Eve’s nickname is ‘Evie – I don’t like it’, which I like to pronounce in a whiny Welsh accent. We refer to Burn as ‘Binny Bots’. Naoko will answer to ‘Coco Chanel’ or ‘Ping Pong Buckaroo’, and Gareth responds to ‘Gaz’ or ‘Gaza’. My nickname is ‘Jinny Baza’. I could try to explain the etymology of all these names, but I’m not sure I remember anymore.
Filming a TV show may not be equal to mining coal, but it’s hard work nonetheless. Our days are twelve hours long and every few weeks in our shooting schedule, we film at night. This means that the only family we see on a regular basis is each other. When we work together, we work hard, and when we play together, we play hard too.
When we were filming the ‘Countrycide’ episode in the Brecon Beacons National Park, northwest of Cardiff, life imitated art a little for me when we were put up for the night in creepy rooms and cottages, not far from the set where the villagers were eating their neighbours. The shoot for this episode was demanding and long. The Brecon Beacons may be one of the most stunning landscapes in Britain, but a bone-cutting wind blows constantly across the moors and, despite the layers from wardrobe, we could never stay warm while filming. We only managed to succeed in that department after we shut down for the night.
It didn’t take long for that party gene to kick in. We headed back to our digs and the five of us – Eve, Burn, Naoko, Gareth and I – had a blow-out night together. We drank too much, laughed too much and sang too loud. At one point, Gareth hit his head on an antique brass bell and we thought we’d killed him. The landlord complained about the noise3 and then he accused Burn of moving the bathtub. Have you seen the size of Burn? The bathtub had to weigh 500 lbs.
We told ghost stories and managed to scare the shit out of each other – so much so that in the middle of the night, I knocked on Evie’s door in my Transformer PJs (she answered in a thong and a bra). We cuddled up in bed together and protected each other from the ghoulies like a couple of terrified siblings.
The next morning, we were all a bit worse for wear when we gathered in the make-up trailer, to say nothing of what we sounded like trying to explain the nasty gash on Gareth’s forehead, which had to be covered up.
Sometimes, the crew joins us in our rambunctiousness. In one of the early episodes of the second series, Ianto has a meltdown in the Hub one night, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, but if you’ve seen it, you’ll know. I have to admit it’s one of my favourite episodes to date. Anyway, while Jack comforts Ianto, he shifts from innocent consolation to a full-on, passionate embrace and kiss.
Gareth and I ‘assumed the position’ and went for it. The episode’s director never called ‘cut’. By the time Gareth and I were hitting the two-minute mark, my lips were getting numb and Gareth was getting twitchy.
‘You fuckers!’ we both yelled in unison, when we finally realized what was going on and pulled apart.
The delight of the crew was obvious and the joke carried them for hours through a tough shoot. Sometimes that’s the whole point of having a laugh or pulling a prank or two or three: the residual benefit of the laughter and the release of stress helps you to deal with the long day or night ahead.
Since we began Torchwood, Burn and his wife Sara have had a son, Max; we’ve been trying to get Naoko a boyfriend; and we’re teaching Gareth how to deal with newfound celebrity. Eve and her partner Brad, and Scott and I have both bought homes in the Cardiff area. The cast has bonded as a family, and we’ve also grown to love the important people in each other’s lives.
Once, when my niece Clare was visiting Cardiff, she and I headed down to the Bay for dinner, where we met up with Eve and Brad. Clare and Eve hit it off immediately, and we all moved together from the restaurant to a bar in town, where two of my favourite girls proceeded to have a champagne-chugging contest4 to see who could drink a bottle the fastest. Not as easy as you might imagine. I called the contest a draw when I noticed they were downing £60 bottles of the good stuff. Eve and Clare and I were singing so loudly that night, we eventually got kicked out of the bar.
I remember Elaine Paige telling me in the early days of my career that when your work family and your real family support you equally, you’re on the right road. As Eve, Clare and I stumbled home that night, the road felt pretty steady under my feet.
‘Live, Laugh, Love’
After school one afternoon in 1985, I had a conference with my high school’s guidance counsellor. As part of her responsibilities, she was interviewing all the graduating seniors and chatting with them about their career goals. My interview went something like this.
‘John, what are your plans?’
‘I’m going to be an actor.’
‘But what will you study in college?’
‘Drama and theatre.’
‘But what else are you going to do?’
‘I don’t want to do anything else.’
‘John, you need a plan B.’
She kept insisting that I think about majoring in something like English or history or business or psychology or communication, anything, anything ‘serious’, so that I could be assured of having a job when ‘the acting thing’ didn’t work out. She actually used the phrase, ‘the acting thing’. I was getting angrier by the minute.
‘Seriously, John, you need to have something to fall back on.’
‘Listen,’ I finally said, standing up to leave, ‘if I fall back on anything, it’ll be my ass. I’ll get a plan B, if or when I actually need one.’
To date, I’ve never needed a plan B. I’d no idea that men, women and children would embrace me as a performer as much as they have, or that Captain Jack would be so popular, but I’m thankful for both. I certainly never set out to be a hero to gay men and women, although I’ve perhaps become one, as the piles of letters and emails I regularly receive attest. I’m just a regular guy, and I’m humbled and honoured by fans’ recognition. Their sentiments touch me deeply.
In the prologue to the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s The Autobiography, a piece I was once assigned to read in high school, Russell writes, ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’
When I was an adolescent, I could understand and even appreciate the first two, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I recognized the existential nature of the third. Being a man of integrity and compassion in the twenty-first century is not always easy, but I do what I can and will continue to do what I can. My own passions are my family, including my dogs, my ability to entertain, and my love of life and all I can make of it.
As you’ve read, many people have shaped my passions and made me who I am at this, the midpoint (I hope) of my life. Pardon me while I spin three times again and touch all the wood I can reach. Any magpies nearby? Since I’ve known him, another Russell has taught me a similar message about living a life of integrity. With his nonchalance, his frankness, his brilliant skills as a writer, and his straightforward approach to life, love and laughter, Russell T. Davies’s friendship has been an added bonus to playing Captain Jack.
At a press conference once, Russell and I were on a panel together to discuss Torchwood. A journalist for one of the baser tabloids asked Russell what the ‘T’ in his name stood for.
‘Some other fucker in the business is called Russell Davies, and when he dies, I’ll drop the “T”,’ Russell replied.
He then proceeded to berate the reporter for asking inane questions. The audience, full of other journalists I might add, was eating out of the palm of Russell’s hand by the close of the session, because he responded to them with honesty, respect and good humour. Well, except for the guy he rebuked.
Two years before I left university in San Diego to study Shakespeare in England, I travelled alone to New York to visit my friend Anthony Rapp, and to see my first live Broadway shows. Anthony and I, you may remember, performed together in Joliet West High School’s 1983 product
ion of Oliver! Off and on through my early college experiences, Anthony, who was a few years behind me in school, and I kept in touch.
Anthony had been acting professionally since he was quite young. In 1986–7, he was playing Freddy, the youngest of two sons, in George Furth’s family drama Precious Sons, at the Longacre Theater in New York. Anthony’s co-stars in the play were Judith Ivey and Ed Harris. I was psyched to be heading to the Big Apple to see Anthony perform and to see some real Broadway shows for the first time in my life.
On that trip, Anthony and I went to see Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher – whom I love as an actor and who was brilliant in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty – and Kevin Spacey, who played Lemmon’s character’s youngest son in the play and who was also great in American Beauty. After this show, Anthony and I found our way backstage and I ended up having a whisky in Jack Lemmon’s dressing room while we listened to him tell stories about Broadway and Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis, and about the ‘good old days’ of theatre. Kevin Spacey came down to say hello and ended up joining us for drinks.
Later that evening, Anthony, Kevin and I went for a bite to eat, and then Kevin took us to the Limelight Club, a dance club in Manhattan in a converted old church, where I drank vodka tonics with Phoebe Cates and a very young Drew Barrymore. A vodka tonic was the only mixed drink I knew back then because I’d ordered them all the time on my dad’s tab.1
On my last afternoon in New York, before I had to fly home, I went to see Rupert Holmes’s musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remains one of my favourite musicals. Despite the ominous tone of the title, the show was funny and poignant and, although I didn’t understand this until much later, it owed a huge debt to the English pantomime tradition. Characters talked to the audience, the audience jeered at and taunted the characters, and a woman played the title character, the orphan Edwin Drood. Years before I came to know her as one of my leading ladies, I sat in the balcony of a theatre on Broadway and I watched Betty Buckley perform as Drood.
No matter how many shows I’ve seen or performed since that trip to New York, no matter how many scripts I’ve read or songs I’ve sung, I often return to those days and remember how I felt that afternoon watching Betty Buckley belt it out, or recall the excitement building up inside me while I lounged on a dressing-room couch, listening to a legend like Jack Lemmon tell stories. I knew then that I wanted to be an entertainer.
Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood has no conclusion and neither does this autobiography. My ending isn’t written yet, my show’s not over. Stay in your seats. This is only the intermission.
Timeline
1989 Billy Crocker in Anything Goes, Prince Edward Theatre, London
1990–1 Chris in Miss Saigon, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London
1991 Domingo Hernandez in Matador, Queens Theatre, London
1991 Matador, CD single
1992 Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, London
1993 Claude in the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Production of Hair, The Old Vic, London
1993 Hair, studio cast recording
1993 Wyndham Brandon in Rope, Minerva Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, Chichester
1993 Godspell, studio cast recording
1993–4 Presenter – Live and Kicking (BBC)
1993–4 Chris in Miss Saigon, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London
1994 Grease, studio cast recording
1994 Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, Adelphi Theatre, London
1994–5 Presenter – The Movie Game (BBC)
1995–6 Peter Fairchild in Central Park West (CBS)
1996 Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, Minskoff Theater, New York
1996 Robert Burns in Red Red Rose, Concert Hall, Aarhus, Denmark
1997 Aspects of Lloyd Webber, solo album
1997 Alex in Aspects of Love, Olympia Theatre, Dublin (6 weeks); Cork Opera House, Cork (1 week)
1997 Cal Chandler in The Fix, Donmar Warehouse, London
1997 Che in Evita, Oslo Spektrum, Oslo, Norway
1998 Concert – Hey! Mr Producer: A Celebration of Cameron Mackintosh
1998 ‘The Younger Man’ in Putting It Together, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles
1999 The Beast/The Prince in Beauty and the Beast, Dominion Theatre, London
1999–2000 ‘The Younger Man’ in Putting it Together, Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York
2000 Reflections From Broadway, solo album
2000–1 Peter Williams in Titans (NBC)
2002 Cabaret – Arci’s Place, New York
2002 Bobby in Company, Kennedy Center, Washington, DC
2002 Cabaret – Kennedy Center, Washington, DC
2002 Cabaret – Stackner Cabaret, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
2002 Cabaret – Lincoln Center, New York
2002 Concert – Sondheim Celebration, Lincoln Center, New York
2002 Ben Carpenter in Shark Attack 3: Megalodon
2002–3 Billy Crocker in Anything Goes, National Theatre, London
2003 Dumaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost, National Theatre, London
2003 Concert – An Evening with the Boston Pops (PBS)
2003 F. Scott Fizgerald in The Beautiful and Damned, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford
2003–4 Billy Crocker in Anything Goes, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London
2003 Anything Goes, studio cast recording
2003 Guest appearance – ‘Children in Need’ (BBC)
2004 Reporter in Method; titled Dead Even in the UK
2004 Jack and ‘Night and Day’ soloist in De-Lovely (premiere at Cannes Film Festival)
2004 John Barrowman Swings Cole Porter, solo album
2004 Billy Flynn in Chicago, Adelphi Theatre, London
2004 Presenter – Friday Night Is Music Night (BBC Radio 2)
2004 Concert – Elegies: A Song Cycle, Arts Theatre, London
2005 Captain Jack in Doctor Who season one (BBC); John’s premiere episode ‘The Empty Child’
2005 Guest singer – Friday Night Is Music Night (BBC Radio 2)
2005 Concert – West Side Story Selections: A Tribute to Leonard Bernstein, Feldherrnhalle, Munich
2005 Cabaret – Pizza on the Park, London
2005 Cabaret – Feestzaal Stadhuis, Aalst, Belgium
2005 Lt Jack Ross in A Few Good Men, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
2005 Presenter/performer – The Sound of Musicals (BBC)
2005–6 Prince Charming in Cinderella, New Wimbledon Theatre, London
2005 Lead Tenor in The Producers (film)
2006 Competitor – Dancing on Ice (ITV)
2006 Judge – How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? (BBC)
2006 Presenter – Keys to the Castle (HGTV)
2006 Captain Jack in Torchwood season one (BBC)
2006 Awarded Stonewall’s Entertainer of the Year Award
2006 Opening and closing performer – Royal Variety Performance, London Coliseum, London
2006–7 Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk, New Theatre, Cardiff
2006 Concert – A Musical Christmas: Friday Night is Music Night, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (BBC Radio 2)
2007 Co-presenter – Live from the Red Carpet BAFTAs (E! Entertainments)
2007 Presenter – The National Lottery (BBC)
2007 Subject – A Taste of My Life (BBC)
2007 Panellist – The Weakest Link: Doctor Who Special (BBC)
2007 Judge – Any Dream Will Do (BBC)
2007 Captain Jack in Doctor Who season three (BBC)
2007 Launched Royal Air Force Tattoo with the RAF
2007 Concert (host and performer) – A Jerry Herman Tribute, Prince Edward Theatre, London (BBC Radio 2)
2007 Another Side, solo album
2007 Guest appearance – ‘Children in Need’ (BBC)
2007–8 Aladdin in Aladdin, Hippodrome Theatre, Birmingham
/> 2008 Captain Jack in Torchwood season two (BBC)
2008 Captain Jack in Doctor Who season four (BBC)
2008 Presenter – The Kids Are All Right (BBC)
2008 UK Concert Tour
With thanks to George Seylaz, webmaster for www.johnbarrowman.com.
Index
(The initials JB and SG denote John Barrowman and Scott Gill.)
Adelphi Theatre, London (i)
Aguilar, Rafael (i)
Agyeman, Freema (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ahearne, Joe (i)
All My Children (i)
American Beauty (i), (ii)
American Cinema Awards (i)
American Werewolf in London, An (i)
Angel (i)
Any Dream Will Do (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Anything Goes:
JB’s first rehearsal for (i)
Joliet Drama Guild (i)
London (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)n, (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii)
pirated versions of (i)
plot of (i)
video-camera incidents during (i)
Arci’s Place, NY (i)
Askey, Arthur (i)
auditions (i)
for Anything Goes (i)
for commercials (i), (ii)
for Doctor Who role (i)
for Opryland (i), (ii)
Aurora, IL (i), (ii), (iii)
JB starts school in (i)
Prestbury in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Autobiography, The (Russell) (i)
Avian, Bob (i)
awards:
Theatregoers’ Choice Awards (i)
TV Quick (i)
Welsh BAFTA (i)
Anything Goes Page 21
