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This is part of an interview I did for The Stage in Feb 2008... Where did you train?Initially I got a scholarship to go to ALRA, but when you’re an actor, you’re always training: Working with directors like Philip Prowse, Andrew Lynford, Sophie Jane Austin, Joyce Branagh and Giles Havergal has taught me a lot and I’ve done some interesting workshops with Complicité and The Wrestling School. I’ve also been given some great advice from people like Kathryn Hunter and Tim Carroll. Recently, I’ve been working with John Osborne Hughes who combines yoga, meditation and philosophy with psychoanalysis and Stanislavski in order to create what I suppose you might call a holistic performance. What has been your favourite job?My favourite job this year was Headlines which was a collaboration between Ampersand and Teatro Vivo: We had to go into the theatre early every day, read the papers, choose a story and find a real or fictional character that could respond or be connected in some way to that story. We covered a variety of newspaper stories such as Alzheimer’s - I played a man who was planning his own funeral; Obesity – I played a bigoted fitness freak; Crime – I played a convicted rapist who was trying to justify his crime. And in one local news story I played an idiot who had cheated on his girlfriend while they were on holiday in Egypt and returned to his hotel room to find she had torn up all of his clothes, thrown cider and black all over the walls and flown back to England – We played each scene to one audience member at a time and we would behave towards them as if they were part of the story, such as the manager of my hotel in Egypt or a friend invited to my funeral. It was really intense character programming, and each person had to be 3D so we needed to build quickly… life pictures and past events, affiliations and purposes, obstacles, relationships. It was the acting equivalent to sky-diving. It was the total opposite to that stale feeling you get in a play when it has run for over six months. Really inspiring! How was working in America? I recently played Alexander Valmont in a modern adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons at The Bailiwick Rep in Chicago: It was wonderful; people in Chicago expect to see good theatre and American audiences are much more vocal than here; you feel a strong connection with them when you’re on stage, which is lovely, because Valmont is a character you can easily play around with, letting the audience in on your schemes and deceptions- they love the audacity and laugh at the games but very vocally disapprove of the immorality and you feel them retreat when you falter because you deserved everything you got! Funnily enough, Jerry Springer the Opera was having its American premier in the same theatre! What are you planning on seeing soon?I want to see Daniel Day Lewis’s latest film and I love Edward Bond’s The Sea so I will go and see the new production at The Haymarket. I also have a ticket to see Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello at the Donmar. What does 2008 hold for you?I’m playing a 60s hippie rock star in an episode of Heartbeat, which is due to be screened this month. It’s great! I had a 1960s convertible Viva, a genuine 1960s Gibson guitar, a psychedelic house and some beautiful spiritual guru type costumes; I got to play a character who wants to completely lose himself: I floated around painting and listening to The Grateful Dead for weeks while I was preparing. It was like travelling back in time. Mark Stevenson has asked me to start researching the role of Othello; he plans to stage a reverse Othello later on this year: Othello will be white and the other characters will all be black. A similar idea was staged to great acclaim in New York by Jude Kelly in 1997. We want to find out if a reversed hierarchy in the play will change the audience’s perception of Othello’s alienation which is what makes him so ready to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful when the opportunity presents itself. Everybody involved in this project so far is very excited about where it will take us: It’s like a voyage of discovery to find out what makes us want to belong; what makes us feel alienated; how we react when we meet an obstacle to belonging: I think these things are the root of jealousy. What do you do when you’re not acting? Surfing; dancing around the sitting room; asking the cat to do impossible tasks like pop the kettle on and then complaining when I end up having to do it myself.
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