‘I directed him here in his second year for a play,’ Jon continued. ‘He was very inventive, very lively and he’d always come to rehearsals with new ideas. The play I worked with him on was a comedy, so I know he has a comic gift as well. I think his character will therefore be quite amusing. He has very distinctive features and he’s very handsome. I think a lot of young ladies will be pleased he’s the new Doctor once they start seeing him in the spring of 2010. With his looks I don’t think he will frighten any of the public, but hopefully a few monsters – he is more than 900 years old after all! I’m very proud of him and everyone here at UEA drama is delighted.’
Matt was attracting serious attention, now – and he hadn’t even left university. He continued his work with the National Youth Theatre and landed another role that was to stand out: that of Bassoon in The Master and Margarita. By this time it was apparent that a serious talent was on the rise. Although he was still at university, Matt was now to turn professional, in a play called Fresh Kills at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2004. From there he went on to take part in On the Shore of the Wide World by Simon Stephens, a drama about three generations of the Holmes family, in Stockport, in the north of England, which began at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and which transferred to the National Theatre. Matt played Paul Danzinger, while the play itself went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2006. It was ironic that when Matt was cast as Doctor Who there were so many people demanding to know who he was, because as a young actor studying drama he was already leaping ahead of the rest.
Matt was now so busy professionally that it was affecting his university work, which meant that he had to come to an arrangement with East Anglia: they agreed that he could graduate without attending lectures in his last two terms. Given the amount of professional experience he was now acquiring, this was an understandable move.
‘[Fresh Kills] took me out of college for six weeks,’ Matt later recalled. ‘Then I was invited to appear in On the Shore of the Wide World. I said to them [East Anglia], I want to be an actor so you’ve got to let me go and do this. I didn’t go to any more lectures, but they let me graduate. I would get the reading list and do my work and send it back to them.’
It was a good move. Working at the National Theatre meant that Matt met the powers that be, made the contacts that would stand him in good stead and landed another really good part almost straight away. It was that of Lockwood, in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys. ‘On the first day of rehearsals, [director] Nick Hytner told us how lucky we were,’ said Matt. ‘As he said, “Not many boys at your age get to be in a play this successful that’s at the National Theatre and by Alan Bennett.”’
That was putting it mildly. Alan Bennett is one of the most popular and successful playwrights writing in Britain today, and The History Boys, which premiered in 2004, made a huge impact when it was first produced. It is set in Cutlers’ Grammar School, Sheffield, a boys’ grammar school in the north, and centres on three history students preparing for their Oxbridge entrance exam. They are being taught by three teachers: Hector, an eccentric but inspirational teacher who is later discovered fondling a pupil; Irwin, a cynical supply teacher; and Mrs Lintott. Irwin’s hidden homosexuality also begins to emerge.
The drama, which won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play, along with an Olivier Award, Drama Desk Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Play, and Tony Award for Best Play, also boasted some stellar cast members, who were either already famous or going to go on to great things. Clive Merrison, Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, James Corden, Dominic Cooper, Russell Tovey and Andrew Knott were among the original cast; initially the play had a limited run, but it was extended time and time again.
The reviews were sensational, too. ‘Nothing could diminish the incendiary achievement of this subtle, deep-wrought and immensely funny play about the value and meaning of education,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian. ‘What is astonishing is how much territory Bennett manages to cover: the teaching and meaning of history, inflexible and imaginative approaches to education, and the idea, as in Forty Years On, that a school has the potential to be a metaphor for English life. It is no accident that the play is set in the eighties, when the arguments between beleaguered humanism and pragmatic functionalism were at the very height.’
In all, Matt could hardly have managed to appear in a more high profile, wildly praised production, and even if he wasn’t in the original cast, it began to give him a taste of what real success could be.
This wasn’t the end of Matt’s association with the National: he also appeared in Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship. ‘As a young actor, there is no better place to learn your craft,’ he recalled. ‘I remember saying to my dad at breakfast once, “I’d love to work at the National by the time I am 25.” I got there sooner!’ Indeed, he was achieving one goal after another while he was still extremely young.
The upward trajectory continued apace. Matt went on to make his West End debut shortly afterwards in a play called Swimming with Sharks; its star was none other than Christian Slater. Matt had a not totally successful first audition but was recalled and got the part. ‘I did better on the recall,’ he remembered. And how was it to work with Slater? ‘Not daunted, but excited. I love Heathers and True Romance. And he’s a really good guy – a nice bloke. He’s funny and genuinely makes me laugh. Yes, I play a bright, enthusiastic young man who is pushed to a very dark, sour place. It’s reminiscent of Faust; it’s about someone who sells his soul to the devil by the end of the play.’
The play got slightly mixed reviews. Slater played a foul Hollywood producer, Buddy Ackerman, in a play that was based on a 1994 film, with Kevin Spacey in the leading role. He provokes Guy (Matt) to such an extent that by the finale, he ties Buddy to a chair and tortures him, not an easy scene to watch or play. ‘Slater’s Buddy presides over a studio division dealing in populist slasher films; Matt Smith’s rumpled, eager film buff Guy comes to work as his assistant, a job which, his departing predecessor pronounces, involves “a lot of shit work for shit wages”,’ wrote Sam Marlowe in The Times.
‘Enter Helen Baxendale’s sassy but serious independent producer Dawn Lockard, with a high-minded script called The Afghani Incident that Buddy might be able to turn to his advantage, and a hot body he is even keener to get his hands on. A triangular power struggle ensues, as Guy and Dawn fall in love and Buddy plays puppet master. The play toys with notions of dumbing down and artistic responsibility, but never properly engages with them. Nor does it fully succeed as a thriller, largely because it’s so difficult to care about the megalomaniac Buddy, the geeky Guy who gradually mutates into a less compelling version of his boss, or the latter’s improbable relationship with Baxendale’s Dawn, whose attraction towards such a dweeb is almost impossible to credit.’
Lizzie Loveridge, on CurtainUp.com, was none too impressed, either. ‘Christian Slater appears rather stiff in the part and his vocal range seems not to vary enough in a stage setting,’ she wrote. ‘He is content to shout at his victim rather than to mercurially switch from malignancy to opportunism but he does pace the stage like a bear. He is facially impassive, as if his suspiciously smooth forehead had been frozen to fill out the wrinkles. This could be in character as Buddy Ackerman might be the type to employ Botox! Matt Smith looks like a klutz initially but I really didn’t care enough to want him to overcome the ghastly Buddy. We know Helen Baxendale has real acting balls, but the role of Dawn doesn’t give her much opportunity to show her full talent and Dawn and Guy seem a very unlikely couple.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that mauling, Matt was a little circumspect about the whole experience later on. ‘He’s cool, Christian, I liked him,’ he said. ‘He’s a good guy but I had a tough time … for a variety of reasons. I’d never done that length of run before. At the Court, you’re in, you’re out. So it was quite at a learning curve.’
At any rate, it also gave Matt his first experience of working with a huge international star. He and Christian actually got on very well, which made up for some of the difficulty. ‘[Christian is] great fun,’ he said in another interview. ‘He’s cool as fuck. He’s all about the work; he’s really focused on the work. He made that whole transaction very easy. He’s a nice man, a good all round bloke.’ There was that word, ‘cool’ again – and a rare incidence of Matt swearing – he was obviously a man who was very aware of what was a little bit stylish, and what worked and what did not.
It also gave Matt some experience of negative reviews, something every actor must get used to, no matter how good they are. As it happens, Matt was going to get sensational reviews when he finally started playing the Doctor, but the run up to it all was something else. He was forced to endure constant criticism about being too young, too geeky, too unknown, too not David Tennant, but he was able to withstand it because he’d had to put up with a lot of stick before.
It was now that Matt started to get some television work. A few years later, when he got the role of Doctor Who, there was wild excitement when it emerged that he had, in fact, previously acted with one Billie Piper – quite a few times, in fact. Billie was playing the lead in the BBC adaptations of the Sally Lockhart Quartet books, although at the time of writing only The Ruby in the Smoke and the Shadow in the North had been made; Matt now managed to get the part of Jim Taylor in those two, his first ever appearances on television.
Sally Lockhart (or Veronica Beatrice ‘Sally’ Lockhart) is a fictional character in a series of books created by the children’s author Philip Pullman. She first appeared in The Ruby in the Smoke, a play written to be performed in schools, about a 16-year-old girl, Sally, who starts to investigate her father’s death. She soon discovers that he is connected to the opium trade, the Indian Mutiny, and a cursed Ruby, and Philip was so taken with his creation that he wrote four books on the back of it, which became known as the Sally Lockhart Quartet, the two already mentioned plus The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess.
Sally herself is the main character, obviously, a very intrepid girl who manages to become a financial consultant, not an obvious career path for women in the 1870s, making various friends and alliances along the way. One of these is Jim Taylor, a Cockney ragamuffin, who loves the theatre and is able to see a person’s true worth. In The Shadow of the North, he falls out of a window trying to save Fred, Sally’s lover and the father of her child, leaving him with a limp for the rest of his life.
The Ruby in the Smoke aired on television in 2006 and met with a mixed response from viewers. ‘I feel this would have done very well as a television series, but as a film it merely felt rushed,’ blogged indigoharmony on imdb.com. ‘The characters introduced promised to be interesting, but weren’t really properly developed, and I had trouble keeping up with all the twists in the plot, which were rushed by in seconds. Sally seemed like a fascinating character, but her character development was left to a few scenes of her standing up to her aunt and demonstrating her ability for dealing with figures. This left the film feeling somewhat sterile – more of a puzzle than a story.’
Another blogger, hesketh27, was more positive, however: ‘This Victorian melodrama proved to be very enjoyable, perfect for Christmas-time viewing. It was sometimes hard to follow, but the superb period detail and larger-than-life characters more than made up for this. High production values were evident throughout and The Ruby in the Smoke stood head and shoulders above the BBC’s absolutely dreadful adaptation of Dracula, which ran the following night. Good performances from the cast overall.’
Bob the moo was a bit down on Billie, and also on Matt. ‘It doesn’t really hang together though, as the mystery tends to have peaks and troughs even across the comparatively short running time,’ he blogged. ‘The central thread concerning Mrs Holland and the ruby is engaging but the rest is not so good and seems to ask the audience just to go along with it. A part of this failing can be laid at the feet of the cast. Piper in particular seems very bland and uninteresting throughout. She had a bit of something about her in Dr Who but here she seems to be restraining it as part of her character – which is an approach that doesn’t work. In the words of a far less kind commentator – she appears to spend more time focusing on keeping her upper lip pulled down over her big teeth! Walters is much better in her role and her parts of the film are easily the strongest and more enjoyable. Smith is a bit too cheeky chappie for my liking, while Field, Anderson, Gilet, Maudsley and others are all solid enough in their roles.’
The Shadow in the North, which aired the following year, didn’t fare much better. ‘The Sally Lockhart mysteries proved to be a mild disappointment,’ blogged Mart Sander. ‘They are not up to the usual BBC period drama standards – or rather they haven’t gotten the period drama treatment. The story relies heavily on a Victorian atmosphere, but you rarely get this in the film adaptations. First of all, Miss Piper, lovely and talented as she is, has the least Victorian beauty imaginable. She is so much AD 2000 that every scene with her in it loses every kind of credibility. …Miss Piper walks straight out of 2007 and makes everything around her 2007.’
LouE15 had actually enjoyed the first drama, but didn’t much like the follow-up. ‘Maybe it was watching this with my parents when it aired over New Year on British TV – but I found this strangely detached, even a bit mechanical,’ he blogged. ‘This time round the leads’ chemistry seemed to be absent, the script dry, the story rushed (as was the previous one) – the relations between the characters insufficiently explained. Considering we’d had to wait a year for this one, I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps the aim was to make a classroom-suitable programme for Victorian history lessons? – if so, why air it post watershed?’
And then there was Peter Boots, who certainly didn’t mince his words. ‘It is sad when an excellent cast is wasted in something quite as preposterous as this,’ he began. ‘Imagine a late Victorian London where a near teenage young lady styles herself as a “Financial Consultant” and sinks a retired school teacher’s entire retirement savings in a shipping line that goes bankrupt after its ship – apparently the only one – mysteriously disappears at sea on a calm day.’ There was a lot more along the same lines – he clearly wasn’t a fan.
So, Sally Lockhart was to be no Doctor Who, on television, at least. But again, it didn’t matter, for Matt was learning his trade. Acting on television is different from stage acting, and he was learning the tricks and how to go about it. And it would shortly be standing him in very good stead.
CHAPTER 8
THAT FACE
It was Doctor Who that was shortly to catapult Matt into the stratosphere, but if truth be told, he was doing pretty well anyway. More and more juicy roles were coming his way, including another one with Billie Piper, which got the critics even more worked up than they had been before once it was announced that he was going to be the new Doctor. This wasn’t just any old role: it was a part in the infamous series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Now here really was a turn up for the books: the Doctor making free with a previous assistant. It was all very rambunctious stuff.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl had become something of a succès de scandale. It had had started as first a blog and then a book by a high-class lady of the night, known only (until she was unmasked as the scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti) as Belle de Jour, after the famous 1960s film of the same name starring Catherine Deneuve and directed by Luis Buñuel. When it was adapted for television, starring Billie Piper as Hannah Baxter, a seemingly normal woman who in fact works as a prostitute, there was a certain amount of shock, not least because Billie seemed extremely clean cut. After her early years as a pop singer, she had become best known first for her marriage to Chris Evans, and then for her role as Rose Tyler. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d expect to go around posing as a lady of the night.
The series was never exactly mainstream; it was shown on ITV2. But it garnered a fair bit of inte
rest. Like Sex and the City, to which it was sometimes compared, Secret Diary of a Call Girl frequently treated sex as more of a laugh than anything else. Billie/Hannah/Belle was the narrator of the series, and would frequently address the camera directly as she came to terms with the fact that she was having a career break. ‘Now that I’m not working I’ll have to find something else to occupy my time,’ she mused, before addressing the viewer with her next conundrum. ‘More importantly, I’ll have to start giving it away.’ Although the show was obviously very different indeed from the one that was to make him famous, it also gave Matt the chance to display his flair for comedy and lightness of touch.
Billie herself was very much a fan of Matt, and was enthusiastic when it was announced that he was to be the Eleventh Doctor. ‘I’ve worked with him three times, including Secret Diary of a Call Girl where he was a punter,’ she said. ‘I love Matt Smith. I think he’s amazing and he’s a great choice for the new Doctor Who.’
Matt’s appearance in Secret Diary was brief, but memorable. His character had carnal relations with Billie’s Belle de Jour, of course, but unusually, it was not as a paying client, or punter, as Billie had termed him. The two met in a store, where Matt’s character Tim was working as a shop assistant and Belle was looking for a wedding gift, before ending up in bed together. The twist to this one was that when they woke up the next morning, Tim wouldn’t leave, and because their arrangement was a traditional one, rather than a deal that involved payment, Belle couldn’t tell him to do so.
Offering to make him breakfast, all she can find in the kitchen is champagne and a couple of bags of pasta; Tim, meanwhile, having been told she’s a legal secretary, finds a cupboard full of massage oil and jumps to the conclusion that she is, in fact, a masseuse. In desperation, Billie rings a male friend, who comes round and pretends to be her fiancé, one who wants to join in the fun. Tim leaves shortly afterwards.
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