passionate about it… I just thought, what a challenge and what an amazing role.”
Davidson had been involved in two documentaries: John’s Not Mad, made when he was 16, and two decades later Tourette’s: I Swear I Can’t Help It.
Before taking on the role, Aramayo had seen neither documentary. “I wasn’t aware of it at all, so I just got to read the script. I just freed myself from any of that stuff really, and just experienced this man on the page and how I felt about it. So in some ways, I think I was lucky that I hadn’t seen them at a time when I wasn’t quite John,” the actor explains.
Well, how did he set about building his portrait of Davidson I wondered? “Well, actually being with John and being in Galashiels” (the Scottish town where John resides), surrounded by all “the people that are in John’s life.”
Beyond that, Aramayo worked with Tourette Scotland, “and meeting as many people as I could with Tourette syndrome and then just basically saturating my life with as much information as I possibly could about Tourette’s.”
He also worked with an amazing movement coach. “And one of the first things that we said was: ‘Let’s find John, John the man and who he is and focus all of our attention there, rather than thinking about the sort of elephant in the room of Tourette’s.’ ”
Also, while still in pre-production, a meeting was organized “and everybody in the room had Tourette’s or family members of people who had Tourette’s,” Aramayo said. For many, especially young people, it was the first time they’d ever met anybody with the syndrome, “and they were understanding Tourette’s in a different way that day before we’d even shot anything.”
That meeting helped Aramayo understand the stakes and to realize there was a purpose for making the movie and “the need for more education around this. It’s a call to action to make the film and to get the education out there and bring people to it,” he said.
I was struck by Aramayo’s change in his physicality in order to capture Davidson and it was in a sense second nature done effortlessly, and that’s not easy.
“Some people talk about it akin to a hiccup or things like that were really helpful, I think, to sort of think that something that happens so absent-mindedly, that you have to just get out of the way of it and let it happen to a degree,” he said. “I feel that if I was constantly thinking that if I think about this, if I’m performing tics, then he’s going to feel inauthentic. So I just have to try and get out of the way of it, is how I would describe it.”
It helped that Davidson allowed him valuable access. “I went to work with him, went to dinners with him, and I saw him as much as I possibly could really, which was great.”
Also being on the ground in Galashiels and the surrounding area was invaluable because, as Aramayo puts it, “then you get a real understanding because also literally just being in Galashiels as well, and in the surrounding area, then you get a real feel, I think, for where somebody grew up and what that feels like. And that was equally important to me.”
In fact, all the more so because the film shot in Glasgow and not in Davidson’s hometown, so in a sense the actor transferred his sense of Galashiel’s physical landscape to Glasgow, and constantly was returning to Galashiels for inspiration.
He would go fly-fishing with Davidson and join him on long walks with his dog. “If I close my eyes and I think about John now, I see him walking along the river with his dog,” he said. Such interactions with John proved vital for his research. “He’s just so unbelievably knowledgeable and he’s able to speak both personally about his experience with Tourette’s, but also intellectually about Tourette, but also his life. And he’s just a very articulate man. One of the things that I thought was really important was his sense of humor, because he’s very funny.”
That warmth, empathy really, is vital because it disarms those who seek to mock people who live with Tourette.
“So just being around him, you’re constantly laughing. And so that was one of the things that you’d sort of go home and think, well, there’s something that has to be a part of this. It’s just warmth to him,” says the actor.
That empathy goes to the heart of the movie and for me the film is about more than a guy with that condition. It seems to be much more universal about how we should learn to take people as they are and treat everybody the same as it were.
As Aramayo says, “people can learn by watching this film.”
Improvisation was also key and was built into the process, but always along the structure of what Jones wrote.
It meant that the actor worked closely with the visionary sound designer Simon Hayes (Wicked).
“So he allowed us the freedom to be able to have no overlaps and to have overlaps, which is obviously sometimes a big problem in the filmmaking process, and allowed for a certain spontaneity buoyancy in the making of the film, which I think really helped,” Aramayo said. “It helped the sort of organic-ness of the scenes come together.”
For all that the actor has done in his career, I Swear was “one of the biggest challenges that I’ve ever worked on I think probably the biggest challenge that I’ve ever worked on. I think probably the biggest challenge I’ve ever had was playing him, I really had to take ownership over it and that when i was on set and sort of just say, ‘Right ,okay, this character is mine now, and I’ve got to step into his shoes’.”
One aspect of the production for both Aramayo and those behind the camera was a question of tone, and there were constant conversations about “where we wanted the film to sit, which is a really delicate place,” he said. “We didn’t want to strip it too much into sentimentality, but also, as we said earlier, bring out the warmth and stuff like that. So we were constantly, so that’s what I mean by every day being a different sort of challenge. It just required different things from you all the time.”
And that dedication comes through in his powerful performance.
Look, Aramayo has done plenty of good work such as playing Elrond in The Rings of Power, but this is his breakthrough performance. It pushes him into a different league.
Such praise makes him blush. “I honestly just feel unbelievably privileged to have played John and to have been part of this story,” he says. “It’s the honor of my life to have played him and to have got to know him and his family. And so I just feel really blessed and privileged to have been a part of it, honestly. And I feel unbelievably passionate about it and what it could do and the education and platform it could bring. And I really hope it does.”
We, all of us, I guess, watch these superhero movies, although I often wish I could be spared from having to sit through some of them, but in a way John Davidson has his own sort of superpower. Watching the scenes of him talking to the various groups, that is an art form in itself, talking to people, explaining something that’s so difficult. And to see that happen I think is so important for people to understand that everyone’s different.
“Definitely,” Aramayo says. “And he comes alive in those moments, John, he really does. When you’re spreading that level of education and bringing people to the table, talking about things, and he really, really comes alive. And he does a lot good in that space. We worked a lot on that sequence too with John. He changed a lot throughout the process of prep, all of us talking and what did we feel was important to be included in these sections and stuff like that. John was very passionate about what we were to say and in these moments. And so it was obviously enormously helpful as his involvement across the board.”
Davidson’s was on set, but Aramayo says “he was amazingly respectful of me as an actor, and he gave me my space, but he was on set a lot, and especially in those community days as well. It was just great having him around him to know he was there. Obviously he’s a pal as well, so his support is lovely.”
I ask Aramayo how hungry does this make him for more roles with meat on them?
“I love playing challenging roles. I love challenging myself. I love stepping outside of myself into something very different from me. It’s why I love what I do,” he responds. “And so obviously I don’t think you look at it in that way in terms of size of roles or anything like that, but I love playing things where I can really get my teeth stuck into something and really create a character.”
He’s now engaged in filming the third season of The Rings of Power just outside London, although the first season was shot over a long period during the pandemic in New Zealand.
The shoot will keep him occupied until the end of this year “and then I’ll try and get a job fast,” he says laughing.
At some point he may get back to his home in Brooklyn. He spent four years studying at Juilliard and moved around the city but has now settled in cool Brooklyn.
It was a big deal for him to study in New York. And he pursued it because, he says, he “just wanted to try something different.
“And I got on the plane because, back in those days, you had to audition in person, so it was really scary amount of money at that point in our lives to fly to America and audition. But we did it. And yet I just wanted to do something different really. And I’m so glad I did because it was just a really different type of education, I think. And culturally just expanded me a little bit. I think stepping outside of, for that point, I’d only lived in Hull, so it was like from Hull to New York, and that really changes your viewpoint on the world, but in a good way, I think, because it just stretches you a little bit.”
I ask who his contemporaries were at Juilliard. He smiles and reveals that “Superman was in the year below me,” referring to David Corenswet, the latest actor to squeeze into those silly blue tights.
Aramayo comes from a family that appreciated the arts. His dad, he explains, “makes furniture very well” but the craft hasn’t been inherited. “I’m not sure I can put up shelves,” he jokes.
His mother has done many things but is now “an amazing foster carer.” His sister, Laura, studied at the Oxford School of Drama.
Aramayo is headed to the Toronto Film Festival to launch I Swear and Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 set against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate. He appears in the film alongside Billy Howle, Jeremy Irons, Hiam Abbass and Liam Cunningham.
I Swear director and writer Jones recalls how during filming he had visitors on set and as they were leaving they wanted to congratulate Jones for using an actor who lives with Tourette.
“They sat there for a few hours looking at Rob on and off camera,” he says, and they had assumed Aramayo lived with Tourette syndrome.
Jones says Aramayo impressed him because the actor would often go off and meet people with the syndrome and he would listen to their verbal tics and write them down and might use the tic in the film. Jones explained that Aramayo would always seek permission from those who had uttered the tic.
When Jones showed Aramayo the script, “Rob said to me, ‘You don’t expect me to tic exactly where you’ve written it, do you? Because that’s not Tourette. The whole energy is you don’t know where it’s coming from and you don’t know what someone’s going to say. And I said, let’s improvise those tics and drop them in completely different places. So when you get Rob together with Peter Mullen, and Peter’s a very experienced actor. He loves improvising stuff. But he was even catching Peter out … Rob didn’t even know he was going to say things when he did. I think he got so deep into the character that he was coming out with stuff.“
The post Breaking Baz: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Star Robert Aramayo Curses His Way Through Upcoming TIFF Movie ‘I Swear’ With Aplomb appeared first on Deadline.
