No-one would ever say that

Brains gently boiling in the sun as I listen to the Aussies being seriously challenged by England in the one day series after their humiliation at the hands of Bangladesh. The game is cricket, for those who may be at sea.

There is to be an organ donor special episode of 'Casualty' for organ donor week - don't ask me when that is. I was interviewed on Friday for the part of the father of a cystic fibrosis victim waiting for a heart and lung transplant.

Following on from the rage of the last post I find myself - after fifteen minutes studying some scenes - blubbing in front of a camera and two people I have never met before. This is in no small measure due to an exceedingly WELL WRITTEN SCRIPT. Actors are always moaning about TV scripts and often feel - true or not - that they are having to make a script work rather than being supported by it. TV drama is not real life and sometimes one finds oneself speaking either subtext or exposition in order to make the drama move forward. This is sometimes a bad thing and sometimes it isn't. It seems to me that if you make too many rules then you're bound to be wrong sooner or later.

Quality of writing however, whether subtextual, obtuse or expositional has its effect on performance and it doesn't matter if "no-one would ever say that". Good writing has an indefinable feeling of truthfulness about it which puts one closely in touch with the ideas and feelings to be expressed.

I discovered during the miners' strike in '84 when I was doing some research for 'The Garden Of England' - a staged documentary directed by Peter Gill at the National, that when people were in a state of passion they became extremely eloquent and more and more sophisticated in their use of the language. Particularly, brilliant use of parentheses, juggling several parts of an idea and drawing them down when required to get the whole picture across - because it was important. I read swathes of transcribed, recorded interviews which never failed to touch the heart because the subject matter, the feeling and the intention all came together because of the need to express it all. I'm sure there was plenty of stuff in there that "no-one would ever say". If only one could bottle it.

Anyway I was sent on my way blinking into the White City sun feeling a little dishragged and a bit surprised but not unhappy with the interview. This acting lark can still sneak up and give you a poke when you're not expecting it.

The Thought Fox

Boom, boom, Mr Ted!

Rage Against The Machine

Auditions can be fun. "We want Rod to come in and improvise being very angry". Heck that's a stretch.

People pay good money to sit in another human presence and quiver with diluvian angst. I get to do it for free on camera and there might be a job at the other end, who knows?

So I saw Karen Lyndsey Stewart and Carolyn McCleod (a solid casting crew) for a v. small part in a new Basic Instinct movie. I had to be a regular patient in a top flight therapist's practice who was in a rage, so I had to come along with a character and a lot of stuff to be angry about.

I suppose I may have chosen a shade of myself; a wealthy partner in a firm of accountants furious at being taken for a ride financially and emasculated verbally by his estranged wife. Pretty much the opposite of my own situation. I seriously do not like this guy but find it very easy to get in touch with his sense of injury and impotent fury. His or mine?

I ranted my rant for the camera and finished in a trembling state of high and unrequited dudgeon. I think they may have been slightly taken aback. I emerged into a sunlit Wardour Street with a spring in my step and a whistle on my lips. I wondered momentarily who was carefree here? Me or Mr. Horrible? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth said Dr. Acting.

Karen Lyndsey Stewart once cast me in the film 'Sylvia' in which Gwyneth Paltrow played the eponymous Plath. I played the man who tried to sell Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) a fox cub at night in a park, providing him with the inspiration for the poem 'The Thought Fox', a great piece about how the poetry arrives.

Unfortunately nobody had researched the life cycle of the fox and as we were filming in October and cubs are invariably born in the spring I was presented with a young but fully grown vixen to stuff into my jacket. It was actually quite a good natured beast but the tail wagging at my waist was a bit of a give-away. They tried a small dog which looked nothing like a fox but finally I ended up doing the scene with a fur stole in my coat and a growing conviction that this scene would prove to be inessential to the final product. I was right. Also superfluous to requirements was any poetry, so the reference would have been baffling anyway to those who were not familiar with the Hughes oeuvre.

It's all a bit of a mystery isn't it?

Mr and Mrs Smith

I just want to let any interested parties know that I have not gone away but that I am in retreat mode in a Chinese sense. Re-grouping.

I have no acting larks to blog about, however while walking along the cliffs near Seaford the other day with J we saw and, more to the point, heard hundreds of the birdy types singing their little lungs out. Uplifting and kind of funny at the same time. "Me, look at me!" they shout "No, me, I'm the one that you want!". "Bet you can't sing this!"

J and I have decided to reclaim our name from Brad and Angelina so Mr and Mrs Smith may well become a byword for something or other. I'll let you know when forces have been marshalled.