Richard Armitage: ‘Sometimes I think they want me for my brain – but no, they want my shirt off’

If anyone had asked Richard Armitage 10 years ago whether he’d ever thought about writing a book, he’d have laughed. “I’d have said, ‘I’m not clever enough’,” he tells me. “I always feel a bit of an underdog when it comes to intellectual pursuits. I didn’t graduate from Oxbridge, like so many of my peers at Lamda [the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art].”

Yet here he is, the author of an atmospheric, icily tense audio-thriller, Geneva, about a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist, Sarah, who is slowly losing her memory. The story, released earlier this month on the online audiobook and podcast service Audible as an “Audible Original”, takes in dementia, Big Pharma and biotech; Armitage narrates alongside Nicola Walker, his voice as soothing as melted chocolate.

“Audible asked me if I wanted to write something,” he explains. “I’ve narrated quite a few books for them and I think they checked the algorithm and realised I score quite highly with crime thrillers. They’ve seen I have an audience.”

Armitage, 51, says this in a self-effacing way. He’s been a fixture on the small screen since 2004, when he emerged as the brooding mill-owner John Thornton in the BBC’s adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, delighting a generation of (let’s face it) female viewers. He has worked with exhausting regularity since then, notching up credits as the imperious dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit film trilogy; inscrutable MI5 spy Lucas in the TV series Spooks; the deliciously villainous Sir Guy of Gisborne in the BBC’s Robin Hood; and the special-forces hard-man John Porter in Chris Ryan’s Strike Back. Most recently, he starred in two Netflix adaptations of the Harlan Coben novels The Stranger and Stay Close.

He is a consistently reliable screen presence: he often plays macho heroes with an interesting, sensitive side and was particularly excellent on stage as tormented visionary Astrov in Ian Rickson’s 2020 West End revival of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. But with grey hair now at his temples, Armitage is wary of taking all this for granted. Hence the branching into other mediums: he’s developing a TV show (which he can’t yet discuss) and, of course, there’s the new book.

“I don’t want to retire when I get to 60, but I don’t necessarily want to still be an actor-for-hire, either,” he says. “It’s quite a whimsical position to be in: one day you’re flavour of the month; next day, no one wants you.

“You can’t force your own relevance. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been relevant, I’ve just been lucky. I’m easy to work with, but I don’t think I’ve ever been hot.”

Some might disagree. Still, I don’t think I have ever met an actor who has such a complicated relationship with his own career. Armitage is a curious mix of self-deprecating, pragmatic and quietly anguished. He approaches each role with the dedication of a scholar, penning preparatory biographies for his character and immersing himself in research (he famously endured waterboarding to prepare for his spy character undergoing the torture in Spooks).

Yet he worries he is sometimes cast because of his looks. “A couple of times I’ve been hired for something and I go, ‘Oh, I thought I was here because of my brain, but actually it’s because you want totty on screen. I’ve done all this character analysis and you just want me to take my shirt off.’ People talk about the power of the male gaze. But the female gaze is just as interesting to talk about. It’s a marketing tool like any other.”

One wonders whether Armitage is actually perfectly happy taking his shirt off. He says he told himself that when he got to 50, from that point onwards, he’d keep his clothes on – but he’s at it again in Damage, Netflix’s forthcoming remake of the 1992 steamy thriller featuring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, in which he stars opposite Peaky Blinders’s Charlie Murphy.

Still, he says that it took him a while to understand why directors would cast him in a particular type of role. “For long stretches of my career, I would take what I was offered. Yet I wouldn’t understand why I was being asked to inflict violence all the time. Why am I firing guns and throwing punches? Why am I not playing gentle, fragile, broken little people?

“But then you watch yourself and you think, ‘Well, I’m pretty tall. And I seem to have this hyper-masculine energy that I was unaware of.’ Then I realised that was quite useful, because maybe the hard shell of a man often harbours a more fragile person that I could occasionally reveal. Because the world doesn’t really allow men to be fragile.”

Armitage grew up in a working-class family in Leicester and only attended the performing arts boarding school Pattison College thanks to a local-authority grant. He worked first in musical theatre, including stints in 42nd Street and Cats, before taking a three-year course at Lamda then joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has always worked hard, an ethic he puts down to both an insecurity about money (linked to his roots) and a gnawing anxiety about his ability.

He admits that the character of Daniel in Geneva – Sarah’s husband and also a scientist – contains a fair bit of himself. “Daniel’s wife has all the glory. He has to accept that he’s pretty average. I relate to that. I know there are people out there who are far better at all this than I am, and I feel my only forte is that I have the discipline to put my head down and work. I’ve always felt like this – in dance, music and acting. I’ve never had that natural, God-given genius, for instance, but when I was younger I knew I could become a fairly average cello player if I worked hard enough.”

Armitage came out at the age of 19, although it’s not something he’s talked about much. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not very interesting. I suppose if I were to stop being hired because of it, that would be something else. But we’ve moved on since those days, haven’t we?”

He genially bats away further questions about his personal life. “When I was younger, the actors I found the most intriguing, such as Gary Oldman, were the ones I knew the least about. I’ve always wanted to be that type of actor; I’ve never wanted to get in my own way. Otherwise it’s a bit like painting a picture then standing in front of it waving your hands.”

These days, he spends half the year in New York: he was advised to move to the US after The Hobbit to expand his career, but couldn’t stomach Los Angeles, so settled for the Big Apple instead. “Although I can’t say living there has brought me any extra work.” That professional angst never goes away. “In fact, it gets worse as I get older.”

He is aware of the absurdities of his profession. “I look at award ceremonies and premieres, in which we’re all swanning around in $400 suits, most of them borrowed, drinking champagne, and I think, ‘What is this illusion we’re all peddling? I’m from a working-class background: I should be on the other side of the barrier!’ ”

Then he laughs. “I say all this, but I’ll probably be seen at yet another film premiere next week.”

Geneva is available now at audible.co.uk