Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An actor best known for playing Mr. Darcy in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice and Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones.
On the island
Eight records
We People Who Are Darker Than Blue
There's something perennial about this man's voice that makes me feel that whatever's wrong in the world, there's a voice of simple humanity, and I just find it always very reassuring to listen to him.
Nigeria has, even though I haven't been back since I was about four, has featured very largely in my life, partly because we've been surrounded by Nigerian people through so much of of my childhood.
I this is a period when I was actually I was homeless, not not on not on the street, but on other people's floors and … the lyrics are slightly incomprehensible, but they're satisfyingly kind of witty and rude.
Mass in C minor, K. 427: KyrieFavourite
Sylvia McNair, Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner
I discovered this around A level time and I was trying to revise for A levels and again that resistance to the drudgery of of schoolwork was upon me and … I just came out of my school book and sort of felt … profound and spiritual and floated out of the window with it really.
There's something very reassuring about miserable music sometimes because it just means you can sit back and say you don't have to pretend everything's going for you and everything's all right and … this is actually about the moment when you realize you haven't got anything sussed at all.
Paul Rogers, I still think, has the best voice of any white man I've ever heard. And Paul Kossoff was quite simply my guitar hero. And I was sitting there in my maths class developing my air guitar skills.
Here it's the life that I would have had in a parallel universe. This is when I'm actually a gruff, tattooed American truck driver who's smuggling drugs and Mexicans across the border.
Symphony No. 3 in D minor: Fourth Movement (Midnight Song)
Maureen Forrester with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta
I was sharing with a another drama student I was sharing a room and he put this on and … I just found this voice absolutely haunting and mysterious and he said that's my mum.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:20What was the first time you ever went on the stage and felt the buzz?
I was about five years old. Pantomime infant school is somewhere in Essex, and I was Jack Frost, and it was a pair of silver satin pants, a blue satin sash, and, portentously, a billowing white shirt. … I don't know if I've been as big a hit since, and … that's when I got the bug. That's where I thought where the love and attention lies.
Presenter asks
10:59How did they treat you [at school in St. Louis, Missouri]?
Just very s subtle isolating behaviour, really. They were friends, and I think the actual teaching I got there was fantastic. But it only takes two or three people in your class, really, who, you know, were looking for a target.
Presenter asks
17:00How would [the drama school's method technique] apply to the character of Robert Lawrence, whom you portrayed in Tumbledown?
Well, that was the most extraordinary opportunity, in that the character that I was modelling myself on not only existed and was still alive, but was my exact age. … Robert was shot in the Falklands War, in the Battle of Tumbledown, on his twenty first birthday. He was shot in the head. It blew away a huge part of his brain. And he fought through, and his will and his courage were absolutely extraordinary. And a weird kind of merging … took place while we were filming. … I would jump out of my wheelchair at the end of the day shoot. And … because I'd felt so connected to Robert, … it was an irony that was not lost on me.
The keepsakes
The book
Woody Allen
It strikes me rather than as a luxury, almost as a form of torture, having one book that you're doomed to go over and over and over again. But I think having been given the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, I'd be in great need of a bit of levity. One of the few things that's ever really made me laugh out loud when I've read it is the stories of Woody Allen. And so I think I'd if there's a compendium of all of them, that's what I'd take.
The luxury
It would probably have to be my guitar, which w if I were on a desert sign it would probably be an opportunity to learn to play the damn thing. And uh failing that, there's this wonderful thing about a guitar is even if you can't play it, you can hold it for hours.
Presenter asks
18:56Have you been frightened of [Hollywood]?
I don't know. … Probably, yes. I did resist it, and I'm not sure whether that was just self-protection. … hiding behind a kind of … snobbery about it. I talked myself into the idea that it was … a value judgment rather than just fear.
Presenter asks
24:51Why do you consider the theatre easier than making films?
I resist the idea that theatre is what it's all really about in terms of acting. I don't see why that is the case. And with theatre, you're in control of the territory on stage. You are going to do it in the sequence that the writer intended it to be done. … Films are not only shot out of sequence to the point which it absolute … mangles what you're trying to do. … Now, I think that is a far greater test of one's ability to do what we were talking about earlier, which is to go back to that childish place where you can just believe.
“I'm not like mister Darcy, I'm much more animated, I talk too much, and I don't own the half of Derbyshire.”
“It's been absolutely what's driven me through life, I think. Even if you write a diary of what you did that day, suddenly your day looks different because it has narrative form. It has a kind of ending to it.”
“At forty-five you realize there's something wrong with that. And thank God I've got kids because you go home and the roles are reversed immediately. You can't say to your child, you behave yourself, I'm going to call my agent. Suddenly you're the slave and … that does help.”
“It turned everything around seeing Paul Schofield. I watched a performance which made me reassess what acting was. It was nothing to do with demonstration. It was nothing to do with even anything that I was conscious of in body language. It was just an expression of integrity. And there was such a paradox in that, because acting by nature is false. So, how can this man, by doing very little, exude truth and humanity and intelligence?”