Actor Jack Bannon takes on Batman’s butler in ‘Pennyworth’
British actor PASADENA, CALIF. — Jack Bannon learned early on that he’s a rotten salesman. While he was struggling to be an actor he worked at the Gap for seven years, from the time he was 16. “I was so bad that they used to encourage me to go into the stock room and pile things up rather than be on the shop floor because I didn’t really like it,” he says.
“They require, ‘Hey, welcome to the Gap!’ And I used to just stand there in the back and not want to talk to any of the customers. So they chucked me into the stockroom which I did used to enjoy — unpacking boxes and things like that. It was much more my sort of thing.”
He claims he’s not really shy, maybe just a little reserved. In fact, he wishes he were more outgoing when he first encounters strangers. “Whenever I meet people I’m very quiet and sit back and assess the room sometimes,” he says.
Assessing the room is not a bad quality when it comes to his new alter ego. Bannon is starring as the young Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s sagacious valet, in the origin story “Pennyworth.”
The 10-episode series, which premieres Sunday on Epix, takes place in the ’60s. Alfred Pennyworth is a former Special Forces officer who forms a security company and goes to work for billionaire Thomas Wayne (Bruce Wayne’s father.)
When Bannon first read the script he thought, at 27, he was too young for the role. “I do tape auditions with a friend of mine who’s an actor as well,” he explains.
“And I nearly didn’t do a selftape because I thought, ‘Awww, I’m not right.’ My friend phoned me, I was going back home on the
weekend to Norwich to see my parents, and he phoned me on Thursday and asked me to help him with a selftape. I said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’ I thought I may as well do mine. Why not? And I did it.”
He did it with zero expectations, but his Norwich accent and brooding good looks intrigued the producers. “The casting process went on and on and on,” he says.
“It took two and a half months, and I think I had seven meetings. The casting process was like a condensed version of my acting career anyway because I kept having to go back and try again and try again. And I just thought, ‘I’ve come this far, I’m not going to let one little meeting derail this whole thing.’”
Although he had done considerable acting when he was a kid, it was just a hobby. His mom, a nurse, would end her shift, drive 45 minutes to pick him up, another 45 to take him to drama school and wait for two hours while he rehearsed with the other kids. She did this for six years until he was 11.
His father, an engineer, kept urging Bannon (the oldest of four) to get “a proper job.” But he was the first to relish any small accomplishment his son made.
And those accomplishments were few and far between. Bannon tried for two years to get into drama school and was twice rejected. “I think if I’d gotten into drama school I would’ve said this is easy, this is fun, and wouldn’t have worked as hard as I ended up working to find the right agent, to save the money to get headshots, to email everyone, to put myself out there,” he says. “It gave me an impetus to go and be tenacious and not take ‘no’ for an answer again.”
He was performing a play in his hometown when the director offered some sage advice. “He said, ‘You’ve got all these contacts from the kids’ TV, you don’t need to go to drama school. You’ve got the talent. Why don’t you write to everyone you know from the kids’ TV back in the day, get some coffees or some lunches going, or whatever?’ That’s what I did.”
He revived old contacts in London, but the two-hour train ride from Norwich was expensive so Bannon found a job in a pub serving beer. “I was as good at serving beer as I was at drinking it,” he laughs. “I worked there for two years.”
In London he also ignited a romance with Alisha Shepherd, a girl he’d met in high school, and he soon moved in with her. Shepherd does costuming for TV commercials and is finishing up at university, he says. They’ve been together for five years. Has she offered some tonsorial advice to the forthcoming Pennyworth? “She bought me some socks and advised me on the trainers,” he smiles.
‘Xena’ tries murder
Xena the warrior princess has a new kind of cudgel. Lucy Lawless is starring in the 10-part Australian mystery series “My Life is Murder,” premiering on Acorn. TV Aug. 5. Lawless plays an ex-homicide detective now private eye who manages to solve the most puzzling crimes while dealing with every-day dilemmas.
The New Zealand-born actress played the derring-do Xena for six years and admits it proved exhausting. “You do get burnt out,” she says.