Interview: Jack Lowden on ‘Tornado’
There’s a stillness to Jack Lowden that makes him particularly compelling to watch on screen. There’s always something going on beneath the surface of his usually prim, proper characters but Lowden chooses nuance and complexity over showiness and spectacle, offering instead a quiet refusal and a purposeful decision to show his hand only when it truly matters. It’s what makes him fascinating to watch in Slow Horses, and what makes him magnetic in Tornado, the moody, bloodstained survival thriller from Slow West director John Maclean.
Set in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1700s, the film follows Tornado (Kôki,), a fierce young Japanese woman, faces the ultimate test of survival when her father’s puppet samurai show is ambushed by a notorious gang led by the ruthless Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his cunning son, Little Sugar (Lowden). After witnessing her father’s brutal murder, Tornado vows to reclaim her life and seek vengeance by stealing the gang’s ill-gotten gold. With her father’s samurai training as her weapon, she embarks on a heart-pounding quest filled with intense action, cunning strategy, and relentless pursuit. As she navigates the treacherous landscape, Tornado must outsmart the criminals hunting her down while leaving a trail of revenge in her wake.
“I love the fact that he barely says anything,” Lowden says of Little Sugar. “I love that. And I think there’s a lot of screen actors that would bite anybody’s hand off not to say anything. It really embraced the beauty and usefulness of an image, which is a really easy gig for an actor. But John Maclean was the thing that really drew it to me. I’m very proud that him and I are basically from the same place, and he wanted to make a samurai film. There was no hesitation.”
Tornado unfolds like a Western told in reverse; nonlinear, unforgiving, and stripped of sentimentality. And if the narrative veers into disorientation, that’s by design. “What ends up in the final film is basically the screenplay,” Lowden explains. “John actually very helpfully made maps. He hand drew maps of the setting and wrote where each thing happens so we could constantly have in our head where we physically are in the script. It’s pretty much exactly what ended up on film.”
On paper, there’s nothing especially complicated about Little Sugar. He wants money. He wants his father’s approval. Maybe one more than the other, depending on the day. “He’s a very simple character,” Lowden agrees. “The beauty of it is that the characters are all very simple. You’ve got Sugarman, Little Sugar, and all of them are very simply just driven by greed.” But thanks to Lowden’s incredibly layered, highly nuanced performance, there ends up being much more to Little Sugar than what initially meets the eye. “What’s wonderful about my character is that he wasn’t just driven by greed, but also having this father that he basically hated and just wanted to be proud of him,” he adds. “He wanted his father to love him, essentially.”
That father is played by Tim Roth, who brings a detached, menacing approach to Sugarman, the defacto leader of the gang. The scenes between Sugarman and Little Sugar are some of the film’s most emotionally loaded thanks to the performances from Lowden and Roth, so it’s surprising to learn that the two actors had no rehearsal time. “It was very sort of tough to do it,” Lowden says. “But when you get to work with someone like Tim, you just know that you’re in the best possible hands. And Tim has this wonderful ‘let’s just get on with it’ work ethic.”
There’s a bleak inevitability to the world Little Sugar inhabits; a place where brutality isn’t just accepted, it’s expected. Every man in Tornado seems to be carrying a knife, a grudge, or both. So is Little Sugar a product of his environment or someone trying to escape it? “I think it’s both,” says Lowden. “He’s a man that has been bred into the world of violence. Violence is always the answer but I think he ultimately wants to get away from that. And I think that’s what he’s trying to do in the film.” His quiet unraveling becomes one of the film’s more tragic through-lines; a man born into ugliness, grasping for a version of himself that doesn’t quite exist yet.
That element of his character manifests into how he navigates the world around him, and how he treats the people he coems across. One of the film’s most charged moments comes in a corridor scene opposite Kōki, who plays the film’s namesake. “It was wonderful,” Lowden says of working with her. “She’s just one of these unbelievably lovely people. And I think one of the few scenes I really got to do with her was in a corridor where I push her up against the wall with a knife, and there are people that you’d want to do that to,but Kōki definitely is not one of those people. So it was difficult. But she was a great sport.”
At once both a western and a Samurai thriller, set in the Scottish highlands, the film could have very much been an alienating mess of different genres and tonal shifts. However, what ends up on screen is a thrilling action film that deluvers high-stakes excitement and a fresh take on traditional samurai lore. Lowden credits much of the film’s tonal clarity to Maclean. “He’s one of these directors that knows what film he wants to make,” Lowden says. “He’s not a ‘let’s see what happens’ kind of guy. He’s worked a lot of it out, so you instantly feel in good hands.” That confidence mattered, especially when the crew was battling bitter Scottish weather. “Those dark January days, to have somebody like John leading everybody was great. He’s a true cinema fan. Every day, you could tell he was just celebrating the fact that he was getting to make his film. And that’s almost enough for John, which is a wonderful thing to be around.”
For Lowden, it was something more personal. “As a Scot, it’s great whenever I get to shoot anything there,” he says. “It was incredibly close to where I actually grew up. I spent a lot of time on hillsides looking over to where I grew up. It was a sort of trip down memory lane. I’m enormously proud that the film was shot there.”
TORNADO is now playing in cinemas.