I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  But the cartoon baddie of Raymond Calitri was stalking me all the way. The first major role I was offered was Sylar, the serial killer in the top-rating NBC sci-fi show Heroes. I said no; I didn’t forever want to be the British actor playing the villain. The role of Sylar became iconic and the actor who took the part, Zachary Quinto, went on to play Spock in the Star Trek reboot, but it was genuinely important to me to challenge the LA industry’s perception of the British guy as the baddie. That policy paid dividends to some degree when another role came up in Heroes for Claude Rains, the Invisible Man. My dad was his usual subtle self. ‘You went all the way to Hollywood,’ he pondered, ‘and all you got was the Invisible Man?’

  I attended the costume fitting only to find the show’s writers and execs waiting for me. They said they wanted me to wear a scarf. I knew exactly why – Doctor Who. I wasn’t going to do that. I didn’t appreciate the self-referencing element. How was that going to help me create a new character? My objection made them sit up a little – ‘This guy has got a mind of his own.’ And one of the worst things you can have as an actor is a mind of your own. If you really want to climb the ladder, leave your brain at the studio door.

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ I told them. But you can’t win with these people. They inserted the line ‘Fantastic!’ into the script. I didn’t realise until too late that it was a trope from Doctor Who.

  I received decent reviews for Heroes but basically all I was doing was repeating the performance I’d given for twenty years in Britain, in America, with a beard. The show’s producers were never going to let me carry an episode, which was what I wanted, and what I was used to. Similarly, I didn’t love the writing of Heroes. I didn’t feel like I was making the standard of television that I was back home. I knew also that eventually they would turn my character into a rogue. In the end, that combination of doubts meant I just didn’t go back. They kept asking me to return and I kept saying no, which really puzzled them, but the message I was putting out was that I needed better material.

  I was used to making drama with a meaning and, therefore, it suited me when I picked up a very low-budget film called New Orleans, Mon Amour, set a year after Hurricane Katrina. There I was, with a head full of issues about myself and my career, in a disaster zone, a place absolutely in the grip of trauma. But in New Orleans, even in its darkest time, I saw an honesty and dignity that was lacking in LA. The culture was far more integrated and diverse, music on every corner, a million miles from the politics of showbusiness and television. I found myself once again believing in a project and threw my heart and soul into it. But similar work was thin on the ground and, back in LA, I was cast in a terrible film called The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (The Dark Is Risible, as I prefer to call it), where I was complicit in letting myself be that character I was so hellbent on avoiding – the villain. We shot the film in Bucharest and I gave a terrible performance. I look back it at now in disbelief, but it’s only with hindsight that I can also see I was working with zero belief in my ability. In The Dark Is Rising, where I really had to come up with the goods, I couldn’t do it. My confidence had gone. The type of work I was finding in America wasn’t me.

  Again, as with the great British film stars of the ’50s and ’60s, when it comes to American cinema there’s a part of me that feels I was born in the wrong era. The American films I love were made in the ’50s, ’40s and ’30s. I feel also that my sensibilities are very European. Even the American theatre plays I’ve done, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, and those of Arthur Miller, I’ve never honestly felt I can get inside them like I could with, say, Molière. What I did love about the American film and TV industry, though, was the utter classlessness of it. I could play anything. Ours is a cottage industry and its less expansive outlook reflects as much. Class rules here, but not out there.

  I wanted to come home, and the opportunity came when I was offered a part in A Doll’s House at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. A year later, thanks once again to the genius writing of Jimmy McGovern, I was back on the BBC in Accused, for which I won an International Emmy for Best Actor playing a flawed and self-destructive working-class character – territory I understood. I was delighted to be back at the BBC. So much of the work I’ve truly loved has been with them. All I ever wanted to do was the likes of those great shows I’d worked on before, and my wishes were soon answered. I found myself handed an embarrassment of incredible parts. In quick succession, I was in Accused, Lennon Naked and The Shadow Line.

  Of those three, it was playing John Lennon that really made me think, I’m back. Being given the opportunity to play a character of such complexity and torment was massive for me. I was back in Britain, working for the BBC, in a lead role that would be judged and analysed to the nth degree. From a career point of view, Lennon Naked told people that, yes, I’d been the Doctor, but now I was going to continue the challenging work I’d done before. It told me something else – that I had overcome a situation that all artists experience, a crisis of confidence, the same that I would, a few years later, face once again with Macbeth.

  I could have taken an easier, slightly quieter route than one of the most famous people on earth, but I have got a considerable ego and I like taking on big roles. Of course, there was another consideration with John Lennon – he’s a founder member of the awkward squad. There’s some great footage in Don’t Look Back, the ’60s documentary that covers Bob Dylan’s tour of England, where the singer starts treating the press as his equals instead of the fourth estate. There’s a sequence where a photographer asks him to suck his Ray-Bans, the classic tortured poet pose. Dylan gives him a long and contemptuous stare. ‘You suck ’em,’ he tells him. Slowly, over a period of time, he starts giving journalists a hard time, and they’re offended. Back then they were authority figures. Lennon watched Dylan bring them down a peg or two, then did it himself.

  From an early age, I recognised Lennon had an attitude where he wasn’t going to be moulded to fit other people’s view of the world he occupied. As I gained a bit of renown myself, I also respected his healthy disregard for the less palatable side of the press, accustomed as I was to people’s view of me, in particular my perceived working-class abrasiveness, so often being informed by a small number of journalists. Google my name along with the words ‘angry’, ‘prickly’, ‘confrontational’, and there will be dozens of pages to justify those terms. But under whose definition? I personally do not believe myself to be any of those things – unless someone pushes those buttons. Those labels are tossed around because I work in a middle-class industry, defined by middle-class values. I’ll freely admit I have been all those things with journalists, but generally it’s because their interview has come from a very middle-class standpoint. The crucible for me was my family and those like them, people who weren’t just not given the tools to advancement and self-expression, but wilfully denied them. I would sit there with a journalist and think, Right, you’ve ignored everybody I’ve come from. You’re not going to do that with me, nor are you going to patronise me, nor are you going to put me in a box.

  A working-class journalist might have a very different take on things, but how often do you see them? So often there’s a narrative about someone like me having a chip on their shoulder. Really? Would the same term be applied to a middle-class actor highlighting a societal injustice of which they had direct experience and knowledge? Saying people like me have a chip on their shoulder is just another way of keeping them down. ‘What’s their beef? What’s up with them?’ Chip on his shoulder? No. What I have is an authority and, in my view, a requirement to explain that there are institutions in this country that serve to keep working people down. If even the supposed egalitarian, ‘eyes wide open’ and honest world of the arts shuts its doors on the working class, then ask yourself what the hell is everything else like? It’s like the other one I get, ‘professional northerner’. Amazing how the word ‘professional’ is one of respect and esteem when it’s applied to someone of a higher soc
ial background. For a working-class person it’s applied only to mock and put down. That anger, which I’m feeling right now, isn’t me being a bolshie working-class bloke, it’s me reflecting a longstanding and still apparent injustice that affects those I love. If only they’d had my opportunities, if only they’d known themselves a little better. I’m not angry because I’m a man – a working-class man therefore ‘unable’ to control his emotions. I’m not angry because my ‘ingrained working-class masculinity’ doesn’t allow me to express myself in a ‘finer way’. I’m angry simply because it is wrong.

  It’s for the same reason that I’ve never bowed to the ‘establishment’ in television. Bear in mind that TV is a very small industry. Many of those at the top go to the same dinner parties, speaking to similar individuals from other channels. That’s where a conversation develops – ‘He’s difficult, he’s an arsehole.’ That north London dinner party circuit has always been something I’ve avowedly tried to avoid. I was aware from the start that if you went to the right places you could further your career, but that scene, with its Oxbridge and old school tie element, made me feel nauseous, to the extent that me and my old acting mate Paul Higgins had a pact that if we met a casting director in a social situation we would be openly hostile in order to make them understand we weren’t trying to stick our noses up their arse. I’m very proud to have made my way in the industry without any of those connections.

  Raymond still follows me round, though. I was having a drink in Stratford-on-Avon recently and a guy came up to me – ‘Oh, man, I loved you as Raymond Calitri in Gone in 60 Seconds.’

  ‘But I was terrible.’

  ‘I know. That’s the thing about you in that film. You’re so bad, it’s good.’

  16

  STRANGLED AT BIRTH

  Mum and Dad had only one picture of me acting on their wall: Jude.

  When I was seven, I woke up in the middle of the night. I was going to the toilet when I heard Keith, who at the time was struggling with his reading and therefore his confidence, crying. I froze.

  He was heaving sobs. ‘I’m thick,’ he was saying, ‘I’m thick.’

  I could hear my mum whispering, ‘Now you listen to me. You are not thick. Don’t let anyone ever say you are.’

  It pierced me to the core hearing someone I loved very deeply say he was thick. And it moved me to hear my mum’s impassioned defence of her child. It was a little snapshot both into parenting and my big brother, the product of an age-old pattern of children being taught to think they had no worth. I feel angry about that even now. My brother wasn’t thick, he is actually a highly talented individual, an amazing builder. He’s very visual and one of the most amazing things for me is to watch him as he takes a building in, working out how it was constructed from the ground up. He is also a brilliant artist. He once created a picture of George Best with his hair made of snakes and the rest formed of images of the footballer cut from popular magazines. Keith should have gone to art school, but it would never have occurred to him. Alan, meanwhile, could well have been an actor, but, eight years earlier than me, a significant timeframe in terms of self-expectation, it would never have occurred to him either. Art school? Drama school? It just wasn’t what people did. But never was anyone in our house considered unworthy or thick. They were respected for what they could do, not dismissed for what they couldn’t, or rather had never been given the chance. If only they’d had my opportunities, if only they’d known themselves a little better, but they weren’t shown how to exploit their talent. A state-sponsored veil was drawn over it.

  Mum in particular loved Jude. She identified quite fiercely with him. And so did I.

  The part had come my way when I was in Cracker. Michael Winterbottom, who was directing an episode, was trying to get Jude off the ground. He mentioned the role to my agent and I went through the audition process. Rufus Sewell and Linus Roache were also in the frame. My view is I got the role because just looking at me I evoke someone who comes from peasant stock. By the same token, I’d heard enough stories of poverty and hopelessness even if I’d never lived it. I had lived a very comfortable life compared to my mum and dad and those who came before them.

  I read with Kate Beckinsale and Kate Winslet, the latter securing the role of Sue. I was already a big Thomas Hardy fan from studying Far from the Madding Crowd in sixth form, but I didn’t know Jude the Obscure. Obviously, once I realised it was a story of working-class exclusion, I understood exactly why Michael wanted me. For him, too, there was a personal connection. Michael was a normal lad from Blackburn who, against the odds, managed to get into Oxford University. The idea of a young man, an outsider, considered by many incapable and unworthy of attending such an institution, meant for him the film had an autobiographical feel.

  Unlike Michael, Jude’s own dreams of making something of his life amid the spires of Christminster (Hardy’s Oxford) are left forever unfulfilled. The self-educated scholar he makes himself is dashed against the rocks of ingrained prejudice protecting the educational corridors from a tide of lowly interlopers. Instead, as a stonemason, Jude is kept physically and metaphorically on the outside of those grand buildings, leading to a key scene, which stands undoubtedly as one of the greatest moments of my career, when he graffities ‘I have understanding as well as you’ on the gates of a university college. I remember vividly the night we shot that sequence and how emotional I felt. When I wrote those words, I was doing so not just for Jude Fawley, but for my mum, dad, and the many, many others like them denied access, learning and expression across the generations. To perform that scene was very, very profound, the words a monument to those fed through a system that not only strangled their dreams but knowingly made them feel foolish to have harboured any in the first place. Challenging the institutionally sanctioned smothering of working-class hope has been the driving force of my life. It is very clear to me that my mum and dad were handed a rudimentary education on purpose, kept in their place because they were intended for the factory and/or the cannon. And so, by extension, were me and my brothers.

  Everywhere in Jude are scenes that link effortlessly, a mental hyperleap, to memories, situations; so poignant. When Jude is reading, learning, taking pleasure in words, that to me is my dad. Ronnie read voraciously, as, interestingly, does my son Albert. The only time he’s quiet is when he’s got a book, at which point he becomes completely transformed and absorbed. I used to love reading to him – memories again of my dad and Huckleberry Finn – but now he wants to read for himself. It gives me great comfort to see him reading so avidly. I hope that he and Esme will be part of a society that respects knowledge and individuality and doesn’t make people feel stigmatised for having any. That hope for the next generation, however, can never quell my deep-rooted anger about what happened to my mum and dad and how they were viewed by the middle and upper classes and society in general. They had a perceived notion of those two people. I know them in detail and they are extraordinary.

  Bearing in mind where I was coming from, it would have been easy for me to overplay the raging young man figure that Jude presented, and no one was more aware of that than Michael. Early on in the process he jumped on me for my anger levels.

  ‘I know what you can do,’ he told me, ‘I know what you can feel. But I don’t want too much of it. There are times when that side of Jude will come out, but essentially he’s a gentle soul. There is more subtlety to him.’

  It was a good lesson for me. Michael wanted me to explore Jude’s more sensitive side rather than it be one note. The Jude presented on screen, as we all are, is a complex emotional bundle, the culmination of me working not only with Michael, but Peter Flannery and Jimmy McGovern – Hearts and Minds with Jimmy; Our Friends in the North with Peter. Jude is a 10,000-piece jigsaw of Peter, Jimmy, Ronnie, Elsie, me, friends, relatives, characters – any working-class person.

  Playing Jude was also a reminder of my own great fortune. I was one of the lucky ones, a working-class lad who had got to a position
where I could play that character. I had benefitted from the Labour governments of the mid-’60s and early ’70s, which meant that by the early ’80s it was still possible for a kid like me to rise up the ladder. With university fees and constant austerity, those doors, sadly, have now closed again. The social revolution of the ’60s is a long time ago.

  For that reason, Jude’s experience is closer to my dad’s than to mine. I got the chance. My sense of injustice was on behalf of my parents. I was having experiences like filming Jude and my dad was stacking boxes. And yet he had the same level of intelligence, sensitivity and curiosity as me. The difference was timing.

  Whether Dad had that sense of injustice himself is less clear. ‘I’m in a warehouse stacking boxes and I’ll do it the best that I can, and I’ll do it with some relish and some dignity, but is this it?’ Maybe. After all, get him at home and he’d be poring through that dictionary – ‘Onomatopoeia – what does that mean?’ But it’s possible also that, thanks to decades of social conditioning, my parents had accepted their position and never questioned it. Why would they? That was their lot. That was how it was. They were frustrated, but the root causes were not analysed because they were buried beneath layers of social reality. I came along and questioned that lack of equality and subsequently was angry on their behalf. And I’m still angry on their behalf. When I made Jude, or any other socially challenging drama, I didn’t want them to love me more, because I already knew they loved me, but I wanted to make them proud. When it came to my career choices, I always wanted to say, ‘It’s because of you. It’s the way you brought me up.’

  Unsurprising, then, that Jude felt like a very, very powerful thing to do. No acting required, it was all there on the page, all there on the wall. I was totally caught up in the importance of the film as a social, political and religious statement. It consumed me in a way with which I was unfamiliar. I’ve never worked with someone who stays in character, but on set some have actually told me that’s what I do. I can kind of see it. I know that I chat to crew members as Chris between takes. I know that I go back to my trailer, check my phone, read the news or about United. But what I also know is that if you spend a day, as in Jude, exploring what it’s like to discover your child has hanged himself and killed his half-brother and sister, you’re going to carry that around. It does things to you rather than you doing it to yourself. I’d felt the same happening with Derek Bentley. While I was filming, Keith told me, ‘You’ve changed your face, you’re frowning,’ which if you look at pictures of Derek he did all the time. I’m not a Method actor in any way, but it was my first sense that what a person does can take over the person who’s doing it. Prior to filming, I’d made a conscious decision to personally involve myself in Derek. Aged nineteen, he had a mental age of eleven. My way into him was an emotional immaturity comparable with his. My secret, my emotional imbalance and my anorexia, both deeply shameful to me, is in that performance, my first instance of using something deeply personal to inform a role. But, invariably, whatever the job, I’d carry something of the day away with me, as would my dad, as does surely anybody whatever they do. Thankfully, I didn’t have the same visceral life pressures to deal with as Dad, the stress of an inescapable working landscape coupled with the need to put food on the table. But I found them in Jude.