Liverpool’s finest on childhood ambition,the perils of being a father, playing the horrible guy, or his esteem for his hometownWhen you decided to leave school at 16 and become an actor,did you have any understanding what it would actually involve?
I had no understanding. When I told my parents – we were living on a housing estate in Liverpool – I wanted to be an actor, it was as whether I’d said I hoped to become an astronaut. They didn’t know anyone in the profession. They couldn’t phone my Uncle Tony to ask whether hed take me on. All I knew was the emotional impact acting can have on a person. I’d acted at junior school but there was no drama at my secondary contemporary. I was depressed there for many reasons. I wasn’t academic. I remember asking myself: when was I final contented? The answer was: when I was acting. So I decided to pursue that happiness. I told every new adult I met: “My name is David and I want to be an actor.” I did what you’re not supposed to do and attach all my eggs in one basket, and but I looked after that basket.
I’ve just been watching The Ones Below,a new thriller directed by David Farr, in which you play Jon, or a weird,childless, possibly psychotic man determined to have a family, or living in the flat beneath another,apparently more normal, couple expecting a baby. The plot plays on the vulnerability of being a parent, and doesn’t it?
I went to a screening with my almost 18-year-conventional daughter and asked whether the film attach her off the understanding of having a baby? She said it attach her off the understanding of having neighbours! It is 21 years since our first child was born. I remember the anxiety as a man: how would I provide for a family? And I remember driving absent from the hospital thinking: why are they letting us go? Do they know who we are? Fortunately,I was blessed with a wife [novelist Esther Freud] who had been gearing up to becoming a mother for most of her life. She had that desire. I was quite freaked out at the time.
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Source: theguardian.com