‘JK Rowling told me I was fabulously foul’
A splendid villain in Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, David Bradley is now about to board the Tardis. He talks to Jasper Rees
David Bradley is a one-man axis of evil. He was Hogwarts’ sourfaced caretaker in the Harry Potter films and a quiet paedophile in Broadchurch, while from a long roll-call of potential candidates he claims the crown as Game of Thrones’ most dastardly villain of all. In the street, does the traumatised public recoil in horror when it sees the bony features of the mass-murdering Lord Walder Frey (garrotted but not forgotten)? Bradley chuckles.
“I’ve had taxi drivers wind down their window and say, ‘I can’t forgive you for what you did!’ Now I’ve gone people say, ‘Sorry to see you go.’ No, you’re bloody not!”
Needless to say, the nemesis of the Starks, author of the infamous bloodbath at the Red Wedding, is an absolute pussycat. “I’ve never had so many laughs,” he says. “It took a whole week to do it with the different stab wounds and the preamble speech, which I found funny. The guy’s got a sense of humour about luring people in with bread and salt. I should imagine Stalin had quite a good time inviting people he knew weren’t going to be leaving the building.”
All shy smiles and quiet modesty, at 75 David Bradley can’t quite believe that he is suddenly famous. In theatre he may be a recognisable name who won an Olivier playing the Fool to Brian Cox’s King Lear in 1991, but for years fans looked right through him as he played supporting roles on TV and film. He remembers being Robson Green’s father in Reckless in 1997, back when Green was a huge star. One day they let fans on set, and Bradley mimes a hurtling throng as it thuds past him.
“It was like – Bouf! Bouf! There was this one teenager who looked back and he said, ‘Hasn’t anybody asked for your autograph?’ I said, ‘No, they haven’t actually.’ He said, ‘Go on, I’ll have it then’.”
Nowadays, people stop him for selfies, and they’ll do so all the more thanks to his latest popular incarnation, which is actually a reincarnation. In 2012, Mark Gatiss dramatised the creation of Doctor Who in An Adventure in Space and Time, and Bradley took the part of William Hartnell, the original Time Lord. There’s no franchise happier with metatextual mucking about, and this Christmas Bradley returns as the First Doctor opposite Peter Capaldi in his final storyline before Jodie Whittaker becomes the first female Time Lord.
“I had such a great time doing the first one and I felt I’d steeped myself in it. The fact that the original Doctor was a bit erratic made him quite appealing to me. Hartnell was a very brilliant actor but also a very complex man. They started to cast him as these bullet-headed authority figures and he felt he’d got trapped.”
No such anxieties assail Bradley. He knew early on that his knobbly Yorkshire physiognomy would limit his options. “You can’t cast this face as Romeo. It looks like it’s been around the block a few times.”
Framed by long backswept locks, his gnarled old-school features make him a slam dunk for period drama
– he’s been in three Dickenses, a Thackeray and a Trollope. And the face was his passport to Potter. One holiday in Italy, his children were devouring the books.
“I thought I’d better have a read so we’ve got something to talk about. My kids were saying, ‘They’re making a film. Get on to your agent, Dad.’ What should I play? In my head, I had Professor Snape. And my daughter Francesca said, ‘No, no, no, Dad. You’re a natural Filch.’ He’s this scraggy old something from the old Wild West or a medieval pickpocket. An appalling geezer. I thought, face facts.” Before his audition his daughter, then 12, coached him to get Filch’s mean, punctilious accent. She’s now a casting director. “To dear David who was fabulously foul,” wrote JK Rowling when she signed his programme at the premiere. “That’s the only feedback I’ve had. That’ll do.”
Bradley’s introduction to showbiz came via his father, a bricklayer’s labourer who had a night job at the York Empire. His two sons got in for free and saw the likes of Arthur English, Hylda Baker and Frankie Howerd. He even got an autographed photograph from Laurel and Hardy.
“I used to just love the variety theatre and I think I’ve retained some of that cheapness.” At his Catholic secondary modern, he had no interests beyond football and cinema, didn’t sit O-levels and became an apprentice at a factory making precision instruments. It could have been a job for life, but he discovered acting via a youth club.
“This retired solicitor’s clerk who ran it said to me, ‘This engineering, you’re not cut out for it, you’re not going to be doing it for the rest to your life.’ Even my foreman at the factory said, ‘Bradley, you’re the original square peg, you know that?’ I thought, maybe that’s a clue.”
This was the Sixties, when the British new wave swept the likes of Albert Finney to stardom. “The smoothie chops, the officer class, were always the heroes. And in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning there was this guy from the North on the same lathe I had on the factory floor saying, ‘I’m out for a good time, all the rest is just propaganda.’ I thought, Yeah!”
Bradley needed three attempts to get into RADA and didn’t go till he was 24. “I absolutely loved it. At 21, I don’t think I was mature enough.”
Does he worry that the likes of him are not deterred by the forbidding cost of drama school? “I think there is a danger of cutting out a lot of young people who just can’t afford it. People always pick on someone like Benedict [Cumberbatch]. I think that’s a bit unfair. They’re good enough to be where they are.”
He landed a job in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company and was soon playing Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard. He never acted in public with Sir Laurence but, as an understudy in Trevor Griffiths’s The Party, once did a full dress rehearsal opposite him in an empty Old Vic.
“He played this Glaswegian trade unionist who has a 25-minute speech. And Olivier said, ‘Do you want me just to top and tail?’ I said, ‘Actually, sir, I’d like you to do the whole thing because I’ve got to respond.’ He could have easily just marked it, but he wasn’t capable. He just gave it all full pelt. So I got to act with him and nobody saw but it didn’t matter. I saw it. I was there.”
Another influential giant in his career was Harold Pinter, whom he met in 1997 when cast in The Homecoming. “We turned up for the first read-through and there was an empty chair next to me. Who walks in and sits next to me? I got really fond of him. Harold wasn’t interested in small talk. If you were an actor, everything he said was practical and helpful and funny: ‘The pauses are something I did 30 years ago. Just ignore them.’
“He rang me up after the press night. ‘David, it’s Harold, just to say congratulations, very satisfying evening. Just one thing. That pause before your very last line.’ I said, ‘It’s turned into a silence, hasn’t it, Harold?’ He said, ‘You’ve got it. Bye’.”
Is Bradley chuffed that the next Doctor will be a woman from Yorkshire? “Absolutely delighted. Jodie’s got such an emotional range. Anybody who’s hung out with her knows she’s just got a wicked sense of humour and she’s subversive and funny and really nice with it. I think she’ll be great.”
As he leaves the Doctor behind, is there anything left on his wishlist? “If someone wants to throw Lear my way I’d be up for that,” he says, and then inserts a Pinteresque pause. “Better if it was in the next year or two.”
Doctor Who Christmas Special is on BBC One at 5.30pm on Christmas Day