Sharlto Copley

Nu-Metro released Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team on 20 August 2010. The big-budget Hollywood remake of the 1980s cult television show, follows four army rangers who try to clear their names after being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.


The film stars South Africa’s very own Sharlto Copley (District 9) as H.M (Howling Mad) Murdock alongside a star-studded cast of Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Jessica Biel. The A-list line up had been confirmed early on, with the exception of the notoriously nutty Murdock.


When District 9 came out, Sharlto caught the eye of producer Jules Daly, who thought he’d be the perfect fit for the role. Jules runs Ridley Scott’s commercials company RSA, which represents Neill Blomkamp, the South African director of District 9. “I got a call from Neill who said the executive producer of The A-Team, Ridley Scott, wanted to get in touch with me for the role,” recalls Sharlto.


But it wasn’t the chance to work with the legendary producer and director that swayed him. “I’ve never pursued acting roles before but I really wanted to play Murdock. The A-Team was my favorite show as a kid and Murdock was my favorite character,” he says. “So to play him was like a dream come true.”

One thing that struck him abo-ut the script was that Murdock was very conservative, a far cry from the original television character. “I needed to show Joe Carnahan what I thought before I met him, which would either get me closer to getting the role or exclude me completely,” says Sharlto. He recorded an eight-minute video in his Austin, Texas hotel suite, improvising all the things that could go wrong for Murdock in a hotel room. He sent this to the director. “I pushed the boundaries as much as I could. I improvised Murdock being stuck in the bathroom, calling BA in the next room for assistance, but BA doesn’t want to help. They end up having an altercation on the hotel phone. I also copied the original Murdock, who had an invisible dog who followed him around. I took my dog to an army therapist because I thought he was racist. It keeps barking at BA.”


Not only did the video secure him the role, but it also cemented a great working relationship with the director. “Joe embraced improv, which was important to me. He would always throw out ideas for me to try out. 70% of the film was improvised. Bradley and Quinton were into it too, but a lot of their stuff didn’t make it into the film.” One scene that did make it in was a cheeky tribute to South Africa. “I’m always looking for little gaps and South African characters I can maybe try and do, even in Hollywood blockbuster movies,” he says.


Sharlto plays a pilot who gets released from a psychiatric hospital and reinstated into the army. The role sees him flying helicopters and setting his cast mates on fire. “I was very grateful Joe didn’t ask me to do my own stunts. During the scene where Murdock gets shocked by a car battery and flips onto the bonnet, the stuntmen cracked open his skull and had to have eight stitches in his head. I freaked out because I thought he was unconscious.""My experience of this film was having stuntmen who actually helped deliver my character to the audience, and not just fly into walls, which is rare,” says Sharlto.


A stickler for realism, Joe sought out the services of Paul Maurice, a military advisor with extensive wartime experience, to train the cast in the use of a wide array of weapons and turn the actors into a Special Forces unit. “Joe really wanted us to know what we were doing so he could shoot the scene and not have to make quick cuts. He wanted it to look real and for the four of us to really function like a team,” explains Sharlto. “When you’re being trained by a guy who’s literally going off and coming back wounded from Afghanistan, it makes you think a little more about what you’re doing and what would actually be involved; it brings it close to home, that you are portraying a glamorised version of what real guys are doing on a daily basis. So we all felt it was important to respect that and be as accurate as possible.”

It was Sharlto’s idea to give his character a Southern accent. “Sharlto has a definite South African accent, but there’s not a shred of this in the movie,” says Joe. “He’s doing this Texas Panhandle twang that is really something. You just can’t exhaust his imagination in terms of what he will give you. His whole attitude was that Murdock is nuts, so Sharlto had to be a bit nuts, changing his personality at the drop of a hat.”

Sharlto says there’s a whole technical side to accents and dialects that very few people actually understand.
“It’s like a science. If you understand phonetics, you can make an accent accurate to a particular region. Murdock’s base voice is a non-specific southern dialect. I used an accent coach, Jess Platt, at the end of the film because I wanted to technically accurate. We listened to every single line and if it wasn’t technically accurate, we’d change it with voice over,” he says.


Liam Neeson plays the leader of The A-Team, cigar-smoking colonel John “Hannibal” Smith. He and Sharlto formed a close bond during the publicity tour, when the team spent weeks getting to know each other properly, but during the first days on set it was a different story altogether. “The scale of this movie was huge. It was completely overwhelming. I was really intimidated meeting some of the actors; realising you’re just about to do a scene with Liam Neeson is surreal,” says Sharlto.

Before District 9 became a worldwide hit, Sharlto was mostly known as the go-to-guy at Cape Town-based Atomic Visual Effects, but he’s taken to acting like a duck to water. “In some ways I am surprised by my success but in a weird way it feels natural and right. I acted a lot when I was a kid and considered being an actor at that point. I’ve had a passion for movies for such a long time that to meet the people I’m meeting now feels like it was always going to happen.”

The A-Team made just under $77 million in the United States and has already nearly made as much in the rest of the world.


Sharlto is represented by William Morris Endeavour.

This article first appeared in The Callsheet Newspaper.