The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman

by Neil Daniels

  Freeman spoke to Ain’t It Cool’s Capone about his experiences: ‘Well, it wasn’t intimidating, but it wasn’t easy either. I don’t think there’s anything about him that is easy, to be honest. Not that he’s a difficult man. I never found that he was weird or difficult with me, but his films aren’t easy, obviously, and his films are always pretty challenging.’

  Martin continued to explain what it was like working with Greenaway: ‘The process that he puts you through is fairly challenging, because as an actor, obviously, you’re used to waiting for the lighting, but you’re not used to waiting that long for the lighting, you know. You’re not used to waiting, like, half the day for the scene to be lit, but that’s, of course, what gives his films their look. That’s why his films are unique, because they look the way they do. I’m playing Rembrandt at the heart of this film, and there has to be a sort of human, beating heart at the core of the movie the rest of the film can sort of exist around. And, he’s a very hands-off director, you know. He leaves you alone.’

  Nightwatching received mostly passable reviews, though critics praised Freeman’s superb performance.

  ‘Often, Greenaway’s handling of actors is his weakest point: but he gets fiercely intelligent performances here from Martin Freeman and Eva Birthistle as the artist and his wife Saskia,’ wrote Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian. ‘Greenaway’s group compositions are bracingly cerebral – and sometimes very erotic. His tableaux vivants are like glittering 21st-century cine-masques, with a poetic structure which swerves conventional expectations of location and narrative.’

  Empire’s Adam Smith penned a review that said, ‘Martin Freeman is outstanding as the lusty young genius who, when commissioned to paint members of the Amsterdam militia in their finery, instead produces a portrait packed with half-hidden insults and an accusation of murder.’

  The Independent’s Anthony Quinn said, ‘Unfortunately, this art history lesson is enclosed within a two-hour movie of nearstupefying tedium. Martin Freeman, stocky and stubbly, is not bad at all as the outspoken artist, and his grief over his dying wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle) is made convincingly raw.’

  Writing in Variety, Jay Weissberg said, ‘Freeman, best known for the UK series The Office, is just the man, inhabiting the foul-mouthed, lusty artist and making him believable rather than theatrical. Birthistle and May are also standouts, rising to the challenge of being flesh and blood amid the stagecraft. Non-English thespers are less successful, made to recite long, explanatory dialogue that’s difficult to decipher under the thick accents. Multitude of players gets lost as Greenaway seems uncertain which elements to focus on at what moment, leaving a disjointed sense that’s not helped by a choppy feel for time’s passing.’

  There were other directors Freeman had a desire to work with. Notably, Francis Ford Coppola, as Freeman is a huge fan of The Godfather films, and then there’s Spike Lee, Ken Loach and Shane Meadows. These directors are auteur film-makers whose body of work carries particular themes which are personal to them – for example Coppola’s Italian-American background or Meadows’s working-class roots – and there’s an individual style to each of the director’s works. Of course, he wouldn’t turn down the chance of working with Steven Spielberg either. Freeman even met director and master puppeteer Frank Oz once and wouldn’t say no to the opportunity of working with him either. Speaking to IndieLondon.co.uk in 2007, Freeman said, ‘There’s also never been a better film than the first two Godfathers, so I’d love to work with Coppola. I’d also like to work with his daughter because I think she’s fucking serious, really serious. But I think there are a lot of people. I met Frank Oz last year and really liked him. He’s a really lovely director as well. Spielberg’s not bad at all [laughs].’

  To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Motown Records Freeman hosted a special edition of BBC2’s The Culture Show, which was first broadcast in March 2009. In the programme he visits both Detroit and LA and charts the story of soul and motown, his favourite type of music. As a self-confessed anorak, it was a joy for Freeman to visit some of his heroes. In Detroit he speaks to the last surviving member of the Four Tops, Duke Fakir, and Sylvia Moy, who wrote ‘Uptight’ for Stevie Wonder, motown producer Clay McMurray, who worked in Quality Control for Motown Records and vied for the release of Stevie Wonder’s ‘My Cherie Amour’. He also chatted to DJ Scottie Regan, who played motown on white radio stations and introduced the music to a new generation of fans. He spoke to the legendary Martha Reeves of Martha and The Vandellas, who later became a Detroit councillor. He also got to interview guitarist Eddie Willis, bass player Bob Babbitt and drummer Uriel Jones, three original members of the Funk Brothers who helped shape the sound of 1960s motown. He then journeys to LA to chart the story of the label, as Motown Records moved to the City of Angels in 1972. He interviews three members of The Jackson 5: Marlon, Tito and Jackie, along with Mary Wilson of The Supremes and Otis Williams of The Temptations, as well as songwriters Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland, whose hits include ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ and ‘Reach Out’.

  Although many of his favourite artists are black American soul singers, he has a firm grasp on contemporary British music, with his favourite bands of the day being Super Furry Animals, The Bees, The Coral and The Zutons.

  Freeman next starred in the four-part drama Boy Meets Girl. It was slightly different from what he had done in the past, so he was open to a new challenge.

  Martin stars as Danny Reed, who is struck by lightning only to wake up and find he is inside the body of a woman – fashion journalist Veronica Burton, played by Rachel Stirling. Veronica has a busy social life, is financially stable and has a devoted boyfriend called Jay, played by Paterson Joseph. Danny is tired of life and directionless and takes out his frustration on his customers at the DIY store where he works. He pines for his co-worker Fiona (played by Angela Griffin) and tells of his encyclopaedic knowledge of pointless information to his good friend Pete (Marshall Lancaster). So the freakish accident that causes him to swap bodies with Veronica turns his life upside down. They both struggle with their new identities and learn some new truths about themselves. However, by the end of the series they long to get back to their own bodies and their own lives.

  Speaking about their preparation for the roles, Rachel Stirling told British Comedy Guide, ‘I watched everything that featured transgender roles, but I have also now played four male parts in my career. Martin and I worked incredibly hard at getting the right physicality and the right voices. We videotaped each other and copied each other’s mannerisms. Waking up in someone else’s body would be a nightmare and I hope we’ve told that story.’

  The pair were not around each other much on set because their scenes were filmed separately. They recorded each other’s acting scenes so they could watch them and pick up on each other’s mannerisms and such. Acting is about observation as much as anything else; watching people talk, listening to them and paying attention to your surroundings is vital to an actor’s research.

  ‘Martin and I studied each other like apes,’ Stirling told The Independent’s James Rampton. ‘Like a lot of actors, he’s quite a feminine, sensitive man, and I’m quite a masculine woman, so we could steal bits off each other. I videoed Martin performing a scene as me and nicked some of his mannerisms.’

  Freeman had a few meetings with an acting teacher to give him some tips about female physicality and how it is different from male physicality. The way a woman talks, carries herself and sits down was important to Freeman’s preparation for the part.

  ‘Voice projection is very different,’ he told British Comedy Guide, ‘and it’s very easy to get it wrong and end up being a bit too panto. It was very helpful to have someone say put your chin down, make your chest softer, use your head less and use your eyes more, because those are little clues that I wouldn’t necessarily have picked up on.’

  He observed the way a woman picks up a wine glass with her fingertips rather than the palm of her hands, for example, an
d how women don’t stare at men, whereas men are not bothered at all who notices them. These little differences in gender, generally speaking, were helpful.

  ‘It’s not as though I didn’t have a camp bone in my body beforehand,’ he joked to The Independent’s James Rampton. ‘I’m an actor, for goodness’ sake! As an actor, you learn to deal with mockery, as most people think it’s not a very manly job. But fortunately, as Adam Ant so aptly put it, ridicule is nothing to be scared of.’

  The series’ key point is how we are defined by the way we look. Freeman and Stirling excel on screen together. They have charisma, charm and chemistry.

  ‘It doesn’t have any of the clichés of gender swapping dramas,’ Freeman said to Last Broadcast. ‘It could have been quite facile but I think it works because I’ve got a bit of femininity about me and Rachael has a bit of boyishness about her.’

  Co-star Paterson Joseph told Michael Deacon of the Daily Telegraph, ‘The script was hilarious but when we came to do it, I realised how horrible this was: it was like having somebody with Alzheimer’s in your life. There’s a scene where she pushes me around, and it was frightening. So it keeps a balance between a situation comedy and a painful, dysfunctional drama.’

  Boy Meets Girl ran for four episodes and began on 1 May 2009. Little has been mentioned of it since.

  John Preston panned the series in his review in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Many theories have been put forward as to why Michael Grade is stepping down as Executive Chairman of ITV. But I’m beginning to suspect I know the real answer. Someone hovering above him in the hierarchy must have seen Boy Meets Girl (Friday, ITV1) and decided that this couldn’t be allowed to go on.’

  The Daily Mirror’s Jane Simon observed, ‘Although Martin Freeman is the better known of the two, it’s Stirling – best known for her role in Tipping The Velvet as well as for being Diana Rigg’s daughter – who gets the lion’s share of screen time in this first episode.’

  A bit of a history buff, Freeman wanted to learn some of the truths of his family, as he told Wales Online: ‘A member of my family had a go once. It’s really difficult to do, and the problem is, you end up with a kind of theory or a half truth. People then end up falling in love with that theory, but the difficulty comes when it’s not necessarily the truth. It’s good to let an expert do it for you.’

  In the space of just a few short weeks he went from knowing almost nothing about the history of his family to knowing a series of important events dating back more than a hundred years.

  He continued, ‘I hoped we would cover my grandparents, and from watching the show previously I knew it was possible to find out about great-grandparents and even further in some cases.’

  It took time for all the newly acquired knowledge to sink into his system. He discovered members of his family faced great adversities and he was impressed by their strength of spirit and character in how they dealt with such terrible issues.

  That same year he was also seen as Chris Curry in the TV film Micro Men, which was originally broadcast on 8 October on BBC4. Micro Men is a one-off TV film set in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s and concerns the rivalry between ZX Spectrum developer Sir Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong) and Chris Curry (Freeman), who created the BBC Micro.

  ‘I didn’t think computers would take off,’ Freeman, a technophobe, told The Scotsman in 2009. ‘But this was more about these two men and their rivalry. It’s so easy and compulsory to laugh when you see Clive Sinclair being interviewed because he is a bizarre figure, but he kick-started a lot of stuff and I came away with an admiration.’

  The film’s central story is about the rise of the British PC market as the two rivalries compete to become the provider of a home computer for the BBC’s programming for schools. The film mixes fact with fiction for dramatic effect.

  Den Of Geek’s Aaron Birch wrote, ‘Armstrong’s portrayal of Clive Sinclair as a tyrannical, yet brilliant inventor is spot on, and Freeman’s far more down-to-earth outing as Curry helps to deliver the confrontational head-banging between the two clashing personalities. What we have here, though, is not simply an affectionate portrayal of the computing giants, but also an intriguing and accurate look into the growth of the now enormous industry, an industry that the UK helped to launch.’

  Never one to shy away from trying out new endeavours, Freeman returned to short films to star in HIV: The Musical alongside Julian Barratt, Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns. Made for around £4,000 it was released in October 2009.

  He then played Paul Maddens in the film Nativity! directed by Confetti director Debbie Isitt and released on 29 November 2009. The film was partly improvised, whereas Confetti was fully improvised, and stars Freeman as Paul Maddens, a primary-school teacher who attempts to produce and direct a nativity play that will outdo a competing school. Jason Watkins, Ashley Jensen, Marc Wotton, Alan Carr, Ricky Tomlinson, Pam Ferris and Clarke Peters also star in the production.

  Freeman thinks the nativity tale is a great story and a grand tradition, so it was something that he was not going to turn down. He’s fascinated by the myth and truth behind the nativity story. Whether you believe it is true or not, there is a reason why it is called ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ and Freeman was not swayed by any religious reasons; he just thought it was a beautiful story. He told The Scotsman in 2009: ‘Organised religion, organised anything, requires commitment and requires an engagement with something. A lot of the time, we don’t want to commit. Of course, if you talk about the Spanish Inquisition, that’s the bad end of organised religion. But organised means there’s more than ten people involved, because it was an idea people liked. I don’t see how you get round it.’

  One comparison had been made between Freeman’s character and his pupils with Jesus and his disciples. ‘I hadn’t seen it like that,’ he responded to a journalist at Inspire Magazine, ‘but the reason for me that any of that stuff, the religiosity, has validity is that there are some quite good ideas and some quite good things to give to people – like the idea of redemption; the idea that we can turn something around. We don’t even see those things in religious terms. They are human things, they are part of our language and our culture.’

  He continued, ‘If we are watching films who do we get behind? The underdog. What the flip was Jesus if he wasn’t an underdog, born in a bleedin’ manger, you know what I mean? I’ve always loved the story because of that. Because whether you believe or not, that is a more succinct lesson about how we should be looking at the world than anything else. The trouble is we stop looking at the world like that when we take it out of that context. We don’t then look at a homeless person and think “what can I do for you?” we think he must deserve it in some way. It’s hard to take out those parallels from something specific and put them into the wider world.’

  The British nativity play at the end of the year nearing Christmas is sort of like the American high-school musical but much less glamorous and more accessible. The children are not little Hollywood stars; in the film the viewer gets to see the kids messing up and falling around. The idea for the film was to make it children-friendly, which Isitt was adamant about. Freeman was not at all concerned about being upstaged by children.

  The actor says he doesn’t just turn up on set and act; there is a process. If it looks effortless on-screen, he’s evidently done his job.

  ‘I’m not interested in, “What can I do to impress?”’ he admitted to The Guardian’s Alice Wignall in 2009. ‘Well, play the role. I hate it when people show you what they’re doing. No one wants to see the cogs. But very often that’s what’s lauded as great acting: “Look at me working! Look at my false nose!”’

  Because the script was improvised and Freeman swears so much, the director had to keep reminding him that it was a children’s film. Martin concluded that he would not have the patience or tolerance to be a teacher in real life. Those high-pitched shouts at the start of the film came from his own experiences as a father. Peep Show’s Robert We
bb does not have fond memories of the filming: ‘just an unhappy experience,’ he said to The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. ‘Improvising, in May, while naked, standing around in a garden. So cold.’

  Freeman, however, enjoyed working with Debbie Isitt, otherwise he would not have gone back for Nativity!.

  Watching school plays can often be a cringe-worthy experience but as a parent there is something very forgivable and enjoyable about it. There’s an innocence about seeing children doing their best and having fun with acting. That’s partly why Freeman was attracted to the film’s premise. It’s real, the kids are not pretending to be kids. They’re doing their best and there’s something very moving and emotional about that.

  The process of making Confetti was less explained. The actors could go in any direction they liked, within reason and as long as it led the story in the right direction.

  ‘… it was more “you have to get from A to Z, saying this, we need to plot that, and at some point someone needs to say that,”’ Freeman explained to Future Movies.co.uk’s Paul Gallagher about Nativity!, ‘Debbie likes the uncertainty, and I think she has enough respect for actors, as good a screenwriter as she is, and she likes to let unexpected things happen that may be, hopefully, better than what she would have had in mind.’

  They had to rehearse a great deal more than what is shown in the final film. They spent hours going through the choreography and rehearsing the songs. During some stints in filming Freeman tried to appeal to the older children to set a good example and, at times, it worked but there were some points during this time when the children were just being children and messing about.