You know Hugh Bonneville from ‘Downton’ and ‘Paddington.’ Now he’s onstage in a Chekhov masterpiece

Interview by Lily Janiak for San Francisco Chronicle

4th February 2025

Hugh Bonneville has growled in a restaurant booth at the bidding of a CGI bear and winced his way through the scathing remarks of Dame Maggie Smith. In multiple films, he’s played against his wide-eyed, kindly appearance to make murderers all the creepier.

Now the 61-year-old English actor just wants to play “in the sand pit of rehearsals,” and the result is Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s first play from the theatrical canon since avowed “new play gal” Johanna Pfaelzer became artistic director in 2019.

Bonneville loves starring in the “Paddington” and “Downton Abbey” franchises, he clarified to the Chronicle during a break from rehearsals for “Uncle Vanya,” in which he plays the title role. “But for me what’s most fulfilling,” he continued, “is building the sand castle, thinking it isn’t right, kicking it down and starting again.”

In film and TV, he continued, “Creative and technical decisions have to be made in an instant, and of course they’re frozen in time. The joy of theater, as Judi Dench says, is tomorrow night you can get it right.”

The cast of “Uncle Vanya” in rehearsal at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photo: Calvin Ngu/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

In Conor McPherson’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play, which begins performances Friday, Feb. 14, Bonneville plays a character whose chances to get it right have all run out. As the inept scion of a once-great family, Vanya lusts after his brother-in-law’s young wife, Yelena (Ito Aghayere), who’s visiting his fading estate. “The audience realizes very quickly that he hasn’t got a chance. So there’s a pathetic humor about that,” Bonneville said. And when Vanya proclaims he could have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoyevsky, had he not “wasted” his life trying to support that brother-in-law’s intellectual promise, few onstage or in the audience likely believe he’s a near-miss genius.

Yet his malaise is shared. “All the characters arguably are grappling with mediocrity,” said director Simon Godwin. Bonneville said he isn’t even sure why the show is called “Uncle Vanya,” since it’s such an ensemble piece. If Vanya sets scenes in motion, so do the disquieting Yelena; Vanya’s perpetually overlooked niece, Sonya (Melanie Field); his self-destructive friend, Astrov (John Benjamin Hickey); and his pedantic, hypochondriacal brother-in-law, Alexander (Tom Nelis).

Bonneville as Vanya-qua-bumbler might seem familiar to audiences from his roles in “Paddington” and “Downton Abbey.” “That’s why I say it’s so easy to play, because it’s like falling off a log,” he joked, adopting a faux-cavalier tone, before turning serious: “No, not at all.” The final film installment of “Downton” premieres in September. “It’s very much for the fans,” Bonneville said. “There’s no great new surprises in it, in terms of we don’t suddenly go to the moon or anything.”

The “Paddington” and “Downton” roles do mean that people get surprised when he’s not an avuncular nobleman in real life. “I remember going on some American morning chat show once with Barbara Walters, who was genuinely pissed off that I was wearing jeans. She said, ‘You don’t wear jeans,’” Bonneville recalled. After he played a serial killer on Netflix’s “I Came By,” he added, “I did get letters of complaint that I shouldn’t do that sort of thing, and I certainly shouldn’t swear.”

(Bay Area audiences can attempt to square their own Bonneville ideals with the man himself at the Mostly British Film Festival, under whose auspices Bonneville appears at the Vogue Theatre on Saturday, Feb. 8.)

The cast of “Uncle Vanya” in rehearsal at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photo: Calvin Ngu/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

In “Vanya,” by contrast, Bonneville is neither good guy nor bad guy. One of the revolutionary qualities of Chekhov’s modernism, Bonneville pointed out, is that “there are no villains … there are just people.” If each character infuriates — for willful blindness, for ineffectual complaining — it’s partly because we recognize our own worst qualities in them.

It’s a truism in Chekhov that artists must depict characters who keep saying they’re bored, all without boring their own audience. But for Godwin, any proclamation of boredom might be a feint. “Somebody who’s ‘bored’ might be saying they’re bored for lots of complex reasons: to protect themselves because they’re actually attracted to somebody that they shouldn’t be, or they don’t want to show that they care,” he said. “A lot of the fun of the rehearsals is to go, ‘When is someone telling the truth, and when are they not?’”

At the same time, moments of truth-baring startle in their nakedness. Bonneville called it a “naive honesty” or “rawness.” Vanya declares his love for Yelena within the script’s first act. Later, after a great familial storm has passed, he muses, “Just think if somehow you could wake up on some clear tranquil morning and everything — all your past — was forgotten and you could just start to live a new life.”

Such sentiments can bridge the distance between tsarist aristocrats, some of whom have never worked a day in their life, and us. They, too, feel trapped. They, too, wonder, as Bonneville puts it, “Could we be better? Could we do more?”

Director Simon Godwin in rehearsal for “Uncle Vanya” at Berkeley Rep. Photo: Calvin Ngu/Berkeley Repertory Theatre


“Uncle Vanya”: Adapted by Conor McPherson from Anton Chekhov. Directed by Simon Godwin. Performances begin Friday, Feb. 14. Through March 23. $25-$134, subject to change. Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949. berkeleyrep.org

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