How death-defying comedy routines led to role as Piglet
NOT MANY comedians can claim to have nearly died in pursuit of a laugh. Nick Mohammed can, but perhaps that’s what you get when you combine comedy with escapology. Mohammed’s last live show,
was a spoof musical tribute to the great magician, which climaxed with him having to escape from a padlocked water tank while handcuffed. He trained for it for months beforehand, using free-diving techniques to learn to hold his breath for two minutes and increase his carbon dioxide tolerance.
“My last show was genuinely hairy. It never became second nature. The one thing you’re not meant to do is breathe out because if you do, your reflex takes over, you breathe in and you drown,” he says cheerily.
One night, at Soho Theatre in London, it went wrong. “I just couldn’t get out,” he says. “That was it. It happened at a point where I was very ready to breathe.”
His cast mates had to help him out but he still finished the show. At the end he apologised to the audience for ruining the illusion. “It was a shame because that show was really good,” he says.
This month, Mohammed returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with an even more ambitious one-man show in which he will attempt another Houdini illusion – vanishing an elephant... while in character, telling jokes.
Fans of Mohammed – comedian, actor, writer, musician and member of the Magic Circle – will know that his comedy gigs are rarely just that; previous shows have seen him playing a violin, doing gymnastics and even performing on roller skates.
Nick’s mother is a retired GP, who is originally from Cyprus, and his father from Trinidad.
Aged four, he was given a magic set and was hooked. He joined the Junior Northern Magic Circle and spent his teenage years perfecting tricks.
At Durham University, where he failed to get into the Comedy Revue, he would perform at student events, hotels and clubs, all the while writing comedy.
His break came – and you can’t say this about many performers – when he went to do a PhD at Cambridge in seismology, and joined the university’s famous Footlights society.
After appearing in several British television comedies, he was cast as Nasa’s head of communications in
starring Matt Damon. This summer, he plays Piglet in Disney’s big-budget opposite Ewan McGregor.
And yet, something keeps pulling him back to his unique comic creation Mr Swallow, a huffy Northern chatterbox who has over the years, turned his hand to motivational speaking, musical theatre and magic with invariably poor results. “He’s born to be on stage, one of those people who has huge delusions of grandeur. Like a cruise-ship entertainer – top of the bill in quite a small environment. He feels like he could do anything and he has an opinion on everything.”
The character is based on a bolshie teacher at his school in Leeds, who treated the classroom as a theatre. “She had this huge attitude,” he says. “The way I’d describe her is that she would always act as if she’d just been heckled.”
It was the hapless Swallow who led to Mohammed’s role in when casting agent Nina Gold saw him performing. His casting as Piglet was similarly unusual; after initially being asked to read for a smaller part, several weeks later producers requested he record some voices for Piglet on his phone. At the time, he was looking after his older son, Finn – he has two toddlers with his wife, Becka. “He was napping at lunchtime so I sneaked into the other room and did four voices – two American, two British and emailed them. A week later I got a phone call saying, ‘you’re playing Piglet’. I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t.”