Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Show you’ll see on TV this year
Richard Armitage reveals how he tackled the steamy scenes in a racy remake of hit film Damage
twins – I brought that into the character. In one shot William brushes Anna’s neck and you can see her vein pulsing. Another time we filmed her getting goose pimples. You don’t often see these things on screen but he’s fascinated by the landscape of her body.’ For the first time in his long career, Richard, whose other roles have included Thorin in the
Hobbit films, worked with an intimacy co-ordinator for the more physical scenes. ‘She’s part director, part choreographer and part psychologist,’ he says of Adelaide Waldrop. ‘She talked about how when you’re doing these scenes you need to talk about the character’s body parts, not your own. So this was William’s body and he’s touching Anna’s body. Separating myself from the character and what he was doing felt like a good way around it.’
Yet at the same time, he knew it was his body that would be plastered over our screens. ‘There was no point going to the gym because William, as a surgeon, wouldn’t be a beefcake,’ he says. ‘But I wanted to look fit and well. Charlie’s younger than me and I didn’t want it to look inappropriate.
‘Charlie and I were both vain enough not to eat anything before the intimate stuff. So we’d arrive on set starving and my stomach would start grumbling and then hers would too, like they were having a conversation.’
Something of a ‘method’ actor, Richard deliberately took himself away from the rest of the cast between scenes and says the whole time they were filming he couldn’t look Indira Varma, who plays his wife Ingrid, or Rish Shah, who plays his son Jay, in the eye.
‘Indira is brilliant in the role, which somehow made it ten times worse,’ he laughs. ‘After we’d finished filming I went to see her in a play and we had a drink afterwards. Even then I struggled to make eye contact. I was thinking, “She must think I’m an awful human being because of what I’ve done. Or what William has done.” I couldn’t get over it because I don’t think it’s something I’d ever do.’
Richard came out as gay to his family when he was 19 but not publicly until a few years ago, saying he was worried ‘if I said the wrong thing or revealed too much, it could all come crashing down and my parents wouldn’t be proud of me any more’.
He’s still uncomfortable discussing his private life, but says he and his partner of five years have become friendly with Charlie and her husband. When I ask if he was worried his sexuality might stop casting directors choosing him for certain roles he shrugs. He’s not sure, but he believes acting means always putting yourself in the skin of someone else. ‘Attraction is attraction and I know this is asked a lot more of straight actors playing gay characters – what’s it like to kiss a man? The answer is it’s just like kissing a woman,’ he says. ‘It’s the same feeling; a pair of lips. And because you’re kissing a stranger you’re trying to engage with them and create chemistry, but at the same time you’re holding them at a distance.’
He admits that distance isn’t always
possible and says he ‘fell in love’ with Charlie platonically, but it was still sexually charged. ‘You can’t always be in charge of your body when someone touches it. You can’t switch it off. I find the mouth the most intimate area of the body – the closeness in the lips I had with Charlie was more revealing than anything else.’
I first met Richard 15 years ago when he’d become the resident heartthrob on Spooks, having already attracted a huge fanbase called the Armitage Army on costume drama North & South. He seemed uncomfortable then with being seen as ‘totty’, and it still makes him cringe.
‘I’ve struggled to prove I’m not just eye candy,’ he says. ‘It’s an ongoing battle as it means people don’t see me as a serious actor. It feels like they think, “We need someone with sex appeal so we’ll hire Richard.” It’s a challenge, but then I do want to work.’
And in some ways he’s just getting started. He’s recently finished filming Holocaust film The Boy In The Woods, about a farmer who helps a Jewish boy to hide, and he’s now working on Fool Me Once, his third Harlan Coben drama for Netflix.
But the thing he seems most excited about is a completely new sideline. With his deep baritone voice he’s long been a fan favourite as a narrator on audiobooks app Audible, and the company encouraged him to write his first thriller Geneva last year. Not only did it become a bestseller, but he reveals it’s now being turned into a TV series that he’ll star in.
‘It’s beyond anything I could ever dream of,’ he says. ‘I’d been hoping I could develop someone else’s book as a producer, but I never had an ambition to write something I could be in. My ego is just not that big. But to think that something I’ve been able to create from scratch is going into production is incredible.’
He smiles, and then this charming, self-effacing man blushes again...
You can’t always be in charge of your body when someone touches it. You can’t switch it off