Christian virtue: a man in the prime of his second act

The night before I meet Christian Slater I am lazily channel-surfing and, a little spookily, on comes True Romance, the 1993 Tarantino-scripted love story and gangster movie that cemented the actor’s stardom. There is much to enjoy in the film: Brad Pitt as a stoner, Gary Oldman as a scary white pimp who thinks he is black, and Tarantino’s dialogue at its best, never better than in a scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. But it is the performance delivered by Slater himself — a comic-store geek whose love for Patricia Arquette makes him capable of insane heroism — that sticks in the mind.

And guess what? As he tucks into his burger at the Ivy, Slater reveals that he, too, was channel-surfing in the London flat where he is staying during his run in the excellent stage adaptation of Swimming With Sharks. And he, too, ended up watching True Romance.

‘I was doing nothing but watching TV yesterday,’ he says, ‘so I’m sitting there and I was watching a couple of the scenes — the Christopher Walken scene — and I thought God, brilliant. It’s so weird, all the things that watching a movie like that bring up for me.’

Fourteen years after True Romance, Slater is now an established favourite in the West End, initially because of his two runs as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and now as the brutally ambitious Hollywood producer Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks. The play, expertly adapted and updated from the 1994 film by theatrical wunderkind Michael Lesslie, is not to be missed.

The part of Buddy was played by Kevin Spacey in the original movie, but Slater’s take on the studio executive who becomes Mephistopheles to his young apprentice, Guy (Matt Smith), is more subtle and seductive.