young man walks into a bar and meets Sam Shepard, Christopher Walken and Al Pacino. The man is Tim Roth. The year is 1990, and the actor is in New York to film Jumpin' at the Boneyard, a bleak movie about drug abuse. Roth, who planned to nurse a quiet beer while watching American football, found himself in conversation with Walken and Shepard. "I thought: ‘What the fuck have I walked into?'" he says. "It was purely by chance." By the time he left, Shepard had promised to write him a part in his next play. It was not the first time Roth had been in the right place at the right time, and it wouldn't be the last.
This unlikely encounter took place at a propitious time, just as Roth was starring as Van Gogh in Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo, and shortly before his comic double act with Gary Oldman in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead hit the festival circuit. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael described Roth's acting as "a form of kinetic discharge". After a decade in which the film industry had largely curdled into a hit machine of bland studio blockbusters, independent film was stirring into life and craft was back in vogue.
Due back in London after filming, Roth instead chose to go prospecting in LA, expecting "to get swiftly kicked out the door". Like his encounter in a Manhattan bar, serendipity intervened. Its name was Quentin Tarantino, the movie was Reservoir Dogs, and it changed everything.
"He came back to my flat after a night in a bar, and we read every scene with all the characters, had a great time – and he gave me the job," says Roth. "I was very fucking lucky. I got given a window, and I jumped." When Shepard, good as his word, called back with a part in his next Broadway play, it was too late. "I couldn't do it," Roth says. "I always regret I lost that opportunity."
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