I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  I’m not alone in feeling dismayed at misplaced directorial interference. Anthony Hopkins once arranged for the cast of Frankenstein to go for a Chinese meal during rehearsals. Anthony received a message from Francis Ford Coppola: ‘Francis doesn’t want you to go for a Chinese meal,’ it read, ‘because he feels it would break the atmosphere.’

  Anthony Hopkins’ reaction was simple – ‘Bollocks, we’re going for a Chinese meal.’

  I’m not sure from where Anthony Hopkins got his instinct to challenge, but I know where mine came from. I remember a bloke approached me in the street in the early 2000s.

  ‘You’re Ronnie Ecc’s lad, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I used to work with your dad. He was a great bloke to work for, but if he felt something was wrong he couldn’t leave it alone.’ I thought, That sounds exactly like him. And there are plenty who will say it sounds exactly like me.

  Loyalty was all to my mum and dad. If they saw something wrong, they would speak up. Mum in particular had a great emotional intelligence but both my parents were very good readers of character. My mum always said about my dad that he could really suss someone out sharpish. If he thought you were worth bothering with, you were his for ever, and if he didn’t, forget it. It was all they had in a sense. They didn’t have material things, but they had an inner dignity – ‘This is my view of the world and you’re not going to change it.’

  The same has happened to me working in this industry. From the start, you make a choice. You either lie down or you do it differently. I did it differently. Financially, I have regrets, and for the opportunities I missed I have regrets. But in terms of my children, and them seeing the choices I made, like I saw the choices my parents made, I have none.

  It’s black and white. Loyalty is massive; don’t let people push you around. Stand up for those people you are working with. Community and togetherness, that is my mum and dad, and I always felt it. Never once did Ronnie and Elsie come on set, but so much were they part of everything I did, they should have got a credit when the titles came up.

  When I’d tell them some of the things that happened in the industry that I didn’t like, they’d tell me, ‘Be careful – keep your head down.’ And I’d say to them, ‘What would you have done?’

  There’d be a pause. ‘Ah, well . . . ’

  Dad recognised that I was a member of the awkward squad. I certainly recognised that in him. Whenever an issue arose, I felt his presence at my side. Just before I started on Doctor Who, I’d sued Working Title, one of the biggest filmmakers in the country, behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. I had appeared as the Duke of Norfolk in Working Title’s film Elizabeth. A book was then produced containing despicable allegations that I had threatened to break the writer’s head open for suggesting I play the duke as impotent. A straight lie, and a deeply damaging one, personally and professionally, presented wholesale as the truth. Interesting also that they should choose to reduce me to, in their eyes, the lowest common denominator, a thuggish working-class stereotype, which tells you a lot about class in this country. That’s what they imagined in me, although perhaps not when I ran rings around them with words.

  I got a lawyer and we wrote Working Title a letter. Their response was to say the reference was a joke. My response was simple – ‘I didn’t think it was funny. My mum didn’t think it was funny. I’ll see you in the High Court.’

  I was advised not to go through with it – ‘It’s Working Title, basically the only film production company in Britain. They’ll never give you work.’

  That was never going to wash. I took Working Title to the High Court, as well as the publishers and the writer, and won a public apology and substantial damages. I didn’t sue Working Title for the money; I did it for the principle. I gave the damages to Sport Relief.

  Working Title’s actions were but nothing compared to those of Mirror Group and News International, both guilty of accessing my voicemail messages during the period in and around when I was in Doctor Who. Again I took legal action and won damages against both. And, again, going for the two biggest newspaper groups in the country might not have been deemed a great idea by some. But to me the most important thing has always been ‘Can I look myself in the mirror?’

  Working Title, News International, Mirror Group – what they had back from me was Salford, my dad and my mum. Joe Orton once said, ‘Everything I do is about revenge.’ He was a working-class Midlands boy. For me, when it came to reacting to those who felt they could walk all over me, there was definitely revenge on behalf of a family who had been institutionally stamped down over the decades and centuries. My mum would say, ‘But, Chris, I didn’t want revenge.’ My dad might feel a bit different.

  As an actor, I was never going to be a company man – I was always going to be Ronnie Ecc. I can trace that desire for truth right back to my very first role of any real significance. On Let Him Have It, I felt Derek Bentley’s challenges were being romanticised and idealised in order to make them easily digestible. My argument was, and is, that you don’t have to make a narrative palatable, you have to make it real, particularly when relating a working-class story, as Derek’s was, for a working-class audience. Don’t forget I had grown up watching important drama with my mother and father. I knew about the complexities of their responses, how sophisticated they were in perceiving moral grey areas. With Derek, that grey area was that he was probably violent and definitely difficult. But I felt the writers and director were so desperate to portray him as a victim that the film we should have been making was getting lost. It was like we were making a film for Guardian readers. I didn’t grow up as a Guardian reader and I didn’t grow up with a Guardian lifestyle. But I knew someone like Derek, and so did most people.

  I began raising concerns on the set as soon as I could see the direction the film was taking. It was a constant tension between me and the director, Peter Medak, whom I both liked and respected. Peter had worked with Peter Sellers, so had dealt with far more complicated people than me. I just felt if he had listened more to my instinct about revealing a darker side of Derek, Let Him Have It would have been a far more challenging end product.

  In a way, Let Him Have It was an example of the British film industry bowing to American values. I hate Forrest Gump. I would like to burn every single copy of that film for the way it treats both mental health issues and women. A sexually free female character who ends up with AIDS? That tells you everything. I wanted to make an angrier, more polemical, more complicated film about a young man who deserved more than just to have the label ‘simple’ pinned to his lapel.

  For me, the best film about capital punishment is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. At its centre is a youth, not unlike Derek Bentley, who actually does senselessly murder somebody. He is a profoundly unsympathetic character and yet when they hang him, as a viewer, we feel it is wrong. We are taken on a much more complex journey. I felt I was betraying the working-class experience with my portrayal of Derek. One reviewer said I was a little bit too Smike-like, referencing the character, thought of as good-hearted but ‘simple-minded’, from Nicholas Nickleby. He was right. There was too much pathos up front, so the shock of Derek’s murder by the state wasn’t heightened; it was lessened. Derek wasn’t Bambi, he was much more intricate, and I made my feelings known. Certain people around me, and I was having the same conversation in my head, were telling me, ‘This is your big break – don’t fuck it up.’ But a big break at the expense of what? The truth? That sounds pompous, but it’s how I was, and still am.

  It wasn’t an easy position to occupy. Derek’s sister, Iris, quite understandably, didn’t want any of her brother’s shadow shown. To her, the story was straightforward – Derek’s victimisation and betrayal by the state. She didn’t want some unknown actor turning up and playing him ‘unsympathetically’. But I felt we were letting Derek down, we were letting the audience down, and we were letting the argument
about capital punishment down if we sentimentalised him. I have always been deeply understanding of the fact that, when you are dealing with real people, it matters so much.

  This ‘attitude’ was coming from a 26-year-old bloke who’d been unemployed for three years, couldn’t get arrested, let alone a part, but that was me, and I have to say I still think I was right. People don’t remember Let Him Have It. The film has some kind of a legacy, but it is largely forgotten. Dance with a Stranger, about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom, on the other hand, is not largely forgotten, and that’s because of the intricacy of the way her story is told allied to Miranda Richardson’s incredible performance. I have to put my hand up and say my performance in Let Him Have It is, at best, a C. If Gary Oldman or Daniel Day-Lewis had played the part, it would have been an A.

  I criticised the film before it came out and writers Robert Wade and Neil Purvis were, justifiably, unhappy that I did so. From a business point of view, it didn’t make great sense. Time has proven their outlook on films correct. Look where they are, look where I am. They now write the Bond movies. My own film work is a little more niche. But in terms of my sense of what is plain right, they are wrong. I had no ambition to be Robert Wade and Neil Purvis and knew it right from the start. They’re millionaires and I’m not. I’d sooner have my career than theirs.

  While I have no idea what Iris felt about my performance, I do know she was pleased with the film overall. Paul Reynolds, who played Christopher Craig, the 16-year-old who was holding the gun when Derek shouted those infamous words, said to me recently, ‘You were just so earnest, Chris – you’ve always been earnest,’ and I think that earnestness was a comfort to Iris. I don’t think she thought my accent was perfect, I don’t think she thought I looked like her brother, and I don’t think she thought I was a particularly great actor, but I was genuine in my attempted portrayal of her brother. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble; I felt a duty to her, the working classes, and to people with learning disabilities and epilepsy.

  While it’s easy to idealise and make heroic my motives, within that desire to do the job right was also a definite element of self-sabotage, a sense that I shouldn’t be playing the role in the first place because I wasn’t good enough, was unable to handle the job. I was a young man myself at the time. I was very insecure, battling my anorexia. I was ambitious and felt already that I was in a position that my talent didn’t merit, which is often when you get bad behaviour from actors. I felt I didn’t deserve what I’d got.

  Yes, I was standing up for what I thought was right, but, looking back, a part of me was speaking up because I was trying to get sacked. If, on the second day of filming on Let Him Have It, they’d told me to sod off, my initial thought would have been one of relief. I’d had a torturous journey with the part. I had numerous auditions, got it, went through everyone in my phone book, told them, ‘I’m going to be a film star,’ and then the project fell through. I had to ring everybody back and tell them, ‘Actually, I’m not going to be a film star.’ Eventually, the casting director, Lucy Bolton, who really championed me, rang me up and said there was a new director on board – the original, Alex Cox, had pulled out – and he wanted to audition me. I had to audition for a part I’d already won. I’d been through the mincer with Let Him Have It before it even started, as had Paul Reynolds, except he was more experienced than me while I was nobody from nowhere. At that point, I’d had two tiny parts on television. Three years before, I’d been on a building site. I was that classic example of not feeling I was good enough, but then again that emotion was useful in Derek. My own naivety and self-doubt mirrored his. That may well be true about conflicts I’ve had elsewhere, where disillusionment and a lack of self-worth have coexisted. What intrigues me is that such low self-esteem could exist alongside such determination.

  Whatever my motivation, I came out of Let Him Have It, my first major piece of work, labelled as a fully signed up member of the awkward squad. ‘Difficult.’ ‘Hard work.’ But I managed to keep working. There are plenty of people in this industry who will never work with me again. Equally, there are plenty who have worked with me multiple times. That argues against me being difficult. I am only difficult if I see something I feel to be an abuse of power or principle. The worst abuses I’ve seen on film and television sets have been by directors. They’re the ones with the power and so they’re the ones who are going to be watched most vigilantly by me. If a director is out of order, I go for them. If they’re suggesting to me how to play a character and at the same time are treating a script editor or whoever like a piece of shit, I’m not going to listen to them. Call it a working-class hangover if you want, but for me, attitude, as served up by those whose views are laced, wittingly or otherwise, with a certain view of a certain type of people, comes clad in a gauntlet. When confronted with bad attitude, I am never going to see it as anything other than a challenge. I have been in situations of high conflict throughout my career on television and film sets. Why should actors be silent? And why should others want us to be? Actors should have an opinion on what they’re doing. They should be inquisitive. They should want to know why before they do something.

  I have undoubtedly seriously damaged myself with my adherence to a set of basic principles. Time and again I have driven a wrecking ball through my own ambition. But if I get in my head that I’m right, I won’t let it go. I can’t turn a blind eye, to the extent it’s almost like I’ve been drawn to conflict, fascinated by how it feels, fascinated by saying things that ‘people like me’ never should. If I was cleverer, I’d turn away, I would get along with everybody. If I’d done that, I’d be a multi-millionaire, but I can’t and I’m not. I am what I am. Before my career had even started, I always harboured an idea that if you stay true to yourself, that same ethos will bleed through to your work. That has sabotaged my career to some extent, but it’s also in many ways made it, because in acting you are your work and if I become malleable to everybody, blind to my environment, in order to further myself, I will stop being me. When I go home and shut the door after a day’s work, I have to live with myself. There have been some notable exceptions, but the vast majority of the work I’ve done has left me feeling personally comfortable. I have self-pride. Had I played a more professional game, my view of myself would definitely be a lot dingier.

  Compromise, full stop, has only served to push my career backwards. The cynical career choices I’ve made have always rebounded. Gone in 60 Seconds (the ultimate metaphor for my chances in Hollywood) and GI Joe were both films taken for the wrong reason. Then there’s The Invisible Circus, of which the Observer film critic Philip French, someone I read avidly, commented, ‘This film contains an extraordinarily bad performance by Christopher Eccleston.’ He’s right. Again, compromise. I’ve given terrible performances in American films because they’ve been badly written, nakedly about making money, and have meant precisely nothing to me. At that point, a film becomes a hollow experience and consequently a hollow performance. I deserved every criticism that came my way for those films. I knew I was bad when I was making them. I was under no illusions that I was totally lost as a performer and a traitor to my true self. Sam Brookes in Sight and Sound said of my performance in Gone in 60 Seconds, ‘Eccleston frozen with his own self-hatred.’ He wasn’t wrong. I hated myself so much I could barely look at my own reflection without wincing.

  When I looked at the reception for those films, I had only one thought – You’ve killed your film career. And you’ve done so by going against your gut instinct, which was not to go for the money. I was influenced by agents but in the end it was my decision. I let myself be pushed. In so doing, I flattened my film opportunities under a stone. I pushed my career and my self-esteem down a hole. It hurt when I landed and it still does. Up until then my reputation as a film actor was relatively intact. Jude didn’t make any money but was well regarded within serious film-making circles, as were Let Him Have It, Shallow Grave and Elizabeth, the latter
despite it being nonsense historically and severely anti-Catholic, saved by a brilliant, luminous performance from Cate Blanchett. Those films gave me a cache, and then, idiotically, I took Gone in 60 Seconds. From that moment onwards, in Hollywood terms, I was just a low-rent villain. The only positive I can take from the whole experience is that I was allowed to portray Raymond Calitri as I saw him. The idea of a Salford accent in a Nicholas Cage film really appealed to me, and so that’s what I gave him. I loved the fact that when I opened my mouth, what would come out would not be the stereotyped cockney gangster or an adopted American drawl, but me. Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer, never said anything about it, so why not? Often American producers or directors think I’m Australian or Irish. They are not well attuned to accent. They only wanted me in Gone in 60 Seconds because they thought I made for a good bad guy in Elizabeth, but in Elizabeth I spoke classic received pronunciation. The fact remains, though, that with Raymond Calitri I cocked up my film career. All it takes is one wrong move.

  I would return to the States after Doctor Who. Initially, I had an unexpectedly enjoyable feeling of starting again. I arrived with no baggage and went to auditions, which I didn’t always have to do in Britain, where I was often offered parts or my agent would be asked, ‘Would he mind reading?’ It always made me laugh. ‘Would I mind reading?’ Of course not, it’s what actors do – we audition for stuff. In the US, I was in and out of auditions like I was back at the beginning. I even auditioned for the role of George Washington. A lad from Salford going all the way to America and ending up playing the first president of the USA? That would have been a coup.