Actor Richard Armitage is perhaps best known for his performance as Thorin in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, as well as roles in the British period drama series North & South and the first Captain America film. But in recent years, he has also gained a reputation as a novelist to watch. In The Cut (Pegasus Crime, Sept.), Armitage's second novel after the 2023 thriller Geneva, traces a decades-old murder's impact on a small English village, similar to the one he grew up in. Armitage spoke with PW about his approach to writing and acting.
A few years ago, Audible approached you about writing an audiobook. Had you thought about writing a novel before then?
No. I enjoyed the free flow of writing whenever I was preparing to play a character. My favorite bit was I'd do a load of research, and then I'd just write their backstory, so where they went to school, how they met their partner, their life story in biography form. So, it wasn't short, probably about 10,000 words, but it wasn't a structured story, and it was triggered by someone else's structured story. So when they came to ask me, I knew that I could form those ideas, but I didn't know if I could structure it well enough to be a dynamic storyline.
Was there something about becoming a novelist that surprised you?
That, like my acting work, you're never really finished. It was similar to acting. You never sort of sit back, dust yourself off, and go, well, that's it. It's all finished. It's an ongoing process.
Which authors would you say have influenced you the most?
In terms of books that really engage me, I've always loved Robert Harris. I love the way that he can create a fictional reality based on true historical facts. Also, Charlie Brooker, who writes [the TV series] Black Mirror. So perhaps I'm inspired by their kind of writing. And those great science fiction authors, like Isaac Asimov as well. I'm a bit of a science fiction nerd.
Could you share a little bit about the inspiration for your debut novel, Geneva?
During the pandemic, I'd seen lots and lots of people in a panic and a spin, not knowing what to do, but a researcher, Sarah Gilbert [who helped develop the Covid vaccine], seemed very grounded as I'd watched a few interviews with her talking about vaccination, and I started to think, how interesting would it be to take a character like her that's so proficient, and then throw her off balance by making her doubt her own sanity, having her be gaslit in a way that is truly terrifying.
What gave you the idea for this novel?
When I was swirling the idea around in my imagination in the early stages, my dad hadn't been very well, so I was spending a lot more time at home. And, to ease my mind, I would do quite a lot of walking in the village, and I'd walk the path I used to take on the way to school and look at how my primary school had changed. And when I walked to the cemetery with my dad, there was a man across from us laying flowers, and he came over to me and he said, "I'm so sorry you had such a hard time at school. You've done really well for yourself, and I'm sorry about what happened." I didn't remember him, and it just gave me the idea of wondering—the little traumas that happen in childhood, how do they manifest as an adult? And then I remembered the double-murder that had happened close enough for us to feel it as kids. It had an impact on our village, and so I thought, I'll gently use some of that idea along with the story of a boy that comes back to his village to elicit a confession for a murder where the wrong person went to prison.
Could you talk a bit about how you prepared to play Thorin as the character was ostensibly laid out for you by Tolkien?
With Thorin, like every role, I always say to myself, no stone unturned, so you have to look for something that you might have missed, or something that might just trigger an idea. I tried to find every reference to Thorin in Tolkien. Originally, the films would have featured the backstory of how he became the king, and the battles that he fought to get there. But I was very much guided by Peter's vision of a sort of dwarf-warrior who was pulling his people back to their homeland. And I also looked at a lot of Tolkien's biography, because there was obviously something in him that was triggering this writing—as we know, the author is somewhere in their own books.
When I was down in New Zealand, I had a spare room in the house I was staying, and I put up all the maps on the walls, and all the photos of the characters, and just enlarged extracts of quotes of Thorin's that would sort of resonate with me, so I could walk into this room and just stand there looking around at all of this information and inspiration, and then feel the character again. It was quite an extended process, working with really uncomfortable prosthetics and costumes over a very long period of time, but I knew that I'd never get another role quite like this one, and so, I thought, don't waste a second of it.
