Blake Ritson - Girolamo Riario

Having started at the National Theatre at the age of 13, Blake Ritson followed the well-trodden path to the theatres of Cambridge, where he read Medieval Italian. That might come in handy now as he stars in the hugely anticipated Da Vinci’s Demons, playing the ruthlessly scheming nephew of Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century Florence. He talks about his time at Cambridge, his exciting new show and a renaissance in television.

Firstly, why Medieval Italian?

Good question. I actually went to Cambridge to study English but there were a lot of dull English professors so I specialised in Medieval Italian to escape them. The Medieval Italian supervisor was legendary for his supervisions consisting of drinking cognac and smoking cigars. An Oxbridge cliché confirmed, I know.

But weren’t you really interested in pursuing acting?

I think so, yes. I’d started acting when I was really young - I was doing plays at the National Theatre when I was about 13, which I got through pure luck. My brother was already at Cambridge, so I would go up as often as I could and saw what immense fun he was having. It has an amazing theatre scene: every college has their own theatre and they’re incredibly well funded so you have about twenty theatres doing a play every term and so twenty productions to choose from. I you’re really ingenious you can get your friend to write or direct as well.

And you’ve produced and directed with your brother [Dylan Ritson] as well, right? Does that make you something of a polymath?

I suppose so, although I do think they’re all intricately related. I would be amazed if any actor with a decent ear for dialogue couldn’t also write good dialogue. I think all of them are also incredibly helpful in providing a much more rounded understanding of the industry. I mean, I’ve got absolutely no question that I’ve learnt things as an actor by directing or being in an edit suite and understanding what’s useful and what’s counterproductive on screen.

Also, an awful lot of your time as an actor is spent sat in your Winnebago or on the set sidelines, waiting to be called, and you could sit there reading a newspaper or immersed in your own creative project. It feels like you’re not wasting the opportunity to get on with something else.

In terms of acting, though, what’s been your most enjoyable role to date?

I think my favourite character is always the last character I’ve played, just because you’re so involved with the character that you become almost infatuated with them. The last character I played is one called Count Riario in this new American series called Da Vinci’s Demons. He’s this remorseless, fearless soldier of God. He’s also unbelievably ruthless and cruel, but a great character to play. He’s also so different from me; it’s kind of wonderful exploring things I’d never do in real life.

Da Vinci’s Demons sounds exciting. What can you tell us about it?

I’m really excited about it. I was out in LA earlier this year to do interviews and I was able to watch the first two episodes. It’s pretty cool! It’s better than what I expected it to be. It was difficult when filming to get a handle on what it’d ultimately look like, though everyone knew that because of David Goyer [the director, who also co-wrote The Batman Trilogy with Christopher Nolan] that it was going to have this really deep, rich mythological element and the characters would have this iconic feel. Because it’s set in the Renaissance Florence, you assume it could become a far more conventional costume drama, but the way it’s ended up is far more historical fantasy. It’s Gotham City more than Renaissance Florence.

And your character is the Pope’s Nephew?

I’m literally the Pope’s bastard. The character is plotting all the time - it’s not that he’s a raving sadist, but cruelty is a part of his methodology. He believes himself to be driven by this pure belief in the divine, so he will do anything. He’s almost like a religiously motivated terrorist. There’s literally nothing he won’t do. And he is a master strategist - he plays this game called ‘Go’, which is purportedly the most complicated game ever created. A deterministic strategy game like chess played in this huge board. It’s a very good metaphor of how he’s ten moves ahead.

Do you get a sense that it’s going to be successful?

All you can go on at the moment is gut instinct, but there is a real buzz about it in LA at the moment. People have responded very strongly to it - there are an awful lot of costume dramas that end up in the same melting pot, but this one feels very auteurist. The American network has really let David Goyer see his vision through: cast it, crew it, edit it, shoot it, and he directs the first two episodes.

Before I decided to do it, I met David for lunch, and I just got such an extraordinary vibe from him. He let me into some of the twists that happens in this series - and later series if we’re lucky enough to get there - and I thought that I’d never met a director or writer with such an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the characters. He knows every character’s past, present and future and what they’ll be doing in series 4, 5, 6. But he keeps things from you, he won’t tell you everything.

But have you signed a contract for any future series?

Yes - six years. I’ts not confirmed it’ll go on that long but it’s likely. All I can say is that, from what I’ve seen of it, I’d be amazed if people didn’t like it. Scripts for a second series have already been commissioned so David keeps emailing me with exciting possible developments. He said that what might be really fun with my character and Leonardo is to, at some point, flip them so that he genuinely does become something of a good guy and Leonardo goes to the dark sides. There’s a real Star Wars mythology you could map over this.

It really seems like series television is in its prime at the moment.

Precisely, and the guys behind Da Vinci’s Demons are the same guys behind Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos - some of the biggest shows ever which have revolutionised modern TV. I think people will look back on this period as the renaissance of television. For example, the production values of something like Game of Thrones are so superior to what you get in a lot of films. There used to be kind of snobbery about films being superior art form but I certainly don’t think that’s true anymore.

Would you want to stay in television then? Do you have any career aspirations?

To be honest, it’s all about the parts, and the director and the writer. I don’t feel one is a superior art form in any way. In ten or fifteen years from now, I only really want to be respected enough to be getting offered parts I enjoy doing.

I don’t really have any particular aspirations to be ‘known’ - I think that’d actually be a real pain in the arse. At the moment, I get recognised occasionally and I don’t mind it, but I have friends who are very well known and now can’t take the tube because it becomes such a painful process. I think it’s a compromise: I’m aware that if you going in for films you have to be known to a certain level for people to come and see you in the cinema, but I think that celebrity per se is not something that I aspire to at all. I guess it’s all part of the package though.

Autumn saw Blake Ritson playing the infatuated pastor Mr Elton in the BBC adaptation of Emma, but now he is swapping his dog-collar for a rather less holy Rope at the Almeida theatre, he tells Matthew Amer.

“He’s the perfect society host,” Ritson cheerfully tells me, describing his character in Patrick Hamilton’s 1928 thriller, Rope. “He makes the perfect cocktails, he has this wonderful Georgian townhouse, he’s very urbane, he’s ferociously witty…” So far Wyndham Brandon doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the Ritson sitting before me, drinking a mint tea and sporting a newly shorn, side-parted, Brylcreemed, authentic 1928 haircut. “But he’s also a psychopath.” Ah.

What a psychopath he is. Brandon is one of two student killers in Hamilton’s macabre tale who, rather than simply disposing of the body of their victim, choose instead to secrete him in a chest and invite his friends and family around for a party. The murder is motiveless and the party a sinister entertainment to see how far they can push their luck and morality.

“There was just every reason to get involved,” Ritson, who is more often seen on screens than on the stage, says of the Almeida theatre production. “I haven’t done theatre for quite a long time and I’ve always said to myself I’d love everything to be right; the play, the part, the theatre, the director. It was with this. It was impossible to say no because everything was so terrific and exciting.”

High on that list of requirements was Roger Michell, a director of whom Ritson is a big fan, both of his theatre and his screen work. The director, he says, whose films include Notting Hill and Venus, and who last worked in London on The Female Of The Species, creates an open, non-judgemental rehearsal room, while still being attentive and detailed. “It’s just very gently being coerced into a terrifically truthful show,” Ritson explains, inadvertently conjuring an image of Rope as a frightened puppy being tempted away from the safety of his basket with a dog biscuit.


Much preparation, Ritson says, has been spent on ensuring the show is well rooted in its late 1920s time period. There was never any question of updating the piece for a modern audience, quite the opposite, in fact, as many of Hamilton’s later additions have been culled for this production. As Ritson says, an updating would hardly be necessary: “The idea of two murderers killing a body, putting it in a chest and inviting the father over; I wouldn’t say it was 1920s specific.”

This research has found Ritson educating himself in Nietzsche, the philosopher who inspires Brandon’s malicious act, while the whole cast has been delving into the social and economic context of the time. “I’ve even been doing a little bit of Charlestoning,” Ritson laughs, “which is yet to be improved. I doubt the audience will be able to gaze into our eyes and see exactly what was playing in the music hall in 1928, but it has been very useful. It adds to the depth and power of the piece.”

Rope sees him jumping forward a century from the series in which he was last seen, Emma, set in the early 1800s. It was a job he describes as “magnificent. I was slightly in mourning when it ended.”

“It was one of those jobs where you drift seamlessly between work and play,” he says of the costume drama that also starred Romola Garai, Johnny Lee Miller and Michael Gambon, who, Ritson exclaims, “is the best raconteur I have ever met. The only danger is he starts a story and it balloons magnificently.”

Having also appeared in Mansfield Park in 2007, Ritson knows his Jane Austen and the passion in his voice exposes a soft spot for the Regency period. “All the social etiquette and the tiny interactions between people; it’s wonderfully nuanced. The period for clothes for me, it’s so wonderfully sculptural. They’re beautiful,” he says. Many of the viewers who saw him playing Mr Elton and Edmund Bertram, I am reliably informed, wholeheartedly agree.



Though he has also played Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, there is far more to Ritson’s repertoire than flowing tailcoats and top hats. His recent roles have taken him from Austen to Auschwitz-set drama God On Trial, Guy Ritchie film RocknRolla and action movie Dead Man Running opposite hip hop artist 50 Cent. It is probably as eclectic a mix of projects as you are likely to see. “It keeps me animated and excited and inventive,” he states very simply.

Ritson was a youngster at Reading’s Dolphin School when he first experienced life on the London stage, playing the roles of Paul Etheridge (White Chameleon), Fleance (Macbeth) and Augustus (Arcadia) at the National Theatre in productions directed by Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn. Rather than head to drama school after completing his A-levels, he studied Medieval Italian – “well, Dante primarily” – and English at Cambridge, but returned to acting as a profession.

Having built a career on stage and in front of the cameras, five years ago he chose to move behind the scenes, working with his brother to write and direct short films. They have not done too badly either, recently collecting the Best International Short award at the St Louis International Film Festival.

On the success of their first three short films – the fourth, a comedy starring a host of British talent, is currently having music added to it – they are writing and directing two feature films and have been commissioned to create a TV series. “It’s all good and busy,” Ritson understates.

It is also one of the reasons that Ritson has been away from the theatre for so long; committing to long stage runs draws him away from this familial project. “When we’ve got quite a lot of momentum behind our features it seems a shame to put them on hiatus,” he quite sensibly reasons.


This may mean, with the wealth of projects in the pipeline, that Rope may be Ritson’s first and last stage outing for some time, although with commercial producer Sonia Friedman attached to the production, he confirms “there’s certainly one eye on a West End transfer”.

Though it would be an exciting proposition, and would follow the success of Duet For One, which made the same move from the Almeida theatre to the West End earlier this year, a transfer of Rope would be slightly more complex as the production sees the Islington venue’s auditorium reconstructed to present the performance in the round. Finding a suitable West End venue to rearrange in such a fashion might be trickier than keeping a body concealed in a chest during a cocktail party, though the new set up, Ritson says, makes it feel “very real and fresh and truthful”.

Mint tea finished, Ritson heads back to the Almeida theatre’s rehearsal space where, day by day, new members of the cast are having their hair cut for the 20s setting and new costumes are arriving. “It’s very slow, but as it creeps into tech week it all begins to take shape.”

It is only on the day before the first show, he tells me, that the cast will be able to use real cigarettes rather than the imaginary fags they have been smoking throughout rehearsals, which is a shame, as: “It’s always so much easier to get rid of imaginary ash than real ash, they last forever the imaginary cigarettes and they just disappear when you don’t need them.” They don’t, however, bring the same ominous glow to a dimly lit auditorium.

Having entertained me perfectly over a drink, the banjolele-playing – “It’s a hybrid instrument between a ukulele and a banjo; teamed up with the gazoo it’s a winning combination” – witty, friendly, engaging Ritson leaves me thinking him a thoroughly nice chap. But then, that is exactly what the psychopathic Brandon would want me to think too.

#ma perchè mai un prof di musica così