Cheat sheet
Tom Goodman-hill on why people cheat
Come on then, I ask Tom Goodman-hill, who hit you? The 50-yearold actor has arrived for our meeting on London’s Southbank with his familiar face – you’ll most likely recognise it from Channel 4’s Humans, or Mr Selfridge – looking slightly altered.
A large, nasty-looking gash crosses the bridge of his nose, accompanied by some bruising around the eyes. I had been told he’ll be unable to pose for new photographs to accompany this feature thanks to “an injury the day before”, and, well, he wasn’t lying.
“It’s quite embarrassing,” he says, gingerly touching the wound. “The lesson is never come between a cat and a baby.” A cat did that?
“Well, no, whenever you have a baby in the house you get jealous pets, and we’ve got two cats that have become very needy. One was around my feet in the kitchen yesterday, and I just went over it, connecting with the kitchen counter. There was a lot of blood. My wife was upstairs with the baby and I ended up in hospital. If I didn’t have such a huge nose, I’d probably have two black eyes too…”
The cats – Margot and Pickle – are veterans of the household, but Goodman-hill’s baby with his actress wife Jessica Raine, the former star of Call the Midwife, is a three-week-old new edition.
The boy (they’re keeping the name to themselves for the moment) is Raine’s first child, but Goodmanhill also has another son, Joe, and daughter, Ellen, aged 22 and 21 respectively, from his previous marriage to production designer Kerry Bradley.
It’s possible I thought Goodmanhill’s fresh wound was inflicted by somebody else since I’ve just seen him be so realistically slapped in his latest role, as Adam, a university lecturer who’s seduced by a precocious student (played by Bafta winner Molly Windsor) in ITV’S twisty, addictive psychological thriller Cheat. Adam’s wife, Leah, does the slapping – and it was real whack, I hear – but then she’s also cheating on him, with another man who’s cheating on his partner.
And the student in question might be ruining Leah’s life just because she caught her cheating in her studies and, in addition, I suppose she’s also sort of cheating on another man who thinks she’s in love with him, when in fact she just wants him to give her confidential information. It’s a drama about cheating, see. It’s called Cheat.
“Absolutely everyone in it is cheating in some form or another, and I enjoyed the play on that. From the subtlest little behavioural cheats to full betrayal, and that’s an exciting thing.”
A noir (from the beginning, we know someone’s dead) but filmed in Cambridge in the sultry heatwave of 2018, the series will air on consecutive nights this week, but every episode ends on the kind of cliffhanger that will make even 23 hours a painful wait.
Goodman-hill’s character – whom he describes as “having something narcissistic about him which isn’t obvious” – begins by seeming to be one of the few morally solid figures in it, especially while his wife has an affair, but it doesn’t take long before he lets the side down too. One of the many questions the programme provokes is if she’s to blame for being led astray first. “It throws up a lot of questions in that respect, about the sort of incremental changes in a relationship that can happen without even noticing.
“The ways in which you try to conserve your own identity and independence whilst subtly not letting your partner know what you’re doing. That felt very real to me, how a relationship is shown up in all its brittle textures,” he says. It almost asks if cheating can ever be excused, in certain situations, I tentatively suggest.
“Yeah. It’s going, what do we expect of the people we trust, and how much will we forgive someone we love or think we love? And at what point does it become too much to handle? When does the fault line become so wide that you can’t repair it any more?”
It is at least the third major drama in which Goodman-hill has played a married man who’s unfaithful. I only mention one other – that his character in Humans cheated with Gemma Chan’s Anita/mia in what may have been the first human/robot sex scene on British TV – but he also offers Grove in Mr Selfridge as well. All three are “totally different”, he says, “but I understand why people see similarities…”
To prepare for Cheat, Goodmanhill admits he drew slightly from his own experience, though not quite in the manner some have recently reported. He and Raine, who married in 2015, met when they appeared in a play together in 2010, and their relationship was announced three years later, not long after Goodmanhill’s separation from Bradley.
Last week, a giddy tabloid press was swift to suggest he might have been channelling a rumoured past experience of overlapping relationships before playing an adulterous husband, quoting him saying “if you know how that feels you’re going to bring something of that to the part”. Evidently exasperated, the headlines were, he says now, “utter nonsense” and he was “quite literally misquoted”.
No, instead, he tapped into his past as a teacher. To research playing a lecturer dealing with unruly students, he contacted some old friends from his teaching days, some of whom are now at universities, to talk through the difficulties of teacher-student boundaries. “When to be a teacher, when to be a friend. I think it must be quite a hard line to find,” he says.
Goodman-hill was born in London but soon moved to Northumberland, where his childhood was disrupted by his father leaving his mother when he was 12.
He eventually gained a stepmother and stepfather, but at the time – “and for a long time” – his elder brother of four years, Max, became his father figure.
Tom describes Max as having “an extraordinary sense of responsibility and justice and fairness”, which is good news for all of us, since he is now a QC and Director of Public Prosecutions. (Alas, he apparently has no inclination to follow his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, into politics). While Max went for law, Goodman-hill trained as a supply primary schoolteacher, and once handled more than 40 pupils at a time. He loved it, but his supervisor, Ken Robinson – now an eminent, knighted educationist – spotted something in him and suggested he’d be a better actor. So off he went to London.
“I think I needed someone to say that to me, and he saw it. I always made it pretty obvious – I used drama to teach history, drama to teach science, drama to teach maths…”
On his second coming to London, Goodman-hill’s first job was to play Jesus Christ in an adaptation of the mystery plays, and he has kept busy ever since, varying the stage with screens small and big – including The Imitation Game and Everest.
Raising children meant having to work “full on, without a break to put food on the table” for almost 20 years, he says, and now they’re old enough to be earning their own money (proudly, he tells me Joe is a graphic designer and curator, while Ellen is a talented fashion designer training at Central Saint Martin’s) he’s starting it all again. He beams.
“It feels amazing,” he says of becoming a father again at 50. “Your recent memories of your kids slightly erase the earlier years, so to see all that again reminds you of what your kids were like.” Fortunately, he never moved far from the family home in south London when he married Raine, and he has remained close to his older children, who were among the first to meet their new half-brother. “They absolutely dote on him already,” Goodman-hill laughs. “It’ll be great to have some ready-made babysitters.” Perhaps warn them about the cats, mind.
Cheat begins tonight on ITV1 at 9pm and runs nightly until Thursday
‘When does the fault line become so wide that you can’t repair it any more?’
‘Absolutely everyone in it is cheating in some form or another’