The actor and environmentalist on playing Atticus Finch, the character’s importance today, and why he dyed his hair white for Stranger Things
Actor Matthew Modine, born in California in 1959, came to fame in the 1980s, most notably in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). More recently, he’s best known for playing Dr Martin Brenner, the sinister scientist in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Next week, he steps into the role of the crusading Atticus Finch, a lawyer defending an innocent black man on a charge of rape, in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird in the West End. Married since 1980, he has two children and lives in New York.
What made you want to play the part of Atticus Finch?
The content of the story – it’s specifically about the history of racism in the United States. The past is not something that’s ancient history. As Aaron Sorkin writes in his adaptation, the civil war is yesterday and it will always be yesterday until we deal honestly with that past. In the US, there’s a crack in the foundation of the constitution because “we the people” didn’t include people of colour when it was drafted. We’ve never honestly dealt with that and when you build a country the foundation is very important. What we’re seeing today is what happens when the walls start to get out of whack, the doors don’t open and the roof starts leaking. We just have to be aware of what happened in the past so that we can fix it and move forward. The play deals with that. I wanted to be a part of it, because I want to be a part of solving problems.
