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So the real reason I am giving up RHLSTP is because I am now a huge film star. I got the train down to Brighton this morning for the first day of filming on Zak The Ripper. I have the first and last line in the film and so I am guessing I am the star of it, which means I no longer have time for scum like you and will soon be on an island with all the other celebrities making some dubious moral choices. My favourite kind of choices.
I won't let it go to my head yet. Let's wait for Oscar season.
I had spent yesterday trying to learn my lines, finding it quite hard to get them to stick. I did manage to get a whole two-hander play in there earlier in the year, so you'd think a couple of paragraphs would be easy. Plus when filming line-learning is a different art. It's very stop and start and you do things multiple times and so it is possible to just learn the lines 30 seconds before you say them. Which suits my current memory skills. Getting stuff to stick so I know it three hours later is the issue. Which is very depressing for me. I used to find it so easy to remember stuff.
That took me a couple of days to be fair. And I can still do it. Even the acronym (maybe not backwards though).
As it turned out because I am playing a detective and today's scenes took place at a press conference, I was given the bulk of what I'd already learned on a piece of paper, because my character was reading it out. That actually made it harder to switch back into the bits that weren't on the piece of paper, but it also made it much less likely that I'd fuck stuff up.
In truth my part in the movie (as we call them in the film business) is pretty small, but that suits me. It can get a bit tedious on set (which is what we in the film business call the place where we are filming stuff - little bit of background detail for you, they film the "movie" with cameras) waiting around and having to do the same thing over and over again. But popping in for the odd day is very enjoyable. We only had to do about five pages today, all with more or less the same set-up and everyone was very excited and up because it was the first day of the shoot. I was working alongside Esther Oladele, who like me is 23 years old. Though for some reason she had been cast as the young police officer and I was the old and embittered detective on the eve of retirement (will he die before the film is out? Or will this be the only film ever where an aged detective is allowed to retire alive? You'll have to watch to find out).
I guess that's just a compliment to my acting range.
You wouldn't have known Esther was relatively new to film acting, except that at one point there was a close up shot of me moving some food around on the table. You only saw the items and my hands. I jokingly said to Esther that I still needed her to sit next to me or I wouldn't be able to get into the role and she took me at my word. Some actors won't even stand in to do their lines when it's someone else's close up. So what a lovely thing for her to do. And what an absolute monster I must be to work with.
We came up with some funny bits of business in an organic way and seemed to find a bit more of our characters in every take. The writer/director Warren was open to us trying stuff and we had lots of time to do these relatively short scenes (and actually finished early). Obviously you usually can't change stuff too much between different takes, but it was good to feel like we were gaining confidence and getting more into character each time.
I guess it's the same thing I apply to touring a stand up show. It could potentially become dull and I think it used to in the early days. But now I see every show as an opportunity to even subtly improve on the last. The craft keeps it interesting. Jesus, I might even be able to do a role with more than three days filming if I keep thinking like this!
It was surprisingly tiring. We hadn't done anything except a brief rehearsal before lunch and I still felt like I'd worked a full day. I really wanted to be an actor when I started out (alongside the comedy which was always going to be my main thing), but I did lose my self-belief (or had it battered out of me). So it's especially nice to get a job like this (and to have done Educating Rita) and not feel self-conscious and (I think) to do it well.
There's a great cast on this film and the script is funny, so fingers crossed it does well. I was telling Esther that nearly every other film I've ever done hasn't even been released -
whither Manilla Envelopes?
Hopefully this one will break the curse of Richard Herring and actually come out. I should probably have warned Warren about that curse before he cast me.
