Who do we think of when we think of Jon Snow? The charismatic news anchor of Channel 4 whose vowel sounds betray his public school education? Who oversees lively debate in the polished format we expect from broadcasting and occasionally causes a stir through his (deliberate) lack of colour co-ordination? Or Snow, the man who was once sent down from Liverpool University for his part in a demonstration against Apartheid, the political commentator who has a special interest in Iran and is still really a reporter at heart?
Whatever the case, Jon Snow The Actor isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind. Snow, who has a small part in Ralph Fiennes’ new film Coriolanus, out 20 January, himself admits that his appearance at the premiere was met with some surprise. “There was a sort of gasp in the audience when I turned up, because it’s a bit sort of ‘Hey, hang on a minute.’” Jon plays a news reader in this modern day-adaption of one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, a story of a talented Roman general whose political career is checked when, despite his military prowess, the people of the Roman State refuse to support him. Set in Belgrade, the city at the heart of the most recent Balkans conflict, Coriolanus has been marketed as a “terse and timeless political thriller.”
I met Jon, who describes himself as “a tawdry, old creep” but is of course rather charming, at the Soho Hotel in London. Wearing one of his trademark ties (whatever else may be said of him, he is certainly a man of many ties), Snow was quick to point out that acting really isn’t his game. He accepted the role in Fiennes’s film, he said, because “it didn’t seem to require anything other than my normal day job. I’d gone into the building absolutely determined not to act but just to do what I do. I mean, I’m a newscaster; I have nothing whatever to do with acting, and three or four hours later I walked out after about 25 takes and what started as “Forsooth, the Volscies are at the gate” became “FOR-SOOTH! The VOLSCIES ARE… AT THE GATE!” So, I ended up…acting.” Shakespeare isn’t really his thing then? “No, I mean I’m genuinely not a Shakespeare buff. I just don’t go to Shakespearean plays generally, although I think I’m going to go to King Lear this year, but generally speaking not. In many ways people need to know [the film] is not really about Shakespeare. It’s about us.”
Although Snow became the main presenter of Channel 4 news in 1989, he has never been happy to limit himself to just reading the news. “Long ago,” he says, “my ambition was to be a Tory MP. I grew up in very sheltered and privileged circumstances and then I went to do VSO [Voluntary Service Oversees] in Uganda and it completely radicalised me.” For Jon, the message of Coriolanus, which claims to provide commentary on recent political events as disparate as the London Riots and the Arab Spring, is that “nothing is ever as straightforward as you think it is.” The same could be said of Snow himself, who has not shied away from controversy – the ties are the least of it.
Jon smiles proudly when I mention the moment in 2006 when he got Tony Blair to confess during an interview on Channel 4 that he didn’t know who Mossadegh was (the democratically elected Iranian leader overthrown by the US with British backing in 1953, a figure essential to any understanding of the history of relations between Iran and the West). He admits that it can be “tricky” at times to remain unbiased in his job: “When you’re asking people questions [on the news] you’re bound to some extent to sort of come from your quarter…there’s no such thing as a neutral human being. You’ve got to try to be unbiased and objective, if you can be, but I don’t think you can ever desert who you are. I mean… I’m very interested in Human Rights. I’m not going to deny them. And I’m not going to advocate that it’s a great idea to abuse them… I’m very interested in Iran and I was there during the Revolution and I’ve been there more or less every year ever since. And therefore when you meet someone who’s taking big decisions about Iran… there, I suppose, my bias would come out.” He hastens to assure me, however, that “it is only really a bias of information…really in the end I think people become journalists – don’t they? – in order to change the world for the better, and that’s what motivates me.”
Whilst Jon will happily talk for hours about Iran, he is less forthcoming about events closer to home. Given his own well-known history of political activism as a student, I wondered if he had a message for the students of today, protesting over tuition fees and cuts in university funding. “I have seen some of the student protests as being relatively self-interested,” he begins. “I’m interested that there are still car parking problems on campuses, that students have difficulties finding somewhere to park their cars. That obviously is a minority but nonetheless there are a lot of cars, students seem to have an extraordinary number of cars. The other thing is that they drink a great deal of booze. Now all of these things cost money. I drank lots of booze but I didn’t have a car, I had a bicycle….so I wonder about money, fees.”
I was about to remind Snow that whilst he might not have had a car as a student, he also didn’t have to stump up £9,000 a year for his education, but he beat me to it. “I was blessed obviously, I had a grant, I was paid to go to university. I mean, can you imagine it?” He pauses, thinks, “generally speaking, as a principle, I would say I’m in favour of student grants. I think the Scottish model is a more defensible situation. What I don’t know is how we go from where we are to where we need to be. I don’t have any easy answers. But I think students with cars and large drinking bills need also to think about people in the community who don’t have cars and don’t have large drinking bills and are in real poverty. I was sent down for a protest that wasn’t about students, it was about Apartheid. It was about multiculturalism. It was about fascism.”
So he doesn’t regret it? “I did at the time. I was really absolutely poleaxed by it. I wasn’t very bright and I’d struggled to get there and so I really felt cut down and I thought: that’s the end. But in retrospect, of course, I’m thrilled. It’s the best thing that could have happened to me. I would have ended up a very tedious lawyer, and probably a very bad one.”
It’s also of course a great story to tell. And Snow is a man of many stories. He is candid about his future in film: “I don’t think I can go much further, I don’t think I have much more to offer in the thespian stakes! My last role was as a woman. I was fifteen and I thought I was too old to play a woman, in a play called Ring Round the Moon…The extraordinary thing is that in the interval the audience found out that Kennedy had been shot. I don’t know how they found out because there were no mobiles or anything but somehow word came, and it completely detonated the whole thing, I mean, the second half was ghastly. And I realised then that I didn’t want to be an actor, I wanted to find out what was going on in the world. And really, in a sense, that’s the moment when I started to be conscious of the world outside, and wanted to be a hacking part of it.”