EastEnders Omnibus

Form.

 

 I didn't know when I self-taped that I was auditioning for a "bumbling lawyer". I just thought Russell would be one of those bad-news-delivering authority interfaces necessary to a continuing drama who might not even get a medium shot because it was all about the reactions. I didn't know to whom he'd be giving this bad news either as the names were changed in the audition script to keep storylines confidential, and I definitely didn't know there'd be a second scene in which Russell would be stripped to his shivering essence in the purifying fire of a face-off with Danny Dyer!

 But behold a bit:

 

 So no, I knew little about the brief if you'll pardon the pun, but I normally send in two takes on a self-tape: one high-status, one low-status (or if the character's status is unambiguous, one slow, one fast, or if the status and pace are both unambiguous... I don't know... one subtle and one stupid) and the low status take turned out to be exactly what EastEnders director Jamie Annett was in the mood for. I've also started to get castings for "William H. Macy" types.

 

 The costume department phoned ahead to ask me if I had a rumpled pinstripe suit to bring to set, but everything I showed them was too shipwrecky, even for Russell. What the director had liked about my tape he said, is that it had suggested a man who nearly gets away with being shit. Which actor hasn't dreamt of hearing that? Jamie also liked that I lived above a pub.

 

 "Russell's not a shit lawyer," he clarified on the hoof as the morning we were given to film both scenes powered along, "He's just shit in court," which is was why he was being so spineless, and why suddenly having to consider the innocence of his client paralysed him. "Yeah, I can see him being a recurring character definitely, the bumbling lawyer" said my new friend Danny Dyer.

 

 Maybe there'd be a spin-off. Hustle Like Russell. "You'd find him in the pub at two in the afternoon," Jamie also ventured, not a direction necessarily, just riffing now on what he was witnessing. I can't imagine being more supported on a set. And look at all this lovely business I was given...

 

  Hankie. Paperwork. Big old briefcase. To say nothing of the bag of crisps Jamie instructed me to take out to get to the paperwork – Walford's own brand, by the way, "Wells Crisps", imaginary packaging – I didn't take the placebo painkillers in the end because I thought Russell might at least have had the nouse to take his pills before showing up, but they were there in the bag if I changed my mind. Am I adequately conveying how much of a dream this job was?

 

To be on that stage in Elstree with people turning out four episodes a week, and to see the three of them working together among all the other work going on – Jamie, Danny, and Kellie Bright – without a quantum of ego between them. Just courtesy, art, and a trouble-shooting focus. For example: "Now, this line.."

 

 "I mean-! I'll just say... Do ya though?" Harold Pinter's favourite actor was right. My line says what his line said. Subtext is pleasure, to quote Matt Weiner. The scene was better.

 Another example: Despite having prepped like hell, I didn't know what would be going on in other episodes, and so hadn't clocked quite a big change to our first scene since the audition. Originally I delivered some good news (the police have dropped the charges) then some bad news (this doesn't mean Linda automatically gets her daughter back), but in the rewrite Mick and Linda already knew the good news and so as Kellie who plays Linda pointed out, the bad news wasn't news any more, and the scene as I had been playing it no longer made sense. It needed a new shape. I stopped playing my lines as someone painstakingly explaining something therefore, and started playing them as someone making excuses, desperate to leave, and suddenly it felt right, and we played what I think are two really great scenes, and there were three cameras recording it, and it went out on national television, and I'm still new enough to this medium to find all of that amazing.

 

 Have I mentioned I'm in EastEnders then? I appear about halfway into episode six-thousand-five-hundred-and-fifty-eight, immediately after the appearance of Alicia McKenzie from the production of Bleak Expectations I was in over Summer, which was a great surprise, playing Debs – I love how we all get names – and pulling the only face anyone should pull when dealing with Janine.

 

  Oh yes, I'm a fan now. Watch the whole thing HERE.