Christopher Eccleston on class, capitalism, fame and shame: ‘My eating disorder was imprisoning’
As a child of no more than seven or eight, Christopher Eccleston saw an animated version of A Christmas Carol. It was his introduction to the Dickens classic and he was so taken with it, he says, that he started to draw it “quite obsessively. The scene where Scrooge arrives home and passes the Scrooge & Marley sign.” What was it that grabbed him? “The unpleasantness of him. I presume that all of us are aware of our duality. I think, from an early age, I was very aware of it. I thought I could be very good or I could be very nasty. I dwelled on that as a child quite a lot.”
Eccleston is about to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Jack Thorne’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, first performed at the Old Vic in 2017 and every year since. He has not seen previous productions, which he is thankful for. “I think I’d have been too intimidated.” We meet in a rehearsal room on the top floor of the London theatre. Eccleston is intense. It is not aggression: he is warm and funny, but there is something hawk-like about the planes of his face and his direct gaze. Partly because of his roles, his image has been one of either bristling male anger or forlornness, but the way he looks and the way he feels often don’t match up: there is a low-key joy to him that does not always come across. In 2016, he was hospitalised with severe clinical depression, but says he is content now. “Very happy with my relationship with my children, and very happy with this work. And happy to have got to nearly 60 in one piece.”
Eccleston, 59, has had a long day, but he is loving it, even if – having spent most of his career in TV and film – he is a little out of his comfort zone. “I always feel quite unfamiliar with theatre, a bit like I’m starting again,” he says. “This has been a very positive experience.” Most of the cast are 20 or 30 years younger than him. “And they can sing, dance and act – that kind of talent.” There is only admiration, no envy.
His career has spanned everything from landmark TV (including Our Friends in the North), to Hollywood films (Gone in 60 Seconds and Thor: The Dark World), to prestige theatre and rebooting Doctor Who. Yet in the past, he has admitted to impostor syndrome and spoken about feeling like an outsider. Does he still? “No, I have accepted finally that I’m an actor.” He laughs. “I seem to have kept working, by and large. It’s also about getting a sense of humour about it and realising perfection … it’s not possible.” Was there a moment when he accepted it? Perhaps as he was about to go on stage as Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company? “Well, we didn’t really deliver and I’m definitely trying to erase some Macbeth memories with this play,” he says with a smile. The 2018 production garnered middling reviews and during one performance, Eccleston fell off the stage. “But yeah, I think you have to pat yourself on the back.” He says becoming a father (he has two children, who are 11 and 10) pushed work into second place, and in doing so, brought a new lightness. “It’s not life or death. It was.”
Scrooge’s salvation gives us all hope, maybe more so now in an era that finds it hard to forgive. Does Eccleston believe in redemption? He exhales and pauses for so long that I think he is not going to answer: “I don’t know, yet,” he says, eventually. “I believe in a sort of reinvention, a rebirth, from my own experiences, being given a different … from the breakdown. Definitely, I’m a very different animal than I was, and I’ve drawn on that for this play. But whether that’s redemption …”
In 2020, he published his memoir, I Love the Bones of You, unflinching in places – he flays himself, almost, with his description of his body dysmorphia, the eating disorder he developed, and his subsequent breakdown – but also a wonderful insight into growing up in a working-class family in 1970s Salford, Greater Manchester, and the inequalities that kept generations of people down. His dad worked in a factory and his mum was a cleaner. His parents, clever and curious, had left school at 14, and their potential was never realised. Eccleston noticed that the women around him were also trapped. “I was terrified of marriage, I was terrified of factory work,” he says now. “It was just blackness to me – I know I sound melodramatic, but it was real.”
He wanted to be an actor, he says, because: “I wanted to show off. I wanted to drink, I wanted to meet women, I wanted to wear eyeliner. I definitely am a frustrated lead singer. Somebody should write a thesis on the influence of lead singers in rock bands on working-class actors. That element of theatre that they brought into the living room on Top of the Pops, all of them, men, women. What was Bowie doing but theatre?”
His parents supported his ambitions, and he has been vocal about the