For his upcoming performance as Benjamin Franklin in the HBO miniseries John Adams, based on David McCullough’s best-selling biography, British actor Tom Wilkinson had to look like a hundred bucks. “Everybody knows what Benjamin Franklin looks like because he’s on the hundred-dollar bill,” says Wilkinson, an agreeably grumpy chain-smoker who only slowly warms to the conversation at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “To play him, you have to have a bald head and long hair.”
Onscreen Wilkinson gamely adopts the founding father’s odd but immediately recognizable tonsorial habits—with little regard, one might add, for his personal vanity—but the actor also brings something rather more unexpected to the performance: his own native accent.
“One of the interesting things about this series is that most of the actors were encouraged to speak with British accents,” Wilkinson says, noting that the Revolution of 1776 was, after all, actually carried out by men who considered themselves English. “The fact is nobody has a clue what Benjamin Franklin sounded like. Apropos of nothing at all, I once heard a recording of Buffalo Bill, and if you had said this was a recording of an English country gentleman, I’d believe it.”
Wilkinson, 59, peers across the top of his shades to make sure his point has registered—that historical drama is just a re-enactment based on our flawed knowledge of the past—and then he drives it home with an amused grumble: “Probably Jesse James sounded like David Niven.”
Although Paul Giamatti has the title role as John Adams and Wilkinson is technically a supporting cast member (Franklin appears in just three of the series’ seven episodes, which begin airing in March), he manages to steal the show, just as Franklin overshadowed Adams in real life. “Their relationship is rather double-edged,” explains the actor. “On the one hand Adams values his experience and wisdom. But Franklin’s place in history is assured, which really gets up Adams’s nose. Part of him is saying, ‘Bastard! What is your secret? And why is it that everyone likes you and nobody likes me?’”
“The great thing about Wilkinson is that, as an actor, he can do two diametrically opposed things at the same time,” says HBO Films president Colin Callender. “He makes his character a man of intellect and erudition but also a very human, ordinary person you can relate to.”
The miniseries follows on the heels of Wilkinson’s recent high-profile turn in Michael Clayton, in which he plays a partner in a powerful New York law firm who suffers a crisis of conscience while defending an agribusiness giant. It’s a high-octane performance that garnered the actor Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.
The two recent roles mark something of a career turn for the actor. Wilkinson has been steadily employed since he graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1970, but even at home in London, where he lives with his wife, television actress Diana Hardcastle, and their two daughters, he says that he can stroll around anonymously. That is no doubt because his film résumé, which really took off with 1997’s The Full Monty, is full of lumpen, emotionally throttled middle-aged men. One writer described his range as “uptight” to “upright,” and Wilkinson’s characters often suffer from an inner life that makes one worry about their blood pressure. Even the best of his everyman roles, such as an Oscar-nominated turn in In the Bedroom, were not exactly starmaking performances. Instead, Wilkinson is, by talent and perhaps by design, a consummate character actor.
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