Mister Fantastic
IAN BERRIMAN LOOKS BACK 13 YEARS TO AN ENCOUNTER WITH CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON
ack in March 2005, i was one of a handful of journalists to interview christopher Eccleston while he was still, officially, the ninth Doctor. we met three days before “rose” aired, in the offices of his agent. slightly hungover, periodically scratching a scabby elbow, he was affable and thoughtful. in retrospect, there were a couple of hints of friction behind-the-scenes, when he said his “confidence was rocked” by the first block of filming, and made cryptic reference to there being “a lot of politics”.
not everything he said made the subsequent feature (SFX 131). For example, we talked about why he’d taken the role. “To a certain extent i took it because i wanted to change my career,” Eccleston explained. “i wanted to act for kids. i just hope that it enables me to play other roles. it’s what an actor does, basically: you do a performance and the main hope is that that job will create another job.”
he discussed how demanding it was. “You’re on your feet all day, then my evenings were about learning the lines for the next day – and the line learning’s a grind. i was fit when i went into it – i’ve always run marathons and stuff – and i needed that fitness for mental alertness.”
Two days before, he’d appeared on Blue Peter, and been touched by a
Bmodel of his Doctor made by a Preston lad – this, it turned out, was sitting in a shoebox waiting for him to collect it the next day. so i asked how he felt about becoming a hero figure for children. “i love dealing with kids,” he said. “i work in a very cynical industry. There’s a lot of backstabbing, a lot of lies, a lot of people in it for the money and the profile rather than for the work. as a child, i always thought actors were special people – inaccessible, like gods. it’s been nice for me to be accessible to the kids so they think, ‘he’s not that different from me – maybe i can be an actor.’”
along the way Eccleston also expressed admiration for David Thewlis’s acting in Mike Leigh’s Naked (“One of the great film performances”), mentioned
turning Billie Piper on to Donnie hathaway’s 1973 soul track “someday we’ll all Be Free”, and reminisced about watching Star Trek as a kid with his dad (“we loved the first series”).
at the end, i pressed him on his plans, and came away feeling pleased with myself for winkling the words “i cannot imagine doing it without Billie” out of him. “Give it five years!” i nervously joked on the way out. Four days later, the BBC torpedoed my scoop by announcing that Eccleston was a one-series wonder…