Orson Welles was very much the leader of The Mercury Theatre Company, despite his relative youth. Born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to an inventor and manufacturer father and a concert pianist mother, both of whom had died before he reached fifteen, Orson was blessed with a commanding physique and a deep and resounding voice. During a visit to Europe at the age of 16, he managed to persuade Dublin’s Gate Theatre that he was a Broadway star and made his stage debut there in “Jew Süss”. He became, in fact, a Broadway legend and a ubiquitous and groundbreaking radio star, following the stage success of “Caesar” with more than a year as the voice of The Shadow in the popular radio serial. All this by the age of 24, when he began work on his enduring cinema classic “Citizen Kane”. Although many felt that his controversial 50-year career was one of unfulfilled promise, his legacy included such classic films as “The Magnificent Ambersons”, “Othello”, “Chimes at Midnight” and “Touch of Evil”, his iconic performance as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” and the memory of his notorious 1938 broadcast version of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”.
“So we had a script and were really excited about it,” says Linklater, “but I said, before we start doing budgets and schedules and trying to go further, let’s get an Orson, because we are not going to do this thing at all unless we can get the right guy to play him. To me, that was the biggest piece of the puzzle that had to fit, before it even had the possibility of moving forward. We thought of all the usual Americans, but we weren’t really getting anywhere. And I remember theorising, ‘you know who our Orson Welles is? He’s in London right now, probably doing Shakespeare. I bet that’s where he is – or there’ll be some great unknown British actor who kind of looks like him’.
“A few months later, Robert Kaplow sends me an e-mail saying that there’s a guy performing in New York at this 50-seat theatre I had never heard of, performing a play called ‘Rosebud: The Lives Of Orson Welles’ for just a couple of weeks. And so I flew to New York and went straight to the play. I’d just had shoulder surgery and I had this brace on, I could barely move, it was really uncomfortable. My only test was, do I believe this guy is Orson Welles? ChristIan McKay just had that kind of Wellesian manner and he had clearly studied him closely. So I talked to him after the show and I got back to Austin just thinking about him and felt ‘let’s take this to another level’. So I flew Christian to Austin and we did a sort of old fashioned screen test.
“We did three scenes from the movie: I cast some people, did period wardrobe, we had an old car and we did a scene in the back; Christian came in and we worked together and hung out for a couple of days. After that, I didn’t even need to look at the footage. I just knew the kind of guy he was and thought the film Gods were making a very special offering, as they sometimes do. And I remember telling him we don’t have money, we don’t have anything – it may never happen, but we’d try. We started sending the script out and the good news was many seemed intrigued by it, but one of the stumbling blocks we had was a Welles who was unknown. Can you get a bigger name to play Welles? Ours was always the same argument: no, this is Welles!”
