“Fun locations would be great but they never happen for me,” the actor sighs. “I’d love to be sent a script and see the location is the Austrian Tyrol, or a beautiful day in Italy, or the Caribbean, or something, but I never get it. “Instead, I get the script, open it up… and it says ‘Exterior: Night. Rain. Mud.’ And I think, “OK, here we go again!” And his latest role – as the evil baddie Dr Thaddeus Sivana in his new superhero movie, Shazam! – was no exception. “We shot in Toronto in the winter, and the very first scene I did was a night shoot – yes, again – with me on wires, hauled up into the air at three in the morning when it was was minus 30 degrees.
“I was up there thinking how cold it was when I heard a voice go, ‘OK, turn on the wind machine.’ Wind machine! It was absolutely freezing!” But Mark, 55, isn’t complaining too hard. Despite the night-time shoots in foul weather, he loves his work, and is in high demand to do it. After Shazam!, he has two more films coming out, the First World War story 1917, and the thriller/drama The Forgiven.
Not bad for a kid who didn’t actually set out to be an actor at all. “I was never in school plays or anything like that,” he says. He had an unconventional childhood. “I went to an English boarding school and when I was there I spent a lot of time watching other people. But that was because my dad wasn’t around, I had no brothers and sisters, so nobody at home was telling me how I should be, nobody was there as an example for me.
“For me, being at school was about having a bunch of people my age to grow up with, and I watched them so I could work out who I was. It wasn’t about wanting to act, although it might have led to it in the end.”
Shazam! super-villain Mark Strong (Image: GETTY)
The son of a teenage Austrian mother and her Italian husband – whom Mark did not meet until he was an adult – he was raised between London, where his mother lived and worked, and his grandmother’s home in the south Austrian countryside.
“My parents met in London very young and they had a baby very young. It was the Sixties and everybody was looking for a good time, I suppose.
“My dad left home when I was a baby – he was only 19 and I guess he couldn’t cope – and my mum brought me up on her own so I spent a lot of time in Austria when I was small.
“My grandmother’s house was amazing, a little rustic old farmhouse by a beautiful river, with a ski lift that took you to the slopes in winter or up into the mountains in summer. It was absolutely idyllic, and I’m not just saying that because my childhood memory makes it so, it really is a beautiful country. I loved it there and actually grew up speaking German before I spoke English.”
Mark Strong and Zachary Levi attend the launch of the DC ‘Shazam’ Fun Fair in London (Image: GETTY)
He drew on those German speaking roots afterwards to go to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to study – of all things – law.
“I was really just fantasising about being a lawyer,” he acknowledges now, laughing.
“I loved the idea of carrying a briefcase and driving a BMW, going to court and winning cases and all that kind of stuff. I had no idea of how tricky it was or how much book-learning you have to do before you get to that point – if you ever do.
“Looking back, I think I really just wanted to act being a lawyer rather than actually being one. Anyway, after a year, I realised that this was not for me.”
Instead, he decided to try his hand at acting. “Everyone thought I was insane,” he reveals. “Well, you can imagine, I had been going to be a lawyer, and then I turned around and said I was going to be an actor instead.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, I just chose the most fun, frivolous thing I could think of because it was so diametrically opposite to this serious thing that I’d been trying to study. So I left Munich and went to Royal Holloway College, London University, to study drama. I don’t think I was any good in the beginning but I plunged in, did a few plays and gradually realised this was something I could do.’
“Could do,” is a bit of an understatement. For 30 years, he has been one of the most soughtafter actors on the big screen or the small, with a fair handful of stage successes – Arthur Miller and Shakespeare among them – to round out his CV. Along with success comes fame. But ask him about that part, and he only shrugs.
“Fame is the least interesting part of what I do. OK, so it may get you recognised on the street – and, yes, for just one day, it might be nice to have people go, ‘Hey! You’re that guy!’
“But I am an actor and I do my job and I love the craft of it and try to drift to where the good jobs are. I have never used any power or fame to get anything I want – although I’ve seen people doing so and it usually ends badly.”
Which is exactly how Mark’s films often end for his characters. He’s fast becoming Hollywood’s go-to villain. He was mafia baddie Frank D’Amico in Kick-Ass and Sinestro in Green Lantern. But his role in Shazam! takes the evil genius to a whole new level, battling a Captain Marvel who switches – at the word Shazam! – from a 14-year-old boy to superhero.
“I love playing a bad guy,” he says. “Those parts are the most interesting. Villains are much more tricky somehow.”
During the rare downtimes, he lives quietly at home in north London with his wife, film and TV producer Liza Marshall, and their two sons, Gabriel, 14, and Roman, 11. “They like to read,” he says proudly of his children. “With young boys, you can’t make them do anything they’re not going to do, all you can do is put stuff in front of them and see what they gravitate to.
“And our two – well, they live in a household full of people telling stories, so it makes sense that they’d want to read. And of course we encourage it because most kids of that age are just obsessed with their screens and phones.”
He lets off steam himself by playing football. “I play on Monday and Friday mornings, with guys like me, actors and writers, who don’t have proper jobs and can play football at that time.There’s Rupert Graves, who is a good friend of mine, the writer Patrick Marlborough, and a couple of directors.
“When I’m not playing, I like to watch. I’m a big Arsenal fan – I have season tickets there. Funnily enough, I’ve just realised something about myself, which is that the places I like to be most in the world are playing football, watching it at the Emirates, or being on a plane.
“And I also realised that those are the three places where I haven’t got my phone with me. So no one can get hold of me. And it’s great.”