The difference could be in Robert Downey Jr’s shoes. The last time I was on a Sherlock Holmes set, though the costumes were wonderful enough, there was a feeling that the clothes were a little less than bespoke. If you’ve ever lined up with extras to be kitted out for a period movie, you’ll know that, unless you’re the star, the clothes being handed to you are likely to fit just approximately, and if you’re lucky enough to be a featured player only then do you get that little extra attention.
On the first Sherlock Holmes movie, the shoes seemed scuffed and battered, which suited the way Guy Ritchie was bringing Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective back to life. Rather than the airy, debonair Victorian gent popularised by the pipe-puffing Basil Rathbone, this new Sherlock Holmes was to be a rumpled debauched genius with an inquiring mind that solved the most exquisite mysteries and sought excitement in the most dangerous places. Gin joints and opium dens. Illegal bare-knuckle boxing clubs. This was not exactly a black-tie-and-tails world.
On set, though, in London’s East End, Downey is wearing a discreet but distinctly killer pair of black leather boots. These boots suggest several things. The first thing is perhaps a slightly bigger budget. After all, the first Holmes movie, made for $90m, was a gamble for the suits at Warner Bros. Though Ritchie, Downey and co-star Jude Law, as the long-suffering, patrician Dr John Watson, all hoped the story would extend to a trilogy, only the box office gods would say whether that might happen. They were in luck. The film made over $200m in the US and £25m in the UK.
The next thing the shoes seem to say is that Holmes has pleased his taskmasters. Downey and his wife Susan, also a producer on the film, seem to be slightly more in charge this time round, poring over a shooting schedule that contains convenient rest days to allow the star to attend to 2011 Golden Globes show. But more than anything else the shoes send a signal that Holmes has evolved. Sherlock Holmes 2 – the day Empire visits the set, it has yet to acquire its grandiose subtitle A Game Of Shadows (numerals are so pre-Pirates) – will not be resting on its laurels.
“Last time,” Downey muses, “we were, I think, treated very kindly, considering that the movie had enough really good, bright, sweet parts, and it kinda held up. However, it wasn’t exactly the most innovative or clever act three of any movie. But we’re all confident that, this time, for the bones of the story, we couldn’t work it out any better than we have.”
Today, what we’re seeing is something called The Shush Club. Or it may be something called a shush club, since nobody seems to know. Because the first thing you need to know is that nobody talks about shush clubs. A sort of late-19th century private drinking establishment, it is a rather louche place that attracts decadent dandies. Holmes, therefore, makes a beeline for it, convincing John Watson, who has been engaged to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) for over a year now, that this would be the perfect place for his bachelor party, whether he wants one or not.
Wilton’s Music Hall, down Graces Alley, Shadwell, has been transformed for the night, which is to say not actually very much, since it is, by day, a period throwback anyway. But things have been added. A bar has been installed, and a stage for acrobats to perform on. But these physical flourishes aren’t what’s grabbing everyone’s attention. So that Ritchie and his crew can block out a fight scene, a gymnast in full Russian assassin costume runs, jumps and cannonballs high above our heads. It seems ridiculously dangerous. Until someone produces an iPhone and shows us the gymnast’s showreel, in which the performer gets dressed and undressed while performing cartwheels.
This scene will be notable for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is that Holmes’s plans for a nightcap will be somewhat interrupted. But this is also the first time the detective will meet one of the film’s three new guest stars. The first, Stephen Fry, who plays Holmes’s brother Mycroft, has popped off to film his terribly clever TV show QI. But upstairs, in a makeshift dressing room is Noomi Rapace, better known as The Girl who, with her trademark dragon tattoo, played with fire and kicked the hornet’s nest in the hit Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s crime novels. Rapace, now back to her normal bodyweight, has few of Lisbeth Salander’s angles and a surprising number of curves. Which is just as well, since she’s playing a traveller who seduces Holmes into her world.
“Her name is Asima,” she reveals. “She’s a traveller, she’s a survivor – she’s used to taking care of her self – and she’s used to taking care of herself. I think that Holmes and she have some kind of connection. They’re both... on the go. Restless. Looking. Heading somewhere. Trying to find some deeper purpose in life. I think they have some similarities. He’s almost like a gypsy himself. He doesnt have a proper home, really. He’s always travelling, he’s always looking for new ideas, he’s really passionate about people, about the human psyche, about science.”
So how did Rapace end up here? “I met Robert and Susan when I was in LA at the end of August,” she recalls. “I was there for four or five days. So many meetings! I only sat down with them for about half an hour, but we had a really good chat. And not about this movie – we talked about acting, about dreams, about the future, the kind of movies we wanted to make. And I felt really from the first second that I liked the energy around them, I liked the way they think and the way they want to work. And Robert, he’s really something – he’s really passionate about his work. They called my agent a couple of weeks later and wanted me to go to London and meet Guy Ritchie. So I did, and a week later they said they wanted me to do this part. So it happened very quickly.”
Indeed, more quickly than you might imagine. “I only had about three weeks to prepare,” she smiles, “but I knew what to expect because one of the producers had told me about the character. And he told me about this gypsy woman – what kind of background she had – and for me that was amazing. Because I had a Spanish father, and he had gypsy roots, and I have always wanted to look into that side of me. So it felt like a gift. My father was a flamenco singer, and the flamenco tradition is very close to the gypsies in Spain. And from that moment I started to think about this woman.”
This might come as a shock to fans of The Girl movies, but Rapace, in the flesh, is far from the character she played in those movies. She smiles quite a lot, and doesn’t quite fit the standard Scandinavian archetype. “My mom is Swedish,” she says, “but I lived in Iceland for a couple of years, and I think the way I am, and my temperament and my energy is pretty far away from the Swedish people. I didn’t know my father. In fact, I only met him a couple of times – he’s dead now – but I always wanted to dig into that part of me. Although I didn’t really have much time, because everything happened so quickly. So I’m having to do all that research, all that kind of stuff now, finding out as much as I can about gypsies, about their culture, and how they lived 100 years ago.” She laughs. “I guess I’m not so typical Swedish!”
PART II
“Dandelion and burdock?!” asks Robert Downey Jr.
“We tried that yesterday,” says Jude Law. “It’s kind of, er, medicinal.”
“No,” says Downey. “It’s like drinking a flower.”
“Yeah,” says Law, “but it’s got that really medicinal aroma, the kind where you think, ‘This has gotta be good for you.’”
We’re now in an Airmaster, which is like a Winnebago but made of metal and cooler looking. This in itself shows some progress, since the last time Empire met these two it was in a steel container, the kind you see on the news with the remains of dead immigrants inside them. Lunch is about to be served, by an American chap named James.
“Oh my God,” says Downey, “this looks fucking righteous. What’s it called today, James?”
“Shit...” says James. “I don’t know.”
“Simple English country food,” roars Law. “English COUNTRY food!
“English food,” agrees Guy Ritchie.
“How apt,” notes Downey.
As the chaps dig into the parsnip purée and horse radish, it seems a good time to mention that Sherlock Holmes – the movie – seems a little more confident second time around. There’s a reeeeeeallly long pause. Then Guy speaks.
“Yeah,” he says. Then he laughs. “But I think we’re more confident than we were on the last one too. I certainly feel that. I feel certainly more confident that these two can act, which I was fucking dubious about the first time round!” The others laugh. “Errrrrrrm..... I think we hit the ground running on this one. But we knew what we were doing. Well, I feel like that.”
Law agrees. “Although we immediately got on, there was still a certain amount of dancing around, working each other out. This time, it was, ‘Great, let’s go.’”
“We had a brutal schedule last time,” adds Downey, “but it was so much fun, and we were so kind of wondering if we could catch this thing on fire and make it work. And pretty early on we figured we were onto something. That it was an ass-kicker. And this time around, we only really started the action last week, which had me a little grumpy for a minute.
“It’s been completely the other way round this time,” says Law. “The first time, we got into the action from the get-go, and at the end we were in New York shooting all the interiors. This time we were in Baker Street from day one.”
“We shot a lot of waffle straight away,” says Guy. “There was a lot of wafflage.”
So what’s the starting point, is there a case to be solved?
“We’re joining dots,” says Law. “Well, he’s joining dots, and I’m getting worried that everyone’s not taking him seriously.”
“Everybody knows Moriarty’s in this one, don’t they?” interrupts Guy.
Yes. It’s even on the Imdb.
“And everybody knows that John and Mary are off doing their thing,” says Downey. “Watson doesn’t live there right now. So the first thing we wanna talk about is this: what is the state of Baker Street next time Watson sees it? What happens there without his presence? And it’s pretty off the wall. But sometimes someone just looks like they’re a little batty. But in fact they’re really just concentrated on something that no one else quite believes yet, but they’re certain of it.”
So what brings them back together again?
Law: “I was going to say...”
Downey: “A bachelor party!”
Law: “Well, a self-made bachelor party, But it was interesting to come up with an idea that would force Watson out of retirement believably. It couldn’t just be for the craic. It had to be for a real reason.”
Downey: “Even last time there was a certain amount of Holmes really never telling Watson what he was up to and taking the piss out of him all the time. So this time around they kind of meet more on equal footing. Watson doesn’t have to come, he winds up being embroiled in it, but his status is really different this time. He’s honestly more central in the story, because you won’t feel the emotional impact of what the stakes are in this unless you’re seeing it through the eyes of the storyteller. So that was the biggest shift this time.”
Well, perhaps not quite. The biggest shift is arguably the introduction of Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Glimpsed briefly in the final moments of the first Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty’s identity gripped the internet for months.
“There were rumours about it even while we making the first one,” remembers Law.
“And they went on and on and on,” says Guy.
“At some point,” says Law, “someone stopped me in the street and told me a woman was gonna play him! I can’t remember who they said it was...”
“Well,” sniffs Downey, “you know what castings are like.”
Was it distracting?
“I dunno,” shrugs Guy. “It probably was. We all liked Brad Pitt and we all like Daniel Day-Lewis. They were spoken about at some point, I know.”
And Christoph Waltz, who was whisked off sushi by Ritchie after winning the Best Actor award, for his performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, at the 2010 Empire awards?
“I was slightly nervous about using Christoph,” says Guy, “because Tarantino used him so well previously. I didn’t want to be the director who fucked it all up. I mean, that’s responsibility of the director. If the film’s fucking shit, then who do you look to? You don’t look to the producers, you don’t really look to the actors, you have to look at the geezer who’s supposedly stringing the thing together. But, in the end, we liked the idea of going with Jared Harris, because we felt it was alternative, and it wasn’t a cliché.”
“And it definitely didn’t feel like event casting,” says Downey. “And the funny thing is, we got a better response from that than we would’ve gotten from any other choice we might’ve made. Anyway, the cool thing is, he came in and definitely started asking all the right questions. And he really demonstrated quickly that he was happy to come in and have things be very, very uncertain and watch them start to percolate and develop in front of his eyes. I mean, we don’t prefer to work that way. But we don’t just go out there and start shooting just ’cos we have a schedule either.”
Does Moriarty have a backstory?
“If you do a Marvel movie,” says Downey, speaking as someone who often does, “and somebody steps in and goes, ‘I have Captain America’s shield,’ and you don’t pay it off in the next one, the fans take that super-seriously. I think with the last movie we threw up a lot of pixie dust and some cool ideas, so now it’s going to go wherever it’s going. It’s not like we’re strapping a gun to Moriarty’s arm, or having him walk around with a remote control thing, setting bombs off. As a matter of fact, just like having Holmes not wear a deerstalker hat or smoke a long, swirly pipe, it’s almost like those are the two thing he shouldn’t do. But he’s up to some nasty stuff.”
“He’s in the foreground of the story,” says Law, “but not necessarily in our faces.”
“To me,” decides Downey, “what solved the bad-guy plot was casting Jared Harris. Because we realised, when we were developing this film, that once you say, ‘What’s the bad-guy plot?’ 430 times, you’re like, I don’t wanna make this movie any more. But once Jared was on board, it solved the issue. In the same way that casting solved the issue of, ‘Well, who’s my co-star in this movie – how’s this thing gonna work?’ Because once Jude and I met, everything took care of itself. And I think...
“…Once you’ve met Jared,” says Guy, “you’ll also think he’s evil.”
PART III
Somewhat fittingly, I don’t get to meet Jared Harris in the flesh; instead, he calls from his home in Los Angeles. The son of hellraiser Richard, Harris, 50, has had an interesting career, popping up in films as diverse as Todd Solondz’s Happiness, M Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water and Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, in which he played a very convincing Andy Warhol.
“The balloon got floated on this role fairly early on,” he says, “because there were two possible ways they were gonna do it. One was the very highly publicised Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Penn, Big Movie Star route. But the other option was just to get a character actor to do it, and there was an internal debate going on about which way to go. So the job was on the table, off the table, on the table, off the table for quite a long time and I stopped paying attention to it, to be honest. And one of the camps, I don’t know whose it was, wanted an actor who wouldn’t bring a lot of baggage with them, so that the audience would experience the character on its own terms. And that argument won out a week before they started, so I jumped on a plane and went to see Guy.”
Was it dispiriting to see the part offered and withdrawn? “No,” he insists. “They’re all fantastic actors, so, from an acting point of view – how wonderful to be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys? But the reality is that those guys are in a completely different league, in terms of their international celebrity. And that’s a whole different set of arithmetic, one that has nothing to do with acting at all. So when the conversation is being had on those terms, you can’t whack your head against the wall about it because you’re a non-starter on that level. You can’t worry about it. because if that is the bottom line, move on and look for something else. There’s nothing you can do.”
In truth, Harris is a much better bet than any of those actors, since Moriarty – only glimpsed twice in the novels, is not a star role – he’s more of a presence. “He’s the ringmaster,” says Harris. “He casts his shadow over the whole film. He’s the motivator of the plot. He has the plan that Holmes is trying to foil. I did a little bit of research into Moraiarty and I discovered that he was created by Arthur Conan Doyle as a match and a foil for Sherlock Holmes, so in that sense he was the first arch-villain, arch-nemesis, whatever you want to call them. And since then, those characters have become grander and grander and grander in terms of their ambition, so you can’t have a plot where he wants to take over the postal service. It’s got to be bigger than that.”
So he was created as kind of an “evil mirror” to Sherlock Holmes? Harris pauses, and thinks carefully. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that people,” he says, “who don’t really give a fuck what anybody else thinks, and don’t care what the consequences of their actions are as long as they’re OK, and don’t believe in any kind of divine retribution at all, they’re at license to do absolutely anything they want. And that makes them very dangerous. And people who operate within a moral compass, like Sherlock Holmes, their hands are tied. So I’d so say Moriarty is very dangerous.”
And as for any more detail, Harris clams up. He has, he says, been watching a lot of “bad-guy” movies, and reached some interesting conclusions. “I realised that once you know what your bad guy’s up to, you kind of lose interest in him. So to maintain the audience’s interest in the character you have to keep the audience guessing, With Alan Rickman in Die Hard, you only find out right at the very end that he’s trying to rob the place. And in Mission Impossible 3, you never find out what the Rabbit’s Foot is!”
“So…” he laughs, possibly twirling an invisible moustache.
“The longer you keep them guessing…”
“...The better off you are.”
* A version of this article appeared in the October 2011 issue of Empire magazine…
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