By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Barrett Sweger

Styling by Javon Drake. Grooming by Reiva Cruze at Exclusive Artists using Clé de Peau and Kevin.Murphy.

TOM BATEMAN


In Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, Bouc, the director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits that oversees the famed train of the title, is a middle-aged Belgian man who serves mostly as comic relief due to his incompetence and inability to help the famed detective Hercule Poirot in solving the eponymous crime despite his best efforts. It comes as a surprise, then, to find him played, in the new film adaptation out today, by the tall, agreeably handsome, and very British Tom Bateman, first seen impishly escorting a prostitute through a restaurant in Istanbul. “Obviously I read the book and very quickly realized that it wouldn’t be helpful, because it’s so different from what Agatha Christie wrote,” he laughs of his character’s transformation. “I had to set out on my own and that came from conversations with Ken as to why he wanted to cast me instead of an older person. I thought, ‘Well, if he wants that sort of energy…’”

That “Ken” would be Sir Kenneth Branagh, the film’s director and Poirot, and a friend of Bateman’s since the two performed together onstage in The Winter’s Tale in London in 2015. “Working with Ken again was one of the main reasons,” Bateman admits about signing up for the project. “He asked me to read the script and even before I knew what the character was I thought, ‘Yeah, I want to do this,’ because I love working with him and learning from him. Then as soon as I read the script, I was completely blown away by this new version of it.”

Murder on the Orient Express is one of English literature’s most popular detective novels, and this latest version adds big-budget gloss—Bateman says even the cakes visible in the dining car were baked fresh every morning—and contemporary nuance. An all-star cast, including Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, and Daisy Ridley, all becomes suspect when Edward Ratchett, a coarse American businessman played by Johnny Depp, is found murdered in his compartment after their train comes to a stop in an avalanche. Bateman found himself playing the straight man of sorts opposite all these finely detailed characters, serving as Poirot’s assistant in investigating the suspicious death. “All of the other passengers have a backstory that they’re hiding and Poirot is constantly piecing things together, and my character is neither of those,” he reasons. “I serve as a stand-in for the audience I suppose, reacting as the brilliant scenes unfolded before me.”

All clothing by CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC.

Although Bateman, twenty-eight, has worked regularly over the past few years, mostly on stage and British television shows, 2017 has served as his introduction to American audiences and the international scene, first as Amy Schumer’s love interest in the comedy Snatched back in May and now in Orient Express, which offered him a bracing introduction to grand-scale Hollywood early on. “One of the first scenes to happen with the whole cast together was me delivering the message that the train is stuck in the snow,” Bateman recalls. “It was quite nerve-wracking because I’d just met Johnny Depp and there were some actors there I’ve watched my whole life, but it was such a wonderful atmosphere. There were no egos, there was no sense of hierarchy, it was just one very exciting team all wanting to tell this story together.”

Although nearing a century old, Murder on the Orient Express continues to fascinate readers today, and Bateman argues that it is not just the plot’s many twists and turns, but the story’s blurring of the line between right and wrong that continues to resonate. “It’s like a Shakespeare play, because it’s talking about humanity and also how far off you can stray from the moral compass before you start deviating into evil,” he explains. “These are good people straying almost as far as possible into evil. I think people keep going back to these stories because the world may change around us, but what is going on inside us doesn’t change. It’s not a whodunit, it’s a whydunit. This film looks at a person who has done something bad and then has to pay the consequences and how the world views that.”

Sweater and trousers by Missoni. Turtleneck, worn underneath, by Dior Homme.

In a similar vein, Bateman is currently filming a television miniseries of William Makepeace Thackeray’s oft-adapted Vanity Fair, as Rawdon Crawley to Olivia Cooke’s social-climbing Becky Sharp. The novel’s themes of greed, reputation, and social status are timeless, but the actor relishes the challenge of making a classic character new. “I always go back to the novel instead of other adaptations,” he explains. “Other people have interpreted Rawdon Crawley as a stupid, simple person who gets taken for a ride, but I sympathize with him a lot more. I think he’s actually blinded by love and so desperate to make something work that isn’t working. I suppose it’s why you do the job—there’s nothing interesting in emulating or copying something that someone’s done before.”

Raised with thirteen siblings, including a twin brother, Bateman joined England’s National Youth Theatre at fifteen and went on to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which offered him classical stage training that proved useful when he earned a spot in a professional production of Much Ado About Nothing before graduating. He established himself as an theater talent before television came calling, and says that his early experiences on set served as a crash course into a different way of acting. “When I step into the rehearsal room in theater, I feel like I know what I’m doing, whereas my first time on a film set I was twenty-one,” he laughs. “I didn’t know what a mark was, I didn’t know that you had radio mikes, I was shocked at the amount of people behind the camera. I had to learn on the job really and I’m still learning now.”

Coat by AMI. Sweatshirt by Gucci. Trousers by Ermenegildo Zegna Couture.

As his breakout year rolls on, Bateman says he is anticipating working more in Hollywood, where he still considers himself an “unknown,” even after having filmed a comedy, a mystery, and a thriller recently. “People don’t really pigeonhole me here, so I can audition for parts that I wouldn’t really be considered for back in London,” he says. “In America, it’s something they’re open to and you can play three to four very different characters in a year. I really enjoyed the variety of different roles and different genres.”

Bateman will next be seen in the action thriller Hard Powder opposite Liam Neeson and Emmy Rossum, playing a character he bluntly calls a “psychopath who shoots people in the head.” Performing for television vs. film may seem like a difference of degrees, but Bateman insists that even as prestige series rise to the level of major movies, neither one is necessarily better than the other, but there is still a valuable difference between the two: time. “Vanity Fair will be about six hours of footage that we filmed in pretty much the same amount of time you’d film a movie,” he explains. “That can lend itself quite well to keeping things fresh and immediate. If you’re filming one scene for a whole day, the challenge can be keeping it alive, but it’s also wonderful to have that time to think and really understand a scene. A good story is a good story and a good character is a good character regardless of what form it comes in.”

Murder on the Orient Express is out today.

Sweater by Ermenegildo Zegna. Shirt by Dsquared2.
By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Barrett Sweger

Styling by Javon Drake. Grooming by Reiva Cruze at Exclusive Artists using Clé de Peau and Kevin.Murphy.

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