![]() There are increasing calls for authentic casting, in which the identities of actor and character match. ‘It seems such a shame if actors can’t play a range of parts’. Known as an action actor – the titular 19th-century soldier in ITV’s Sharpe, Ned Stark in Game of Thrones – he played, in blond wig and false breasts, Tracie, the trans alter ego of an English teacher. Before Broken, there was 2012’s Tracie’s Story, which gave Bean his boldest screen role. Time was his third primetime BBC collaboration with McGovern. And we’re all like that, aren’t we? We all like to think we have mostly good bits with a few bad bits – but others may think we have more downs than ups.” “That ambiguity is what makes Jimmy’s characters so rich. ![]() “They’re both very self-critical, and a mix of fallibilities and good qualities,” says Bean. Where Father Michael is seen by society as a good guy and Mark Cobden as a bad man, the truth is far more complex. In Time and Broken, there’s a tension between what the characters say they believe or don’t believe and what they actually think.” Jimmy McGovern claims not to believe in religion, but Catholicism is a thread in his work. Time and Broken are linked by Mark and Michael having been baptised into the same faith: Michael is a Catholic believer who struggles with doubts, while Mark has lost his faith but is tempted by a prison chaplain to lapse from atheism.īean, who grew up in a practising Catholic family in Sheffield but was deemed “too out there” as a child to be encouraged towards the priesthood (as McGovern was), says: “The church offers Mark a lifeline. You should ask Jimmy about remaking it that way.”įour years ago, in another McGovern drama, Broken, Bean played Father Michael Kerrigan, a Merseyside Catholic priest forced to double as a sort of social worker because of state and council cuts. Was the casting ever up for discussion? “It was always me for Mark and him for Eric. Watching Time called to mind theatrical experiments in which actors have swapped the main parts in a play on alternate nights – the king and Bolingbroke in Shakespeare’s Richard II, the brothers in Sam Shepard’s True West – and I fantasised about seeing the drama with Bean as the prison officer and Graham as the inmate. Their scenes together are acting as grand slam final tennis, each participant judging whether to match the pace of the other player or change it. The drama intercuts the experiences of Cobden and Eric McNally, his supervising prison officer, played by Stephen Graham. Now, it’s: “Oh, fuck, I have to remember all that?”’. ‘I used to count up my lines and want more. ![]() I wanted just to react to what was around me,” he says. “I wanted the locations – the cells, corridors, exercise yard – to be new and shocking to me, as they are to him. That wasn’t too difficult some mornings!”īean deliberately chose not to speak to any prisoners as part of his preparation for playing Mark Cobden – who is often the only person on his wing experiencing incarceration for the first time. You want to look like someone who’s exhausted and in shock. But I put on the bare minimum, nothing too flattering. “You do have to wear some makeup or you look a different texture from everyone else. I shaved each day but aimed to get the effect of someone using a cheap razor in a little cracked mirror in their cell,” he says. “It’s not as if I didn’t have to do anything. As a leading man, his time before shooting is usually spent trying to look as good as possible. That can be uncomfortable, but it gets you to the truth.”Īs well as fewer lines to learn, Time also allowed Bean to reach the makeup trailer later. You can draw on situations in which you have felt alone, or sad, or nervous. “But if the character is alone, it’s about trying to think what they are thinking. Is it not technically harder to convey everything facially, though? “Yeah, it is,” says Bean.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |