A conversation with Cosmo Jarvis is both soothingly calm and ceaselessly agitated. The stocky 34-year-old actor, dressed in checked shirt, black jeans and weather-beaten trainers, is affable and matey when we first meet. An hour later, there is a vigorous goodbye handshake, a mumbled “legend, legend”, and a wish for my “safe onward journey” as though he is a flight attendant and I’m a holidaymaker. To himself, however, he is less kind. He huffs and puffs when he can’t find the right word, and clasps his head in his hands while he hunts for an honest answer. Our meeting is punctuated by silences, though they are of the ruminative rather than the awkward sort. “I’m talking shit,” he says after one circuitous reply. “This is impossible!” he exclaims after another. The impression is of a man shouldering a heavy burden.
It is about to get heavier now that he is playing the lead in Shōgun, a spectacular 10-part period adventure adapted from James Clavell’s 1975 blockbuster novel set in feudal Japan, and previously filmed for TV with Richard Chamberlain in 1980. The series combines political skulduggery, plush sets and costumes, and a smattering of Game of Thrones-style violence; the first few episodes alone deliver several decapitations and the sight of one unfortunate soul being boiled alive in a cauldron. As for Jarvis, his brooding, bestial vibe couldn’t be any more different from Chamberlain’s matinee-idol slickness. He plays John Blackthorne, loosely based on Captain William Adams, who became in 1600 the first English person to set foot in Japan. When Blackthorne’s beleaguered ship drifts into a Japanese harbour where his ailing crew are taken hostage, he finds himself first used as a pawn in the local power struggles, before being appointed a samurai complete with his own army – just in time for the kind of spectacular combat sequences that might have left Kurosawa agog.
Playing the lead in the series, which was shot over 11 months in Vancouver, was “incredibly daunting”. No wonder. Jarvis featured in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi series Raised By Wolves, as well as Peaky Blinders, where he was the tragic, shell-shocked Barney, part of the plot to assassinate Oswald Mosley. But the roles that established him as a kind of undercard Tom Hardy, with a similar mix of the sensual and the brutish, have mostly been in low-budget, high-fibre indie projects. Many audiences will have had their first who-the-hell-is-that? moment with Jarvis when he was the coarse groomsman drawn into a torrid affair with the mistress of the house, played by Florence Pugh, in the 19th century-set psychological drama Lady Macbeth.
“That was quite a serious job for me,” he says. “I knew it demanded a certain level of realism, so I said: ‘Fuck it!’ and went for it.” What does that entail? “It’s so hard to talk about!” he says, amusingly exasperated. “I know where I have to get to. I guess the ‘fucking going for it’ comes from … in the absence of a more ordered and eloquent methodology … just getting there mentally.” he talks
He acquitted himself admirably as Wentworth in the vacuous Netflix take on Persuasion, opposite Dakota Johnson as a smirking, Fleabag-esque Anne Elliot. But for Jarvis at his most agonisingly magnificent, there is nothing finer than Calm With Horses, where he played Arm, part attack dog and part dogsbody to an Irish crime family. Inhabiting that damaged psyche for 11 months would have taken its toll on Jarvis. Spending that amount of time in the skin of the self-assured Blackthorne, who could make Richard Burton look a bit dithery, did wonders for him.
“I enjoyed playing him because he knows what he’s talking about,” he says. “That’s something I’m not used to. It just became second nature to such an extent that I dispensed with myself. It affects everything. It even affects conversations with people in the 7-Eleven in Vancouver.” Did he retain any of the character’s confidence after filming ended? “Oh God, no!” he splutters. “No! No.” He stares at his knees. “I wish.”
Practical details, such as learning how to use a flintlock pistol, helped with the confidence levels. Research was trickier. His initial preparation, which focused on linguistic authenticity, he dismisses now as “mostly red herrings”. Then he found archive recordings of sailors in Kent in the early 20th century. “One of them had quite a high voice. It sounded like the wind. I tried to apply that to Blackthorne, but that wasn’t right either.”
The realism he needed turned out to be closer to home. “My old man’s a merchant seaman and I borrowed a lot from him. The confidence in his style of speech suited Blackthorne.” His father also advised him on matters of navigation. “There’s a moment where Blackthorne is taking a depth reading with a piece of rope with tallow on the end. He was meant to be using a sextant but the weather was so bad it would have been nonsense. My dad suggested the depth reading instead, and the props master said: ‘Let’s do it.’” Jarvis has watched enough nautical dramas with his father to know how he would have reacted to any goofs in Shōgun. “I kept thinking of him sitting there, as I’ve seen him do in the past. You know, the captain says: ‘Starboard,’ and the ship turns port. And he’ll go: ‘That’s fucking bollocks!’”
Jarvis, whose mother is Armenian-American, was born in New Jersey. Was his dad sailing there at the time? “I don’t actually know what the deal was,” he says, suddenly vague. Has he never asked his parents how they met? “Nah. I mean … ” Ah. He doesn’t want to get into it. “I don’t want to get into it,” he says, good-naturedly but with evident relief. “I came here when I was a baby. I’ve never lived in America.”
Does he feel any connection to the US? “I don’t feel a connection to anywhere,” he says. Not even to Totnes, where he was raised? After all, you can hear the soft Devon lilt in his voice. “I don’t think about it. There are more pressing objectives afoot. Like starting a family.” He puts his hands in his lap and I notice his wedding ring. “And trying to do good work.” Devon was somewhere to escape from, he says. “I knew damn well that there was very little infrastructure available for people who wanted to gravitate toward the film industry. That’s why I came to London.”
Jarvis launched himself by writing, directing and starring in The Naughty Room, a DIY, dope-fogged comedy about a young man whose mother keeps him locked in the bathroom, which he shot at his grandmother’s house. He also recorded two albums. “It was a way to get into acting,” he shrugs. His winningly jaunty anthem Gay Pirates, about queer love on the high seas (“You’re my land ahoy / Yeah you’re my boy”), was accompanied by a mini-historical epic of a video that went viral in the days before everything did. “I don’t think about any of that any more,” he says, squirming in his seat. “It’s no longer relevant. I’m an actor. I have nothing in common with it. It’s out of my hands. People can do whatever they want with it. If they wanna like it and go look at what I did in the past, that’s fine, but I haven’t been attached to it for a really long time.”
These words are spoken with such pleading softness that it is only afterwards I realise he has delivered this disavowal of his past without any of the usual silences or clutching of the head. Get him on a subject that makes him uncomfortable and he can romp through it like a Just a Minute winner. It is the subjects dear to his heart that give him pause as he struggles to honour or explain them.
In the wake of Shōgun, Jarvis will be in some high-profile films including Alto Knights, a gangster yarn starring Robert De Niro and directed by Barry Levinson of Rain Man fame. Has he ever contacted film-makers he admires rather than waiting for them to approach him? “I’m a terrible networker,” he protests. What about a fan letter? Dear Mr Scorsese, that sort of thing? “Nahhh!” he cringes. “If I were to acquire employment, I’d prefer it goes through the proper channels.” He even hates being offered a part without an audition “because you haven’t had a crack at it and received judgment from the appropriate parties”. Proper channels, appropriate parties: his phrasing has the ring of the HR department, a world away from his visceral onscreen self.
Beneath it all, though, is a real sense of urgency. “There’s so much I need to do,” he insists. “Such a wealth of characters that somebody might require the portrayal of. You always have to be on call.” It’s an unusual way to put it, almost as if acting were his civic duty. Perhaps directors could shine a light into the sky whenever they need Cosmo Jarvis, just as Gotham City does with Batman.
Shōgun is on Disney+ from 27 February.
