Officeranda gentlemane
Outlander star Steven Cree tells how movie legend Richard Gere reacted when asked if his hair was real
OUTLANDER star Steven Cree has revealed he nearly blew it with Richard Gere – after making an embarrassing faux pas about the superstar’s hair.
The Ayrshire-born actor starred alongside the Hollywood giant in BBC drama MotherFatherSon in 2019.
He was so spellbound by the An Officer and a Gentleman star he told him how much he loved his hair.
Steven said: “A lot of actors say they don’t get starstruck but when I met Richard Gere, I was dumbstruck, awestruck and starstruck all at the same time.
“He’s one of my all-time favourite actors so coming face to face with him on set really threw me.
“On the first day, when I was sitting across from him at the table, I couldn’t take my eyes off his hair. He eventually looked at me and I said, ‘I’m sorry but I just have to tell you that your hair is absolutely incredible’.
“He was taken aback and said it was a wig, to which I replied, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘No!’ and for the rest of the time we sat in awkward silence. I can’t quite believe I said that.”
He added: “On the last day of filming I went up to him and said, ‘Lovely to meet you and good luck.’ He just looked at me, took my face in both his hands, looked into my eyes and did that little smile he does.
“I thought, ‘Is Richard Gere about to kiss me here?’ If he wanted to I would have let him but he just sort of nodded and walked away.
“It was surreal but also brilliant. It was a memory I’ll always treasure.”
Steven, who played the character of Andrew Bentham in the BBC miniseries about a crumbling media empire, continued: “I loved working alongside Richard and the late great Helen McCrory. She was a phenomenal actress. I did a scene with her and she was so good I nearly forgot my lines.”
Steven is best known as Ian Murray in Outlander. He has also been in films Terminator: Dark Fate, Maleficent, Robert the Bruce film Outlaw King and The Titan as well as TV series COBRA, opposite Robert Carlyle.
The 41-year-old, from Kilmarnock, credits his success with becoming a dad. He lives in London with his casting director wife Kahleen Crawford and their four-year-old daughter Teddy and said: “My daughter changed my life and my career. Screen-wise, it has been the most productive four years.
“I like to think I’ve always been an empathetic person with a strong moral compass and becoming a dad has reinforced those traits in me which I think has helped me land so many great roles recently.”
Steven, whose new psychological thriller The Twin is out in cinemas in April, got his TV break on Outlander and says he knew the show was going to be a global success.
But his Celtic co-stars on the series – Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe – were worried no one would like it.
The ex-Onthank Primary School pupil said: “I was with Caitriona and Sam when episode one was about to screen and they were really worried what the reaction was going to be.
“I told them not to worry. I knew it was going to be well-received because epic period dramas like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones were doing so well at the time.
“What I didn’t know was how spectacularly huge it was going to be and that it would spawn awards and fan conventions where we were surrounded by fans from every continent bar Antarctica.”
Steven and Sam have become pals but admit that some people don’t get their mickey-taking Scottish banter on Twitter.
He said: “Sam and I banter away and its sometimes to our detriment. It’s always goodnatured but sometimes our followers don’t get it. It’s hard to ‘get’ sarcasm online. People take it too seriously and think we’re having a go.”
Steven is looking forward to seeing what fans make of the last season of A Discovery of Witches.
The hit fantasy series is based on the All Souls trilogy, about a historian who discovers a bewitched manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and is forced into a world of magic – full of vampires, demons, witches and forbidden love.
Steven plays Gallowglass, the best friend and nephew of the show’s star Matthew de Clermont (Matthew Goode). He said: “I was nervous entering such a successful show, especially as I was playing a character who was so popular in the books. But it turned out to be one of the best roles I’ve ever played.”
A Discovery of Witches is on Sky One and NOW TV on Friday.
I was dumbstruck, awestruck and starstruck STEVEN CREE
Sir David Attenborough discovered the hard way that plants can be just as vicious as animals. Filming in a desert in the US for new BBC1 series The Green Planet, his crew encouraged him to touch a cholla cactus with viciously sharp spines.
Executive producer Mike Gunton laughs: “One of the joys of going on location is thinking up horrible things to get David to do. We got a Kevlar under-glove, and then a welding glove.
“So David bravely put his hand inside this cholla cactus, as requested. And half way through it these spikes still managed to get through those two bits of protection. And it’s quite painful, isn’t it?”
Nodding grimly, Sir David, 95, says: “Yes! The cholla really is a physical danger.
“It has very dense spines in rosettes, so they point in all directions. And if you just brush against it, the spines are like spicules of glass, I mean they are that sharp and they go into you and you really have trouble getting them out.” Sir David hopes to convince viewers that plants can be every bit as aggressive and dramatic as animals – they just do things on a different timescale. A quarter of a century on from his The Private Life of Plants, advanced technology allows The Green Planet to show their daily struggle for food and light as they battle for territory while trying to reproduce and scatter their young. Sir David says: “In Private Life of Plants we were stuck with all this very heavy, primitive equipment, but now we can take the cameras anywhere we like. “So you now have the ability to go into a real forest, you can see a plant growing with its neighbours, fighting or moving with its neighbours, or dying. “And that, in my view, is what brings the thing to life and which should make people say, ‘Good lord, these extraordinary organisms are just like us’. “In the sense that they live and die, that they fight, they have to learn to reproduce and all those sorts of things. But just that they do them so slowly, so we have never seen that before.” Viewers will see how plants count, hunt, deceive, communicate and protect their relatives – and
that when plants and animals interact, the plant is usually in charge.
Sir David believes now is the right time for this series. He says: “The world has suddenly become plant conscious. There’s an awareness that we’d starve without plants, wouldn’t be able to breathe without plants.
“And yet people’s understanding about plants, except in a very kind of narrow way, has not kept up with that. I think this will bring it home.
“This is not about gardening, this is about a parallel world which exists alongside us, and which is the basis for our own lives, and to which we’ve paid scant attention over the years.”
The series, which starts on Sunday, is split into five episodes which cover tropical forests, deserts, fresh water, the seasons and the human world.
The first episode, Tropical Worlds, shows some astonishing plants including the rafflesia, better known as the parasitic corpse flower, which is found only in the rain forest of Borneo.
This plant plugs into a vine and spends several years growing a huge bud which, when it opens into the world’s biggest flower, lasts for just one night. Its texture and colour mimics an animal carcass and it smells like one too. The flies it lures get a dollop of pollen stuck on their backs, which they carry to another flower, so pollinating it.
Series producer Rupert Barrington says: “We decided to focus on finding situations where a plant could demonstrate that it has a strategy, or it’s in control of a relationship. For example, showing the audience how a plant entices animals into doing something for them, or how a plant can protect itself against being eaten.” The Green Planet was four years in the making and shot in 27 countries using time-lapse, ultra-high-speed and thermal cameras, motion-control robotics systems, macro framestacking and the latest developments in microscopy. Filming plants proved to be far harder than filming animals.
Rupert says: “This is partly because they don’t move on our timescale, so they’re much more complicated.
“Any piece of behaviour which might last five minutes for an animal could last three months with plants.”
Because of this, a much bigger production team was required.
Rupert explains: “We needed a time-lapse expert, a standard camera, a drone operator, someone who can operate a crane, and someone who is able to put cables and tracks through the forest.
“You often had several different cameras and a whole suite of lenses. We had lenses which could film the surface of a single leaf hair in a wide angle so you see the landscape of the leaf.
“On some shoots we had more than 50 cases of kit, compared to 15 to 20 cases for filming animals.”
Mike says the kit brings a whole new perspective, adding: “When you use this technology, it’s like parting a curtain to go into a parallel universe.” ■ The Green Planet, BBC1, Sunday, January 9, 7pm