‘Cling film? My
From The Full Monty to shocking murders, Mark Addy reveals all to David Stephenson
MARK Addy made a name for himself by having cling film wrapped around his bare torso to help him lose weight in the unforgettable film The Full Monty.
“It didn’t help that I was eating a Mars Bar at the time!” he jokes when we meet in London.
But when I ask the glazier’s son where the next Mark Addy is coming from, he has a serious message for TV producers.
“I think there’s going to be a hole where the working class actors used to be and it will be Eton boys pretending to be them instead,” he says. “I think it’s going to be a problem.”
York-born Addy, 55, is playing the lead detective in harrowing White House Farm, a drama about the notorious Jeremy Bamber case. It clearly has no comic potential for him but he steals the show nonetheless with his measured, sympathetic performance of an under-rated cop who turns the case on its head.
Yet none of his acting success would have happened, he says, if he’d not got a grant to go to RADA, the prestigious London drama school, and if he hadn’t been singled out by a teacher at Nunthorpe Grammar School in York, where his father worked at the iconic Minster.
“It was my drama teacher there who inspired me,” he says. “Drama was the only thing that I showed any interest in. I wasn’t academic. I had an English teacher who encouraged those of us who were into it to meet of a lunchtime and read a play like Look Back in Anger. But it was all off our own bats.we were encouraged to do it.we were interested in performing. It was also stuff that we’d never ever heard of.
“Peter Jackson, the teacher, used a run a drama club on the Friday evening at the school, so you’d stay around for that, from 7pm to 9pm, and there were others there too who went on to become professionals such as Nigel Betts, and Patrick Murphy who became Andrew Lloyd Webber’s head of production.
“So that one drama teacher made quite a difference.”
Addy got into RADA in 1982. “It’s much more difficult for working class people now. I got a grant from the local council then. My parents couldn’t have afforded it at the time. I wouldn’t have gone.”
It was an impressive cohort. “We had Sean Bean, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Watkins and Imogen Stubbs.there were some really good people. Back then, there were only 23 students to a term, 15 guys and eight girls. And they said that was the proportion of work available to that number of people at the time. Now it’s 50/50, which is right.”
He says it was “an incredible break” for him, “especially coming to London for the first time and living away from home”.
DURING his time, he did 35 plays in front of a paying audience, with a three-night run. “It was a great experience,” he says. But he truly doesn’t know about the “next Mark Addy”.
He ponders a little. “Unless there’s a way of funding those places then you’re not going to get it… although I know Jim Cartwright, the playwright, I think he’s set up a kind of drama school specifically for workingclass kids.
“Shane Meadows [who made the film This is England] will also pick out kids who are not actors and improvise with them, and bring them up to a level of performance that they didn’t think they could reach. So there are a handful of people who are trying to make a difference but you’re not going to see the same number of actors like that getting through the system.”
That’s surely wrong I suggest. “I think it is, it will be problematic for them to cast things – I really don’t know the answer,” says Addy, who has also starred as the bluff Hercules in Saturday tea-time TV fantasy Atlantis, and as equally downto-earth Fred Flintstone in the movie The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.
Now there’swhite House Farm. His character, Detective Sergeant Stan Jones, died five years ago in real life. “It was a case of trying to find what made the detective say to his superior, ‘I think you’re wrong’,” a move that eventually saw the conviction of Jeremy Bamber