8699/21618
My last day of filming on Zak The Ripper with a call time of 8am. I had fancied that I could make this if I had stayed in Htichin and got a very early train, but the production had wanted me there for sure, hence my night of haute cuisine in the Premier Inn.
I was picked up and taken to a remote cottage. As I was being driven up the track to the location I wondered if this whole project had been an elaborate plan to kidnap me and maybe/hopefully turn me into some kind of sex slave.
To be fair if someone had gone to this level of trouble to make me their prisoner I would have to respect that. It turned out that everything was legit, which is a step up from most of the films I've been in, most of which, so far, have been released. If only I could spot the common factor in all those movies then maybe I could work out what the problem was. But I can't see anything that connects them.
The schedule was fluid today because there was some outside filming and the weather was meant to be bad. In the end they decided to do the inside scenes first - bad news for me as my scene was outside. Could I have stayed at home and travelled down today? By the time it reached lunch and I wasn't even in costume yet, I figured that maybe I could have,
This is the way with filming though and it would be churlish to complain that I was being paid to sit around and chat and eat kitkats with the other actors. I am not a diva, whatever the production crew on the Pottery Slamdown might have told you, and I know that, unless you are in every scene of a film then there is a lot of sitting around. I'd only worked with three of the cast up to now (and one of them only very briefly) so it was fun to meet some of the others.
It was around about 4.30pm before we were anywhere near doing our scene. That's a lot of sitting around - though I had tried (and failed) to do a bit of work on my laptop in the afternoon. I had a few lines today, but they were nearly all "Come out with your hands up" so, aside from a list of three names that I thought might trip me up, I didn't even really have to learn anything.
It's all been quite static for me up to now, but today I had to do a stunt. If driving a car two metres and then braking hard can be classified as a stunt. Which I think it can. As I was driving towards a building it was a bit of a game of chicken as to how far I could go before I braked. As the car was going at 5mph I should probably not have done two takes where I was at least half a metre short of my mark.
I had been sceptical that we could get everything done in the less than two hours we had, but we ended up having time for multiple takes. And I had a few "Come out with your hands up" cut from my lines.
The actors who were wrapping today got a round of applause, as it traditional and I got changed back into my quite similar to the costume clothes and then was rushed back to Hastings station to get the train home.
As we approached Finsbury Park the train stopped and the driver told us that due to a fatality on the tracks at Haringay we were not able to go forwards and might have to return to St Pancras. This usually means having to get a taxi home from London which I was not in the mood for. Sitting around all day is surprisingly tiring.
A few minutes later the driver came back on the intercom to tell us it was good news. Though he did have to temper that a little bit. The person who had been hit by the train had not died, which mean that they'd been taken to hospital and the service could continue. Good news for us and better than expected news for the person. I tried hard not to resent them. I didn't entirely succeed.
So I was home by 9.30pm. All the glamour of being a film star behind me.
I wonder if Tom Cruise stays in the Premier Inn and gets the train home.
Probably.
