From Doc Ock to Joe Orton’s homicidal lover, Alfred Molina has run the gamut. The quintessential character actor, he has stolen whole movies with a few minutes of screen time: He got impaled in Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s first reel, but he left an indelible impression as Dr. Jones’ traitorous South American guide, and he managed to upstage Mark Wahlberg’s prosthetic schlong with his turn as a cracked-out drug dealer with a fondness for Night Ranger in Boogie Nights. In An Education, he takes an affable turn as Jack, an aspirant patriarch in 1960s England who’s set on his precocious high-schooler daughter Jenny (Carey Mulligan) going to Oxford. So firm is his desire for his daughter’s betterment—and, by social osmosis, his own—that he’s swept off his feet when a charming stranger named David (Peter Sarsgaard) starts taking his daughter to see string quartets in London and name-dropping C.S. Lewis. Although his character teeters on the edge of comic caricature, Molina fills him with so much heart that it’s hard to avoid being a little on his side. Molina recently sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about growing up in 1960s England, playing “exotic” roles, and why it took him years to feel British.
The A.V. Club: Your performance is really critical to making the movie work. In order to buy the plot, we have to believe that this overprotective, somewhat overbearing father can do a complete about-face when confronted with this charming, seemingly cultured man, to the point of letting his teenage daughter go away for the weekend with a man more than twice her age.
Alfred Molina: I think he responded with the best will in the world. He’s a man who clearly wants the very, very best for his daughter, and his drive, his ambition, is in a way satisfied vicariously through her. I think he was a very typical man of his era. This is a man who, in the early ’60s, would have been through the war, would have come back to a country that was supposedly a land fit for heroes, where they endured up to… 10 years after the end of World War II, they still had rationing in England. So I think there was a whole generation of men who, by this time, were fathers of young men and women who really wanted something much, much better for their children. And that meant education. We had the Education Act of ’44 [which made secondary education feasible for young women and the working class], National Health was in place, it was everyone’s right. If you were bright enough and smart enough, you could go to university, and I think for lower-middle-class parents like Jenny’s, that was the most crucial thing they could give their children.
AVC: And that was the first time they had the chance to go to university?
AM: Yeah, very much. Particularly for that class. So it was something which they’d earned, they’d worked for, they’d fought for. Now, given the fact that he’s got a rather limited, narrow, patriarchal, provincial view of the world, given the fact that the man has very little imagination of his own, into his almost hermetically sealed life comes this rather exotic whiff of the outside world, which challenges him on almost every level. Jack is an older man, he’s not a schoolboy, which is something that David could control and manipulate, as we see with his relationship with the young school-kid who she does bring home for tea. David is a man of the world, a man who seems very plausible, in terms of education, class, knowledge, information, access. To use an anachronistic term, he ticked all the boxes that would have made someone like Jack think that this whole thing was kosher. Plus the fact that on an emotional level, I think, because it’s what all successful con men do, is that Jack, like his daughter, in a sense, falls in love with David. So the romance—the infatuation, I think, maybe is a better word—is the same for the father and the mother as it is for the daughter. It was something I never thought about consciously while we were making the film, but I realized afterward that the only time you see Jack drink, the only time you see him laugh, the only time you see him having a good time, is in the presence of David.
AVC: His daughter acts as if she’s never seen him drink in the house before.
AM: Yeah, he drinks, they go out. David releases, liberates him in a way. So the shock of the betrayal, the shock of discovering the guy’s not what he seems to be, is as hard for the parents as it is for her. That’s the tragedy, because he didn’t see it, and he didn’t protect her.
AVC: In a way, their relationship gives him what he’s hoping to get by sending his daughter to Oxford, but without the trouble of sending her to Oxford.
AM: Absolutely, absolutely. Of course, the other contradiction implicit in that is that when she suggests David might be proposing marriage, the father is the first one to say, “Well, that’s great. Marry him, and you don’t have to bother to go to university, because you’ll have everything that university would have given you.”