I THINK MY CHARACTER MAY BE THE BIGGEST AR*E EVER PLAYED
Do you faint at the sight of blood? MARION MCMULLEN finds out how Rory Kinnear fared playing a narcissistic, boozy Victorian surgeon in new comedy Quacks
DESCRIBED as having touches of Blackadder, new period comedy Quacks, which follows a group of young medics around Victorian London looks set to be a hit.
AS well as boasting a quality cast, which includes Rory Kinnear, Rupert Everett and Mathew Baynton, it was written by Rev creator James Wood.
Here Rory, who plays surgeon Robert Lessing, gives us the lowdown on what to expect:
What made you want to be part of Quacks?
I READ the script and I thought, ‘That’s actually really funny…’, so I did the pilot. Then it took more than a year before we were all available to get back together, which meant that writer and creator James Wood had time to work on the scripts and get everything in place, then we could rehearse a month before we even started filming, which is an unbelievable position to be in.
Are you squeamish?
I DON’T think I could be a doctor, I hope everyone would be pleased to hear that. But yes, it’s funny, we have had prosthetic stuff to do and quite a lot of delving around in guts, which are luckily not people’s, they are totally made up.
But also you have supporting actors who come in for the day to lie on the table, and it’s amazing how quickly you distance or disassociate them from being human beings to being flesh.
How authentic are the scenes where you are operating?
OBVIOUSLY there is no one alive today who would be able to tell us, but the medical historians and The Wellcome Trust have been involved with this in terms of giving advice.
I’ve spoken to a few surgeons as well because lots of it hasn’t changed that much, apart from perhaps size. An appendectomy would have involved a cut from top to bottom, whereas now it’s tiny.
Have you ever been under the knife?
WHEN I was born I had something called a pyloric stenosis, which I had a small operation for in the old stomach muscle, and I’ve seen
people 20 years older than me who have huge scars down here. I have a quite big one across here and now, of course, they’re absolutely miniscule in size. How would you describe your character Robert Lessing? WELL, surgeons – particularly the top surgeons – were rock stars. People came to the theatres to see them perform and to operate, and I guess we still sort of think of surgeons in terms of their levels of confidence, shall we say. Robert has that kind of God complex whereby, you know, a centimetre either way can end somebody’s life, and you have to have a certain degree of conceited arrogance to be able to do that sort of thing. What actually happened in terms of people watching the surgery in the theatre? THE surgeon would do one show a week, so there would be one public showing, and they would usually try and get the goriest or the most pioneering or the most exciting.
Obviously when the big crowds were in, you wanted to do your best job, and you wanted to make sure they didn’t die. And there is an element of playing to a crowd, sometimes introducing the type of surgery, what the patient is, what the problem is, and Robert loves it.
He has a bit of a hand tremor which we touch on lightly during the series and he’s self-medicating with alcohol, so we don’t know where that might go.
He plays up his lothario status as well, and enjoys it, and does very well as a surgeon financially. Did you approach playing Robert as a rock star or as a surgeon? IT’S probably more the peacock side of him, the conceited side, and the inviolable sense of right.
I think he has to have an iron-clad confidence in what he is doing, and his right to be doing it. So that’s pretty fun to play, that kind of character, as well as him being deceitful and underhand and a drunk and all the other things. The cast includes Rupert Everett, Mathew Baynton and Tom Basden, so were there a lot of laughs flying around? IT’S quite fun. In fact, probably one of the most fun jobs I’ve had. It’s a really jolly little team. I’m a terrible corpser and Mat’s pretty bad too. Tom’s the steely resolve amongst us. What makes you laugh? NOTHING! People slightly stumbling over a line, I mean, it’s pathetic! But it’s been really fun. Your career is hugely eclectic. How does this compare? THE sets are quite lavish. Obviously having done Penny Dreadful for Showtime, that’s set in a similar-ish time but a bit later. But in terms of sets and costume that have been created with this level of detail, it feels incredibly detailed and lavish. Any final words about your character? I THINK he’s the biggest ar*e that anybody’s ever played! I mean, there are other ar*es, but not ar*es that are quite so justified. The most you can think about Robert is that he’s an ar*e. Because he knows he’s good at something, and he’s right – and he is one of the best surgeons in London, if not in England.
I don’t think you can be a surgeon and be racked with self-doubt, particularly, well, specifically not in theatre. QUACKS starts on BBC2 on Tuesday at 10pm.