Matthew Goode on A Single Man, Accents, and Spray-Tanning with Colin Firth

When you say, "Colin had to work extremely hard," can you elaborate a little more on observing that? How did he change and/or evolve?

I wasn't on set every day, but I'd go back to the hotel and see Colin in the evenings and he'd be exhausted. Obviously I saw some of the other scenes he shot. But look: I've loved Colin for a long time -- ever since Another Country -- and I think he's an extraordinarily subtle actor. And I don't think he's had an opportunity to shine in a film, or been central to a film, for quite a long time. And when I read this script, I thought, "Surely, he's just going to knock this out of the park." It's extremely intelligent, which Colin is in real life. We really got on, too. We met on the plane, and the minute we got off the plane we had to go to the hotel and have a spray-tan together in Colin's bathroom. So I'm standing in only my pants, standing there for 45 minutes, drinking a couple of vodkas with Col. I can't think of a better way to get to know an actor -- it was embarrassing at the beginning, and by the end we really didn't notice.

Also, he obviously didn't have to do an accent. Which I know he can do, for sure; I've heard him do it when he's telling jokes, and he's spot-on American. But I think that allowed him to get even closer. An accent can hinder you when you're trying to get closer to the emotion of the part. When he picks up the phone and is told about Jim's death, that's one of the finest pieces of acting I've seen on film in a really long time. Super subtlety, and there's not a moment that goes past that you're not 100 percent convinced that this guy's world has been ripped apart.

You've played several Americans yourself over the years. How has that accent affected your relationship with those characters?

Well, there's a different rhythm. That's what you're always worried about when you're playing someone American against someone who's English: You're worried you're going to lapse into the same rhythm and not be able to keep your accent going. That's one of the nice thing that's happened to me so far in my career; you rehearse a lot more how you'll say [lines]. It doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes there are moments when you'll stop thinking about the accent, and you'll just do it and something new comes out of it. Or you're really listening and responding to the other person because they changed the way they say it. You automatically go into saying yours differently to keep up the equation or the balance of it all. I didn't really get a coach again, except for a little bit on my own back in London. I'd done it in The Lookout, but what was good about The Lookout for me was that I had long scenes. There was one particular scene that was just me talking for 12 minutes nonstop. When you have large chunks of text, that really helps keep you in the accent. Whereas when you have one line here or one line there, it makes me nervous. But as I say, it all worked out quite nicely here.

With the gay-marriage battles going on around the country, to what degree does A Single Man feel like a piece of political activism?

It definitely wasn't intended to be. Tom read the book when he was younger, and it really struck home with him. Then he met Isherwood and [the author's longtime partner] Don Bachardy. He was looking to do his first feature about 20 years after he read the book, and he came across A Single Man again and thought, "Oh, well, that would be a really beautiful film to make." If you ask him, he'll say no -- it's not because it's gay. It's because of the tones and because of his relationship with Richard; there's a mirroring of his own life, and he had a story to tell. He just wanted audiences to watch this film about love and loss. It's certainly not a political movie about how hard it still is to be gay. The Prop 8 thing was an irony that just came up: We'd come a long way, but we haven't come far enough.

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