With Jude’s themes still, sadly, relevant to a modern audience, Michael also wanted it not to be a film trapped in its era. Liam Cunningham, as the teacher Phillotson, Kate Winslet and I were rehearsing one scene when Michael really got a grip on us.
‘Why are you acting like you are in a period film?’ His face was palpably shaking with frustration. He was absolutely right. He wanted to shoot a period film as Ken Loach would, hence the graphic childbirth scene, the intimacy of the sexual content.
I felt Michael’s approach, a period film addressing the classic imbalance in this country, would make Jude a great critical success. I was also very, very ambitious at that time. I had plotted my way through the business to reach the point of being a lead in a film and I thought this was my take-off point. I’d seen Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis become major movie stars because of performances in small British films and, in my arrogance, I believed the exact same fate was awaiting me. The sound of that bubble bursting echoed from Christminster to Salford and back. I overheard somebody mention a review of Jude in Variety. They hadn’t wanted me to see it as it was hard on me and hard on the film. My heart sank. But the more I thought about it, the more I’d had it coming. My performance in Jude is deeply flawed. As an actor, I was frozen in my own issues. I was anorexic. I wasn’t good at intimacy. I was a depressive. I was unhappy. I was tight, an emotional mess. I didn’t know how to enjoy my life. And I let all that invade Jude. As with Let Him Have It, I’d had an opportunity to deliver something extraordinary, and I didn’t. I delivered something that was solid. I thought Let Him Have It was going to be my version of Sid and Nancy or My Beautiful Launderette. But I did not deliver in the way Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis can, and that’s because, with the best will in the world, I’m not in their class, not as good an actor, or don’t work as hard as them. I’m a decent actor, a good, solid actor, but I’m not touched with what they are. To use a football analogy, George Best was created in heaven, but Kevin Keegan made himself. I’m Kevin Keegan, and, like Keegan, I had a focus and a determination, but sometimes it wasn’t quite enough.
Some observers also questioned mine and Kate’s chemistry. We were friends, we liked each other, and got on really well, but I’m not sure I was ever really Kate’s idea of Jude nor she my idea of Sue. Kate is a very beautiful woman, while Sue isn’t described that way in the book. To me, what Jude is attracted to is her defiance, her intelligence, and fire, while the film puts great stock also in her beauty. I felt it weakened Jude that it looked initially like he’d gone for a pretty blonde when actually Sue is a proto-feminist, braver than him, more willing to challenge.
I also felt there was a double standard at work on Jude that sidelined its more radical agenda on sexual parity. There’s a love scene in which Kate and I are fully nude. Michael came up to me afterwards – ‘We have to go again because we saw your penis.’ It frustrated me. They were, after all, showing everything of Kate. Jude the Obscure was a ground-breaking novel, the last Thomas Hardy ever wrote. He was so destroyed by the self-righteous conservative reaction that he never wrote another. Jude the Obscure was provocative. I wanted to push those boundaries. How could it be that we were showing Jude’s children die, but then couldn’t show his penis?
We went to Cannes with Jude. While we were shooting, Kate Winslet had been nominated for an Oscar for Sense and Sensibility. At the same time, Ewan McGregor was there on a junket for Trainspotting, very much the film of the festival. And there was me with a film about a bloke who’s in love with his cousin, can’t get into Oxford, and whose kid has hanged himself.
I had actually been offered the role of Begbie in Trainspotting and said no. Instead I sent Danny Boyle a letter outlining why I should be Renton. I don’t have a problem with turning down Begbie because I’ve always really liked Robert Carlyle and I’ve always thought he’s a better actor than me. I’d also worked with him on Cracker and felt he was one of us.
Myself and Kate went to do a press call. The paparazzi trained all their cameras on her. I was blinded as all the flashes went off. I couldn’t see them and they didn’t want to see me. As a young man, in comparison to Ewan, who was clearly going to be enormous, and alongside Kate, already established as an incredible Academy Award-nominated actress, I was invisible. I wasn’t jealous. But I was acutely aware that it wasn’t going to happen that way for me.
I’d had a similar experience with Shallow Grave. If I had been more business-savvy, I would have taken that performance, got myself a publicist, and flogged the arse off the good reviews I received. As it was, I slightly missed the boat. Danny was very, very angry with the American distributors. Shallow Grave was a massive hit in the UK and could have been a massive hit in the States but was handled badly. To some extent, I’m glad that boat sailed because, if I’d experienced what happened to Kate and Ewan, I don’t know what would have happened to me. George Foreman said the best thing that ever happened to him was getting beaten by Muhammad Ali because he was out of control with his arrogance. Take the anorexia and combine it with the fame that Ewan and Kate experienced, and I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Also, I’d already fallen in love with the scripts for Our Friends in the North. I’m sure in this day and age, my agent would say, ‘Don’t do the telly, darling, go after the film,’ but my agent then, and my agent today, would know, with one or two notable errors of judgement, I will only ever do what matters to me. Some actors run their career with their head, others with their heart. Ewan McGregor has done some fantastic work and has had a great career. I have done some fantastic work and have had a great career. The difference is I haven’t the kind of money he does or the cache to get the roles he does. Maybe a bit more head would have been useful at times.
Perhaps if Jude had come eighteen months later, it would have been seen in a different light. One senior exec at the American arm of Polygram, which co-produced the film, said to me, ‘Chris, if Jude had come out after Titanic and Elizabeth, you and Kate would have probably got Oscar nominations. It’s just how the business works.’ I’ve had an amazing career but so many times I’ve watched that ship sail over the horizon. In all honesty, I’m not sure I’ve ever understood when I was in positions of influence, or ‘on the rise’, sidelined mentally as I was with my anorexia and other problems. The good part of that is that I’ve had to keep making interesting choices. Instead of trying to promote Jude all over the world, I did Hillsborough because I felt a moral imperative.
Kate is a great example of how, even with great success, you can maintain integrity. Just look at the choices of films she’s made. She’s played some incredible roles, especially considering the limitations of parts for females in the industry.
Jude might not have taken me where I thought it would from a career point of view, it might not have been viewed by others as I viewed it, but there is one review I hold dear. Mum and Dad went to see the film in Bolton, a midweek matinee with only two other people in the cinema. As they were walking out, my dad turned to the other couple.
‘Did you enjoy that?’
‘Yes,’ they replied.
‘That’s my lad,’ he told them.
I’m not sure they believed him.
17
THE TRUTH
‘Not both of them. They’re all I’ve got.’
He handed me a faded Polaroid. On it was a picture of two girls. Their eyes were shut. The firmness of how they were closed told me they were dead. ‘That’s what it’s about,’ he told me.
Sarah Hicks and her sister Vicki died in pen three of the Leppings Lane end of Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough ground on 15 April 1989. Liverpool fans, the sisters, aged nineteen and fifteen, had, with great excitement, gone to watch their team’s FA Cup semi-final with Nottingham Forest. Shortly after 3 p.m., they held each other as the life was crushed out of them. The picture Trevor Hicks was showing me was of his daughters in the morgue. I knew what he was telling me: ‘You’re going to act this, but it really happened to me.’ He wasn’t ju
st telling me that for Sarah and Vicki; he was telling me for all ninety-six victims of that unimaginably dreadful event.
Seven years earlier, I’d been playing Pablo Gonzalez in A Streetcar Named Desire, my first professional job, at the Bristol Old Vic. We had a Saturday matinee starting at 2.30 p.m. and during the show, as we entered and exited the stage, we could see a terrible tragedy unfolding on the TV in the dressing room. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. Bodies were being carried across the pitch on advertising hoardings by fans. I was absolutely stunned. Like everyone else, I was asking over and over again, ‘How has this happened?’
The Sun then took over with its foul and despicable lies of ‘the fans were pickpocketing the dead, pissing on the police – they’d forced the gate’. In the Thatcherite language of the day, Liverpool was a place of feckless, lazy layabouts. A bunch of thieves, spongers and cheats. The Sun took that narrative and blithely smeared the name of a city lost in grief in the most sickeningly awful of ways.
I was reading The Guardian at that time so was aware of an alternative voice. I was already imbued with a profound distrust of The Sun and a hatred of its toxic disdain for the working class, masked, as ever, in a tub-thumping right-wing rhetoric. But the damage was done, and only with time did it start to emerge that the Hillsborough families were victims of an industrial-scale institutional injustice dripped down from the very highest level. Margaret Thatcher was only too happy to ally herself with the self-same South Yorkshire police force that, just a few years previously, had broken the miners for her. Thankfully, there will always be those dedicated to scratching beneath the surface. The investigative work of academic and author Phil Scraton was key to uncovering what really happened that day. Scraton’s book Hillsborough: The Truth is widely accepted as the definitive account of the disaster and its aftermath, focusing on the inadequacies of the police investigations, official inquiries and inquests, and revealing the extent of the systemic review and alteration of the statements of South Yorkshire police officers. It also detailed the treatment of the bereaved in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and the inhumanity of the body-identification process.
Like most people, I’d struggled to comprehend the scale of the emotional pain of those involved in Hillsborough; not just the families, but those who witnessed those terrible events, and the tens of thousands more deeply affected across Liverpool. While Hillsborough had shocked and revulsed me, I, like the rest of the country, had got on with my life. And then, seven years on, I was contacted by a producer. The Hillsborough Family Support Group had approached Jimmy McGovern, himself a Liverpudlian, and asked, ‘Will you tell our story?’ Jimmy didn’t need asking twice. And when I was asked to take the role of Trevor, neither did I. But it was important to me that Trevor should give me his blessing. Morally and ethically, there was no way I could do it otherwise. I wanted to square it with him, at the simplest level to ask, ‘Is it all right?’ That’s not something that drama school had taught me; it was the way Mum and Dad had brought me up. If I was going to start digging over someone’s uncommon grief, there was no way I could possibly broach doing so without speaking to that person first. I’d felt exactly the same three years before with Iris Bentley.
It was when I went to see Trevor that he showed me the picture of Vicki and Sarah. He had a room in his home that contained all the information and documentation surrounding the tragedy. I was already aware of the responsibility of playing someone who had experienced a profound personal loss. Now, though, in Trevor’s home, surrounded by the tangible memories, presence, of his girls, I felt that responsibility acutely. It was entirely right that I should do so. I was thirty-two, and a young thirty-two – childless too. What did I know of Trevor’s experience? He was reinforcing in me the reality of it.
As I got to know Trevor better, I gained emotional knowledge as well as what was required from a purely acting point of view – mannerism, expression and accent. But I felt it was equally important to have a panoramic view of his life. Trevor differed geographically from a lot of the other relatives in that he was a businessman who lived in Middlesex. He was an establishment man who believed in the establishment – the police, Conservative Party, and judicial system. That same establishment had killed his daughters and then told him they had killed each other and themselves. Despite that, Trevor maintained dignity at all times. He kept his composure and pursued a plan of using the establishment way against the establishment. He felt that if the families ranted, raved and ultimately disintegrated, then those with something to hide had got them exactly where they wanted. If an external body, i.e. the judiciary, does not perform its role, people turn on one another and are weakened. Those in the establishment hope for that. It cements their power and position. That’s what injustice does: it creates more and more injustice, belief that is fractured and broken. But the Hillsborough Family Support Group still gathers today. They’ve had their ups and downs, but they are still unified. Within that group, as they sought justice, were all kinds of different standpoints, all coming from people who were emotionally fraught, grieving deeply. Trevor himself could, quite justifiably, have been consumed with a rage so blinding that fighting for justice would have been impossible. That day in Sheffield, stood in the half-empty paddock next to the murderously packed one in which Sarah and Vicki perished, he attempted to draw a policeman’s attention to the plight of his daughters and those suffering with them. He was told to ‘Shut your fucking prattle’. He then witnessed death all around him. He had post-traumatic stress disorder even before he had to deal with the death of Sarah and Vicki.
And yet together the families did it. And it was that endeavour, that pursuit of the truth, that myself and Annabelle Apsion, who played Jenni Hicks, Trevor’s then wife, came to understand as we met not only Trevor and Jenni but others who had lost children, including Eddie Spearritt, who went through the abject despair of seeing his 14-year-old son Adam die in his arms. I found it hard then to imagine how he dealt with his loss. Now, as a father, I find it impossible. The same can be said for Trevor and Jenni. That they could carry on at all is a source of wonder to some. They have, after all, lived through every parent’s greatest terror, the thing that ends all human beings: the death of a child. I have said it myself – ‘If my child died, that would be it.’ But the last thing a child would want is for their mum or dad to die too. When it comes to Trevor and Jenni, and so many others, such as the parents of Tim Parry, killed aged just twelve by the IRA in Warrington in 1993, their strength is incredible, as is that of the mothers whose strained voices we sadly hear so often now, when, on the same night their child has been stabbed to death, find it in themselves to say, ‘I forgive.’ Astonishing.
Trevor and I were, on the face of it, worlds apart. But, as time went on, we found some odd common ground, such as always ordering the same thing off the menu, and occasionally adopting a bluff northern persona – Trevor is originally from North Yorkshire. Eventually, when he remarried – and I still find this remarkable – I would be best man at his wedding. But my surprise at being asked was born out of honour. I knew we had made a deeper emotional connection than that of simply actor/subject. Movingly, I had my one and only spiritual experience with Trevor. I was struck that in the field next to his house were two racehorses. Maybe I was being pretentiously poetic, but in my head I thought, Vicki, Sarah. Trevor, being an engineer and very practical, had built a stable for them. I was visiting one time when we went out about 10 p.m. to get them in. They came straight over to Trevor. I’d never been that close to a racehorse. It was enormous, with a huge, long face. It made me think of a dinosaur. Trevor was stroking it, talking to me in his bluff way, when I noticed that his eyes were wet. At that moment, I became aware of something in Trevor, an unimaginably deep wound that, for the rest of us, unless we’ve been through it, is just beyond comprehension. It seemed to me that the horse was communing with Trevor, drawing the emotion from him, to the extent the animal was actually vibrating. Then the horse seemed
to create a circle between me, Trevor, and it. There were a thousand questions in my head – ‘Is this happening? What am I feeling here? What is going on? Does Trevor know what this horse is doing? Does the horse know?’ It was as though the animal was running the entire thing. And then the circle broke and that was it. It remains the only supernatural thing that has ever happened to me. Only years later did I hear about equine therapy and its benefits to disturbed adults and children.
I Love the Bones of You Page 18