Much of The A-Team felt formulaic, even by explosion-fest standards, but native South African and relative newcomer Copley walks away with huge chunks of the film with his manic energy (and, as he reveals to Movieline, his permission to ad lib wildly) in his role as "Mad Dog" Murdock, a role originated on TV by actor Dwight Schultz.
I was looking at your background and hadn't realized that you began your career as a TV producer in South Africa.
Yeah, actually one of the founders of a TV channel in South Africa, early in my career.
I'm just wondering what the culture shock must have been like for you, going from being very bottom-line oriented and worrying about what everything's costing to going on the set of what must have been a mammoth production, and not having money be your problem.
[Laughs] It's very true. The first time that happened was with District 9; that was actually harder, because I was originally meant to be a producer [on that film]. I produced Alive in Joburg for Neill [Blomkamp], the short that it was based on, so throughout District 9 I was watching decisions that were happening and trying to organize things in my head, and looking at the schedule and thinking, OK, this isn't going to happen. [Laughs] I worked quite hard during that process to shed that side, the instinctive worrying, and by the time A-Team came along, I came in so late into the process, I had really accepted, OK, you're just going to look after your character and let everybody else do everything else. And by and large, I was able to do that. I was able to silence that other side of myself.
Did you go into the business knowing that you wanted to be an actor, or is this all sort of a fluke?
Basically, I started being interested in film when I was 9 years old, and I started making little movies, like so many people do. From the age of 10 to about 19, I must have made two or three hundred little shorts, little comedy sketches, little action pieces; at one point, quite a whole, long movie. And in the whole process, I acted a lot. When I was in school, I used to write plays, act in plays... I had kind of an entertainment sensibility. But by the time I was out of school, I just felt like acting was too much of a luxury ticket. I enjoyed being more in control of what I was doing in the creative process, and I dropped the idea. So coming back to it, doing District 9 reminded me of what I used to do as a kid. It was pretty awesome in that way. I never totally left it; I would often come to work and be a different character -- much like Dwight Schultz had done in the original A-Team -- so it felt very natural to me, although from the outside, it looked like, "Wow, this guy is suddenly acting."
Do you find the American accent a challenge at all? I always assume that English-speakers in other countries grow up watching our TV shows, so they all have an ear for it.
Yeah, and that was kind of a Dwight Schultz thing growing up -- as a kid, I would do 18, 19 different nationality accents. I remember I would do a sketch as the United Nations, with different people discussing a certain issue, just to practice and have characters. I don't do that as well anymore because I'm out of practice, but I've always been fascinated by dialects and phonetics and what people think they're hearing. There is actually a science behind it, where a sound is technically accurate, and that's pretty fascinating as well.
There's that whole thing about the French "r" and the Spanish "rr" that your mouth can't form unless you were speaking the language before puberty.
Yeah! I mean, there's different theories about whether or not certain people can make certain sounds, and there seem to be people that have a genetic ability to do it, more than others. But fundamentally important for me, in creating a character, is figuring out what kind of dialect they're going to use.
We're all still getting to know you on screen, and both films you've been in have been genre films with action elements. Is this the kind of film that interests you most, or is this just one of the many arrows in your quiver?
What I like doing is any role that I feel like I can connect with an audience and that will be entertaining to watch. That's really the number-one thing. I'm not as much a genre guy; I watch a range of different movies. I really enjoy comedy, but at the same time, I'm not averse to doing something that's really dramatic. I guess most of my life I gravitated more toward comedic stuff, but that's really how I make my decisions: whether or not I can make this character work for an audience.
Most of the films that Americans see about South Africa tend to be either dour or triumphant stories, almost always about apartheid. What are some of the things we don't know about the country that aren't in Hollywood movies?
That's a good question. I don't know that I could answer that easily, since different people have different levels of awareness about South Africa, I've noticed. For instance, after the World Cup now, it's more sort of in the Western consciousness. And during the time of the election of Mandela, people had a sense what was going on. But there were things that surprised people; for example, I grew up at the tail end of apartheid -- I was born in 1973 -- and most of those laws were pretty much in effect. I went to private school with black guys, Indian guys, we were like a miniature United Nations, and I grew up in that environment. It was bizarre, as I got older, to realize what the country was that I was living in. I grew up very sheltered from the political situation as a young kid, with all these kids of different cultures and races.
So a lot of people were surprised by that. They really thought it was a clearly segregated thing, but even in that situation, there were [black] kids whose parents had money, and that was a kind of dividing... tactic, if you will. If you had the money, there were British schools that would take kids of different races. It was a more complex situation than people were aware of.
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.]