Change of role cannot hurt John

Press, 28 July 1986, Page 12

Change of role cannot hurt John

By

BART MILLS

John Hurt has suffered enough. The movies defaced him in the “Elephant Man” brainwashed him in "1984,” shaved him bald in “Champions” and imprisoned him forever in Turkey in “Midnight Express.” Now the Englishman Hurt has decided to get back at the world. He said: “It’s oddly depressing to make so many ‘serious’ films. It’s like having to live permanently in some hard, grey town.” Hurt thus leapt at the chance to appear in “Jake Speed,” a low-budget (SUS 3 million) ac-tion-comedy made in Zimbabwe. He plays a Sidney Greenstreetstyle comic villain, a murderous

white slaver “so despicable you’ve got to laugh. He’s vicious, but all his vices are weak ones.” Hurt, aged 46, is concerned about flexing his comic muscles on screen, because whenever he comes to Hollywood, he meets executives "who expect me to be a deeply serious person, with a perpetual frown on my face.” In fact, Hurt is adept at comedy — if you got the joke of his very English Caligula in “I, Claudius,” and his very twee Quentin Crisp in “The Naked Civil Servant” on television. “Comedy is hard work,” he says in his molasses-on-gravel voice. “In drama, if you nearly make

someone cry, you’ll do all right You can’t make a comedy and nearly make someone laugh. ‘Nearly’ isn’t good enough." Ever the trouper, Hurt makes light of the hardships he’s endured for the sake of cinema. In the torture scene in'“1984,” a cageful of ravenous rats was fastened over his head, and audiences everywhere cringed. All he can recall, though, is the rat-fright of his ostensible torturer in the scene, the late Richard Burton. “Oh yes, and the fact that the rats liked to turn and break wind up your hbse.” •■' ■ < —Copyright Los Angeles Times Syndicate.