LONDON -- Claridge's is a hotel for tourist swells, the famous, the importantly busy. The surrounding neighborhood near Grosvenor Square teems with embassies and old money.
Alan Rickman sits in a suite like he belongs. He reigns as one of England's most celebrated actors -- now appearing as Judge Turpin in the "Sweeney Todd" film musical, which opened Friday -- and he has grown into a children's icon for playing professor Severus Snape in the "Harry Potter" series.
No one will ask Rickman for his room key. Once upon a time, though, Claridge's -- in the parlance of Harry Potter -- was a hotel that shall not be named.
"I was a poor boy and the word Claridge's would be off-limits," says Rickman, a native of west London.
Not even a family visit for afternoon tea? "You stay in your patch pretty much," he says. "We'd have no reason to be here. You went where your friends were. You went where you can kick a tin round the streets. This is landed-gentry area."
Rickman, 61, concedes his horizons have expanded considerably. After forging a career notable for a small but zesty gang of baddies -- Hans Gruber in "Die Hard," the Sheriff of Nottingham in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and Valmont in the "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" play -- he got to sing and be sinister in "Sweeney Todd."
The issue, he insists, wasn't whether he could do it. "I think it was them having the confidence in me," he says of "Sweeney Todd" director Tim Burton and the producers. While Rickman performed in "Private Lives" onstage in New York, he was summoned uptown to sing a few notes in a tryout. He passed.
It would be easy to dismiss Judge Turpin as all bad. He banishes Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) to an Australian prison on a trumped-up charge and steals Todd's wife and daughter. That sets the stage for Todd's revenge-fueled return to 18th century London as a barber who slits the throats of customers and donates their flesh to the meat-pie maker downstairs, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter).
Rickman says Turpin feels pain for being romantically spurned by Sweeney's daughter, who has become the judge's ward. Whether Turpin deserves to feel pain is up to the audience.
"What's interesting about this film is, who's worst in it?" Rickman says. "It's not a beauty pageant of nice people."
