Christopher Plummer: 'Who the hell wants to be happy all the time?'

What gives the Canadian star of Hector and the Search for Happiness joy? Dogs and Shakespeare but not The Sound of Music …

Hector and the Search for Happiness - review
Christopher Plummer
Christopher Plummer: 'I was always a happy kid.' Photograph: Broadimage/REX

Hello Christopher. I think there's a delay on the line so we'll have to try not to interrupt one another.
I'll leave some room after you speak to allow your profundity to hang in the air.

Oh dear. I think you're going to be disappointed. Where are you today?
I'm in the new Four Seasons in Toronto. They just built it, so it's very spiffy. The room service is good. They have some quite talented chefs down there. I'm in the middle of preparing for quite a tough movie (1). It's about a German who is trying to find the Nazis who killed his family in the concentration camps. It's a very depressing, but well put-together story.

What characterises the Canadian character?
They're very staunch. The Canadian character, although slightly apologetic, is rather strong and brave. And they're born to be comedians. If you're Canadian you must have a sense of humour about your identity. That's why there are so many terrific comedians from Jim Carrey all the way back to Mort Sahl. The country grew up in the middle of two great powers, America and Britain. It was terribly confused about who it belonged to. I grew up in Quebec which had an identity of its own because we were French-Canadian. We were actually allowed to drink wine as youngsters while the rest of the country at the time was rather puritanical. The Duke of Edinburgh came to Toronto years later and made himself unpopular by remarking on the antiquated drinking laws, but he was quite right.

In your new film Hector and the Search for Happiness (2), it is a shocking 96 minutes before you even appear. It was like Waiting for Godot. I thought you'd never show.
I did suggest they cut some of that and get straight to me after five minutes. No, I don't mind at all. I rather liked my character. He was like the Stephen Hawking of happiness, very Tom Stoppardian. It's a delightful movie. Simon Pegg is terribly talented, very funny, such a delicious sense of humour. And there's Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette: it couldn't be all bad!

Your character lectures about childhood's "moments of untarnished joy". Did you experience many of those?
I was always a happy kid. I'd play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It's a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?

Would it be fair to say that for you to be happy, there must ideally be dogs nearby?
Always. Not dogs dripping doo-doo or anything like that. Clean dogs. With clean parts. But, oh God, yes, I love dogs.

Your memoir (3) even starts with the line, "I was brought up by an Airedale."
It's one of the great opening lines, isn't it? Along with Dickens and a few other authors, obviously. I actually was brought up by an Airedale. I don't really remember my parents, especially my mother. It was only the dog that I saw.

I was watching a commercial you did in 1980 for Polaroid, where you take a picture of the adoring dog sitting next to you. Did you stipulate that there had to be a dog involved?
Yes, I must have put it in the contract. Good God, I don't remember that.

Even in Up!, where you're heard but not seen, your character Charles Muntz is still surrounded by dogs.
So he is! Well, that's all right with me. Some of the best casts I've ever worked with have been dogs.

Is it as much of a performance when it's voice-only, as in Up! or in another great canine film, My Dog Tulip?
Well, first of all, Pixar is a great group, they let you really invent and take over. They draw the character from what you're doing. In a sense, you're inventing the chap. And absolutely, yes, one gave a performance in the little studio, with accompanying facial expressions.

So, I've seen your Polaroid ad, but not your Hamlet.
No one in Britain has! For some reason the BBC guarded Hamlet at Elsinore very jealously after transmission in 1964 and hid it from the public. It was a groundbreaking production because it was one of the first BBC films to be shot outdoors on location. It was a terrific hit in America and I bought a house in Mayfair on the proceeds of it; that wasn't bad.

Helen Mirren said she'd like to play Hamlet.
I accused Helen when we were working together (4) of wanting to play every sex in the world but her own. I don't know if she took it nicely.

Which female Shakespearean role would you like to play?
I wouldn't want to compete with Mark Rylance's wonderful Shakespearean women. His is one of the great Cleopatras of all time.

You said of your daughter Amanda (5) that she could "raise tempests". Could you elaborate?
She has that inner madness and fire that she lets fly. She did certainly in Agnes of God, which she did on Broadway. There wasn't a live thing standing once she'd finished. Where she unleashes that power from I don't know, but it's quite natural to her, and rather frightening.

I haven't mentioned The Sound of Music. Are you pleased about that? (6)
Yes. But that's not the last question, is it? Otherwise I may suddenly have to go.

Would it be fair to say you've made your peace with that film now?
Absolutely. But I always had made my peace with the film. I just wasn't the happiest creature in it because I didn't think my part was very exciting. And I'm right!


(1) Atom Egoyan's Remember, with Dean Norris (Hank in Breaking Bad) and Martin Landau.

(2) Simon Pegg plays a psychiatrist who travels around the world to find the secret of happiness. Plummer is a lecturer and author in a salmon-pink cap and sweatshirt. His class applauds and guffaws ingratiatingly in the way that students only ever do in movies (see everything from The Mirror Has Two Faces to Boyhood).

(3) In Spite of Myself. "His description of having sex at a party with his leading lady, all the while conversing with her husband, is a classic" – New York Times.

(4) The Last Station, in which Plummer played Tolstoy. It earned him his first Oscar nomination. He won in 2012 for Beginners.

(5) Tim Roth's diner-robbing partner-in-crime in Pulp Fiction.

(6) He has referred to it over the years variously as The Sound of Mucus and S&M.

Hector and the Search for Happiness is released on Friday 15 August