The Crownstar once dreamed of being a mime.
Onscreen, he speaks mostly with his face.
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Oh!, she said.
Its not an uncommon reaction, says Menzies, sitting in a conference room in Netflixs London office.
He assumes (correctly) that my friend knows him as the sadistic Black Jack Randall onOutlander.
Thus the familiarity of his face and the simultaneous revulsion he isthatguy, the horrible Black Jack.
But Menziess position as oh,thatguy!
Theres a heat to him, Menzies tells me.
Theres a pent-up energy.
An alpha maleness that has had to be diverted in different directions.
Hes more choleric [than the rest of the royal family].
More inclined to bite.
Which I find endearing.
Menziess own face is memorable, interesting, distinctive.
He is handsome in a way that suggests both ruggedness and elusiveness.
They must be smile lines its hard to imagine how else theyd form.
Yet in his acting roles, Menzies often deploys his face more severely.
Even in a comedy, he is almost always the straight man.
The moment is hilarious, and Menzies plays it with complete tragic gravity.
It occurs to me that the lines on his cheeks could also be the result of grimacing.
Depending on the role, he and his deep-set cheek lines twist the character toward charismatic-compelling or charismatic-repulsive.
Menzies instead makes the characters sternness gruffly appealing, the charisma of a modern, funny Mr. Rochester.
(Ill take it, he says, amused, when I offer this theory of his performances.)
When Menzies was young, he was mostly a tennis player.
He tried to attend the famous Lecoq mime school in Paris but couldnt scrape together the money to go.
But at RADA, he says, I got the [acting] bug.
I am slightly stunned and more than a little sad that Menziess mime career never materialized.
Especially onscreen, less words are often really helpful, he explains.
You dont need all of that.
If Im able to get rid of some of that, then I can land the punch better sometimes.
Many scenes in this episode involve lengthy nonverbal sequences.
It makes me a bit embarrassed.
Yes, you hope that lightning will come down and invigorate the monster, as it were.
But theres no substitute for working hard.
He loves to go to the theater.
As Menzies has gotten older, he says, he has become more melancholy.
I find life hard, he claims sincerely, with what I suspect is a fair amount of understatement.
Bruising, curious, disappointing at times, amazing at times.
You have more life experience, and you get more beaten up along the way.
I find it a bumpy ride.
I know lots of other people find it funner than I do.
But in a way, this has been useful for his profession.
The emotions a performer needs to access are all closer to the surface.
