I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  In my case, that relationship was with a woman who was superficially far more sophisticated than me – and who also had some issues with food. While we should have gone into the drama school environment, found our feet, and understood how to handle what was a massive change in our lives, instead we became co-dependent. A major element of that was food, or rather the lack of it. Soon it became ridiculous, a sudden realisation of what extremes I could push it to.

  In college, meanwhile, there was never any mention of mental health as part of the learning process. Life outside drama school wasn’t monitored. Overnight, I’d gone from the family home to a bedsit in the middle of God knows where. There were no halls of residence. You found yourself a room in the Ham and High magazine and that was the end of it. Even if there had been supervision, I doubt it would have made much difference. Men weren’t being diagnosed as anorexic in the early ’80s. The closest I had to a confidant was a woman in the college who was bulimic and anorexic. She wasn’t alone. Eating disorders were rife among the women, but as far as I was aware, I was the only male in the group, who also happened to be the most alpha northern male. I watched girls go up and down in weight and I went up and down too.

  It was my dirty secret that I was doing what those girls were doing. I felt emasculated to be suffering what I felt at the time to be a female condition. I didn’t want to admit to wanting to be beautiful. The working-class male is a peacock, but we’re not meant to talk about it. I come from people where you most definitely didn’t talk about anything personal, and if you did it was very oblique. Down the years, my obsession with food and appearance has affected a lot of my romantic relationships because I thought of it as very unmanly. Again, that shame was something I was willing to tolerate rather than face up to. It was for the same reason, an embarrassment at the loss of masculinity, that, while I recognised that my relationship with food wasn’t normal, if anybody else told me, such as family members, I would be very defensive. To be northern, working class and have an eating disorder, when you’re not even supposed to look in the mirror, is a source of deep self-hatred.

  At the same time, I was extremely hard on myself in performance. I equated giving a bad one to being a bad person. The mark of a great performance is truthfulness. As an actor, that is our raison d’être. We are supposed to tell the truth. Therefore, if I couldn’t be truthful, in my mind I was a liar. It was as though a bad performance made me unworthy, like some kind of religious belief. I don’t feel like that now. I’ve given dreadful, terrible performances in films and I look at them and think, That is shite. But it’s not who I am, as an actor or a person. Back in the early days, though, it very much was. It was zealotry, not compromising, not settling for second best, perfectionism. That inner flagellation drove me, and it seemed quite normal, to the extent I could reconcile it as a perfectly reasonable tool in my armoury. But it is not healthy and it is not achievable. When Nadia Comăneci scored a perfect ten on the uneven bars at the Montreal Olympics, did that mean that some element of that performance, even in the most miniscule of ways, could never be improved on? Pursuit of perfection allied to self-punishment is extremely damaging. Even now I can detect it in young actors, that extreme self-consciousness and self-loathing. It hurts me to see it and I hope that they too can find solace in reasoned self-negotiation rather than an endless torture.

  My predilection for self-punishment meant Central was never going to be a gilt-edged experience. Not that I had any real expectation as to what I wanted to get out of drama school anyway. I’m not sure it was particularly relevant training. The teachers who directed us were middle-aged people expressing interest in an art. With knowledge of the industry, I now look back on it as being unstructured and a little conservative. On the other hand, that might have been a good thing because, if I’d ended up at another institution, such as Drama Centre or East 15, both much more actively Method-based, I might not have made it to the end. Coupled with my own late adolescent intensity and internal mental spiral, it would have been too much of an overload. As it was, on top of what I was learning at Central, I began teaching myself, the start of my tendency to autodidact. If we were looking at Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, I would naturally read around the subject. Angelo, from Measure for Measure, who I played at Central, was a case in point. Shakespeare found the inspiration for Angelo in St Augustine, in front of whom the devil appears in the shape of a nun to tempt him. Religious hypocrisy – brilliant. Because of that I ended up in Foyles on Charing Cross Road looking for books on religious iconography and St Augustine. Staring at the shelves, I looked round and there was a nun right next to me. I loved moments like that, and they came because I never saw a job as just acting; I saw it as an investment in the character and their situation. I read and read and soon felt I had a broader mindset than when I arrived. I also felt I had a stronger one. I fell to pieces under pressure when I played for Salford Boys in a way that I have never fallen apart under scrutiny on stage.

  At drama school, the teachers cast the productions. It’s a democratic process for the first two years. If the production is Richard III, five actors play Richard across five acts. When it comes to the third year, however, all that changes. The drama school is now advertising its wares. Some actors are in the window display, others find themselves at the back of the shop. At the time, Central and RADA were the best two drama schools, or so we were told, and so the agents and casting directors, like the big cats they appeared, would come for the raw meat. The idea was they would like what they saw and invite you to a meeting. Despite my own concerns about my aptitude, I was right there at the front of that shop window, with a big ‘For Hire’ sign around my neck. I got the best casting, a succession of fantastic roles, and yet, in my head I felt uncertain. Mentally, I thought there was a specific brand that was needed, and that brand was quite middle class. I was riven with the same conflict that had accompanied me throughout the previous three years – ‘Am I a Hampstead taramasalata-swilling luvvie? Or am I a working-class socialist actor who wants to help effect change?’ That muddlement left me in a no-man’s land. I didn’t know what or who I was. I’d been given a fantastic opportunity and yet all I could think was, You’re going to get found out.

  At the end of that process, I was the only one who ended up without an agent. No interest at all. It was confirmation of what I’d always thought – I was going to fail. Always coming back to the single same thought – I’m not an actor, I’m not sensitive, I’m not poetic, I don’t have an imagination. My psychology meant there was a curious kind of satisfaction. ‘See, I was right. I am shit. They gave me the best casting and I can’t get an agent.’ But there was still another part of me going, ‘I don’t want to give up on this.’ It left me in a position that no amount of mental arbitration could resolve. I was determined to make it as an actor alongside the absolute conviction that I couldn’t be one if my life depended on it. Those two standpoints absolutely coexisted in my mind.

  A good deal of the determination to carry on came from me simply having nowhere else to go. I had no money, zero skills, Thatcher was ripping the heart out of industry, and I’d put all my eggs in the acting basket. It felt to me that I hadn’t really learned anything at Central. I understood the superficial and rudimentary requirements it took to be an actor – the ability to do Shakespeare, accents, contemporary work. I knew how the system worked, and I was willing to work the system. But I had no self-belief that I could be an actor. I’d come out of there still at war with myself, the same glass-half-empty character, always expecting the worst. There’s a segment in Johnny Marr’s autobiography where he talks about standing on a street corner in Manchester, realising he’s young, and being happy to be young. If that’s true, brilliant. But that element of being young was wasted on me. I’d love to have had the wisdom of ‘This is you at twenty-one – grasp it, enjoy it!’, but I was just a mass of self-conscious confusion.

  While never for a minute did I think I could succeed on ability and t
alent, I did maintain a feeling that physically I had something going for me. I was striking, and I was striking because I’d worked hard at turning myself into a razor blade. I was also very diligent about seeking work, buying the Stage newspaper and checking out every article and notice. I had a real work ethic and focus and maintain that to this day. There are far more talented actors than me, far more, but I am so focused and driven when I go after something. Same as when I played football. I wasn’t the best, but I was the fittest.

  For two years after Central, I lived in a bedsit in Belsize Park – 59 Glenmore Road. I wrote hundreds of letters to theatres, sometimes making up stories to tug on their heartstrings. I’d be a drug addict who was cleaning himself up and was desperate to get back into acting. Lurid, gothic stuff. I was trying to appeal to their generosity, but in reality anyone who read them would think one thing and one thing only, I’m not having him anywhere near me.

  These were my Withnail & I years – without the glamour. My mum’s not going to like this, but I did a fair amount of shoplifting. I would get up early and steal bread, left out the front of shops by the delivery man before they opened. I’d do the same with milk and newspapers. I didn’t have a fridge so the milk would be kept out on the window ledge. The other thing I nicked were bottles of dry Merrydown cider and cans of Tenants Super. I’d mix them and get totally off my face. I would also go to the Swiss Cottage pub and drink really strong pilsner lager. The idea was always to get pissed as quick as I could. I had no chance of getting a girlfriend, stinking of failure and self-loathing, while trying in some ways to romanticise it, hanging around in libraries reading poems. I had the long student coat, Echo & the Bunnymen haircut, Levi 501s, docs, 501 sweatshirt turned inside out, donkey jacket – the works. If there was a 1980s student section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I’d be in it.

  There was definitely an inner feeling during those barren times that the whole idea of becoming an actor had been a pipe dream. ‘What was I thinking that I could do this? Operate in this area?’ I had failed. It was always going to happen. How could it have been any different? I was on the floor, self-esteem shattered, listening to The Smiths, in a bedsit, getting my dole cheque, and drinking it in two days. I was a very angsty young man and began to think I’d have been better off coming through in the ’60s when there was a real emergence of working-class actors – Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, to name but a few. I soon realised, though, that actually, as ever, they were the exception. The rule was exactly the same. White, middle-class, received-pronunciation-speaking actors were the order of the day. Twenty years on, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Phil Daniels and Ray Winstone stood out in exactly the same way. I saw Phil in Quadrophenia, Gary in The Firm, Ray in Scum, and Phil, Gary and Tim together in the Mike Leigh film Meantime. Why was I so struck by them? Because there were so few others like them, that’s why. Same when I saw David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s film Naked, I was stunned. He was one of my generation, my background, giving a performance that was as good as anything I’d ever seen. Why was I stunned? Because he was like me. People like me, I thought, reinforced by the evidence on film and TV, very, very rarely get to where they want to be.

  My plight wasn’t helped by the fact that an actor had to have an Equity card to work. To get an Equity card, however, you had to work. Catch 22. My mum flew into a rage when Derek Hatton got one by doing panto in Liverpool when I’d done three years at drama school and couldn’t get my hands anywhere near one of the damned things.

  I’d always managed to pick up bits and pieces of other work. While at Central I was an usher at the National Theatre on Saturdays and Wednesdays. I was selling tickets and ice creams and watching Anthony Hopkins on stage in Pravda. It was amazing to see so much real live theatre, to be able to drink in the bar – to see Anthony Hopkins eating beans on toast in the canteen. Out of Central, the job I found didn’t quite offer the same access to the acting elite but at least the dress code was easier. I managed to boost my income a little by life-modelling at the Slade School of Fine Art. I would sit there eight hours a day with a fifteen-minute break every forty-five minutes. The sculptor Bruce Mclean was there, and I made a great friend in the artist Susanna Jacobs, despite the fact that the first time I ever met her I was stark bollock naked. I also life-modelled at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. I was extremely body-conscious, and so what did I do? Went and took all my clothes off and had it spoken about as if it was a lump of meat. There’s obviously some bottle in there. But there was also an element of me thinking it was a bit bohemian – ‘I’ve studied Stanislavski and Brecht, I might as well be a nude model. Tell my dad about that!’

  Perhaps it was life-modelling in the early days that persuaded me also, somehow, despite my own revulsion, to reveal myself on screen as often as I did. I have lost count of the nude scenes I’ve done down the years. Even now, when I think back to the shower scene in Shallow Grave, I can hear Danny Boyle saying, ‘There it is, the Eccleston arse.’

  I’d ring home once a week and every now and again Mum and Dad would send me a letter with a fiver in it. To them I was their son who was living in London as an unemployed actor. They were understanding. It was a hard game I’d gone into and now, after drama school, we were into the reality. I’d have odd jobs here and there – as well as the life-modelling, I worked on building sites, or leafletting, all cash in hand, which meant I could still get my giro – so Mum and Dad knew I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing, although I did spend a significant amount of time in bed, in the pub, or lying around on the floors of bedsits.

  In all that time, I got two auditions. One was for a part in Chelsea, for Attack Theatre, where the director Ian Brown sat me down and asked me how I was doing. I was honest and told him about my struggle to get work.

  ‘I think you should keep going,’ he told me, ‘because I think you’ve got something.’

  Sixteen years later, the same Ian Brown wrote to me. ‘I now run the West Yorkshire Playhouse,’ he explained. ‘Would you like to come and play Hamlet?’

  I remembered exactly who he was. I’d never forgotten his encouragement. And I did play Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

  For now, that appeared unlikely in the extreme. But I was offered a job at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, a behind-the-scenes role on a touring version of Don Juan with Bernard Bresslaw and Jonathan Kent, directed by Ian McDiarmid. At the time, the Royal Exchange had a mobile theatre. They’d shove it in vans and tour round the region. At the interview, it was flagged up that I’d been to drama school.

  ‘You do know you’re not going to get an acting job out of this, don’t you, Chris?’ asked Ian. ‘Because we don’t want you giving any of the actors a hard time.’

  Ian was very direct, and I knew what he meant, but actually I was glad not to have to think about acting. I was relieved to be doing something else. I wanted the pressure off. I didn’t want the expectation on myself anymore. I’d never felt like an actor. I always thought I was too big and clumsy and stupid. It was like football all over again, another failure, and actually I just wanted a job and some money in my pocket. Working with the Royal Exchange gave me a sense of dignity because there were certain things in the show that only happened because of me. The gypsy lifestyle of taking shows on the road appealed to me also, and I became the court jester, the joker on the crew. When the tour finished, I then settled into a regular backstage job at the Royal Exchange. My mum and dad, and me, began to think that stage management was where I’d end up. The downside was I found myself living back at home. It caused a lot of tension between me and my dad and there were some bad arguments. I think in his head they’d got rid of me once and now I’d come back. Mum and Dad had formed a new relationship with just the two of them in the house and then suddenly there I was again, moody, belligerent, the lot. I was becoming a man and was doing so in my childhood home. It was horrible.

  We were all saved when, out of nowhere, the phone rang one day. It was the castin
g director of the Bristol Old Vic.

  ‘We’re doing a production of A Streetcar Named Desire,’ I was told. ‘Phyllida Lloyd is directing it, and we’d like you to play Pablo Gonzales.’ It was an odd moment. There was just me and my dad in the house. I told him, and I could see he was pleased, and not just because I’d be out of his house. Phyllida had seen me at drama school. Whether she had asked after me, found I wasn’t working, and out of some act of kindness or generosity handed me that role, I don’t know. What I do know is I’ve never stopped working since.

  9

  THE BONES OF ME

  ‘Skinny is only one body type.’

  Susie Orbach

  Look at me as Derek Bentley. The bones I had then, or rather the way I displayed them, made me look as if I was fashioned from steel. Playing Derek in Let Him Have It was my breakthrough role. It came four years after I left Central. The control over food had continued way beyond drama school, the really worrying thing being that, as my career kickstarted, it was working. I was climbing the ladder. My skeletal appearance was being rewarded. I was starving my system, which must have been affecting my cognitive processes, but at the same time I was still managing to turn up at rehearsals and deliver what they wanted. Yes, I was ill, but I was bold with it. I was Jekyll and Hyde – complete and utter self-loathing neurosis, and complete and utter unyielding determination. I knew the way I was behaving regards my body was unhealthy, but I also knew it was making me striking. I don’t mean handsome; I mean physically different. After I played Derek, I didn’t stop there. I lost a massive amount more weight. That was a straight reaction to, and I say this with due naivety, ‘Here comes fame.’ I had found a way into the industry and I wasn’t going to lose it.

  Acting has a lot in common with the modelling industry, and when I started out there was certainly a vogue for high cheekbones, that Daniel Day-Lewis cadaverous look. To achieve that, I needed to starve myself. I was quite practical. ‘I haven’t got the ability, but I’ve got a distinct physical appearance. Hone it, take it to its extremes, and I’ve got a chance.’