How Ewan McGregor’s performance guided ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ editor Tim Murrell [Exclusive Video Interview]
Tim Murrell doesn’t always read the source material for projects, but he did read Amor Towles‘ 2016 bestseller “A Gentleman in Moscow” after getting the first script of Paramount+’s adaptation. “It can be really useful and just kind of give you insight into character and settings and other nuggets of character that don’t make it through to the script that can really help inform how you look at certain scenes and how things are played and how things develop,” Murrell tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Editors panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I loved the novel and obviously things get changed in adaptations … but I felt the spirit of the novel was beautifully carried through by [showrunner] Ben Vanstone.”
The limited series stars Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who has been sentenced to house arrest in an attic at the Hotel Metropol following the Russian Revolution. Just like in the novel, the story unfolds over several decades as Rostov sees friends and enemies come and go, and builds a new life inside the hotel walls. Murrell edited two episodes, including the premiere, and his guiding light was McGregor’s nuanced performance.
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“I think the tone and the feel of the show was very inherent in the script and then immediately in Ewan’s performance. The challenges of this show were dealing with a character who’s a man of many masks — certainly at the beginning of the story, very cloaked in his sort of manners and the traditions of his era, a man of wealth and great standing. He’s clinging onto those as the world around him has been destroyed,” he says. “And we slowly reveal who he really is, but you have to get to it a little quicker than that in order for the audience to access him. But there were some wonderful scenes of him just on his own where the mask would slip, just little beats. And Ewan was wonderful at calibrating those and giving us these moments — you knew there was some sadness behind that kind of mask.”
The premiere includes brief flashbacks, teasing the backstory of Rostov and his sister, and a montage tracking his first 46 days in the hotel. The count has developed a routine, which sounds mundane, but the progressively faster pace of the montage is anything but.
“That was a lot of fun. It took a lot of time to get all the pieces of that,” Murrell says. “It became a great opportunity to kind of allow a burst of energy into a world that could sometimes become kind of staid. It never did in the show, but it could do — a man trapped in a hotel. It was to see him almost seize the day a bit. The way the count works, the character is very just tables in front of you, stiff upper lip and get on with it, make the best. Which he starts to do and as the pace quickened, then it delivers him out into this rather sad wide shot, where he’s suddenly like, whatever he tries to do or occupies, it’s always the same thing and it keeps being the same thing. And there’s a point where whatever face he puts on, he goes downstairs. He’s up in his little attic room. Life is not going to get any better here.”
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