Latest / Half the Picture / #32 - ROBERT SHEEHAN

Transcript

#32 - ROBERT SHEEHAN · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  Slaunch ago, or welcome to, have the picture podcast with me, Roberto Xi'in-Face.
• 0:10
  That's the first time anyone's ever done that, direct to camera.
• 0:12
  Why, where else would you do it?
• 0:14
  Well, I mean, I'll do an intro.
• 0:17
  All right.
• 0:19
  Hale Satan.
• 0:21
  But I get a lot of people quoting lines back at me, like,
• 0:24
  you'd shag your own sister for a slice of cheese.
• 0:28
  I don't have a sister.
• 0:29
  That makes it all the worse.
• 0:30
  You're f***ing perfect.
• 0:33
  I enjoyed the third season of misfits.
• 0:36
  I must confess, I actually never watched seasons 4 and 5.
• 0:39
  Nathan has a sort of love story with this Welsh girl.
• 0:43
  I mean, she's pregnant.
• 0:44
  So Rob's her belly and goes, it's like having a threesome.
• 0:48
  That was on the cutting room floor.
• 0:50
  That was on the cutting room floor.
• 0:51
  Some of my favorite stuff of Klaus is in the second season,
• 0:55
  where he's trying to run away from the mad cult that he's created.
• 0:58
  You know, everyone, I'm a complete fake.
• 1:00
  And I don't believe it.
• 1:02
  Oh, you know, they're too invested in it.
• 1:04
  You see that video?
• 1:05
  John Cena apologising in Fluent Mandarin to the Communist Party.
• 1:10
  In Fluent Perfect Mandarin.
• 1:13
  It's like this is the most confusing thing I've seen all week.
• 1:17
  That was all good tic-toc stuff.
• 1:18
  That was all good shit.
• 1:19
  Especially the bit about the Chinese Communist Party.
• 1:25
  I can video or like, you know, that kind of thing.
• 1:33
  It's like, I'm clueless.
• 1:34
  How long can get away with insulting the Chinese Communist Party before you get cancelled off tic-toc altogether?
• 1:42
  Not too long, I imagine.
• 1:43
  I once worked for the fellow who owns American tic-toc now.
• 1:47
  Oh, really?
• 1:48
  Yeah, and he owns like baseball teams.
• 1:50
  And he's been trying for decades to buy a Hawaiian island.
• 1:54
  Kui.
• 1:56
  But I don't think he's managed to succeed in buying it.
• 1:59
  I think the poor Hawaiians have managed to defend him off for the time being.
• 2:05
  Such a fucking mad oligarchy culture, isn't it?
• 2:08
  We're living in now.
• 2:09
  Yeah.
• 2:09
  And it makes it just by entire countries.
• 2:12
  Yeah.
• 2:13
  And it makes a change if, because normally people like that get their way, don't they?
• 2:16
  So it's, if he's not been able to get by itself in Ireland.
• 2:20
  Because then the people will talk them to fuck off then.
• 2:22
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:22
  That's, you know, the second home.
• 2:24
  I've been trying to buy the island of white for the past couple of years.
• 2:28
  But if you've received serious pushback, you know.
• 2:34
  Who's been put, who's been, who would push you back on the island of,
• 2:36
  on the island of white?
• 2:37
  David, David Ike.
• 2:40
  He lives there.
• 2:40
  You should get him on.
• 2:41
  Is that his base of operations?
• 2:43
  That's his base of operations, yeah.
• 2:45
  It's that's another way of saying he lives there.
• 2:47
  Yeah.
• 2:49
  Yeah, he lives in the island of white, David.
• 2:50
  Yeah.
• 2:51
  There's a, there's a big film culture on the island of white, I would say, right?
• 2:54
  Have you ever shot anything?
• 2:54
  No, I've never shot it there, but I did go through the island of white,
• 2:57
  the Mingela Film Festival on the island of white, because Anthony Mingela came from there.
• 3:02
  And his whole family come from there because they're kind of rich ice cream makers
• 3:06
  from the island of white.
• 3:08
  Well, that is from his family originally Italian, I want to say.
• 3:11
  Yeah.
• 3:11
  And they moved over to the UK.
• 3:13
  They must have done, yeah.
• 3:14
  Yeah, we had Jack Davenport, the actor on the pod, you know?
• 3:17
  Oh, yeah.
• 3:17
  I know of him, yeah.
• 3:18
  Yeah, he worked with Mingela on Tanta Mr Ripley,
• 3:22
  with Matt Damon and...
• 3:23
  Yeah, was he in that, yeah?
• 3:24
  Yeah, he's got kind of like a supporting role,
• 3:26
  but he had lots to say about like working with Mingela at the gallery,
• 3:30
  Hoffman and like Matt Damon and so, yeah.
• 3:32
  That's coming out tomorrow, that episode, actually, that's all, all scheduled.
• 3:36
  Jack Davenport, don't velvety, sexy voice.
• 3:39
  Hello.
• 3:41
  Hello.
• 3:42
  That's lovely.
• 3:42
  It's actually not too far off.
• 3:44
  What was he...
• 3:46
  What was he, you know, watched recently, The Morning Show?
• 3:49
  Did you see that?
• 3:50
  No, I didn't.
• 3:51
  It was good.
• 3:52
  It was good.
• 3:52
  I was sort of resisted it for a while.
• 3:54
  It was like, oh, holier than thou, American bullshit.
• 3:57
  Here we go.
• 3:59
  But actually, it was very intelligently written, really well done.
• 4:02
  And, you know, he has a sort of a...
• 4:06
  The part of a...
• 4:08
  Yeah, sort of ex of Jennifer Aniston's character,
• 4:11
  who's kind of constantly picking up her pieces, you know.
• 4:16
  But it was good.
• 4:16
  Yeah, it's worth the watch.
• 4:17
  It's really good.
• 4:19
  I had two hours of him.
• 4:20
  We chatted for a couple hours, and it was just like, his velvety voice.
• 4:24
  I know it was like, what do you mean?
• 4:26
  It was just like two hours of just velvet.
• 4:27
  And the liquid velvet in the years, you know.
• 4:29
  Was it very soothing?
• 4:30
  It was.
• 4:31
  I was like, that didn't actually...
• 4:32
  No, it's up, not because...
• 4:33
  Not because what you're saying was, oh, it's up.
• 4:35
  It's just because his voice was just...
• 4:36
  The ASMR of his voice was just like, sorry, sorry, okay.
• 4:39
  Yeah.
• 4:40
  He just pretends to doors off.
• 4:42
  I've so...
• 4:46
  I've so far...
• 4:46
  Sorry.
• 4:47
  I've so far never dosed off in one of these.
• 4:49
  And so far, I've never had a guest dosed off either.
• 4:51
  So have you ever been to a live event and dosed off in it?
• 4:55
  I actually, I've only...
• 4:56
  No, I haven't actually.
• 4:57
  Really?
• 4:58
  I've never dosed off watching movies at home,
• 5:00
  but I've never gone to something and dosed off.
• 5:02
  I've done that many, many times.
• 5:05
  Why have I done that?
• 5:07
  No one else? Have you ever anyone else done that?
• 5:10
  Yeah, yeah.
• 5:10
  I just feel too guilty about like, if I miss the movie,
• 5:13
  I'm like, oh, shit.
• 5:14
  You know, I've got to have to get back and say,
• 5:16
  be too busy to stop the sleep from overhauling me.
• 5:20
  You know, especially in theater, you know?
• 5:23
  I've fallen asleep in some really good shows.
• 5:26
  Shows I've been enjoying, you know?
• 5:28
  Well, I think theatre, they come down a lot hard.
• 5:30
  I've heard actors, if they notice someone
• 5:33
  in the front rowdosing, they'll just be like,
• 5:35
  oh, fucksake.
• 5:36
  And I like target the guy in the front row.
• 5:38
  They come down hard on it.
• 5:39
  Although I did play in the old Vic,
• 5:41
  and every Wednesday, the blue rinse brigade
• 5:44
  would come in in the bosses for the, for the matinee.
• 5:49
  And half of them would be asleep about 15 minutes into the show,
• 5:52
  you know what I mean?
• 5:53
  And you should have just learned not to take it too personally.
• 5:56
  They're just having an expensive nap.
• 5:58
  It was once, right?
• 6:00
  I was at the RSC.
• 6:01
  I was there, I was going to do some work with Trevor None.
• 6:04
  And he was, he had a show on Volpone.
• 6:07
  So I went along to the show.
• 6:09
  And I was sat up on the kind of mezzanine level.
• 6:11
  And I had a seat and it was an old, old man standing behind me.
• 6:15
  And he was like, oh, I love the theatre.
• 6:18
  And I said, it was, come here and sit down next to me.
• 6:20
  We can cheer this seat, come here.
• 6:23
  And the lights came up, the show started and he went,
• 6:29
  and at the interval everyone broke into applause and he went,
• 6:32
  I just loved the theatre.
• 6:38
  It was just fast asleep for the whole thing, you know.
• 6:42
  I had a similar experience when I went to a gig at the Playdeum, John Cale,
• 6:46
  you know, for the Velvet Underground.
• 6:47
  Love John Cale.
• 6:48
  He's amazing, isn't he?
• 6:49
  He did a gig a couple of years ago there for his, for his latest album,
• 6:52
  at the time his latest album.
• 6:53
  And there was a bloke, it was packed out.
• 6:55
  There was an old bloke about 60 years old,
• 6:58
  sitting behind me, directly behind me.
• 7:00
  And he did the same for E-Fell asleep.
• 7:03
  But I don't know what the play was like, but Cale, you know,
• 7:05
  he's got that avant-garde kind of drone sound
• 7:07
  and he's like playing the violin and all that shit.
• 7:10
  And then like this guy was just completely unfaithful.
• 7:13
  You just slept through the hole, this like roof-shaking gig.
• 7:16
  And then like there was a song where Cale was playing these drones anywhere
• 7:20
  and it was in like these long sort of hand-zimmer kind of notes like,
• 7:24
  like that, and then space and then do.
• 7:27
  And then in the spaces in between show you just hit,
• 7:28
  he would go, you would hear.
• 7:34
  Humbling.
• 7:34
  Humbling for John Cale.
• 7:36
  And I could tell everyone around me,
• 7:38
  they were getting irritated at this guy,
• 7:39
  because they could hear me.
• 7:40
  Yeah, well, yeah.
• 7:41
  And they paid like, having much to see.
• 7:42
  Jamming a little.
• 7:43
  Yeah, and I, well, I just thought it was hilarious,
• 7:45
  because I could hear the energy in the room turning against this one guy behind me.
• 7:48
  And I was just like, this is brilliant.
• 7:50
  Should be refreshed in the lobby after the show with a stick.
• 7:54
  A friend of mine went to see Hamilton
• 7:56
  and her boyfriend had gotten them.
• 7:59
  No, sorry, the director we were doing a film with got her the tickets, right?
• 8:03
  So she went back to New York and she took her boyfriend to Hamilton.
• 8:07
  And they had wanted to see it for ages.
• 8:09
  So they're sat there in the really good seats.
• 8:11
  And behind them, there was this person singing along to all the songs.
• 8:15
  And she was like, fuck, shut up, fuck off.
• 8:18
  Didn't come here to listen to you, you fucking arrogant prick, right?
• 8:21
  And then after a while she was like, I'm going to say something.
• 8:24
  I'm going to turn around, I'm going to say something.
• 8:26
  And then like, the song ended and she was like,
• 8:29
  and it was Paul McCartney.
• 8:31
  She was like, oh, she's like, oh, carry on.
• 8:38
  He loved the show.
• 8:39
  He'd been to three or four or five times.
• 8:41
  Bloody hell.
• 8:42
  They didn't realize he was such a big Hamilton guy.
• 8:44
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:45
  Wow, wow.
• 8:46
  Musical guy.
• 8:48
  To the point where he could sing along to what every song,
• 8:50
  for a while, he was like, you know, I know you've sold millions of albums,
• 8:53
  Paul, but shut the fuck off.
• 8:56
  You know, it's not your turn.
• 8:58
  People have not paid tickets to come and hear you singing,
• 9:01
  even though it's a lovely thing.
• 9:03
  It's that thing if I think sense of hubris would success
• 9:07
  where you think that every audience is your audience.
• 9:10
  Not that I think he thought that, but, you know,
• 9:13
  that can happen, you know.
• 9:15
  Have you ever done that?
• 9:16
  Well, you've been in a cinema or a theatre
• 9:18
  and like, so one's been just being jabbered on and you've said,
• 9:21
  it's my entire teenage life, you know.
• 9:24
  All we had was an outlet, social outlet of the weekend was this cinema.
• 9:29
  And no fucker would ever shut up during any film.
• 9:32
  So, you know, and we'd like we had to have sort of
• 9:35
  in our local cinema had to have security with big prison torches
• 9:40
  coming in every 10 minutes and flashing them and people to try to get them to
• 9:43
  shut up and then trying to get like getting the ushers
• 9:47
  who were teenagers themselves trying to drag other teenagers out of the cinema
• 9:51
  that were misbehaving.
• 9:52
  It was like a fucking war zone, you know.
• 9:55
  You know, you're just sitting there trying to enjoy your movie.
• 9:58
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:59
  Did you ever get dragged out?
• 10:00
  Yeah, yeah.
• 10:01
  Got kicked out a few times, yeah.
• 10:02
  I used to work for like kissing in the back row, you know.
• 10:05
  That was heavily discouraged.
• 10:07
  I've seen plenty of that because I used to work at Cineworld
• 10:10
  and they have this thing where instead of flashlights,
• 10:12
  the torches like on you go in and check with a torch,
• 10:15
  you go in and check with night vision goggles.
• 10:17
  In every...
• 10:18
  Jesus, that's creepy.
• 10:19
  It's creepy and you see...
• 10:21
  It's an awful little bill leering at you.
• 10:24
  It's watching your film.
• 10:24
  I'll be honest, it does feel that sometimes it did feel a bit like
• 10:26
  science and lambs because you go in
• 10:28
  and like you're checking every single screen like regularly
• 10:31
  and you see some shit.
• 10:33
  I'll tell you that for a fact.
• 10:34
  You see some stuff like...
• 10:35
  Like like sexual favors and are...
• 10:37
  Big time, like...
• 10:38
  It's gone from kissing in the back row to other...
• 10:42
  I remember one time, I think it was that
• 10:44
  a Russell Crowe movie, the Pope's exorcist.
• 10:47
  That's not a sexy movie.
• 10:48
  It's not a sexy movie.
• 10:49
  It's not an aphrodisiac, is it?
• 10:51
  Why should Russell Crowe do an exorcism?
• 10:53
  Whoa!
• 10:55
  This is really getting me mised.
• 10:56
  But well, I mean, it was working for some people
• 10:59
  because I went in to check it
• 11:01
  and I turned on the goggles, you know.
• 11:03
  And literally, this is policy, you have to do this.
• 11:05
  I wasn't, you know, I wasn't just able to look
• 11:06
  and then at the back row...
• 11:08
  At the back row, I see this bloke
• 11:11
  and he's got like a...
• 11:12
  And it's just like a bloke.
• 11:13
  He looks at first place, just like a bloke sitting on his own.
• 11:15
  But then he's got a coat over his lap,
• 11:17
  which was bobbed up and down, the classic one.
• 11:20
  And then I see this and I do it like a double take.
• 11:22
  It's like, is that what I think it is?
• 11:23
  And then, a second later, he sort of looks to his right
• 11:27
  and sees me looking at him.
• 11:28
  And through the night vision goggles,
• 11:30
  he makes direct eye contact with me,
• 11:32
  whilst he's getting sucked off.
• 11:34
  I'm a sight...
• 11:34
  I'm going to involve you.
• 11:35
  I'm going to involve you over.
• 11:37
  I was a...
• 11:38
  I was an o-willing kind of mish.
• 11:40
  But then again, you're getting paid a wage
• 11:42
  to sort of, you know,
• 11:44
  perv on people in the cinema.
• 11:45
  Yeah, it was minimum, but, I mean,
• 11:47
  it's better than nothing.
• 11:50
  You know, some people do that for free.
• 11:52
  Yeah.
• 11:53
  Actually, that was it.
• 11:54
  Like someone, a colleague of mine, went into check
• 11:57
  and she was like, I don't know if I'm seeing what I'm seeing,
• 11:59
  but Billy, which you mind checking.
• 12:00
  I was like, all right, fine, I went and did it.
• 12:03
  I was like, yep, that's exactly what it is.
• 12:05
  Let's get management in.
• 12:06
  And then...
• 12:07
  What do you do then?
• 12:08
  Why don't I know?
• 12:08
  This is why I wasn't the manager,
• 12:10
  because I was like, just jabbed them with a riding crop.
• 12:14
  I think they're like that.
• 12:14
  The riding crop, it's a riding crop before I might be into that.
• 12:17
  With what do they call that thing that they zap cows with?
• 12:20
  A cattle prod.
• 12:21
  Cattle prod, that's what you need.
• 12:24
  I think it was quite another true sieve,
• 12:26
  like they sort of tiptoe that the stairs were like,
• 12:28
  yeah, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop doing that.
• 12:34
  Well, it's the most sort of limperisted kind of, you know,
• 12:38
  sort of deterrent, isn't it?
• 12:40
  Just stop it, just stop that now.
• 12:44
  Yeah.
• 12:45
  Yeah.
• 12:45
  Are we, are we rolling?
• 12:47
  Yeah.
• 12:48
  I can go.
• 12:48
  That was all good TikTok stuff.
• 12:50
  That was all good shit.
• 12:51
  Especially the bit about the Chinese Communist Party.
• 12:54
  I'm gonna have to do like John Senna
• 12:56
  and learn Chinese to apologise, isn't it?
• 13:00
  Did you see that video?
• 13:01
  No, I didn't.
• 13:02
  John Senna, apologising in fluent Mandarin
• 13:06
  to the Communist Party about the fact that he'd said about his latest film,
• 13:10
  how Taiwan was going to be the first country to see this movie.
• 13:15
  And so the Standing Politburo Committee took serious offence,
• 13:19
  because they're like, that's not a country.
• 13:21
  And if you wanted to be shown in our country,
• 13:23
  you're going to have to revoke that statement and apologise.
• 13:26
  And he did.
• 13:27
  In fluent, perfect Mandarin.
• 13:31
  It's like this is the most confusing thing I've seen all week, you know?
• 13:35
  Is a man of many skills.
• 13:36
  Yeah, he is, yeah.
• 13:38
  In fairness to him.
• 13:38
  Invisibility, you know, he bends over to the man, you know it.
• 13:42
  Chinese Communist Man.
• 13:44
  All their muscles and see where it gets you.
• 13:46
  Well, they've got a lot of ammunition.
• 13:48
  I guess they could probably, you know,
• 13:48
  you don't want to get on the wrong side of...
• 13:50
  That's it, yeah.
• 13:51
  Yeah, they've got a big old marketplace on there for Senna.
• 13:56
  Well, a big old marketplace for like most movies, just kind of...
• 13:58
  I feel like more and more Hollywood is kind of catering more and more to like,
• 14:01
  you know, Chinese government Chinese audiences.
• 14:03
  Chinese people call that soy sauce.
• 14:06
  So when Hollywood movies put a bit of Chinese in there.
• 14:10
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 14:11
  Oh, there's a bit of soy sauce there.
• 14:14
  To appeal to us, you know.
• 14:16
  Yeah, I've been in a few of them.
• 14:17
  Oh, yeah.
• 14:18
  Yeah.
• 14:18
  Was the Mortal Engines kind of like that?
• 14:20
  Yeah, the Mortal Engines was a bit of that.
• 14:22
  Geostorm.
• 14:23
  Oh, of course.
• 14:24
  The greatest 4DX movie ever made.
• 14:26
  Oh, really, yeah.
• 14:27
  I heard such good things about that.
• 14:28
  I didn't see it as that official.
• 14:29
  Well, I heard it was like,
• 14:31
  that was the way to see that film was 4DX.
• 14:34
  I can't wait in there because I've never actually watched it.
• 14:37
  I really?
• 14:37
  No, really.
• 14:38
  I've never seen it.
• 14:39
  You and Gerald Butler, you didn't like...
• 14:41
  No, I got on a storm with him.
• 14:42
  A Geostorm.
• 14:43
  Yeah.
• 14:44
  Which didn't even rehearse that.
• 14:47
  I mean, come on.
• 14:48
  It's good.
• 14:48
  It's good stuff.
• 14:49
  But I didn't know I just couldn't ever bring myself to sit down and watch it.
• 14:53
  Really?
• 14:54
  Yeah.
• 14:54
  There's some stuff like that.
• 14:55
  You just sort of be like,
• 14:57
  especially the bigger stuff where maybe your part is more marginal.
• 15:00
  You're just like, yeah, whatever you mean.
• 15:02
  It's a bit...
• 15:02
  I suppose like, you know, some people,
• 15:05
  you know, people often ask that question,
• 15:07
  do you watch your own stuff?
• 15:09
  Do you, you know...
• 15:11
  And sometimes, yeah, most of the time, yes.
• 15:13
  But then there's also this sense of the art
• 15:17
  having gone through several filters of other creativity
• 15:20
  by the time it reaches the screen.
• 15:22
  So the thing, the idea that you had on the day for the scene, let's say,
• 15:27
  has been remixed so many times and kind of gone through the filter
• 15:31
  and for the purposes of the editor and the director.
• 15:34
  Quite a few different times that what you see
• 15:38
  may not resemble what you tried to do on the day, you know.
• 15:43
  And that can be kind of demoralizing and jarring if you're not ready for it.
• 15:47
  You can kind of put you off watching your own stuff.
• 15:50
  And so it's a bit, I suppose I like in it too, you know,
• 15:54
  a singer writing a song, producing a song,
• 15:57
  and then someone coming along and sampling the song, you know,
• 16:01
  and then someone saying,
• 16:02
  oh, do you see your work in that person who sampled your work?
• 16:06
  And you go, no, not really.
• 16:08
  Because that's a whole different song, you know?
• 16:10
  Yeah.
• 16:10
  So that's what it feels like.
• 16:12
  And is that because of like the way the editor
• 16:14
  will might take your performance and recut it and re-encly it,
• 16:16
  and it's not what you might maybe not quite what you intended?
• 16:19
  Yeah, what, whatever kind of
• 16:21
  opaqueness of feeling that you imposed upon it when you did it, you know.
• 16:27
  It's gone through someone else's vision.
• 16:31
  And even like I watched the,
• 16:35
  there was a sort of promo thing that they cut together for this new series,
• 16:40
  I did called grown-ups, and we were at the rap party and sort of,
• 16:43
  you know, G everybody up and go, look at what we made, it's great.
• 16:47
  They sort of put together a rough cut, kind of trailer-style thing
• 16:52
  of the opening of the series.
• 16:54
  And it's a bit with me, and everybody, there's a bit, it's sort of close up bit,
• 17:00
  and everybody went, oh, yeah, that bit was good.
• 17:04
  And inside I was going, that was shit, me.
• 17:07
  Because there had been bits on the day that we'd filmed of the same thing
• 17:14
  that I thought were better, and I had a vivid memory of in terms of my performance.
• 17:20
  But like, really, by the time you've gone through all of that,
• 17:25
  and you've developed all these sort of millions of micro-attachments
• 17:29
  to what you think you're building,
• 17:32
  and then it all just gets absolutely obliterated for the final thing.
• 17:36
  You kind of have to just completely let it go, and that is a sort of a very Buddhist process,
• 17:43
  I suppose. But it can result in you feeling like you have no ownership over your screen stuff,
• 17:51
  which is a bit sad.
• 17:53
  Well, it's in some ways, that's surprising to me to hear,
• 17:56
  because your performances over your career have been so, they have so much energy and so much
• 18:00
  kind of idiosyncrasy.
• 18:02
  Oh, thank you.
• 18:03
  Oh, but it's true, like, going back to the early days,
• 18:05
  stuff like, you know, Misfits and Red Riding, and then Umbrella Academy,
• 18:08
  like, you've got such a fantastic energy on screen.
• 18:10
  So, the idea that someone, it's almost like there's no modulation of that,
• 18:15
  it's just kind of there on screen and there, it's like, take it or leave it.
• 18:19
  And I think in the hands of editors who have a deep love for who they're editing director-wise,
• 18:27
  actor-wise, music-wise, you know, you see the, you can see the admiration in the cuts,
• 18:34
  you know, and you can see the kind of all the oddness or the most of it left in,
• 18:38
  and cherished as much as possible.
• 18:41
  So, I think it comes down to the hands of the editor, really.
• 18:45
  And then the commissioners, because the commissioners have a huge hand in the edit,
• 18:50
  of course, you know, they're going on, and they're kind of leaning on,
• 18:54
  especially in the edit, because, you know, yourself, that's where things kind of come together,
• 18:58
  because before that you just have a big jumble of stuff,
• 19:01
  you know, and then you have to make some sort of story out of it, totally.
• 19:05
  I hear a lot of actors, they like to, one of the reasons that actors like to produce
• 19:09
  their own work is because it means that they can get in the editing room and have more of a say
• 19:13
  in what gets cut and what doesn't. I mean, is that something that you've ever thought about?
• 19:17
  Yeah, I think so now, because now that I've gone through the terrible agony of writing a
• 19:21
  couple of books, I think I could probably endure the agony of the editing room.
• 19:26
  And by agony, I mean, you kind of have to just self-subdivide into two different people.
• 19:34
  And one of them is looking at all of the quirks and oddness and kind of lovely
• 19:40
  spontaneity that happened on the day, and you're trying to cherish that.
• 19:43
  And the other person is standing behind you with his arms folded going,
• 19:48
  nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. All of that needs to be serving the story,
• 19:53
  the ultimate arc, you know, that's what this is in service, too.
• 19:59
  So you kind of, as they say, you know, you write with fire and edit with ice,
• 20:03
  or whatever it is. And so after writing books, I think I know how to do that, you know,
• 20:09
  so I think I'd be, I wouldn't be a pain in the arts in the editing room, I mean.
• 20:14
  Because you kind of have to be able to see the wood for the trees,
• 20:17
  have that objective kind of distance.
• 20:19
  Yeah, yeah, be in it and be watching yourself being in it at the same time.
• 20:26
  Isn't that life in a nutshell? You can say that. I mean, I remember hearing a story about a
• 20:31
  director, I think it was Fred Zimmerman who went after he would finish a shoot, he would take
• 20:36
  himself off climbing in the Alps before he went to the editor room, basically just to get his head
• 20:42
  out of the film that he just made so that when he came back to the edit, he could just look at it
• 20:45
  completely. Good idea. Yeah, good idea. Yeah, imagine climbing in the Alps could be quite life
• 20:51
  threatening. Yeah, yeah, because it completely meant you just had to be in the zone climbing the
• 20:56
  Alps and not losing his life rather than thinking about, oh, did that take, was that take any good,
• 21:00
  was that you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's that also that thing that Blur described as
• 21:05
  Conflue, where they've gone off and they've done a big thing like a tour, you know, and then they
• 21:12
  have to go back and sort of they're having to be a decompression process from sort of furiously
• 21:21
  in a kind of carnival circus way, making something to just like gripping the furniture at home.
• 21:30
  Yeah. And I'm all right in thinking, because looking back over your career, like, you know,
• 21:34
  you've done so much fantastic stuff and then, but when you were a child, I'm all right in thinking
• 21:38
  that this journey is an actor, creative, got started when you said to your mum one day, like, I want
• 21:43
  to be an actor, was that how it, and she was like, okay, was that how it started? Yeah, yeah, pretty
• 21:48
  much. I mean, to give that context though, I also said that I wanted to be a horse rider, I wanted
• 21:55
  to be, although she said no to that, because horses were too expensive. I said a lot of things
• 22:01
  back in the day. I remember once I was in school, and I got pulled out a class by the principal,
• 22:07
  but it was kind of the vibe of, oh, you're definitely not in trouble, what's going on here?
• 22:12
  And there was a journalist who'd come to the school to do a kind of piece,
• 22:17
  a kind of profile piece on one of the students, and probably because I was a precocious little
• 22:22
  fucker, they decided, right, he'll be the one that will do the interview. And so the journalist
• 22:28
  asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said a doctor, because I just couldn't
• 22:34
  think of anything else to say, you know, and I think it was about 12 or 13 years old. So, you know,
• 22:40
  I've changed my mind a lot through my childhood, but no, it was always something in the dramatic
• 22:47
  arts. I think it was about 12 or 13, I did a play then, and that was the true, like,
• 22:56
  truly religious, in a very real sense experience, you know, for the first time in my life,
• 23:03
  revelatory experience of high frequency connection between whatever change I was affecting in the
• 23:13
  audience, you know, and adults and making them laugh and everything's like, wow, that's a kick
• 23:19
  that was impossible to match, you know. I remember you saying once that, like, your religious experiences
• 23:25
  as a kid were performative, but your performative experiences were religious. Yeah, is that how it felt?
• 23:32
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a good, because in the book playing dead, I was trying to figure out a
• 23:38
  way of talking about my own life with an angle, you know, not just, oh, and then I had my communion,
• 23:45
  you know, just boring as hell. But I was trying to think like, what is the point of me telling these
• 23:52
  stories, you know, in terms of the sort of through the lens of meditation and all that,
• 23:58
  and I was raised in a very kind of relaxed Catholic way, because by the time I came along,
• 24:03
  Ireland had started to do quite well economically, and the 90s were very prosperous and very corrupt,
• 24:10
  but prosperous, you know, and so religion was falling away, and at the same time in Ireland,
• 24:17
  there were, you know, grown adult men and women standing up on a live talk show audience,
• 24:23
  the late late show, in floods of tears talking about how they'd been physically and sexually abused,
• 24:28
  so the kind of moral cornerstone of the Catholic church was,
• 24:34
  a fucking phone is on airplane mode. They become so intrusive, haven't they?
• 24:40
  Our little spying devices in our pockets. Sorry about that. It's all good, man, it's all good.
• 24:46
  But what's the saying about some? Yeah, all of that kind of created this sort of interesting,
• 24:54
  perfect storm of religionlessness, you know, super fast secularization of Ireland, you know,
• 25:02
  and so we were still plotting through the initiations of Catholic sort of life,
• 25:07
  baptism, communion, confirmation, and it would all just felt like this weird,
• 25:14
  meaningless field trip, you know, this sort of like a chronic boredom in the church,
• 25:22
  say all in the passion of the holy lamb and the eucharistic reflection, you're like,
• 25:26
  what the fuck does any of this mean? You know, it might supposed to be getting something out of this,
• 25:31
  you know, so I was always really confused by religion, so I'm kind of going, I really liked the kind of
• 25:37
  the convergence of large amounts of people, and that group being quiet together, that really
• 25:45
  kind of interest me kind of watching people being quiet, because, you know, every other space
• 25:50
  in my world growing up, people were always chattering at 90 miles an hour, you know,
• 25:54
  to me, if it was down the pub or down the sports pitch or wherever else, it was just incredibly
• 25:58
  social vocal space where everybody was nattering on. So there was something really intriguing about
• 26:06
  the church where people would just sit and kind of bow their heads together as a group, you know,
• 26:12
  you're thinking, that's interesting. And then, you know, it was interesting to watch religion change
• 26:16
  from that, I mean, it is still that in Ireland, but less so, more in the rural places,
• 26:22
  but now you have this kind of privatization of religion where it's a very personal question,
• 26:28
  isn't it, as somebody, you know, what do you believe, you know, or what's your relationship to God,
• 26:34
  everybody like, well, that's my private personal business. It's like, wow, that is like the
• 26:41
  complete opposite of what religion was, you know, what gathered, it was about gathering,
• 26:48
  you know, it was about community, it was about sharing something, you know. So I hold that
• 26:55
  on a great suspicion, that idea that somehow religion has been privatized, not in a money way,
• 27:01
  but, well, to some degree, but anyway, I veer off piece, so the religious experiences of my
• 27:10
  childhood were performative because the Catholic Church have all these kind of hoops that they make
• 27:17
  you jump through in the form of initiation ceremonies, and also just regular mass where you,
• 27:22
  you know, you get up on the pews and then you stand, sit down, then you get down your knees,
• 27:27
  and then you repeat what the priest tells you to repeat, and then you do the hoki-koki up the aisle,
• 27:33
  and then you turn around, and that's what it's like, you know, you do all the stuff, and it's sort of,
• 27:37
  I think this very little religion left in it, and there's a lot of compliance in it, you know.
• 27:45
  And then, yeah, then suddenly on stage, you know, audience participation, and telling jokes,
• 27:51
  and making people laugh, you know, watching a group, a room full of people, just erupt together
• 28:00
  all, you know, across the emotional spectrum, laughter, and, you know, sort of sorrow and joy,
• 28:08
  and everything, it's just thinking, this is religion, this is what it is, this is what the point
• 28:15
  of it is, is a high intense connectivity, you know, is that more of this, so I love doing theatre
• 28:22
  for that, you know, I love doing theatre, as close as I can get to Panto without having to do Panto,
• 28:28
  the happier I am. Have you ever done Panto, am I just...
• 28:32
  Only in the form of, well, that first player did ever, which was, which was called Oliver with a twist,
• 28:40
  which was basically Panto, and which was just a school play, but then a couple of years ago,
• 28:46
  we did with Neil and I on stage, and that was basically Panto. I mean, there was musical
• 28:51
  interludes, the audience were shouting and roaring, they were all drinking, you know, there's
• 28:57
  certain lines you'd say, we want the finest wines known to humanity, we want them here,
• 29:02
  and we want them now, and you just hear in the audience, just, just, just, just, just,
• 29:08
  just cans opening it like, it was just brilliant, it was like, that was the level of audience
• 29:14
  participation, it was just wonderful, because again, in London particularly,
• 29:23
  theatre can get a little bit like Protestant mass, you know, everybody sits very,
• 29:30
  you know, basins, very quiet, they like church mice, and it's not proper to utter a sound,
• 29:38
  you know, you sort of think, you know, church, theatre and church, they influence one another,
• 29:46
  I think, you know, they're essentially the same, you know, when you take away the names and the
• 29:52
  symbols and the promo, you know, essentially, it's human beings trying to achieve the same
• 29:58
  sense of coherence, you know, so, anyway, in the age of secularization, you know, people just turn
• 30:06
  to the theatre darling, you know, it certainly do. It's interesting to hear all that because,
• 30:11
  like, your description of church and religion might you say, it's like, there's so much performance
• 30:16
  in it, but it's very, it's all performing in the name of sort of authenticity and God, but it's
• 30:20
  actually, to you, it sounds like it felt very inauthentic, whereas the actual out and out performing
• 30:25
  on stage, that, that was where authenticity was. Yes, yes, because authenticity, I think, is
• 30:31
  another word far, the coherence, you can all feel as a group, you know, you suddenly get the
• 30:39
  sense within yourself that everybody is communicating in a way that doesn't require language or any
• 30:47
  kind of symbol, you know, we're all surfing on the same radio frequency now, you know, and there's
• 30:52
  this awesome momentum, and that is, I think it's the same in sport, you know, it's the same in
• 30:59
  any kind of group activity, people are looking for that feeling, you know, at the kind of
• 31:03
  championship final or, or at a play or panto or whatever it is, you know, concert. It's essentially,
• 31:10
  I see now at this stage of my life, I see those things all essentially as the same pursuit, you know,
• 31:18
  music festivals, people are kind of going on a pilgrimage to get in alignment with each other,
• 31:24
  you know, at least for a while, and then they'll kind of fall away from each other again,
• 31:29
  and go back to work, you know, and, yeah, this is, you know, there are, there are sort of things
• 31:39
  that are endemic in our, in the human condition, and one of them is pilgrimage, and I think
• 31:45
  church is pilgrimage, theater is pilgrimage, concert, music festival is pilgrimage, big time,
• 31:51
  everybody goes out into a field and sort of changes bodily and mentally, often, after face on drugs,
• 31:59
  not always, you know, it's not always, yeah, change of condition, sleep, and in a tent, you know,
• 32:05
  these are challenging things, you know, but they're all thrown into the challenge together, you know,
• 32:12
  and that's pilgrimage, and it's outside of their comfort zone as well, it's like when you go to the
• 32:16
  cinema or to the theatre, you're stepping out of your home and you're going out, and even though,
• 32:20
  even if you're just going to the cinema, you know, you don't know what might happen, the film could
• 32:23
  be great, could be bad, you're experiencing it ideally with a big lot load of people all sort of
• 32:27
  reacting at the same time, there is something kind of very precious and kind of sacred, I think,
• 32:31
  about that, and if you look at the hero's journey of the heroes at home, everything is fine, the
• 32:38
  Hobbit, the Harry Potter, you know, he was upset in his foster home, wasn't he? But basically, you
• 32:44
  know, there's a sense of domesticity and stability, Luke Skywalker, Neo from The Matrix,
• 32:51
  all basically the same story, where they all have to leave home and go out into the scary
• 33:00
  hinterlands, and that's the same thing as we all do every day, you know, it's a sort of,
• 33:08
  it's a kind of, what do you call it, a kind of beach sheet for everyday life, you know, blown up
• 33:14
  to epic proportions, you know, even I was talking to my, well, she's my cousin's wife,
• 33:20
  she's more like my sister-in-law, and she was saying about having trouble with people at work,
• 33:26
  you know, and that thing of being at home and having to kind of steal herself emotionally,
• 33:31
  and then ruminating on what's going to happen, is there going to be an altercation when I see
• 33:35
  these people and all that, you know, and I was like, that's the hero's journey, you know,
• 33:40
  you're at home, and then you've to go into a cave and slay a dragon, you know, within yourself,
• 33:47
  the Pied Piper of Hamlin, it's like, we tell the same story over and over and over and over
• 33:52
  and over again to help us cope with daily life, you know. And they say that your intellect is your
• 33:58
  sword, like classically, and like you shouldn't leave home about your sword in those situations,
• 34:02
  let your home about your mind and your heart and soul really, to face those kind of challenges.
• 34:07
  Have you got challenges? Totally true, but intellect, I think, has to include a sense of agency
• 34:14
  over that fizzing confrontation that one can get when they're in a fight or in an argument where,
• 34:21
  you know, if you're not experienced in the ways of emotional intelligence, you know,
• 34:26
  because you've tapped your temple there, but if you're not experienced in that intelligence,
• 34:30
  you can completely lose the ability to speak, can't you? We've all been there, you know, and so
• 34:35
  sometimes in Western ideas, we forget about how important it is to be emotionally and kind of
• 34:42
  got and heart intelligent as well as sort of which I think comes about by taking the kind of
• 34:49
  laser point of focus and putting it inside our own bodies and kind of giving that value as well
• 34:56
  as like, oh, that external thing, that book, that degree, that, you know, those things are
• 34:59
  making me going to make me feel different inside, you know, but they ultimately won't,
• 35:05
  but they will, you know, they certainly will temporarily, but yeah, you know, it's true,
• 35:12
  you know, the sword I think is made up of the three brains, you know? Definitely.
• 35:17
  I remember Dustin Hoffman saying once when he was doing Tutsi, when he was playing, you know,
• 35:21
  that the Tutsi herself on screen and getting into character as a woman, and he noticed that
• 35:26
  something that women do that men don't do is they do, and for anyone, the listeners, you know,
• 35:30
  but watch it on YouTube, you can see what I'm doing. They do this, women do this a lot,
• 35:34
  but men don't really do that, and he said there was something so sort of spiritual and human about
• 35:38
  doing this, and I think that really relates to what you're saying up to me, like, it's the heart,
• 35:43
  it's what's inside, not just up here in the head. Yeah, because I think women have the right
• 35:47
  way around. I think they're far more innately. They're the woman in the room nodding, like, finally,
• 35:54
  a man acknowledges this from an innate perspective. There's this, I think, a woman has a sense,
• 36:01
  typically is a far superior sense of knowing what's going on with a person, you know, just by
• 36:08
  encountering them physically, you know? Then I think a lot of men know far more about what they
• 36:15
  think than what they feel, you know? And on the meditation journey, that was something that was
• 36:20
  a sort of an interesting development in me that I sort of developed a far greater sensitivity to
• 36:28
  that sort of feminine trait in the human character, to be like, oh god, I just had to sort of
• 36:34
  steal myself to other people's emotional energy more, you know? Because it was like,
• 36:39
  Jesus, you know, that person has a lot going on and they may not even be consciously aware of it,
• 36:48
  you know? But it's just vibrating through their biochemistry, you know? And that was annoying,
• 36:56
  it was tough, because then you kind of sort of build a sort of fortress. I've spoken to other women,
• 37:02
  they call it like my cape or my veil or, you know, walking through the world. It's interesting,
• 37:10
  yeah? Yeah. And that sort of heroes journey that we were talking about there, like, kind of even
• 37:14
  just as simple as getting up in the morning and going outside. I mean, how do you think,
• 37:18
  did you ever sort of think of your acting journey in those terms? Because it has been a journey,
• 37:22
  like, you know, going from Ireland and sort of doing theatre and small screen roles and then going
• 37:26
  up to bigger things, like red riding. I remember you say that red riding was like the thing that
• 37:31
  kind of changed things for you, career wise. Yeah, yeah, it did. And it's funny, you know,
• 37:37
  I was in the middle of doing a different film in Northern Ireland called Cherry Bomb and then
• 37:42
  got the script for red riding trilogy through and read them. And fairness, it was filming all day
• 37:48
  and read them in the evenings, kind of half knackered and couldn't make head nor tail of what was
• 37:54
  going on. And we're back to my agents and was like, I don't know what the fuck, I don't even know
• 37:58
  what this is about when I've read it. It's like, what, and they're like, no seriously, seriously,
• 38:03
  wow, trust us. It's really good. It's really good. That's okay. And then just sort of came up with
• 38:10
  something on the day and they really liked it. But, you know, I did, I would go through fierce
• 38:16
  bouts of anticipatory anxiety going into auditions, which is fairly typical, I think, for actors.
• 38:22
  And it's accumulative as well. It's more you're an actor, you're more like this terrible dragon
• 38:27
  rears itself up in you, you know, and you have to figure out ways of dealing with it.
• 38:32
  And but other than that, I was quite sort of coxure and fearless at that hour of my life, you know.
• 38:39
  It was less, there was less fear about leaving home, but there was no fear about like moving to
• 38:44
  London, there was no fear about doing anything, really. It was just sort of that kind of
• 38:51
  annoying accumulative anxiety in anticipation of doing an audition, you know. So you'd be in the
• 38:58
  toilets, like taking toilet roll and wiping your armpits, so you didn't have sweats and then
• 39:04
  going in there and going, hello, hello, hello, how's everybody today? I'm absolutely wonderful.
• 39:10
  You know, having to perform even before you start, you know, before the cameras rolling.
• 39:16
  Often that was the harder performance, yeah, which you'd know your lines, you know, you just
• 39:20
  needed to get your sort of social animal steady, you know. And like there's a bit in that play in
• 39:28
  dead about, I realized about auditioning that because my first audition was this highly adrenalized
• 39:36
  transcendent experience for me, I was 14 years old, so it was very formative, you know.
• 39:41
  And I realized that later on in life, through self-reflection that me auditioning, I wasn't the kind
• 39:48
  of pay dirt, wasn't necessarily even getting the job, it was just recreating that adrenalized
• 39:56
  transcendent, non-self experience again in the audition room, you know, where the self is so
• 40:03
  apparent, you know, where it's double-hard to be yourself. And by that I mean not really have
• 40:09
  a self, you know, or a referential self in that moment so that you can kind of act unencumbered
• 40:16
  and be unencumbered. So yes, so I was kind of like, if I'd reached that point in audition,
• 40:24
  I didn't get the job, I sort of didn't care, I was happy and content, you know.
• 40:28
  So it was just, it was an interesting thing, so I think a lot of us have formative experiences
• 40:33
  in our youth and then we unconsciously pursue those things as adults even if we don't know them.
• 40:39
  That we're doing that, you know, kind of chasing them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If we're not careful,
• 40:44
  we can be chasing for the rest of our lives, chasing is not, it's not ideal, like, because it's
• 40:52
  again, it's in the pursuit of something external, always, for a lot of lead-up misery.
• 41:02
  An angst. Yeah. And a lot of energy as well. Yeah. So like you're expanding a lot of energy on
• 41:07
  something which, you know, might not be the right direction. Yeah. You know, you're just like,
• 41:12
  that's what your kid wants. That's not necessarily what you want, you know. And the sort of, and
• 41:21
  I don't know, like, it's definitely objectively true that human beings these days remain
• 41:29
  less mature until they're biologically older. Maybe I've said that in a roundabout way, but I just
• 41:35
  mean, you know, people don't get married and people don't have kids until much later in life now
• 41:41
  compared to our parents' generation, certainly grandparents' generation. There was a sense of
• 41:46
  growing up fast. And that didn't mean emotionally that meant work, family, children, you know, now,
• 41:55
  because that's just the way it is. And because I suppose economic stability, we live in a time where
• 42:01
  we can devote so much of our energy to, like, things that we like, you know. And that's good,
• 42:08
  but it also arrests us in terms of maturation. And so we end up kind of dressing like we, a lot of
• 42:16
  us dressing like we did when we were teenagers and, you know, still wearing the superheroes on our
• 42:22
  tops that we liked when we were children. You know, and I think there's something wrong with that,
• 42:30
  you know, because your child is a valid part of yourself. But when you've grown up, when you've
• 42:36
  hit puberty and moved on, you have to become the master of your child and not the other way around,
• 42:43
  you know. And there's such a huge marketing machine in the world, especially in our business,
• 42:47
  for targeting that child within, you know, that sort of mirrors you in nostalgia.
• 42:55
  And that's not healthy. It's just not healthy, you know. It is sort of, it just arrests people
• 43:02
  emotionally, I think. I agree. And do you think there's like a sweet spot in the middle there?
• 43:06
  Because as you say, once you take away that sort of entrenched societal,
• 43:10
  it enforced notion of responsibilities of like, yeah, marriage, children, work,
• 43:16
  their own parents and grandparents had to deal with. And now that's kind of dissolved away.
• 43:20
  And now we're kind of, it's kind of a bit more like, do what they're willed, I guess, in some ways.
• 43:24
  In terms of you can pursue, you don't have to, you can grow up at your own pace. Do you think
• 43:28
  there's a sweet spot in the middle there where, because I agree, too much the way is there's
• 43:32
  a kind of arrested quality. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, with enough leisure and when things are
• 43:38
  easy, it can corrode the sense of will, you know, sense and determination. So the sweet spot has
• 43:45
  to include reintroducing intention going, actually, no, I want this and I'm going to work for it.
• 43:53
  And, you know, it's just, you know, the age old thing, you know, if it's to do with having children
• 44:00
  or it's to do with, but I think, you know, when things are really good, it just breeds complacency
• 44:07
  in people. And people get used to their situation very easy, don't they? Yeah, human beings are
• 44:12
  incredible adapters. Even if their situation isn't good, you know, they'd be like, well, you know,
• 44:17
  this is life, you know, absolutely. And not hope for change, but the sweet spot is the
• 44:24
  flying the flag for change and making things, I think, whatever better or more peaceful or,
• 44:31
  you know, whatever it is, following one's back, whatever that is, you know, and perhaps
• 44:37
  shutting this down more, you know, because this can be the death, I think, of what one truly
• 44:44
  is being led towards, you know, like I moved to the countryside a few years ago and I just,
• 44:50
  because I think through meditation, everything, there was just this deep, very, very deep
• 44:55
  voice that felt other in me coming up through going move to the country,
• 45:02
  be out and away out of the industrialized world and get, learn how to live in the countryside,
• 45:09
  where there are birds singing and there are trees swaying in the wind and there are bees and
• 45:14
  insects and all sorts around and you can kind of, you can nourish that world and I went, okay,
• 45:20
  now I have to go and nourish nature, you know, and actually very proudly thrilled because two days
• 45:29
  ago, after a much prep, me and a couple of pals planted 130 trees on my land. Wow, and like,
• 45:39
  we've got like, I've got 150 more sitting there ready to go, which is knackered, it was like
• 45:46
  seven o'clock in the evening still planting trees, like I'm falling asleep on my feet,
• 45:53
  my God, the profound satisfaction of planting all those beautiful trees and thinking, wow, they're
• 46:01
  going to be there for hundreds of years probably, you know, hopefully, if I have anything to do with it.
• 46:09
  Sounds like quite a lot, if you're planting like hundreds of trees, it sounds like quite a good
• 46:12
  spread, you've got that. Yeah, there's of land and about two and a half acres. What do you know?
• 46:17
  Yeah, not bad, because I want to say, because have you been recently doing up kind of renovating as
• 46:21
  well, kind of the house and the house and the land as well? Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, whipping it
• 46:26
  all into shape, you know, nice, yeah. And how far away are you from the kind of industrialised
• 46:31
  kind of centres, are you pretty far removed? About, well, you know, I've a town that's 10 minutes
• 46:38
  drive away, which is, you know, it's a fairly sizable town. It's not that big like, but it has
• 46:44
  everything you need. And then I've got a city about an hour and 15 away in the car if I'm driving
• 46:52
  illegally. And do you find the, yeah, being outside of those centres, you find peacefulness in that?
• 46:58
  Yeah, oh, I mean, oh, just a piece that's sort of characterised by
• 47:08
  absolutely jumping for joy, you know, pluttering around my land with a wheelbarrow.
• 47:15
  Just, it's just the happiest, it's just like a piece of paradise on earth, really and truly, you know?
• 47:22
  Yeah, really truly. So is it kind of the quiet domestic life kind of beckoning, do you think?
• 47:28
  Like, yeah, yeah, you know, I don't think I could go full animal husbandry because that requires
• 47:34
  being there on the daily, getting up a dawn, you know, to sort of tend to chickens and goats and
• 47:42
  cows and donkeys and whatever else, but I don't think I could do that. I still love travel too much,
• 47:49
  I mean, I still love going to London for the weekend and going to see a few mad things and
• 47:54
  catching up with friends and, you know, I've got this, I've got this wish now to go and do a really
• 48:00
  tough expedition style thing somewhere. I don't know where that is, but I think possibly in a desert
• 48:05
  or in a jungle, you know? So I've got this mad appetite to go and experience the world, yeah,
• 48:12
  yeah. So you kind of got that balance down of kind of maybe the quiet life and the adventure.
• 48:18
  Yeah, yeah, because it's taken two and a half years just to get sort of not even average good
• 48:26
  at living in the country, you know? And my part of the country is very wet, like it can be very
• 48:30
  relentless. And so you have to learn how to exist, I suppose, you know, and not have all your
• 48:38
  stuff get destroyed, you know? And my God, there are many things that can destroy your prize
• 48:44
  possessions, don't where I live. Myce, rats, mold, damp. Jesus Christ, you know. But it is, you know,
• 48:57
  so you just do all these things have to become second-aid. And also, sir, I have to learn how to kind
• 49:02
  of be kind of all right at making things as well, you know? And fixing things, you know, because
• 49:08
  you're hard to be broke waiting for trades, people in that to show up. Weeks you'd be waiting for,
• 49:14
  you know, and not that I can do electricianing or I can't, you know, can't do plumbing or any of that.
• 49:19
  But I'll have a goal now, you know? I'll have a proper goal. Whereas, you know, when I first moved
• 49:25
  to the country, I had total baby brain where I was just in awe of everything. It's like, oh my God,
• 49:30
  that's a rock wall. It's probably been there for over a hundred years. And I'm like, knock it.
• 49:36
  Knock it. It's in the way. You know, I've sort of got things the right way around now, not like,
• 49:43
  not giving life to dead things, you know, in the sacrifice of actual life, you know.
• 49:52
  So yeah, you know, it's interesting kind of being confronted by the part of your brain that
• 50:00
  are utterly undeveloped, you know? Yeah. So you're saying in a kind of a zombie apocalypse,
• 50:05
  you're building up those areas which would help you survive in the post-apocalypse. Oh yes.
• 50:10
  Absolutely. Big time. I think I could handle the zombies now.
• 50:16
  What would be your one? You have one tool slash weapon, let's say. What's your reckon?
• 50:23
  Oh, I mean, my brain immediately went baseball bat over the nail for it.
• 50:27
  But that's good weapon, but it's not really good tool, you know? Yeah, I mean, it'd be all right for
• 50:33
  minor digging, you know, sort of, you could, you could, you could put, you could potting, you know,
• 50:39
  you could put little useful little holes on the ground with it, but yeah, you wouldn't do much digging
• 50:43
  with it. No, you can maybe like, you could bore some holes and, you know, if you were hanging a
• 50:47
  picture, maybe, but like, you know, be a bit, you know, a bit destructive. You tricky, yeah. I'm
• 50:52
  always torn between like an axe or a shovel. That's good. Yeah, because you could have a good
• 50:58
  sharp edge and you could get some good digging done, you know. So that's all you need, really,
• 51:05
  is beheading zombies and planting plants, you know, and so your two main bases covered.
• 51:09
  Well, it worked, ensure that they're in the baseball, they're cricket bat and spade.
• 51:13
  And? And spade. It's a shovel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 51:17
  Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen that. Yeah, it was, it's anniversary yesterday, actually.
• 51:23
  Oh, really? Yeah, it's about 20 seconds. I want to say, yeah, 20 seconds. Oh, yes,
• 51:28
  when it came out, yeah. Did they ever make a shot at the dead too? No, like Hot Fuzz and World's End
• 51:33
  were kind of two sort of sequels, but not to end, not direct sequels. What are the, the
• 51:38
  Carnet O' Trillity? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard Eddie Marzan on your podcast talking about World's End.
• 51:44
  Yeah. Oh, Marzan. He's one of the best. He is a kind of, you know, talk about church and
• 51:51
  theatre and the likeness. He has a sort of wholeness listening to him, you know, because he sort
• 51:59
  of sees past the things that you know are seen as divisions by other people, you know, he's just
• 52:05
  just totally centered, isn't he? Certainly centered. And also, I'm very honest and true for,
• 52:10
  and you know, no bullshit in his performances or in just in himself, but he's very true.
• 52:17
  Yeah, he's a very pragmatic sort of person. He said that nice thing about acting where he's like
• 52:22
  see people kind of, you know, having sort of minor meltdowns on set or, or, or, you know,
• 52:29
  want to be actors and there's, oh, I could never do it. And it's just that they just,
• 52:33
  they have the idea of acting down completely wrong. They just think it's something else entirely.
• 52:41
  You're like, yeah, I feel that too, you know. But there you go, Eddie Marzan. Let's not
• 52:49
  nick all of Marzan's wisdom, put it on this because you subscribers have already heard that episode,
• 52:53
  so just be raking over Marzan's grave premature. Well, I'll go back to your career. I mean,
• 53:01
  so the first thing I would have seen you in, so sort of not too long after Red Riding would
• 53:06
  have been misfits, which I guess fits. Yes, I know, which was such a huge, huge show at the time.
• 53:12
  I mean, like, I mean, I went back and looked at it in the run up to this chat and it's still,
• 53:16
  for me, still holds up, right? You know, you're in your performance and the rest of the cast,
• 53:20
  like you are and Antonio and Lauren, like, it's such an incredible piece of work. I mean,
• 53:25
  talking about auditions, what you were saying earlier, like, do you remember, like, how you landed
• 53:28
  that role? Do you remember how that, what that process was like? Yeah, I came into the auditions
• 53:34
  quite late, I think. I'm not sure why that was. It was just probably a timing thing.
• 53:41
  And so I came in at the point where they were mixing and matching actors for the various roles.
• 53:46
  You know, so it was two rounds of that. The first round, you know, the last round, there was maybe
• 53:54
  five or six actors per role that we were in and we were all kind of milling about. And we're all
• 53:59
  sort of in between the ages of 19 and 25, you know, so we're all like, oh, oh, you, you, you,
• 54:07
  you know. And I remember the infernis to young me is credit. I sort of looked around the room and
• 54:13
  I could hear all these actors like socializing at 150 miles an hour, you know, me and going, oh,
• 54:19
  yeah, you know, I did this about that. And I was like, Rob, you could either have the chats to
• 54:24
  people now or you could come up with five funny things to say if there's any improv to be done
• 54:29
  in the room. So I did, I was like, I've got superpowers and whatever, you know, and I did that. I was like,
• 54:34
  no, that's basically funny. And then and just sat there for a bit and came up with some stuff and
• 54:40
  then got to got to use a fair bit of that in the room. And I was like, delighted with myself.
• 54:48
  And then, yeah, that was it really. I came away kind of thinking, I think I probably got that,
• 54:57
  you know, and it was just because they thought, oh, he's really good off the cuff, you know.
• 55:03
  So I thought, you know, while everybody else was chatting and bolstering in the green room,
• 55:08
  you know. So, yeah, so I was, it was pretty, it was pretty quick, really, the auditioning process.
• 55:18
  It was within a couple of weeks and then into the show. But then, you know, to the credit of the
• 55:24
  production of Miss Fitz, they threw us all together in a rehearsal space for like two weeks before
• 55:31
  we filmed anything. And by day two, we were all thickest teams, you know. And day three or four,
• 55:37
  then they put us on a mini-boss and made us go out to some like military obstacle course out
• 55:43
  near Gatwick, right? And we were sat, we sat in a mini-boss and I was like, I'm not going to do it.
• 55:49
  I'm just not going to do it. I don't have the right clothes, you know, they say we're supposed to
• 55:53
  bring like jumpsuits and whatever. I don't have a jumpsuit. And then they were like, we have,
• 55:59
  we have jumpsuits for you. Don't worry about that. And you're like, oh, yeah, but like, we're all kind
• 56:04
  of on the bus going like, what were you? Why is this? And then so we were like at the starting
• 56:08
  line of this obstacle course. They were like, right, three, two, one, go. And it was like waiting
• 56:13
  through mud, under barbed wire, jumping over stuff. And there's these military guys shouting and
• 56:19
  roaring at us in camels, right? And blowing whistles at us. And by the end of it, we were like,
• 56:26
  looks like we've been through World War Two, you know? The last of us were kind of staggering
• 56:31
  over the finish line. We were like, come on, come on, you could do it again. We were like crying
• 56:36
  and sweating, covered in muck. And it was just really clever of them, you know, to kind of really
• 56:42
  bond us as a group. And I think a lot of that showed up on the screen, you know, because I,
• 56:48
  you know, going back to that kind of emotional sensitivity thing, sometimes you watch films and
• 56:52
  television, you go, none of these actors are remotely comfortable, you know? They're saying
• 56:59
  they're lines, they're doing their thing. But they've never been in the room before, you know?
• 57:03
  And you can tell a hundred fucking yards away. And you just think, do you think we can't tell?
• 57:09
  Like, you know, you've created this whole world. But at the center of it, you have a bunch of
• 57:16
  people who have no idea who, you know, they've never, they don't know each other, you know?
• 57:21
  And bigger the things are, the less rehearsal they dedicate to the thing, which is
• 57:28
  completely topsy to bizarre, in my opinion, you know? Because they think, I think is, you know,
• 57:36
  scheduling and, you know, the Hollywood system and they're getting the, you know, the most
• 57:41
  in-demand actors to come in and they just expect to come in and do your thing and be prepared,
• 57:47
  you know? And if you get the good actor that everyone likes, on screen, saying their lines,
• 57:54
  I mean, that's the value in it. And you go, well, no, I mean, it's about the connectivity,
• 57:59
  it's a, we all exist in relativity, don't we? We exist in the spaces between each other, you know?
• 58:06
  And so I just find that baffling and imagine how much better films and tell you would be,
• 58:11
  if they just gave that a bit more credence and a bit more weight. I complain about that in my book
• 58:19
  as well. Well, I think you're absolutely right, like even just going back and watching that first
• 58:24
  episode. So I don't know what order you guys would have shot it in, but like from the first scene,
• 58:29
  you just feel that, that connectivity, that, as you say, that kind of relativity, the chemistry
• 58:34
  between the, you know, the whole, the group of you is just immediately apparent. And like I say,
• 58:39
  like, you know, and like, and each of those parts is perfectly cast like yourself and then you
• 58:44
  earn and then, you know, Lauren, like everyone is just at the top of their game, out straight out the
• 58:48
  game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what are your memories of working with those guys? I mean, because it seems
• 58:52
  like you guys, as you say, were really close. Yeah, we were really, really close, yeah. It's really,
• 58:57
  really fun memories, really, really fun memories. And unsaid, you know, they let us, they were
• 59:03
  completely permissive in terms of just letting us dick around, delay filming, wander off, you know,
• 59:10
  practical joke each other, taking the piss, but they just were just, just highly encouraging
• 59:16
  of all that, because they just wanted all that kind of, you know, that silliness and sort of
• 59:23
  immaturity and defiance, you know, all those things that sort of characterize those
• 59:28
  people at that hour of their lives, they wanted all that on camera. So there was never a moment
• 59:32
  of like, right now, listen, let's be professional, you know, never any of that, you know. So it was
• 59:37
  just a playground. It was absolute playground to work on. It was just, yeah, it was just,
• 59:43
  it was just really, really wonderful. It was hard work, you know, it was really hard work. We were,
• 59:47
  we were just, we lived and breathed it for months on end, you know, it was tough, but
• 59:54
  it was very, very surreal, you know, we finished the show and then we watched the first episode of
• 1:00:00
  it on television. And then like the following week or week after that, we won the BAFTA for
• 1:00:07
  best series, you know. And you got nominated as well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Lauren Sarkar and
• 1:00:14
  it was just all very like, Jesus Christ, this is just, you know, because you're at an age where you're
• 1:00:20
  just endlessly regenerative. So you just think, well, this has happened pretty easy, you know,
• 1:00:25
  you look back, you're like, no, we worked really hard on it, you know. So it was just lovely,
• 1:00:30
  yeah, it was really just, you know, of course we were going out then like lunatics of the weekend
• 1:00:35
  and like just partying like mad and just, yeah, it was just, it was a magical, magical time,
• 1:00:42
  really magical. And I was living in Covent Garden, can you believe? In a flat,
• 1:00:48
  in Covent Garden, well, making misfits. In this really nice flat, it's almost managed to land
• 1:00:53
  this very, very nice flat, lost the security deposit, of course, because the rap party ended up
• 1:01:02
  in the flat afterwards. And then for some reason, in a fit of drunken spontaneity, Iuan punched one
• 1:01:10
  of the windows and broke it. Oh my god. And broke all the, it was four floors up. So broke all the glass
• 1:01:18
  outwards into the alleyway outside, which is where you come out downstairs and walk out, right?
• 1:01:24
  And then the land lady, who was a, who was an eccentric woman, she was a bit sort of
• 1:01:30
  flappy and can worry some, she said, well, what happened to the window? And I went, oh, you're never
• 1:01:38
  a guest, right? I said, you never guess. I was sitting, I was sitting in the bedroom and all
• 1:01:46
  of a sudden I heard a big bang on the window. And I came in and all the glass was broken inside
• 1:01:53
  and there was like feathers and blood. A bird's pigeon just come flying out of nowhere,
• 1:02:01
  smashed the glass, would you believe it? And then she came back and went, well, that's obviously not
• 1:02:07
  true. Because there was glass found in the alleyway. And then she sent, right? She sent a big
• 1:02:16
  long letter with, you know, she took the money out to repair the window. And there was a very,
• 1:02:20
  very, very tiny bit of money left in the form of a check. And she sent the letter in the check
• 1:02:26
  to the production company of misfits, not to me, with the complaint letter saying how bad my
• 1:02:33
  behavior had been. It's like, fuck you, you fucking bitch. You know what I mean? Trying to
• 1:02:39
  fucking character assassinate me like, but they just got the letter. It was laughing at and go,
• 1:02:45
  I don't know why she sent this to us, but I remember one quote from it going,
• 1:02:51
  Russell Crowe-esque behavior. I was quite proud of that. But that was all, that was the only
• 1:02:56
  damage we caused. You know, that was the only thing. Everything else was very responsible.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah. But yeah, it didn't throw the fridge out the window. You said something interesting
• 1:03:04
  earlier, which was like when you were that age, you felt kind of, kind of fearless. You felt like
• 1:03:10
  you were kind of maybe almost bulletproof, like going into auditions and getting interacting.
• 1:03:14
  And I was running about that because the, you know, playing Nathan, who obviously his power is
• 1:03:19
  his immortality, you know, his central qualities, his kind of fearlessness and his kind of
• 1:03:24
  youthful kind of sense of just like, you know, of I'm immortal. This is who I am.
• 1:03:29
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think there was any crossover at the time between you and Nathan?
• 1:03:33
  Do you think like you kind of fed into the character and how it was developed?
• 1:03:37
  Yeah, you know, I was, years later in reflection made me go, God, I used to know a lot about
• 1:03:44
  kind of my own opinions, but not a lot about what I felt about things, you know. And I think,
• 1:03:50
  you know, a good casting director, good filmmakers and that can see that in an actor, you know,
• 1:03:57
  see that quality. I'll be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that person has the germ
• 1:04:03
  of what we want for this character, you know, without having to, without speaking a word, you know,
• 1:04:10
  they somehow embody things, you know. And so, yeah, I kind of, I think I kind of swaggered
• 1:04:15
  around with the kind of cock sureness that lent itself to Nathan, yeah, because I know you've got a
• 1:04:21
  great improvisational energy as well. I mean, even looking at something like umbrella academy,
• 1:04:25
  that line of, like, you know, my father's, I'll give him a call, but he's playing chess with tennis
• 1:04:31
  of Hitler. So that was improvised, I want to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those lines. So you've
• 1:04:35
  clearly have a good sort of vibe and knack for just coming out with great improv nuggets, I guess.
• 1:04:41
  There was one on misfits. It was the Christmas one where, like Nathan has a sort of love story with
• 1:04:50
  this Welsh girl and she's pregnant by someone else. She's heavily pregnant. And we have this sex
• 1:04:57
  scene that happens in the locker room. And Nathan was kind of doing her from behind, right?
• 1:05:06
  And he's sort of rubs her belly and goes, it's like having a threesome.
• 1:05:14
  And they all laugh, they're like, no, we can't, we couldn't, we can possibly. It's just far
• 1:05:21
  to disgusting and indecent. So that didn't end up, Nathan was on the cutting room floor.
• 1:05:28
  On the cutting room floor, those fools. But yeah, we're always thrown stuff in, you know.
• 1:05:37
  I remember they get on mortal engines. The producers came to me and they're like,
• 1:05:40
  they're, everyone's really lively while we're getting and everything, but they're a little bit
• 1:05:44
  concerned about how much improv you're doing. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, the script goes through
• 1:05:53
  a lot of approvals and, you know, we kind of have to sort of stick to what we've come up with.
• 1:05:57
  And I was like, okay, all right, you know. Anyway, there you go. I think it's sort of a film set
• 1:06:06
  or any sort of set that sort of curbs spontaneity, I think, is not a great idea, you know.
• 1:06:14
  There was a good one actually, well, we're on it. There was a good one on the film Moonwalkers,
• 1:06:17
  I don't know if you saw that, where my character has taken mushrooms before filming a fake moon
• 1:06:24
  landing, right, where he's, where he's Neil Armstrong, yeah, I was playing Neil Armstrong.
• 1:06:30
  And it's taken all these mushrooms, right? And we're about to go on, we're in our spacesuits.
• 1:06:36
  And Rupert Grint, I tell him, I was like, I'm not after taking learn of mushrooms.
• 1:06:42
  And he's like, why have you done that, mate? It's not a time for me. Like, I was like, I know,
• 1:06:46
  I can hear what you're saying, but right now, my penis is whispering to me,
• 1:06:51
  and it's telling me that my parents are cousins, but I don't think they are.
• 1:06:58
  So that was a good moment.
• 1:07:00
  Hmm, where's that line in with the Dexter Fletcher has in that episode of Misfits?
• 1:07:03
  Yeah, because he plays your dad and he says, because you come out like, you know, I'm really
• 1:07:07
  tall and you're freakishly short. And then he goes like, where'd you get this stuff? And he goes like,
• 1:07:10
  I don't know, it just comes out. And that's how it is.
• 1:07:16
  God, you had to be years, years since I've watched Misfits.
• 1:07:21
  You know, maybe I've become a little bit too suspicious of memory lane.
• 1:07:24
  Maybe I should allow myself a little look.
• 1:07:27
  Well, as I say, I think it still holds up. And some of the, like you were saying,
• 1:07:31
  with about that scene with, you know, sort of Nathan's girlfriend in the Christmas special,
• 1:07:35
  like, Nathan out of all the characters, if I like, he had the most extreme behavior,
• 1:07:40
  like, he had the most out there stuff usually happened because of, or,
• 1:07:45
  you know, because of Nathan or to Nathan. And like, like, stuff like, you know, like,
• 1:07:49
  the scene of you and Roof, the odd lady and the first series, Shaggy, the odd lady.
• 1:07:53
  And then like, shitting the rabbit out of your ass in the, in the, in the biggest pit.
• 1:07:56
  Like, it's mental. Yeah, did you ever like, bulk it any of that? When you read the script,
• 1:08:00
  you're like, all of it. Yeah. All the constant bulking. But at the same time,
• 1:08:06
  you're kind of pinching yourself going, this is just, I can't believe I get to do this
• 1:08:09
  magic on telly. This is just wonderful. And I suppose approaching it with such relish
• 1:08:17
  and with a, a, a dollop of gratitude meant kind of bringing that kind of youthful fearlessness
• 1:08:26
  to it. You know, I remember once actually it was a nice moment where there was a sort of slow,
• 1:08:31
  slow motion sequence of Nathan putting sun cream on himself. It was me like,
• 1:08:39
  trying to impress Kelly in that. And we're like, you're loving it. It's like it looks skinny,
• 1:08:44
  spindly, pencil-y, little twats. And I think Daniel Kaluuya put out a tweak on my god,
• 1:08:54
  Robert Sheeran is fearless or something. And it's like, oh, you know, this is funny,
• 1:08:58
  because it didn't really occur to me, generally, that would, that would put the shits of all the
• 1:09:04
  people. I think because the environment was just so, it was very, very nurturing and permissive.
• 1:09:13
  And it just meant, you know, just meant we, we had the license to do anything. We really did.
• 1:09:19
  Yeah, that freedom to kind of fail in that kind of, and just, and to try, just try things.
• 1:09:23
  The more we failed, the more they left. It was just, it was a win-win.
• 1:09:29
  And do you have a favorite kind of, like, I see, or like, line of Nathan,
• 1:09:32
  something that you're kind of a quirk that you got to do that you was like, oh, that was,
• 1:09:36
  I was particularly pleased with that. There was a line where he said,
• 1:09:42
  he's talking about, I can't remember what character he's talking about,
• 1:09:45
  where he'd had this one night stand with this girl, you know. And they're like, oh,
• 1:09:49
  no, that's terrible. He fucking, she, she knows you. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I mean,
• 1:09:54
  we had this great night. I mean, everything was going really well. And then I tripled myself.
• 1:10:00
  And he goes, was that, was that mean? He was tripping myself. You know, where you come,
• 1:10:07
  you can shit yourself all at once. It's just like, it's just the most, like, immature,
• 1:10:17
  pure island nonsense. It was just great, you know, but there was an art to it, you know. Yeah.
• 1:10:23
  But I get a lot of people, quote in lines, back at me, like, the,
• 1:10:28
  you'd, what was it? You'd shag your own sister for a slice of cheese.
• 1:10:32
  We literally were quite in that one in the office this, yesterday, this morning. Yeah.
• 1:10:37
  Yeah, that's great, isn't it? So I don't have a sister. It's like, that makes it all the worse.
• 1:10:43
  You fucking purpose. Yeah. It felt like a show that you could kind of get away with anything,
• 1:10:50
  really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, looking back on it, the way it was made and the way,
• 1:10:54
  like you say, it was quite a sort of that environment of rehearsal and then the cast being so perfectly
• 1:10:58
  put together. And then, and just the way TV was made, then, like, you know, the way it kind of,
• 1:11:02
  it's very compressed, like it doesn't stop moving. It's just full to the point. Yeah.
• 1:11:05
  It had a real spiciness immediately. Totally. Yeah. I mean, if you think it was made today,
• 1:11:10
  do you think it would be different? Do you think it could be made today? Like that?
• 1:11:14
  Yeah. I think so. Yeah. You know, I think we, you know, despite all the age of political correctness,
• 1:11:23
  I don't think, you know, mad irreverence has gone anywhere. You know, I think as long as it's
• 1:11:30
  funny or it's attempting to be funny, then it's worthwhile, you know. Never had people's expense,
• 1:11:35
  of course. So I think, yeah, absolutely, it could be made. You know, you know, I think like,
• 1:11:44
  there's been a huge adjustment in television and films, more television, really,
• 1:11:48
  you know, because you've got sort of these broadcasters that are public service broadcasters,
• 1:11:54
  but also privately-run broadcasters, you know, who all have feel a sense of responsibility
• 1:12:00
  to represent, you know. And that means sort of telling stories of people who are not,
• 1:12:07
  I suppose, gender typical, or they're not part of the majority race, whatever else.
• 1:12:14
  And that's very, very worthy stuff. It's great that that's happened. You've seen stories
• 1:12:19
  you've never seen before, but I think sometimes with that stuff, the writing can get overly cautious.
• 1:12:26
  And when writing is aware of its audience, it just becomes really shit, I think, really mediocre
• 1:12:31
  and beige. And so as long as whoever was writing the modern day misfits wasn't worried about
• 1:12:37
  offending their audience, then it would be great, you know. Yeah. And then when it came to decision
• 1:12:43
  to leave the show, I mean, what was your thinking behind that? Was it just a sense of like,
• 1:12:48
  I want to, I've done my time, I want to try something. Yeah, basically that, you know, I was so,
• 1:12:53
  I was so sort of flighty, it was only 20 in 21 when we made the show. And it was a very sort of like,
• 1:13:01
  I was hungry, I wanted to try lots of different things. And I had a real appetite for a variation.
• 1:13:08
  And I had a real sort of a suspicion of being typecast, you know. And when I, when people turned
• 1:13:15
  around to me, we were like, I can't believe you would have left. I was like, what do you mean?
• 1:13:19
  Of course, I was going to leave, you know, I was only contracted for two series, you know,
• 1:13:25
  but they were like, yeah, but it's just successful in that. You're like, well, so will the next thing
• 1:13:30
  be, you know what I mean? And I kind of, you know, it was out of a sense of professional ignorance
• 1:13:36
  definitely, you know. I mean, if I had my time again, I don't know if I would have, if I had known
• 1:13:42
  at what I know now, you know, would I have left, I don't know, but I, yeah, I remember being
• 1:13:53
  really sort of gobsmacked by people's reaction to me leaving. But ultimately, I was glad I left,
• 1:14:01
  you know. It seemed to some like almost a sense of heartbreak like, oh my god, I can't believe
• 1:14:05
  they've gone. Yeah, yeah, which I guess must be quite strange being the actor behind that character,
• 1:14:10
  like, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was nice sort of, but I think, you know, of course,
• 1:14:18
  it's great to, especially with a show that you've helped to create kind of thing, you know,
• 1:14:23
  your part of the DNA of it, to kind of be with it for the length of it. But in the case of
• 1:14:29
  misfits, and this is the case with many TV shows, the writing got delegated after season two,
• 1:14:36
  you know, quite substantially. I don't know how much the Howard Overman, who's the creator,
• 1:14:42
  had written the first two seasons. And he had been developed very, very well by the producers and
• 1:14:49
  fairness, you know. And then they got sort of staff writers in, you know, who were young and trendy
• 1:14:57
  to kind of write the show. And I think when that happens, sometimes a show is at risk of becoming
• 1:15:04
  a kind of pastiche of itself, you know, becoming a bit self-aware, you know. It's not just when
• 1:15:12
  it's not just one person's vision. Yeah, yeah, it's people going, oh, you know, what you know,
• 1:15:17
  it's very misfits is this, you know, sort of something of the kind of originality can get lost.
• 1:15:24
  And I think, to be honest, you know, I enjoyed the third season of misfits. I must confess,
• 1:15:31
  this is a mad thing, but I actually never watched seasons four and five. It's not terrible to say,
• 1:15:37
  it's just, you know, I just kind of never got round to it, you know. I'm sure it's brilliant,
• 1:15:42
  you know, a lot of people love the show right to the end. And it's not like I stopped loving the
• 1:15:48
  show. It's just like I kind of, you know, I just sort of just, you know, but, you know, of the bit
• 1:15:57
  of three, I thought I thought all the acting was fantastic, but some of the writing had gone a
• 1:16:01
  bit pastiche, yeah. So I just was, you know, it kind of made me go, wow, I didn't see that coming
• 1:16:08
  at the time, but how could I, you know, but in a way, it made me glad that I did leave when I did,
• 1:16:16
  you know, maybe you almost became a bit too extravagant like some of the concepts like the zombies
• 1:16:22
  and lots of sort of quite big job elements kind of came in. Dr. Who, you know, where there's kind of
• 1:16:29
  gimmicky bad guys every week. I mean, that wasn't what the show was when it first began.
• 1:16:35
  It's like what sort of curious superpowers or villainous powers can we invent, you know,
• 1:16:44
  for it to kind of, to become the adversity for the heroes, you know,
• 1:16:52
  and like, you know, it's hard to write many series of television. It's really, really hard to keep
• 1:16:57
  it going, I think, you know, but it's, especially, you know, there's so many forces at play,
• 1:17:05
  you know, when something starts making money and you know, it starts, you know, that has a huge
• 1:17:12
  can have a big corrosive effect on the material going forward, you know, because then there's this
• 1:17:18
  pressure to not fuck up the thing that everybody loves, you know. What did you find that on?
• 1:17:26
  Because obviously, the projects you've worked on have been some of those big, you know,
• 1:17:31
  series, things like misfits, but also, of course, umbrella academy, a huge series. I mean,
• 1:17:35
  did you find what you were saying there about the kind of pressure of a show, the size of that?
• 1:17:40
  Did you find that on umbrella academy as well? Yeah, well, there was a sense of pressure
• 1:17:46
  when we went back to shoot the second series of umbrella academy, because the first series,
• 1:17:50
  we were all ignorant and it was a bit like the first series of misfits, actually.
• 1:17:55
  Now, we're all just flouncing around and, you know, nobody really knew what the show was going
• 1:18:00
  to be yet, you know, I mean, people didn't, the people who were making the show, the directors,
• 1:18:06
  Steve, Overlord, producer, head showrunner, you know, of course, they had a never-kid,
• 1:18:16
  instrumental person, the cinematographer, throughout the four seasons of umbrella,
• 1:18:21
  he was the person who kind of conceived of the look and the feel. And, you know, same with
• 1:18:27
  misfits, actually, both misfits and umbrella academy had a really, really distinctive look and a feel,
• 1:18:33
  that kind of odored the world from the real world, you know, sort of just heightened it in ways
• 1:18:39
  to do with color and shadow and camera angle and both were very, very distinctive, you know.
• 1:18:45
  And so those guys were in a room going, right? You know, they knew the show they were making,
• 1:18:50
  but we, the actors kind of, you know, didn't ultimately couldn't conceive of the world before
• 1:18:56
  the world is presented to us in the final edit, you know. And so there was a great sort of
• 1:19:02
  unknowing, which was freeing in the first series. And it's not like suddenly it became very
• 1:19:08
  difficult to play that same character in the second season, not at all. In fact, some of my
• 1:19:13
  favorite stuff of Klaus, the character I play, is in the second season, where he's trying to run
• 1:19:18
  away from this mad cult that he's created. Yeah, then he's like, you know, everyone, I'm a complete
• 1:19:24
  fake. And everything I said is kind of borrowed and made up. So anyway, listen, you should all just
• 1:19:33
  go home now. And I don't believe it. Yeah, they're like, oh, they're too invested in it. And I
• 1:19:41
  really, really loved all that stuff. So like, I don't think the material suffered, but the atmosphere
• 1:19:47
  on set tightened up, definitely, because there was more budget. There was more to lose, you know,
• 1:19:55
  because we had this big show and the first season was so successful. So there was a bit of an
• 1:20:01
  atmosphere of, you know, crew members tiptoeing around you, you know, with the energy of, please
• 1:20:06
  don't get me fired, please don't get me fired, please don't get me fired, you know. And he's like,
• 1:20:10
  and I just hadn't really fully experienced that before. And I recoiled from that, you know, I was like,
• 1:20:19
  you know, I just, I went into myself a little bit more in the second series, didn't, couldn't quite
• 1:20:26
  figure out how to let myself fully enjoy the filming of the second series. On set, I mean,
• 1:20:32
  off set, I was having an absolute ball in summer in Toronto of 2019.
• 1:20:40
  It's just magic, like the summers they have are just paradise, you know. So yeah, basically,
• 1:20:46
  there was this suddenly, there was this atmosphere of, right, we have this thing and we can't
• 1:20:51
  fuck it up, you know. So that was it. And like it, you know, season three and four, I think,
• 1:20:58
  me personally was about finding peace with that environment, you know. And I think, you know,
• 1:21:05
  that environment sort of came in waves, you know, there was times when it was ultra intense. And then
• 1:21:11
  series three of umbrella, which we shot in beginning the winter of 2021, like the height of
• 1:21:18
  lockdown, you know, excuse me, was intense in another way because there was like loads of extra
• 1:21:25
  actors on set, television making in Canada had been classed as a vital service, you know,
• 1:21:33
  as if, you know. But it meant that we were all working and there was loads of TV and film being
• 1:21:39
  made in Toronto, like arguably more than ever, you know, in the middle of the Covid. But like the
• 1:21:46
  laws were just utterly insane, you know, all of the ways that you had to behave yourself. And then
• 1:21:52
  I think, you know, the Covid brought out a lot of like social Nazism, you know. And that was the
• 1:21:58
  thing that made me the most allergic people going around wagging their fingers at everybody.
• 1:22:05
  And so there was a lot of that kind of strain, but that kind of eased off as well as the series
• 1:22:11
  went on. And then series four, I was just like, you know, I was just like little Buddha wandering
• 1:22:17
  around going, I don't care if this actor is bitching and moaning about something. It's like it's
• 1:22:22
  just water off a duck's back, you know. So it's, it taught me a kind of a, a different kind of
• 1:22:30
  fortuity over time, making umbrella, because in making big stuff in America, in the Americas,
• 1:22:37
  say broadly, is far more hierarchical. You know, everybody knows their place a bit more,
• 1:22:48
  it's a bit like the military or something, you know. And people like, you know, the word on set is
• 1:22:53
  and now in Ireland as well, like because Ireland has a lot of studios now and they've big stuff
• 1:22:58
  coming in and they just shot that show Wednesday there again. You know, there are few friends of
• 1:23:04
  minor crew members and set builders and everything and they are told, under no certain circumstances,
• 1:23:09
  to do not speak to the actors. Really? Don't look at them, don't speak to them, you know.
• 1:23:14
  And you're like, that is so fucking, that's such an American imposition, you know, being
• 1:23:24
  being printed upon a culture where you don't need to do that. You don't, like in Ireland, it's
• 1:23:31
  far, far, far less hierarchical. Yeah. And it was interesting because I just shot a TV series
• 1:23:39
  for Netflix and it's a full, almost entire Irish cast, it's about an Irish family in South Dublin
• 1:23:47
  based on a book by Marion Keys. And it was, it was a very, very different experience.
• 1:23:54
  It's just like, you know, just everyone having the crack, taking the piss out of each other,
• 1:23:59
  you know, every, you know, there was just far more, far more equanimity, I'd say. More egalitarian,
• 1:24:05
  kind of. Yeah, but, yeah, it was more equal. Yeah, yeah, whereas, you know, you're, you're
• 1:24:09
  factioned off a bit more into your, into your departments in North America. That's the way it
• 1:24:16
  works for them. I think that comes with money, you know, because the symptom of money is ego,
• 1:24:22
  you know, and ego wants to claim the latter, you know, ambition. And then the ambition wants to
• 1:24:28
  represent itself by, oh, I need a bigger trailer. Yeah. Yeah. And so that start becomes endemic
• 1:24:34
  then into the system where they just assume that you're selfish and ambitious and that manifests
• 1:24:41
  itself as wanting to be alone all day, even when you're with other people, you know. It's a
• 1:24:48
  weird one, you know, I love being with people, you know, but I'm from a smaller place with far
• 1:24:53
  less population density and far less guns, you know, and far less kind of manifest destiny, you know,
• 1:25:01
  far less kind of self-servingness built into the DNA of their culture, you know. So it's sort of
• 1:25:10
  appaft. Yeah. To be honest, that's why it was so nice to get to do a Netflix thing with a
• 1:25:17
  Netflix wage in Ireland, right? You didn't have to travel to, you know, else much much better. Yeah.
• 1:25:24
  You didn't have to travel to fucking raging wild west Trump o'clock, you know, to go and do my job,
• 1:25:32
  you know, and I think the show we did, it's called grown ups. I think it's brilliant. I've seen
• 1:25:35
  chunks of it. And the first half of it was directed by Gryff James Griffiths, who just directed
• 1:25:43
  that ballad of Wallace Island. Oh, great. Should have him, actually. He's a beautiful character
• 1:25:50
  film. So he has this really just beautifully sensitive and kind eye and spirit, you know.
• 1:26:00
  And it's sort of, you know, the show is about these people who are all emotionally fucked
• 1:26:03
  in their own special ways. But what I think what's different about it, you know, compared
• 1:26:09
  to other shows that are about the rarefied rich of the world is that the gaze of the camera
• 1:26:16
  say is all about compassion, you know. It's about like you feel like the guard of, you
• 1:26:25
  know, the gaze, the watcher of this show really loves these characters despite what they
• 1:26:30
  do, you know. And I really, and that was all the writing as well, it was in the writing
• 1:26:35
  by Sam Strauss, who's an absolutely stunning screenwriter who wrote that show apple cider
• 1:26:42
  vinegar and she's done many other things, you know. That kind of what you said there
• 1:26:47
  about that kind of yuck feeling of like of all of that kind of bullshit that goes on
• 1:26:52
  on like a big set and the kind of not be it. The crew members not being encouraged, not
• 1:26:56
  to speak to the actors. Yeah, yeah. On Ollum Breller Academy then, was that like, did
• 1:27:00
  the other cast members feel the same way that you did? Like, because, again, like, you
• 1:27:04
  know, we must say, like, that's another great cast that you've worked with Elliot Page
• 1:27:07
  and Tom Hopper. Like, did you all feel that what you just described there about that feeling
• 1:27:11
  a bit like, oh, we can't put this up? It's a day feel the same way. I don't know. I
• 1:27:15
  mean, I don't know if I could speak for them on that, you know. I'm not sure to be honest,
• 1:27:20
  you know. I really don't know if they felt that as sensitively as I did. I'm not sure,
• 1:27:27
  you know. I know that, for example, Tom Hopper had done a big, big, big show American thing,
• 1:27:34
  black sales for years. I think they did, like, four or five seasons of that. So, you
• 1:27:38
  know, he was, you know, well-inducted into that sort of culture of thing. Again, I don't
• 1:27:44
  know, black sales was like that, never spent a day on that set. And, yeah, I mean, I
• 1:27:50
  couldn't tell you, you know, I mean, you don't know. But it's interesting to hear that
• 1:27:54
  because about your, sort of, that set feeling kind of, by sounds of it, kind of a bit
• 1:27:59
  uncomfortable, a bit eggshell, turning on eggshells. Quite formal, you know. Yeah, quite
• 1:28:04
  formal. And it was funny, you know, coming on to grownups and noticing a certain feeling
• 1:28:13
  in my body, a certain formal feeling, you know, that was dare-automatic since some
• 1:28:18
  relatives bringing it on and going, I don't need this. This doesn't serve me here, you
• 1:28:26
  know. Yeah, get rid of this feeling. Just get rid of this formality, you know, that I'm
• 1:28:30
  imposing on a very, very informal set, you know. And so, I managed to kind of clear that
• 1:28:38
  away, which is nice. Because everyone on a film set, you know, I remember something
• 1:28:43
  that Tom Cruise once said about his films, it was just, you know, like, if someone comes
• 1:28:47
  up to him and says, oh, you know, I'm going to help you make your movie. He's like, no,
• 1:28:50
  don't say that. It's our movie, you know, everyone, even if whether you're a focus
• 1:28:53
  puller or a lead actor or a director, everyone is making everyone's part of the process.
• 1:28:57
  Yeah. Everyone's important. They are, you know, especially, you know, the focus puller
• 1:29:02
  and like anyone who's like turning the gears of that thing, that's where it's made,
• 1:29:11
  you know, we get all the, we get pushed to the fore, the actors and go, oh, well, I tell
• 1:29:16
  you the story that happened on set, you know, as sort of half sort of doing the pretending
• 1:29:22
  in the show and then half doing the PR, you know. But really, that's, we're just scapegoat
• 1:29:28
  so that the people who do all the real work in film and television, you know, can remain,
• 1:29:35
  I suppose, where they want to be, which is around the camera. That's where I think
• 1:29:41
  60 to 70% of the artistry of the job is done, you know.
• 1:29:48
  Would you ever go work behind the camera yourself? Would you ever be tempted to pick up a camera
• 1:29:53
  and direct or... Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah, possibly. There's a thing I wrote recently, I thought,
• 1:30:01
  if I had a very, very good kind of experienced cinematographer, in fact, I have a cinematographer
• 1:30:07
  in my head who I worked with once and it's like, I just, he works really fast, you know,
• 1:30:13
  a lot of handheld. And I was like, I think, yeah, I could direct something, you know, because the
• 1:30:18
  thing I wrote was very like, very actory, of course, you know. But I'm doing, you know, I'm writing
• 1:30:25
  a lot of things now, I'm trying to get things off the ground like everybody else, you know.
• 1:30:29
  I've written a few films and... But yeah, that one thing, I think, I could well,
• 1:30:38
  I could well step into those shoes, maybe, you know, it's the first time I've ever thought that.
• 1:30:43
  And is it like a short film or a feature or... It's a feature film at the moment, you know.
• 1:30:49
  But the way independent film market is I'm thinking, maybe this could just be a series of YouTube clips,
• 1:30:55
  just make the same thing and just chop it into, you know, 50 clips and go, there you go, YouTube, you
• 1:31:01
  know, here's a bunch of shorts for you. Who cares, you know, it's all the same, you know,
• 1:31:06
  people are getting, you know, just go and then tell them at the start, watch these in a row
• 1:31:14
  and then you'll have the film, you know, because things have changed now and I think in a way
• 1:31:21
  films are dying, you know. How do you mean? Well, if you look at how we used to watch things in
• 1:31:30
  terms of screen entertainment, it was at home or in the cinema, you know, or at a film festival or
• 1:31:37
  whatever. But now it's all internet, you know, obviously at home and like the algorithmic,
• 1:31:46
  the platforms have engineered people in such a way and engineered the content makers in such a way
• 1:31:57
  to kind of bend their users around to maximizing them in terms of profitability and I think
• 1:32:06
  what that means is they've absolutely sabotaged people's ability to focus, you know.
• 1:32:14
  My friend makes content for the internet, he's a podcaster and does all the videos for YouTube
• 1:32:20
  and does that stuff and he said like algorithmically they're just being pushed into shorter and
• 1:32:26
  shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter bursts of thing. You know, it's just true. You know,
• 1:32:34
  and you know, as you see things like ADHD and anxiety mental disorders and things in the young
• 1:32:41
  absolutely skyrocketing through the roof and you're just like maybe this has something to do with
• 1:32:46
  impulse control and perhaps our impulse control has been utterly sabotaged by the fact that the
• 1:32:52
  content we watch changes like world subject matter, you go from a cuddly kitten to a war zone in 12
• 1:33:00
  seconds, you know, it's just it's just utterly head melting and then you kind of take that like
• 1:33:11
  over stimulation of of of information and stuff and be like, and then go back to your normal
• 1:33:18
  life and then you you worry about the fact that, you know, you put the bread in the toaster and
• 1:33:23
  then you forgot that you were making toast, you know, and then you go, oh my god, I have ADHD,
• 1:33:30
  I need ADHD medication. You're like, no, you don't, you've just you've just your impulse control
• 1:33:38
  has been sabotaged by extremely well-paid, extremely well-educated marketing people, you know,
• 1:33:45
  who are good at engineering your attention on screen on screens. And like, you know, it's it's an
• 1:33:55
  interesting time now where you see these platforms, you know, law enforcement in America went in
• 1:34:02
  and did sting operations and were able to drag out loads of emails, loads of correspondence that
• 1:34:07
  prove that these platforms knowingly were causing harm to children, you know, and now they've just
• 1:34:14
  paid out hundreds of millions of dollars with thousands of more lawsuits coming down the pipe and
• 1:34:20
  I'm like, fucking good, good because they have run ragged with young people's minds, you know,
• 1:34:27
  it's just so addictive, you know, it's like on another scale to what we, if what it used to be,
• 1:34:35
  you know, and so that's, I think, why films are dying, because it's just too absorbing,
• 1:34:42
  you know, just they've, like, unlocked, you know, the work of WB Skinner, his name is WB Skinner,
• 1:34:50
  uh, operant conditioning was his thing, you know, about engineering people's free will, like they
• 1:34:59
  took that and fucking ran with it, you know, that him and the work of Daniel Kaneman and Amos
• 1:35:06
  Tversky from Israel who were able to look at sort of, um, behavior in large numbers, you know,
• 1:35:13
  and how to predict it and how to manipulate it, you know, it's just like they just took all that
• 1:35:19
  and just worked it into this data extraction model that is, it's, it's been very meddlesome,
• 1:35:26
  I think, to the human condition, you know, so these lawsuits hopefully will try to, um,
• 1:35:33
  try to address, you know, the core issues of what causes all the damage, and unfortunately,
• 1:35:40
  I don't know if you can put the genie back in the bottle in terms of how quickly the videos
• 1:35:45
  come at you and how quickly they change, you know, like, I, you know, maybe it's because I was born
• 1:35:51
  before, like, the hyper super duper ADHD internet, but, you know, when you watch a film or you watch
• 1:35:58
  a piece of art on Netflix or whatever, and then as soon as the credits is on, they're, they're asking
• 1:36:05
  you to review it, and then like five seconds later, they're, they're showing you something else,
• 1:36:11
  you go like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, you are massively
• 1:36:16
  undermining the thing that you paid tens of millions of dollars to make. Absolutely. You know,
• 1:36:21
  you have to let the complexity of a good piece of art settle, you know, from the conscious thoughts
• 1:36:28
  down into the unconscious, into through the heart, through the gut, you know, you have to sit with
• 1:36:33
  something, for at least, I don't know, a while, like, I don't know, an hour or two hours, a night,
• 1:36:40
  a few days, you know, but if you, if you bombard people with, oh, you've watched that, you'll
• 1:36:47
  like this, watch this, and people are kind of sort of beaten into submission by these, these,
• 1:36:54
  these designs, you know, which are incredibly bullish and anxious, you know, like skip the credits,
• 1:37:01
  you're like, what, you're gonna, like, it's the credits is a beautiful thing, it's part of the
• 1:37:06
  pleasure of watching a piece of screen art, because not only are you letting the kind of names
• 1:37:12
  of the human beings that made the thing, Netflix didn't make the thing, they hired people to make
• 1:37:18
  the thing, you know, they hired artists like us who ran around with cameras, and then they go,
• 1:37:25
  doom, it's Netflix, you're like, no, it's not, these are other people who don't work for Netflix,
• 1:37:33
  who are commissioned by Netflix, you know, and in fairness, Netflix has creative input,
• 1:37:38
  and often it's very good, like on grown ups and stuff, they were telling me about the notes
• 1:37:42
  that came down, which actually did improve the show, but my point is that as you watch the credits,
• 1:37:50
  and they kind of wash over you, you also have this kind of black screen, you know, you have a kind
• 1:37:55
  of a sudden respite from what you've just been shown. Yeah, you're taking out of one state,
• 1:38:03
  and now you're into another more certain state. And it's like, you know, don't, don't
• 1:38:08
  cut your nose off to spite your face streaming platforms. You know, you're cheapening the thing
• 1:38:14
  you're paying more and more money to make. You know, and it's just, you know, Ron Pearlman,
• 1:38:21
  who's a friend of mine, who I love very much, and he's just made, he's just start an independent film
• 1:38:26
  studio, which, you know, fair play to him. I mean, it's a, it's an uphill struggle, I tell you,
• 1:38:34
  but he was doing one of these lovely kind of meandering Instagram lives, and he was, he's just
• 1:38:39
  talking away, and he just goes, you know, streamers are where movies go to die.
• 1:38:49
  I was like, I agree. Well, they don't even get to die there. They can't, they get, they land on
• 1:38:54
  a streaming service. They kind of get, for buried, and then they, they might even just get deleted
• 1:38:58
  and just lost forever. Yeah, they get buried alive and never allowed to die. Yeah, which is what,
• 1:39:03
  you've been there as an agent. Yeah, indeed, I have, but, you know, it's a tricky, it's a complex
• 1:39:12
  chat, isn't it? Because in the one hand, there's an enormous amount of work, you know, there's an
• 1:39:17
  enormous amount of stuff getting made, and somehow the cost of that has been that, that lovely religious
• 1:39:26
  coherence that we were talking about earlier on, where we all come together outside of our homes,
• 1:39:33
  to watch a piece of art. That's kind of been, that's been hugely,
• 1:39:40
  I don't know, decimated, you know? Yeah. And you know, you never know, there could be an upswing
• 1:39:45
  again. I think there's been a lot of unexpected upswings in terms of community gatherings,
• 1:39:52
  you know, as a result of all this text screen, societal domination, you know, there's been sort of
• 1:39:58
  ways that, particularly younger people are trying to rediscover what they know they need
• 1:40:05
  innately, which is each other, not each other on a screen, you know, that's just a terribly,
• 1:40:12
  terribly, terribly weak and bleak substitute, you know, the real thing, you know.
• 1:40:18
  You know, you can't smell someone's B.O. through Facebook, right? That's the point. You smell
• 1:40:24
  something else on Facebook, something maybe more rancid, but like child sex trafficking before
• 1:40:29
  you smell. Proven, proven, not just me saying that, the U.S. Courts of Law, Zuckerberg, you officially
• 1:40:37
  are a child sex trafficker. Thanks very much for Instagram.
• 1:40:43
  Yeah, but that, something that I'd like to, because we should have alluded to over the course of
• 1:40:47
  this chat, which you've touched on, is your meditation, because for you like then, but
• 1:40:53
  go segue, segue, but stick with me, because, because hang on, because, but what you
• 1:41:00
  spectacular presenters, no, no, but what you were sitting there, because what you were saying about
• 1:41:04
  like that dopamine rush of like, of instant graphication, instant communication with digital world,
• 1:41:11
  like how do you, how do you keep that arms length? Is meditation kind of part of your process
• 1:41:15
  when you keep them length? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because meditation came round where I was just
• 1:41:21
  constantly sort of feeding the impulse, you know, the impulse of restlessness to work,
• 1:41:28
  and if I wasn't working, I'm like, what's going on? Are we going out? We go for dinner,
• 1:41:31
  we go for a few drinks, you know, sort of just sort of constantly looking for a form of soothing
• 1:41:37
  or sedation to try to satiate the kind of beast that is, you know, just basically a form of
• 1:41:48
  appetite, and you know, unfortunately, like the Buddhist adage, you know, feeding the impulse,
• 1:41:56
  be it libido, be it, you know, just inability to be alone is like drinking saltwater, you know,
• 1:42:04
  the more you drink the thirstier you get, so the worse the appetite becomes, you know, and the
• 1:42:10
  the less and less you have the agency over and above the impulse, you know, and by impulse I mean
• 1:42:17
  a physical compelling physical sensation that comes through you that makes you want to get up and
• 1:42:22
  do something, you know, and that's the thing that the phones have locked in on, really, really
• 1:42:28
  powerfully, you know, because it's like the pigeon in a box that's been given seed, you know,
• 1:42:33
  it picks the thing, it gets the seed, picks the thing, it gets the seed, it's like that, but with
• 1:42:37
  brain dopamine, you know, so I was alone in, it was doing a film, I was alone in Oregon,
• 1:42:44
  Portland, Oregon, shooting night, and then we were, we were all snowed in with this big storm hit
• 1:42:51
  Portland, and we all had to stay at home for like two, three days, and I was just buying myself,
• 1:42:57
  like climbing the walls, just didn't know what to do, so I can't, I just, you know, it's just
• 1:43:04
  suddenly, you know, it was kind of, it was funny, it was ironic because it was a form of pilgrimage,
• 1:43:09
  but it was at home, you know, but by home I mean a very functional mod can't air be and be, you know,
• 1:43:18
  and it just, it just struck me as really awful and tragic and despairing the fact that I couldn't
• 1:43:23
  be alone with myself, it's like what does that even mean, you know, what does that mean that I just
• 1:43:28
  can't be, how can I expect to be happy or, you know, content or bring a sense of joy to someone else
• 1:43:38
  in a marriage, if I myself am utterly out of control of how I respond to impulses that happen
• 1:43:47
  within, you know, and people try to other meditation and associated with Eastern religion or some
• 1:43:53
  bullshit, but it's about input, you know, it's about like one's relationship with one's body
• 1:44:01
  mind, you know, so anyway I started stubbornly meditating from that point and about six to 12
• 1:44:09
  months in of like just failing desperately and being constantly swept away on the torrent of,
• 1:44:16
  of like unwanted thoughts, certainly there was a sort of, you know, a break, a kind of a break in
• 1:44:26
  the waves, you know, in the kind of the smashing, certainly disparate to sort of dispersed and I was
• 1:44:35
  left, just sort of kind of at an inkling, a sort of a just beyond like it's see and feel the
• 1:44:42
  quiet coming, you know, and then at a certain point around 2018, especially during umbrella one
• 1:44:50
  actually, I was meditating by the new time, I was meditating loads and loads and loads, I couldn't
• 1:44:56
  get enough of it, you know, because what had changed was that impulse, that swept away, that oh,
• 1:45:03
  you know, saying egoic and competitive and demeaning things about myself and other people inside
• 1:45:09
  my head, I had suddenly disassociated my sense of self from that thing and suddenly was looking at
• 1:45:15
  that thing like a sort of a defunct Windows 93 operating system that was an idiot inside me,
• 1:45:23
  like I was like this thing is an idiot, he's such a moron, why did I ever allow him to cause me so
• 1:45:28
  much distress, you know, but it took time to kind of disentangle from that like that, that, you know,
• 1:45:35
  talking monkey, you know, that's again Buddhism call it, and so then I was feeling like wow,
• 1:45:43
  you know, if I can do that, what else can I do, and I started reaching deeper and deeper platforms
• 1:45:48
  of my consciousness, where I was having these like brilliant 3D vivid fucking 8K hallucinations
• 1:45:57
  with my eyes closed, you know, like the experiences of reality that I couldn't ever have conceived
• 1:46:03
  out before, and then I thought that was the finish line, you know, but then I was like no,
• 1:46:09
  I'm not going to get swept away on the hallucination stage, I'm going to keep going and going and
• 1:46:15
  going and then you know, and then my button, then I get to a stage where my physical body would
• 1:46:20
  start sort of dissipating and disappearing like a mist, you know, and realize that I was completely
• 1:46:26
  non-physical, in essence, you know, so at that point I had disentangled myself a sense of self
• 1:46:33
  from my idiot mind, from my body, experientially, you know, not like theoretically,
• 1:46:41
  and then I had an out of body experience one day where I ceased to even be like my mind or my
• 1:46:51
  not so much of my thoughts are conceptual and over there, but like even the thing watching the
• 1:46:57
  thoughts disappeared, you know, I was like, and I just became everything for I don't know how long
• 1:47:05
  it's in the book anyway, but it's just like it was one of the probably the most profound personal
• 1:47:14
  experience of my whole life and I realized, wow, I am a kind of temporary, you know, physical
• 1:47:20
  on this frequency manifestation of the creator or God or whatever you call this highly
• 1:47:27
  specialized, highly organized, highly adaptive, highly intelligent system that we all are,
• 1:47:33
  kind of just manifesting itself physically from the perspective of a human being, you know.
• 1:47:39
  In TM, they call it the unified field, transcendental meditation, they call that the unified
• 1:47:43
  field, the kind of collective unconsciousness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that was just like, wow,
• 1:47:49
  I don't, you know, death is an illusion, life is an illusion, and suddenly, you know, beyond the fact
• 1:47:57
  this, you know, when my inner life became something that I was working hard to avoid all day,
• 1:48:07
  when it changed from that into something that I yearned to to commune with,
• 1:48:12
  suddenly like the safety net beneath life appeared, and it's just like, wow, I have this blissful
• 1:48:20
  sort of nurturing like fucking prana, shakti, like highway of sensational physical love that
• 1:48:31
  flows through me whenever I want, you know. It just, you could just go on about it in words,
• 1:48:37
  in millions and millions in different ways forever, but it just completely, it just upgraded my life,
• 1:48:43
  you know, in a way that I could have never conceived of before I began, I began just thinking,
• 1:48:48
  I just want to be able to sit still, but actually what happened was I sort of started a little bit
• 1:48:55
  down the road of understanding the true nature of life, you know. It's like, amazing,
• 1:49:03
  that's religion. Yeah, and do you think it's, it affects, it affects your acting, like in a positive
• 1:49:09
  way as well, like your creativity? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, because, you know, if you're stumped,
• 1:49:16
  and if you think, oh, I don't know, it's all right about this thing, just sit there for 15 minutes,
• 1:49:21
  you know, and loads of ideas that are brilliant and kind of, that connect up things that are in
• 1:49:30
  different areas of your subconscious, somehow, you know, find each other and become a larger idea,
• 1:49:36
  that all happens in meditation, like Eddie Marzan was saying, you know, he's, and also anticipatory
• 1:49:41
  anxiety, unfortunately I've discovered that that is something that doesn't really go away with
• 1:49:48
  experience, you know, every new job that kind of comes back, you know, and it's kind of dragon
• 1:49:53
  that has to be slayed, and it can be quite exhausting. But again, meditation can completely sort of
• 1:50:00
  dissipate that and sort of take the fangs out of that. So it just helps in a myriad of different
• 1:50:08
  ways, you know, in sort of all these different ways. And also, like, I did a play a couple of years
• 1:50:15
  ago, brilliant new Irish play called Reunion, is it a playwright called Marco Roe, who's just
• 1:50:21
  world class writer alive today. I've just was like, I'm going to meditate for this entire play,
• 1:50:27
  you know, I'm going to just meditate through the whole play, and it just became this nice challenge
• 1:50:33
  that I would do. And it was just, it was just wonderful, like, realizing that once, you know, once
• 1:50:40
  you know how to do something, obviously, once something is in the back brain, actually just don't do
• 1:50:45
  and then it does itself, and you can have your attention somewhere else entirely, as it does
• 1:50:51
  its own thing. And it was just again, that was just sort of kind of an amazing breakthrough,
• 1:50:58
  it's like, wow, it upgraded me as an actor because, you know, you see actors who know the thing,
• 1:51:04
  but they're trying to do the thing on top of knowing it, you know, and they're just doing,
• 1:51:08
  there's too much, too much happening. They're overcompensating for the sense that they don't think
• 1:51:13
  they know it, you know, they just need to let it happen. They just let it, yeah, exactly,
• 1:51:17
  just sort of surrender. So meditation, another word for meditation, could be utter surrender,
• 1:51:23
  you know, physically, mentally, you know, and breath wise and just let everything just let it all
• 1:51:34
  go, you know, and then you'll notice how quickly certain physical parts of you and certain
• 1:51:40
  mental parts of you want to stay stuck, you know, and they go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:51:44
  because I make up a really important piece of the pie chart of your identity as things currently are,
• 1:51:51
  but then the more they're just not, no, I refuse, just let go of, eventually they give up the ghost,
• 1:51:59
  and also I think a lot of thinking, like the body, you know, if you're in pain, you know,
• 1:52:06
  that's an alarm bell from your body going, pay attention to me. I think when thoughts are going,
• 1:52:11
  oh, and one is ruminating, that's just really your mind going, please pay attention to me.
• 1:52:17
  Don't take a drug to sedate me. Don't, you know, don't, whatever, don't run away from me,
• 1:52:27
  be with me, you know, and tell me that you're my boss, because again, like a recalcent from
• 1:52:35
  dog, we have this little yapper in our heads, and like a dog who thinks it's the boss of its
• 1:52:44
  owner, it's anxious, it's unhappy, you know, it doesn't play well with others, and we have that
• 1:52:50
  animal instinct in our minds, you know, and I think these days it's far too fashionable to
• 1:52:56
  identify as it, and to be medicated for it. Yeah, we need to avoid that. Yeah, I think that's
• 1:53:04
  a lovely note to end on, Robert. I mean, this has been an absolute blast. I mean,
• 1:53:09
  it's been lovely chat. Yeah, that has. I mean, I guess one last quick question, I mean,
• 1:53:14
  because like, it's wide UTM, so it's when you talk about meditation, it's just fascinating,
• 1:53:17
  it's nice, you know, and because it's such an interesting field, and all obviously all the work
• 1:53:21
  that you've done as well, that you've taken us through, I mean, if you could do anything now,
• 1:53:24
  like as an actor, as a creator, what would you, if you could do anything, what do you,
• 1:53:28
  what would you want to do, do you think? Yes. I think I would make one of the independent films
• 1:53:33
  I've written, you know, I'd love to get a film I've made that I've written, that would be an
• 1:53:38
  absolute dream come true, you know, be a beautiful milestone. Yeah, so cross your fingers for a
• 1:53:45
  sayer prayer to whatever God's you worship, or God's plural if you're a filthy pagan.
• 1:53:55
  And on that note, and on that note, Hail Satan.
• 1:54:09
  Hey everyone, thanks so much for listening to my chat with Robert Sheehan,
• 1:54:13
  who remember to like and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode,
• 1:54:16
  and stay tuned for more exciting, interfusing guests coming soon on half the picture.