Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  My second TV acting gig later that year was on the second series of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer. I was beyond thrilled to be working with my heroes at last. I’d been to a couple of recordings from the first series and Bob had hinted to me that I might be asked to appear if the show returned.

  Before we shot in the studio, we went on location. I had been to plenty of studio recordings where they would have several cameras all covering the same action from different angles, but I was surprised to learn on location that just one camera was used, and then moved and the lighting changed, before the whole scene was filmed over and over again. I was struck by how long the process seemed to take.

  In youth theatre I had become accustomed to discussing details and nuances with the director following each rehearsal and performance. Little analysis or discussion took place here. After each take I would look round to the director or Vic or Bob and ask ‘Was that okay?’ They seemed surprised by the question and would give a distracted nod. I learned that, in general, a film or TV director will only tell you to change something if they think it isn’t working. They rarely engage at length with the subtleties of your performance, as time is tight and they have so many different things to focus on as they look at the monitor.

  Continuity was another concept that I had not considered beforehand. There was a lady – the script supervisor – whose job it was to make sure you stood in the same place and moved your hands in the same way on each take. Unprepared for this, I had made all sorts of instinctive choices – hands in my pockets on this line, then hands out of my pockets, then pointing, then hands back in my pockets, the arms folded, then on my hips etc. – all of which I then had to remember on top of my lines. I learned quickly that it was far simpler to keep my hands by my sides and stay in one place for the whole scene.

  Actually, should you be remotely interested, here are some other things I have learned while filming over the years.

  Eating onscreen – which sounds fun – is less fun on the eleventh take. I was delighted when we wrote that Marjorie Dawes, visiting her mum in hospital, tucked into a box of Cadbury Milk Tray (free chocolate on the BBC – result!), but it soon became sickly and it was nigh on impossible to talk properly with a mouthful of gooey chocolate caramel. A spittoon was hastily improvised.

  Sitting down is always preferable, especially if you’re doing one of those scenes that takes two days to film. I was very jealous of the actors in The Royle Family on that comfy sofa. If you do have to do something physically demanding, then at least be strategic and don’t expend all of your energy in rehearsals.

  There’s nothing worse than trying to remember your lines during a take. We’re all human and we all blank sometimes – particularly as we get older (eek!) – but knowing the lines properly in advance allows you to get on with acting.

  Large stuck-on moustaches are very itchy, especially where the long hairs at the top go up your nose. Small moustaches are bearable. Beards that go from ear to ear look great but as soon as you start talking, they need to be repeatedly re-stuck with cold, stinky glue that doesn’t work very effectively and is then suddenly a total bugger to get off at the end of the day. If you don’t remove it properly, you can wake up in the middle of the night, as I have done many times, with the pillow stuck to your cheek.

  Sometimes you try on some shoes in advance. They look perfect and the costume designer is in ecstasy. They’re a bit tight and they pinch your toes a little, but it’s only for a few days, right? NO! You’ll hate them by 9 a.m., hate the costume designer by 10 a.m. and hate yourself by 11 a.m. You’ll be in a mood all day, kicking them off at any opportunity. ‘You won’t see my feet in this shot, will you? Can I go without? Just in this shot?’

  The director makes the creative decisions and the producer does the hiring and firing, but really everything on set is run by the First, or rather the First Assistant Director. This is the person who organises the filming schedule and then hollers from dawn to dusk like a sergeant major. They’ll tell you which scene we’re about to film and which angle we’re shooting it from. They’ll call the actors on to set. They’ll order the costume and make-up departments over for ‘checks’ – which occur immediately before each take. There are quiet ones and there are loud ones, who scream and shout. They constantly harry – ‘Come on, people, we need to keep moving’. They can be brash and infuriating and then show great sensitivity. I am in constant awe of all of them. It is the ultimate multi-tasking job and definitely the most demanding role on any set.

  You might feel like a diva when you ask for a cup of tea and sit on your arse while some poor girl on work experience called Tabitha scampers off in the rain to get it for you, but actually if you did get up and get it for yourself, and then the First AD called for you and you weren’t there, there would be a post-mortem. Budgets – and therefore schedules – are always tighter than you’d anticipate. Ditto, if it seems like you’re being called in, rushed to make-up, squeezed into costume and then made to sit around for hours doing nothing, it’s because no one wants to be responsible for you not being there in the eventuality that you are suddenly needed. It might unexpectedly hail or an actor might be taken ill or some other act of God might occur – and then you could be called upon earlier than planned. What can NEVER happen on a set … EVER … is nothing at all.

  Whatever you’re filming, I can guarantee you will either be too hot or too cold. British shows tend to shoot in the summer (apart from Doctor Who – as I write this, I’m about to spend three days in the forest and it’s minus 4 degrees). As Ashley Blaker once said to me, this country is too cold, apart from that one week of the year when it’s too hot.

  You can’t throw a sickie – if you’re ill, you’re expected to go in and film regardless. Too much money has been invested and the schedule is too packed for an actor to have the flu. You’d have to have been already dead for several weeks, with a doctor’s letter to prove it, before you’re allowed to stay in bed for even one day and recover.

  Crews can spend hours lighting a shot of a dandelion in the morning. Tape measures come out, tracks are laid, we film for a couple of hours and then the director decides to switch the dandelion for a buttercup and we start all over again. Then, towards the end of the day, some bright spark realises that we’ve still got a whole scene to do before the sun sets. This is what is commonly referred to as the ‘kick, bollock, scramble hour’, in which you film seven pages in forty-five minutes. Director Ben Wheatley once told an interviewer that the process of filming was ‘Hollywood in the morning, Hollyoaks in the afternoon’.

  And lastly, when you’re not on camera, you’re quite possibly still on mic. I daren’t think of how many times I’ve forgotten this. Yes, the producer is a berk but you definitely don’t want him to know that’s what you think!

  Right, lecture over. What else have I been in?

  Well, I was in a lovely BBC film of The Wind in the Willows in 2006. Less lovely was the fact that I wore padding and thick, heavy costumes in the 40-degree heat of a Romanian summer. My prosthetic make-up melted off continually.

  The food at the studio consisted of out-of-date army rations (honestly), so I survived on a diet of salad and sweets. Filming hours were long and for some reason we were staying an hour away from set. On the way there, the streets were lined with stray dogs and cats – both dead and alive. I saw one puppy cross the road and get sliced in half six feet in front of me, an image too horrific to forget.

  I grew so exhausted during the shoot that I began sleep-walking at night. The first time, I woke up with the lights on, in the bathroom, naked, peeing at the wall, with no knowledge of how I had got there. The second time I woke up, again naked, trying and thankfully failing to open the front door.

  And yet I loved the job and had a blast filming with the other actors. Mark Gatiss and Lee Ingleby, like me, delighted in the company of Bob Hoskins, who played Badger and was permanently but very entertainingly irascible. As mischievous as actors can be, there is also a
sense that you have to try to behave on set, because you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult. Bob had reached an age and level where he wasn’t worried about anything like that anymore. If he thought anything was taking too long, he’d simply bellow ‘SHALL WE GET A FUCKING MOVE ON?!’ at the top of his voice and within seconds we’d be shooting again. We loved it.

  Because of the cost of flying out actors from the UK, a lot of the smaller roles in the film were taken by local actors, whose voices would be re-dubbed at a later date. Many of them spoke little or no English and had learned their lines phonetically. They’d deliver their dialogue almost quizzically, with the strangest, most random intonations and then stare blankly at me. As the shoot wore on – and high on sugar – I found myself becoming more and more helpless with laughter when appearing alongside them. I longed for it and dreaded it. Rachel Talalay, one of the most brilliant directors I have ever worked with, was sympathetic and understood the absurdity of the situation. How she managed to cut around my crazed performance, I’ll never know. When one actor carefully pronounced the ‘b’ in ‘doubt’, I collapsed on the floor in stitches, the camera still rolling. I was embarrassed and apologetic – those poor actors – but then as soon as the First shouted ‘Action!’, the same thing would happen again.

  The worst instance of ‘corpsing’ I have ever experienced was onstage in Prick Up Your Ears, a play about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. A woman in the third row had a laugh that sounded like a wild animal and every time she cackled, so did half the audience – not at the action onstage but at the noises she was making.

  Eventually the laughter spread to the stage itself. There were three of us in the play and we now found ourselves chortling along, until the show stopped several times, for two or three minutes at a time, while the whole room just roared.

  At one point, on maybe the second or third outbreak, with the play again having simply collapsed, I stepped forward and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry but a hyena seems to have escaped from the zoo.’

  The audience applauded and it was my vain hope that by truly acknowledging the hysteria in the room we might all – cast and audience – somehow draw it to an end. No such luck – we simply couldn’t find a way to get past it. As we played out the brutal, bloody death scene at the play’s close, the audience continued to titter. If the director had been in that night he would have rightly been apoplectic. But he wasn’t. And there was no one to take control.

  Afterwards, the mood backstage was in stark contrast. The reality of what had just happened began to sink in. An audience had come to see a West End play and instead they had seen a mess. A shambles. A debacle. We felt ashamed at our amateurish behaviour. The other two actors in the play expressed fury at me for having stepped out of character with my gag, but I countered that the play had already fallen apart by then and more likely they were angry with themselves for laughing so much.

  You could argue that I was in the wrong for my actions. I don’t know the correct thing to do in that situation. Despite my youth theatre experience, I have never trained formally as an actor, I didn’t go to drama school and took the stand-up route instead. I still feel like I’m learning on the job and I’m always surprised when anyone casts me in anything, to be honest.

  One of the biggest surprises of my career was when I found myself in a giant Disney movie. Having eagerly awaited the arrival of any and every new Disney film as a kid, I didn’t dare imagine that one day I’d be in one myself. I wish I could tell you stories of how I had to go through thirty-eight auditions and sleep with someone very powerful but the truth is that one day I simply got a call to go and meet Tim Burton, who was about to direct a big-budget, 3D live-action Alice in Wonderland.

  As I arrived at his office in Belsize Park, he was sat at his desk doodling Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To my surprise there was no audition. He just told me a little about the movie and said he hoped I’d be up for playing both the Tweedles. I then went off to the US to film Little Britain USA, straight from that to Hungary to do a series for Comedy Central called Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire and then, fortyeight hours later, head spinning, I was at Culver City Studios on set with Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Wasikowska and Anne Hathaway.

  I think we gave up on the clangs, didn’t we?

  On my first day I was introduced to Richard ‘Dick’ Zanuck, one of the producers of the film and a Hollywood legend. My trailer was huge and like a lovely log cabin. I’d never seen anything like it. Dick took one look at it and to my surprise promptly sent it away for something even bigger. During the shoot I would grill him on his career. For someone so successful – he had produced monster hits like Jaws, Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy – he was incredibly gracious and always had time for me.

  All of my scenes were shot on green screen and I wore a not-too-flattering green leotard with so much padding round the middle that I looked like an apple on legs. Because I was playing both Tweedles, it was suggested that I might have another actor around, who could stand in for whichever Tweedle I wasn’t playing at that particular time. The producers found a very smart, talented actor called Ethan Cohn, who impressed them so much that they went on to give him a role in the movie as one of the Queen’s courtiers. For parts of the film the Tweedles are a good deal taller than Alice. Ethan and I learned to walk on stilts so that we were at the right eyeline for Mia. Special tall chairs were built for us so we could rest between takes without having to take the stilts off.

  Ahead of filming, Tim Burton asked me to write a page or two about how I saw the Tweedles, and then we sat in his trailer and talked it through. Because they fought in such a juvenile way I wanted to play them as kids and he seemed to like that. I loved working with him because he would always let me do one or two takes before giving me any notes. I’ve worked in the past with directors who are so prescriptive – before I’ve had a chance to even try anything – and I find that can shut me down creatively. Tim was the opposite.

  I was on the movie for about ten weeks. Most of the time – as anyone who has played a supporting role on a huge movie will tell you – I did nothing. That is to say, I got picked up at 6 a.m. from my suite at the Sunset Marquis Hotel where Disney had put me up, was driven to set, got dressed and had make-up and breakfast. By then it was about 7.45 a.m. One of the runners would knock on my trailer door and give me a five-minute warning. Very occasionally I would find myself on set five minutes later. However, more often than not I guess I was there ‘just in case’, which meant I would then lie on the sofa watching TV for a few hours, have a nap, wake up, have lunch (whatever I fancied, because I had a driver who would go and get it), get another five-minute warning, watch some more TV, have another nap and then, around 6 p.m., get driven back to the hotel.

  It sounds glorious – and it sort of is – but my mind doesn’t respond well to inactivity. There’s only so much local American TV news you can watch. I wasn’t used to it. I had just come off Little Britain where, even if I wasn’t in the scene, I had co-written it and would be pacing by the monitors, scrutinising the action and bothering David by suggesting changes.

  And so on Alice I took to wandering around the set, keeping myself occupied. It goes against protocol, but I would occasionally even go and see if any other actors were at a loose end as well. One day I knocked on Johnny Depp’s door. Similarly twiddling his thumbs, he was watching YouTube videos of people falling over and chuckling to himself. I joined him and we whiled away a most pleasant afternoon.

  Sometimes I would go and chat with the make-up artists. Johnny had his own make-up trailer, but the rest of the cast shared one. There was a bank of three workstations where Mia and Anne and I would sit, and then one separate workstation at the end, on a slightly raised level behind a thin screen, where there was more space. Here Helena would have her prosthetic Red Queen make-up applied each day.

  One afternoon, again bored out of my tree, I went to chat with the make-up artists as usual, and was being
particularly silly, riffing away, doing lots of loud, crazy voices. People were either heartily entertained or simply being polite, but I was in full flow.

  The following morning, while being made up, I was talking to the make-up designer about a film she had worked on previously, starring Dustin Hoffman. I spoke in awe of him. She then casually told me that he had popped into that very trailer the day before so she could cut his hair.

  ‘When?!’ I asked. ‘Oh, I wish I could have met him.’

  ‘When you were doing all your voices, Matt,’ she said.

  At that point I realised that one of the greatest actors on the planet had come in for a short back and sides and had been subjected throughout to the mad, indulgent rantings of a fat British idiot (see chapter I).

  Actually, some months later I did meet the great man himself at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills. The friend is also famous, but that’s enough clangs for now. Anyway, Dustin was eating a corn on the cob and it accidentally fell off his plate and into the pool. As we talked he found one of those little nets and fished it out. Seconds later the cob fell into the pool again and he had to fish it out again. I accept that there is no great dramatic thrust to this particular showbiz anecdote, but you’ve got Dustin Hoffman, George Dawes, a swimming pool and a slippery corn cob. If that’s not enough for you, I suspect you’ll never be happy.

  I hope, by the way, that Dustin Hoffman doesn’t mind me retelling that half-anecdote. I’m quite sure that the image in your mind now of him rescuing a cob from a pool with a net in no way detracts from your memory of him in such classic films as Papillon and Marathon Man.

  Eighteen months after we finished shooting, Alice in Wonderland was released. Avatar had recently been the first breakout hit in the new wave of 3D movies (where, finally, you didn’t have to wear the flimsy paper glasses with one green and one red eye). An audience hungry for more 3D flocked to see Tim Burton’s film and it surpassed all box-office expectations.