The A-Team's Sharlto Copley on Budgets, Apartheid and Going Off Script

In doing The A-Team, how much did you guys feel like you had to be faithful to the show, and to what level was there freedom to rewrite things?

For me, it was very simple; I read the script, and I felt that Murdock, as he was written in the script, was not what I would want to play. I would want to play him more like the original Murdock, or like what I remembered, and that's why I shot a series of scenes in my hotel room [as an audition tape]. I called up all the things that could happen to Murdock in a hotel room, I sent it to [director] Joe Carnahan, which was really improvising around a lot of things that Murdock did -- specifically, that he would change his accent, he would do impersonations, I even did some "invisible dog" in there. And I said "Joe, if I can do it this way, if you're open to improvising, this is how I see him, which is closer to the original guy, I would love to do this role." And thankfully, Joe bought into that and supported it and said, "This is exactly what I'm looking for." And so that's really what my focus was, to make a character that, as a fan, I would like.

It seems like there's always this terror with big-budget movies, especially the ones that want to be franchises, that they don't want to take risks or try something unusual. But then when they do, sometimes you luck out and get something like Johnny Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, which Disney originally hated. In a lot of ways, you steal a lot of the movie by bringing some fresh energy to it, so it's interesting to hear that they let you go off-script.

It does make sense, what you're saying, that people would have those kinds of concerns. And that did occur every now and then in our process. But I really stuck to my guns, and thankfully Joe did as well. A lot of what had been done, and I can only really speak for my character, I felt like what they were doing was to try to make him a kind of "cool crazy," where it wouldn't be as much. "No, that's too over the top, let's take it down."

For example, it wasn't written that he would change his accent all the time. And I was like, "I don't know, man..." When I watch the show now, I get that you can't recreate that exact style, but Murdock doesn't date as much for me as the other guys. I still find Dwight's character entertaining to watch, even now. Because there was kind of an entertaining caricature-ness that is difficult [to pull off]; if you have the wrong actor doing that, I can understand the concern, with today's audience and that kind of realistic filmmaking and all that. But it does depend on who the actor is and the place that you're coming at that character from, and if you analyze it too much, you lose the energy and the entertainment value.

So what's next for you?

Uh, I can't say! [Laughs] But it's awesome.

[Author's note: A few weeks after our conversation, it was announced that Copley would reunite with his District 9 director Neill Blomkamp for a "sci-fi/allegory" called Elysium; Matt Damon is currently in talks to co-star with Copley.]

Pages: 1 2