The Goode news

Matthew Goode springs to the defense of the new Brideshead Revisited like a superhero-in-the-making.

The question is inevitable, and Matthew Goode knows it; if you star in a new film version of Brideshead Revisited, which was adapted as a 1981 miniseries that helped launch the career of Jeremy Irons and fostered a brief vogue for teddy bears and elegant flannel slacks, people are going to ask…

“…What were you thinking?” chimes in Goode with a warm grin and a laugh. “It’s one of those things; obviously you’re never going to better [the miniseries]. It’s definitive and has every great actor in it,” he says of the epic 11-hour adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about a
man’s passionate relationships with the members of an aristocratic Catholic family.

“When I was up for the role [of Charles Ryder, played by Irons in the television version], I spoke to my mom,” he recalls. “The first thing I said was, ‘Did you know they’re going to do a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited?’ And she was like, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake! It’s been done already, and it’s been done perfect.’ ‘And they’re thinking of using me as Charles.’ ‘Oh, well that’s brilliant, darling.’” Goode smiles at the memory. He smiles a lot, and it’s a shining, room-filling smile.

He has what used to be described as movie-star good looks, with piercing eyes and features that just escape being too delicate. That face might be most familiar from Match Point, in which he plays an aristocrat taken in by the social-climbing Jonathan Rhys Meyers. When we point out that now the roles are reversed and he is playing the middle-class interloper among the aristocracy, he’s amused. “It’s true. There is that. I hadn’t really thought of that.”

But Goode also has displayed a surprising range, adopting a buzz cut and a very convincing Midwestern accent to play the menacing-but-charismatic villain opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 2007’s The Lookout.

It sounds like an incredibly shrewd career move, varying upper-crusty Englishman roles with edgier fare, but Goode explains his career trajectory in far more pragmatic terms: “I’ve just been incredibly lucky. You take the jobs you get offered.”

If director Julian Jarrold needs someone to defend his new version of Brideshead, he could do a lot worse than Goode, whose enthusiasm for the project is obvious. Long after we’ve moved past the question of remaking something beloved by many, Goode circles back to the topic, as if he’s defending a friend unjustly wronged.

“People are going to get really pissed off at this adaptation, I’m sure, in the same way that the original adaptation is so beloved,” he notes. “I think that comes from the fact that it seems like nonfiction for some reason. Everyone has this extraordinary connection with it.”

Most surprising in Goode’s understanding of the story is his read on the relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flight. Though the novel is discreet, it clearly implies that they are lovers, and Charles often refers to Sebastian as the great love of his life. You might expect the new version to embrace a 21st-Century sensibility and treat Charles as a bisexual, who loves both Sebastian and Julia. But the script—and Goode—doesn’t see it that way.

Goode is insistent that Charles loves Sebastian, but not in a sexual way. “It’s like he has the greatest summer he’s ever had in his whole life, and this amazing platonic connection. Obviously it’s one-way; he’s receiving attention that… not that he really doesn’t want—it’s more complicated than that.”

But in the end, Goode sees Charles as a straight man, a change that is sure to outrage purists and devotees of the cult of Sebastian, the character most people remember most vividly from the novel (and the miniseries).

Goode is going to have to get used to fanatical purists challenging the correctness of an adaptation, since his next role is in Watchmen, the highly anticipated screen version of a work that is often called “the Citizen Kane of graphic novels.” Goode has the choice role of Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias. If he thinks the literary crowd is tough, wait until he gets a load of the graphic-novel fanboys.

Brideshead Revisited opens Friday.

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