Sylvester McCoy was so delighted by the nefarious side of his character in the darkly comedic thriller “The Owners” that he could scarcely wait to slip free of his mild-mannered facade when the shoot began.
“I wanted to get to the nasty part really quickly,” McCoy says by phone from his home “up a mountain in a medieval village” in France recently. “But Julius (Berg), the director, kept saying, ‘Hold back, not yet.’”
In “The Owners,” the 77-year-old McCoy plays Dr. Huggins, an elderly practitioner who dotes on his dementia-afflicted wife Ellen, played by Rita Tushingham, at their English country manor.
When four young villagers surprise them at home one night — three not-so-bright robbers and a girlfriend played by Maisie Williams, who knows this is a terrible idea — the doctor and his wife look doomed before dangerous secrets start tables turning.
“The story itself was a great twist, and an unexpected one, really,” McCoy says of his initial attraction to the screenplay adapted from the French-language graphic novel, “Une Nuit de Pleine Lune.”
“And so the mystery of it’s great,” McCoy says. “But also playing a villain like that, I don’t get that role very much,” he says. “I’ve done a few over the years but not for a while. And I love the idea of this sweet, sweet old couple being terrorized by young thugs, and then suddenly the worm turns, if you know what I mean.”
McCoy says that while “it’s an enjoyable thing to do, to go to the dark side,” he and Tushingham, the star of such classic ’60s films as “A Taste of Honey” and “Doctor Zhivago,” discovered a knack for cracking up cast and crew when night came.
“She’s from Liverpool and she’s hilariously funny,” McCoy says in his native Scottish brogue. “We were both playing these very dark parts, but when we left the set we turned into a comedy duo. We made everybody laugh to feel better.”
Their on-screen relationship is sweet … until it turns seriously weird.
“The way Rita plays her is so sweet really, and he wants to care for her,” McCoy says. “I mean, it is a love story, isn’t it? He loves this lady, and he does it for her.
“He’d do anything for her. The excuse is love. I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m doing something really beautiful. I’m in love with Ellen, you know.”
How they deal with the four home invaders we won’t reveal, but suffice it to say these thieves picked the wrong senior citizens to mess with.
Williams, who starred as Arya Stark in HBO’s “Game Of Thrones,” plays Mary, the girlfriend of Nathan (Ian Kenny), who she knows isn’t clever enough to pull off the heist he’s planned with best mate Terry (Andrew Ellis) and scary new friend Gaz (Jake Curran).
McCoy says he and Tushingham, 78, had a blast working with the younger foursome.
“They weren’t aloof,” he says. “They weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, who are these two old farts?’ We all enjoyed each other’s company and enjoyed making the film.
“And the lads, Jake Curran, who played the really nasty, tall, skinny guy? What was wonderful about him was that he was such a nice chap, a really good fellow,” McCoy says. “Ian and Andrew, too.”
Williams, too, impressed McCoy greatly with her talent and professionalism at just 23.
“Maisie should be called A-Maisie – Amazing Williams,” he said. “She’s really a lovely, great fun, young woman, with great vitality and joie de vivre. And she knows the business inside and out because she’s grown up in it, hasn’t she?”
This, of course, isn’t the first time McCoy has been cast as a doctor. Or the Doctor, we should say, given his place in television and pop culture history as the Seventh Doctor on the long-running British sci-fi series “Doctor Who.”
He appeared in the role from 1987 to 1989 and says that at the time he took the job he really didn’t understand how significant it would be for him.
“I was quite ignorant when I took it over because in those days you couldn’t record anything,” McCoy says. “It went out once and they never repeated it. I was always working so I never saw it.
“So when I took it on, it was just an interesting job,” he says. “And I didn’t realize that what I had taken on, that it was part of British TV culture, and that it was incredibly important.”
He knows that now, of course, having traveled the world to conventions where fans of “Doctor Who” are thrilled to meet any of the 13 actors to play the Doctor in the history of the series.
“What’s given me the greatest pleasure is when I travel the world, going to conventions all over the world,” McCoy says. “The warmth that people have for ‘Doctor Who’ is part of their childhood, and their adulthood as well.
“And then there’s a whole new generation who are discovering it,” he says. “They hunt out all the old classic Doctors, so we get the whole new generation of fans. Young people, recognizing you, coming up for selfies.”
Earlier this summer McCoy revisited the role, traveling to a London recording studio to record an audio version of “Doctor Who.”
“I saved the universe, again,” he says quite matter-of-factly.
“It’s such a privilege, really,” McCoy says of his place in “Doctor Who” canon. “I had no idea what I’d let myself in for. It’s just quite extraordinary.
“So lucky I was. Am, really, because I’m still doing it.”
