Taking it to its extremes was something at which I became very adept. There was an extended period when the anorexia had a grip on me that I was hardly eating and yet over-exercising to a ridiculous extent. For twenty-five years, I ran 10 miles, seven days a week, while still taking in tiny amounts, a couple of sandwiches or less. I was never bulimic but occasionally I’d get so hungry from the running that I’d gorge carbs – bread, cereal, crisps. Then I’d see a photo or a picture of myself – ‘Oh my God’ and feel sick with guilt that I’d given in to such ‘greed’. The conversation about weight never ever stopped buzzing. The only thing I wouldn’t stop was drinking. I didn’t care how many calories, I loved getting drunk. Alcohol, sex and performing all offered a release from the torment of the rest of the day.
My view now is that I was deeply depressed. I didn’t run for the usual health reasons – when I finished, I’d buy twenty cigarettes and walk back from the shop – I was running because I was self-medicating, giving myself a dose of endorphins. I also had clarity of thought while running. For a good few years, I had an internal dialogue with myself. I had enough about me to realise I was living in the West, I had my health, a successful career, friends and family who loved me, and yet I had this terrible negativity about life. I was repulsed by myself for having so much and not appreciating it. I can remember saying to myself on a run – and I can still picture exactly where I was – ‘What you need is a near-death experience.’ Maybe then I would find some perspective. Little did I know.
At that point, there was no voice shielding me from that self-hatred. No one telling me that such thoughts, such lowness of esteem and mood, were random across the population, and not based on ‘success’ or income. I needed to be diagnosed with depression to have that voice.
I always rooted my negativity in the anorexia. As time went on, I’d read enough about eating disorders to make the link. The most profound thing I heard about the illness came from the writer and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, who argued that because anorexics can’t control the universe outside themselves, they create a universe inside themselves that they can. And that’s what I was doing with food. The manifestation of that was that it ruled my life. For many years, I would avoid social contact because it involved eating. I couldn’t eat in front of people. It wasn’t just about not wanting to eat. I felt by the act of eating in front of others they would see my problems, and so I spent more and more time on my own eating my strange neurotic little meals. My life was a 10-mile run, a tiny meal, and then two bottles of red wine. Wake up and repeat. I was completely imprisoned by anorexia. It isolated me. And yet somehow it offered me the control to which Orbach alludes. It allowed me to operate in a world that was totally counter to the dialogue of worthlessness in my head, one that anyone else would have run, not 10 or 12, but a million miles to avoid. Here was a very insecure young man from a working-class background, who’d grown up socially conditioned that he’s not worth anything, and had deep-seated issues about physical appearance and ability, and yet had decided to step into the most public of all industries. Anybody with an ounce of common sense who’s anorexic and dysmorphic would stay the hell away from being a television, film and theatre actor. It’s set in concrete in this industry that you have to look a certain way. The ones who smash that concrete are the ones to admire, those who get work simply because they are brilliant actors. I never felt I had any ability as an actor so I did everything I could to make myself ‘look like an actor’. I had an iron will to do that, allied to a serious mental health condition, which nothing could penetrate.
My enormous ego then exacerbated the situation. I wanted to be the lead, and you can’t be the lead without the leading man looks, a fact borne out throughout time and the industry – James Dean, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando. I wanted to play Hamlet; I didn’t want to play Laertes or Horatio. Michael Billington claimed that one of the great misunderstandings about Albert Finney, an incredibly striking figure, was that he was a leading man. Finney, he opined, was in fact a character actor with the looks of a leading man. I decided I wanted to be, or should at least look like, a leading man. That, to me, was the way to make a living. In reality, what I am is exactly the description Billington applied to Finney.
To some degree, the industry has agreed. Myself and Ralph Fiennes came through at the same time. There were four films we both auditioned for – Oscar and Lucinda, Quiz Show, Wuthering Heights and A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia – and he got them all. If you look at photographs of me and Ralph Fiennes in 1990, you can hardly tell us apart. The difference is he was more conventionally beautiful. Mixed in with my working-classness, I had looks that, in one light, could be seen as handsome, and in another not dissimilar to Plug from The Beano. I’d always been aware of my sticking-out ear and my big nose.
‘You’ve always had that nose,’ my mum would say. ‘I took you back to the doctor’s. “I’ve been looking at other babies,” I told him, “and they don’t have much of a nose. But he has. Is there something wrong with him?” ’
‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ the doctor told her. ‘He does have a rather prominent nose, but it means he’ll find his way in the world.’
Ralph not only doesn’t resemble a Beano character but is also a better actor. The only part I felt I should have got and he shouldn’t was Heathcliff because of the class roots of the character.
At no point, no matter how successful I became, did that absolute need to look a certain way, the body dysmorphia, disappear. Rarely do I ever watch stuff I’m in. Not only don’t I think it’s practical – there’s nothing I can do about the performance so I move on – but it can be a trigger. If I see an image of myself I don’t like, the next step is to think I’d better go on a diet. I’m hypercritical of myself physically so I soon learned the best course of action was to do the job and end the association there. If I had to attend a screening, it could be excruciating.
Even now, I take a selfie every day to analyse myself. I have also weighed myself every day for decades as a matter of routine. I’m as near as anything 6ft, and big with it, and I never wanted to be above 11 stone 7. Ideally 11 stone 4. In Our Friends in the North, my weight goes up and down. I’m skeletal at the beginning but there comes a point where Nicky’s middle-aged when he’s carrying a little more weight, and it works for him. But it wasn’t intentional on my part and I was horrified. Nine years on, the illness is still there raging within me as the Doctor. People love the way I look in that series, but I was actually very ill. The reward for that illness was the part. And therein lies the perpetuation of the whole sorry situation.
It never goes away, and it doesn’t for thousands of actors today. It’s absolutely normalised in our industry. I know for a fact that studios put women on diets, and that is undoubtedly happening to men now as well. I was making my way in the ’80s and ’90s when men operated to less blatant rules about appearance. The glare was on women, and the industry wasn’t slow in telling them they had to look a certain way, hence the amount of anorexia and bulimia in my drama school.
There’s a permanent hum in my head about food. It’s rare that I eat and don’t have some kind of internal dialogue. Billy Bob Thornton, who has also suffered with anorexia, called it a private radio.
Thankfully, I have improved. I still have a food and exercise obsession, but when I do eat, it’s healthy, and when I exercise it’s in a sensible way. If I have a day off from exercise now, I’m fine about it. Previously, I’d go into a depression of disappointment with myself. Of course, what had in fact happened was I’d not delivered my daily dose of endorphins.
My eating habits are eccentric but I’ve made a real conscious effort to tailor them so I can eat with other people. I cook for the children and, while I don’t view them through the lens of my anorexia, I know I am going to be vigilant of any manifestation of what I went through.
I still have a negative relationship with mirrors. That’s vanity and insecurity, all tied up with ongoing body dys
morphia. I will take a deep paranoia over my appearance to my grave. Even now, if someone says to me, in all innocence, ‘In those days, you were all angles,’ my immediate internal reaction is to think, I need to lose weight. That is an automatic click mechanism. Hearing someone say that makes my stomach turn over. They are saying I’m fat.
I mentioned to my agent the weight I’d put on for Macbeth to make him soldier-like and she, again quite innocently, said, ‘I think you should go back to running.’ Straight away my brain was off – ‘She thinks I’m too fat.’ This is a 55-year-old man thinking this way, and the very fact I’m admitting it makes me feel like a spoiled child. But that’s dysmorphia and anorexia in action. I’m fortunate in that I’m conscious of my mental process and have an angle on it. If I do put on weight now, I don’t detest myself and I don’t hide away quite as much. If a woman says, ‘I like you as you are,’ I believe it. Women deal with a constant noise about body image. If they say, ‘You’re fine as you are,’ bearing in mind how oppressed they’ve been, I accept it.
Women have always had it worse, and still do by some distance, but for me there was a moment in the ’80s that marked, for men of my generation, the beginning of a very slow equalisation in the genders about eating disorders. When Sting took his shirt off in the video for ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ and revealed that lean and muscular figure, combined with those incredibly defined cheekbones, it became a landmark image that would be repeated, in one body or other, on TV and billboards across the decades. Travel on the Tube now, or through any city centre, or into a newsagent, and there are thousands of pictures of men with insane bone structures, eye-popping bodies. Young men are looking at those and thinking one thing and one thing only – I don’t look like that. That’s been going on for women for years.
There are many times I’ve been interviewed and many times I’ve wanted to reveal that I’m a lifelong anorexic and dysmorphic. I never have. I always thought of it as a filthy secret, because I’m northern, because I’m male, and because I’m working class. Similarly, I have never been diagnosed as anorexic. I never sought that diagnosis out. Why would I? I could easily self-diagnose. I could see it all around me. And, in the bizarre world I occupied, in my mind it was facilitating my success. I was a deliberate, practising anorexic. My challenge was to learn to manage the condition and have a high-level and visible career at the same time.
Over time I have come to understand what happened to me more and more with anorexia. I was shackled by fear, a fear that comes from who I am and where I’m from. It’s facile to say we can shake off our past. We can’t, and I haven’t. What’s more, I’m glad I haven’t. I would never want to. I am shaped by my parents and my family. Their form within me is unmalleable.
10
BREAKDOWN
I was running through the streets of London. Not unusual – I’ve pounded thousands of miles through the capital. Except this time, instead of shorts and a vest, I was fully clothed. Instead of early morning on Hampstead Heath, this was 1 a.m. on the Euston Road. In January. With a suitcase.
It was cold and wet. I tried to flag a taxi but nothing doing. I ran all the way to Paddington and banged on the door. They were expecting me. I’d rung earlier. ‘I’m either going to die or kill myself,’ I’d told them. ‘I need help.’
They gave me lorazepam, which allowed me to sleep for a while. Then they gave me some more.
Eventually, and inevitably, Dad erupted. He punched someone at work. His breakdown had finally broken through the mental and into the physical. The target for his long-pent-up rage was one of the university guys who’d been talking to him, or, more probably, patronising him, about how, from a sociological point of view, to deal with different characters on the factory floor. Of course, my dad was actually one of those men. The only difference was he now wore a suit. He found his colleague’s approach disrespectful and knocked him out. Immediately, he was filled with remorse and, because he was very highly thought of, the incident was papered over. Even so, he was home for about eight weeks sat in his chair. I asked my mum if he’d had a nervous breakdown. All she said was he was on tablets. It was all very Alan Bennett in its working-class unspokenness. There’s a chance those words ‘nervous breakdown’ would never have been used by Dad’s GP. I doubt very much that a man of his class in that era would have been diagnosed as having undergone such an event. He’d have been handed some pills, told to go home for a few weeks, and that would have been the end of it. There were no posters up in factory toilets about mental health back then.
As I lay on the mattress in my old bedroom in Little Hulton, the synergy of the contours on our life maps wasn’t lost on me. When I thought of him, I was actually seeing myself. I had just experienced a nervous breakdown at exactly the same age. We were both fifty-two when we found ourselves dealing with a seismic psychological event.
My marriage had ended the previous Christmas. I’d landed up in the Marriott Hotel in Swiss Cottage. When the door of my room swung shut, it signalled yet another hammer blow to an already fragile mental condition.
That first night in the hotel room, I felt in a very heightened state. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep for a couple of hours before waking with a start to a terrible reality – the dream of my family had disappeared. I’d left Albert and Esme. To me it was the ultimate betrayal. They are my flesh and blood and the best thing that ever happened to me. I knew I’d left for the right reasons, but the missing of them, the fact that my head wasn’t under the same roof as theirs anymore, made me very, very unwell. They were so young. And I’d learned to love in a very pure way, with all my attention, very hands-on. I’m no different to any parent – Albert and Esme are first, last and everything, and suddenly I had no outlet for all that love. I had failed, unable to give them a stable family with a mum and dad.
I was chain smoking, in a state of constant and fierce anxiety, spending my nights at the Marriott and days existing in a Costa. Insomnia, something I’d never suffered before, was my new companion. I’d always slept well, now I’d fall asleep for twenty minutes, wake, and be faced with the grim reality of my life. That cycle would revolve all night, turning, churning, again and again and again. Then I’d have to get up and go to work, when, inside, there was a growing fear. I didn’t want to live any more. I thought I’d lost my children. I’d been a hands-on father and now it seemed, with solicitors involved, I might never see them again. Whatever happened, I’d never have what I had with them.
I alerted my brothers and my mum. They were talking about coming down to be with me, but I didn’t want to spoil their Christmas. Anyway, I had to be back at work at the start of January, playing Maurice in the second series of The A Word, set in the Lake District, which only emphasised the physical and mental separation from Albert and Esme. Maurice is a comic character, one who couldn’t have been further removed from my mental state at that time. The idea of adopting that persona seemed totally unrealistic. And yet on set I had this extraordinary realisation. I’d walk into my dressing room, see Maurice’s ‘uniform’, and know I was at work. I’d climb into those cords, button up that check shirt, zip up his blue anorak, and be functional. At the end of the day came the reverse ritual. Taking off Maurice and putting my own clothes back on would bring the sheer hopelessness of my situation flooding back. It was the exact reversal of my dad’s situation. For him, the shirt and tie signalled a descent into the world of middle management he so hated. He could only regain his true self when he took off his uniform.
I’d get back to the hotel and then the trouble would really start. I’d lie there in a state of abject mental agitation. Terror. Just living in terror. Then I’d wake up the next morning, put the costume on, and play the character. I had to. There were other people relying on me – actors, the writer, the director; I had to do my job.
In the middle of January, I returned to London to see Albert and Esme. I was missing them deeply. This time I ended up in a different hotel, the White House near Regent’s Park. B
y now, because hotel rooms weren’t my children’s home, my place of safety, they had become phantasmagorical places, oppressive, pressing in on me. If the terror I had felt in Swiss Cottage and the Lake District was bad, now it was overwhelming. I was in a state of extreme anxiety, convinced I was either going to die or I was going to kill myself. I had absolute certainty. If I was to have killed myself, one of those hotel rooms is where I would have done it. In my despair, I reached for my phone and looked up a psychiatric hospital. I rang ahead, grabbed my bag, and ran. It must have made for a bizarre sight to anyone who might have recognised me. In my sheer terror, that was the last thing on my mind.
Behind the sophisticated frontage of the hospital, I sat in a consulting room. In front of me was a doctor. He was talking to me very seriously, asking me questions about suicide. I couldn’t concentrate. Inside I was laughing, not at him, but at the situation. Even at this time of intense breakdown, I was doing something I’d done all my life – subconsciously stepping outside of myself, seeing myself from the point of view of an observer. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous.
I was given lorazepam and shown to a room. Next day, I rang my agent.
‘I’m in hospital,’ I told her. ‘I can’t go back to work.’
‘You’ve got to finish this job,’ she told me.
It’s all right for you, I thought.
But she was right. She was looking at the wider picture – that I would get well. She didn’t want me to be known as someone who wouldn’t finish the job. And, intuitively, she understood that when I was at work, I was OK.
I Love the Bones of You Page 11