Oscar winner Mark Rylance plays the worst golfer in British Open history in ‘The Phantom of the Open’

At one time, Mark Rylance hadn’t been aware of the real-life story of the worst golfer in the history of the British Open.

But when a screenplay about Maurice Flitcroft, a shipyard crane operator who managed to enter the Open in 1976 despite never playing a single round of golf, came his way, well, that was not something the Oscar-winning actor was going to pass up.

“The appeal was the appeal of Don Quixote, or a little bit of that character in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ that Jimmy Stewart plays,” Rylance says on a video call from London.

“He maintains his own opinion, his self-respect, despite all contrary evidence.”

And there was plenty of evidence to the contrary as “The Phantom of the Open,” which opens in theaters on Friday, June 3, makes clear.

After catching a golf match on the telly late one night, Flitcroft sent away for a cheap set of clubs and an instructional manual, apparently convinced that he, a chain-smoking crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness, had as good a shot as anyone at winning the prestigious British Open.

But when he realized that to enter the qualifying rounds as an amateur he’d have to have a golf handicap, which would have required him to actually have played golf before, he instead ticked the box for professional golfers. No one at the tournament thought to check if that was true.

On the first hole, Flitcroft took a big swing with his second-choice club – he’d forgotten his 4-iron in the car, he later explained – and sent the ball all of 40 yards.

Though Open officials begged him to stop, Flitcroft flailed his way to a score of 121; at 49 over par, that was the worst score in the history of the tournament first played in 1860.

Thanks to the media sensation this created at the time, Rylance was able to watch scores of interviews with Flitcroft on YouTube, studying not only his mannerisms but his motives, too.

“I kept thinking, ‘You must be having a joke,’” he says. ” ‘You must be taking the mickey of these interviewers. You can’t be serious.’

“But watching close-up time and again, I could never see a crack in the sincerity of his belief in himself. That on a good day, he could match Arnold Palmer or Seve Ballesteros or any of them. That he was at that standard.

“So I thought, whether he’s having a joke or not, he appears to be sincere, so I should play it sincere,” Rylance says.

Big dream, no doubts

“The Phantom of the Open” at its heart is a story about following one’s dreams, no matter how unlikely. For Flitcroft, there never seemed to be any doubt to his quest. He doesn’t seem to have had, or at least listened to, that little voice in your head that says, You can’t be serious.

Rylance says he thinks self-doubt can often derail a dream before it starts. “Particularly with activities, sports, arts, that have professionals.

“You know, you can listen to Miles Davis and get very daunted to pick up a trumpet,” he says. “You can watch someone play Shakespeare like me, maybe, who has had training and years at the Royal Shakespeare Company and be daunted to speak a bit of Shakespeare at a wedding or a funeral.

“I think that’s a great shame,” Rylance says. “So I like that aspect of the story, too. That this is an amateur who enters into the professional field by accident, and by intention, too, I guess, and comes out honorably in my mind.”

Flitcroft refused to be ashamed or abashed by his performance at the Open, he notes.

“He did the best he could. He left his 4-iron in the back of the car, and if he hadn’t done that it would have gone better,” Rylance says, laughing.

Good at golfing badly

Rylance plays tennis but hadn’t touched a golf club since he was a boy, so learning to play a bad golfer for the film came naturally, he says.

“I had a grandfather who had lawns at his house in Kent that were beautifully flat,” says Rylance, who is British but spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Connecticut and Wisconsin.

He and his brother found an old set of golf clubs from their grandfather’s days as a banker in Hong Kong, and with their friends from the village created their own little golf course.

“Eventually, we ventured over the hedge into the playing fields of the village, so we had maybe a nine-hole course that we made up ourselves and we loved it.”

All that was long, long ago, says Rylance, 61.

“My swing, they say, is natural and is all right,” he says. “But yeah, it was rare that a ball went where I intended it to go. So that was fortunate.”

A family and a friend

Though “The Phantom of the Open” is centered around the game of golf, it’s not a golf movie. Instead, it’s a film about family – Sally Hawkins is wonderful as his supportive wife Jean, as are the actors who play his stepson Mike and his twins James and Gene.

For Rylance, the screen partnership with Hawkins, who’s earned Oscar nominations for her roles in “Blue Jasmine” and “The Shape of Water,” was life-changing.