Two weeks ago, Timothy Spall tried to hide his excitement while sitting in an office in Midtown, but his mile-wide grin gave him away. Three minutes prior, the New York Film Critics Circle announced on Twitter that they'd chosen him as the year's best actor for "Mr. Turner."
"I've been around a long time, so if I pick up a few compliments, it's nice to be able to phone me mom," he tells The Post. "My mom's getting on, she's in a care home. So when I talk to her, rather than just ask her how she is and what she's had for dinner, I'm now telling her I'm good."
Talk about an understatement.
His latest role, as 18th-century artist J.M.W. Turner, is his biggest to date, the one that may finally make the 57-year-old actor a household name in the States. In the biopic, in theaters Friday, Spall paints the strokes of the artist's life with a nuance that's also earned him a best actor win at the Cannes Film Festival and has pundits buzzing about an Oscar nomination.
"It feels like a moment. It does," he says, humbly. "I'd say two-thirds of my career has been [as] a supporting actor. So to come to this point later on and finding leading roles, [it's] an exclamation mark of some kind."
Spall was born in London to a hairdresser and a scaffolder. At 26, his acting career was launched in England as Barry on the series "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet." He's worked steadily ever since — highlights include the villain from "Enchanted" and Winston Churchill in "The King's Speech." But he's most recognized for the "Harry Potter" films, in which he played Peter Pettigrew, a man who is also a rat.
"I don't mind being the rat dude," he says with a hearty laugh. "For a long time, it was, 'Barry, where's your motorbike?' Now it's 'Turner, where's your paintbrush?' "
Spall spent two years training with a portraitist to play Turner, ultimately replicating one of his works, "Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth." Prior to this, all Spall could do was "doodle a bit."
Still, some of the film's most powerful scenes aren't about painting, but rather seeing Turner face debilitating illness — something Spall is all too familiar with. He's a leukemia survivor, in remission since 1996.
"Life throws things at you that you don't choose," he says. "So if you are lucky, and have the audacity not to die and to live and take the experience, it's an old cliché, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Spall, who is married and has three grown children, used his battle to bring depth to the role of Turner.
"Having gone through a serious illness — and I had a young family at the time — [there are] all the questions that you have to ask yourself about what's going to become of them and what's going to become of you," he says. "It gives you a true sense of what it is to be up against 'it.' "
With a new lease on life, Spall embraces the now — including focusing on his invigorated career and enjoying his favorite pastime: spending time at sea on his barge with his wife.
"It's bloody dangerous!" he says. "There [have been] a few times where I thought I might have dodged the ol' illness bullet, and tempted the drowning one."
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