Famous Faces
Just Jimmy
Following a year spent playing characters from comic conman to uncompromising cop James Nesbitt wants a bit of time to be himself.
AFTER “working non-stop with various
things, so many that it makes my head go a bit giddy”, actor James
Nesbitt vows that he is going to take it a bit easier for the rest of
the year.
Or maybe not. James (40) is one of those performers who can be
seduced, almost overnight, by a “real thunderer of a good script”.
He says he’d almost given up on Murphy’s Law (the BBC drama
series about an undercover police officer) until he realised the
character could be made a lot darker, with grittier scripts, if the
project was offered as an after-the-watershed event, rather than its
usual pre-9 pm slot.
The result was one of the blackest TV dramas that James has done in his
career and, he says, “probably the most satisfying material I’ve
done in recent years . . . I was well chuffed.”
Now James maintains that he’s going to take things in a more measured
fashion for a while.
“It has been a pretty hectic few years,” he admits, swigging at a
bottle of Rolling Rock beer, “and, by and large, most of it is stuff
I’ve been pretty proud of. I loved making Passer-by, and I enjoyed The
Miller’s Tale in the BBC’s Canterbury Tales series. That
was a breeze for an actor like me, it was so well written. Oh, and then
there was Quite Ugly One Morning, which was just a hoot to do.”
In that drama James played Parlabane, a scruffy journalist with a guilty
secret. Based on the best-selling thriller novel by Christopher
Brookmyre, it was set in Edinburgh, and Parlabane had a Glaswegian
background. James doesn’t do accents. He is Northern Irish, and
Northern Irish is what he does. The fact that he was supposed to be
Scottish didn’t really occur to him until he turned up for first
rehearsals.
“Actually, I can do accents,” he insists, “and pretty well, too!
But I had a chat with the director, and we decided that time didn’t
allow us the luxury of me trying to get the Glasgow thing right. We’d
have to retake shots if I veered off-course. So Northern Irish he was. I
have to admit, when I ran my Scottish accent past my co-star Daniela
Nardini, she screamed with laughter and said I sounded incredibly camp
— definitely a strong reason for me sticking with my own way of
talking!”
There is, he thinks, “not very much of a chance that I’ll play that
wee man again, much as I’d like to. The public seemed to have a thirst
for him, the ratings were good, and there were rights given to
Clerkenwell Films, who made it for ITV to do more of Christopher’s
work if they wanted but, well, the call hasn’t come. A pity. There was
a shelf-life there, and I am saddened that part of my acting career is
over. I loved working in Edinburgh, a really fine city, because, very
selfishly I admit, we seemed to be eating out in really good restaurants
every night!”
If he’s famous in one field these days, James admits, it’s for the
current TV ads for a certain printed phone directory service.
“That looks as if it will go on for a while, there are a few more in
the pipeline,” he explains. “I like doing them, they are fast
turnaround things, they’re fun and when I’m dead and gone they’ll
mean there’s a bit of cash left in the bank for my daughters to have
holidays and stuff.”
It’s as Tommy Murphy that James is probably best known and he finds
him an intriguing character to play.
“I knew that viewers enjoyed meeting him but I really didn’t feel
that we had properly cracked him until this series. I said that if we
did more, I wanted to change him. His sense of humour should still be
there of course, but I suspect there was a bit too much of me in him
before. I liked this new version of Murphy though. He lives, I think,
from the excitement of being another person when he is undercover, of
‘fooling’ his audience.
“That made me relate to him, because actors do the same thing, they
live off the adrenalin of impersonating someone else. I worked diligently at making him the hard man that he is. I spent a lot
of time with a real undercover copper, and that was fascinating, finding
out how quickly he reacted to things and how disciplined he was.
“Murphy won’t avoid a scrap if it presents itself and that was
difficult for me, because I have never ever been a fighter. Physically,
I was surprised that I got quite strong, and I certainly straightened up
(I’m a natural sloucher!) and I now carry myself in a different way.
“Actually, playing Murphy has made me more confident as a person and
he was one of the few characters that I have taken home with me and
talked about,” he continues. “Mind you, much as I like him, I often
wonder how he would cope with me if we met up socially. I really don’t
think that he’d have that much time for James Nesbitt, actor, if truth
be told!”
But James has also been known to react pretty sharply when he has to.
Filming in Scotland last year, he looked out of his rented apartment in
Edinburgh and spotted a large white van moving up and down the road. It
had been there for two or three hours, maybe more, and it kept changing
places. So the Cold Feet star set out in the wee small hours to find out
the who, the what and the why.
He explains, “My wife Sonia was asleep, as were my girls, Peggy (7)
and Mary Penelope (3).” He didn’t ring the police — probably the
most sensible thing to do — but instead he rapped on the doors of the
van and demanded to know what was going on.
Lurking in the back of the van was a photographer from one of the London
newspapers. “On reflection, he was a sight more shocked than I was,”
he laughs. “He admitted that he’d been following me around for five
weeks! We had a conversation, and I realised that, however distasteful I
found it personally, he was only trying to do his job. He even had the
nerve to ask me for an autograph — for his wife, of course. It always
is! I gladly gave him it, although the situation was more than a bit
hysterical. We parted amicably but enough was enough and I warned him
that I did not want any more.”
The snapper was out to capitalise on the star’s love life becoming
very public after a rocky patch in his marriage — an earlier kiss and
tell story had revealed that James had a brief affair with a 22-year-old
legal secretary. It was a severe embarrassment for James, his family and
his friends. “It was emphatically not the image that people had of me.
When I went home to see my parents in Northern Ireland, people would
give me a curious look, they’d cross the road, and they’d say
‘We’re praying for you’, which was fair enough comment!”
Reflecting now on those days, James says that as a child, his heroes had
not been, “great Irish writers like Joyce and O’Casey and Wilde but
people like Georgie Best, Hurricane Higgins and Norman Whiteside. Best
and Higgins both famously self-destructed and I too went on to press the
‘self-destruct’ button, not that I knew I was doing it at the time.
“I was just, well, having a good laugh. For a while, I didn’t know
who the heck I was. I spent years going around and doing interviews,
giving great soundbites about this guy called Jimmy Nesbitt and, if
truth be told, I actually didn’t know who this character was! There
was more than a certain amount of fiction along the way, and it’s only
after all that tabloid revelation business that I’ve started to take a
long and considered look at myself. I think that I was maybe more than a
bit lost for a while. And being grounded with Tommy Murphy has helped me
more than I could ever explain!”
He says quietly, “The people who came out of this strongest were my
wife and my family, and that was hard for them, I know. But when my
‘dual life’ imploded it was a huge turning point for me and I began
to feel a lot happier with myself.”
Sonia and his daughters are rarely parted from Jimmy these days. When
he’s been filming on location they’ve been near at hand. And they
arranged a surprise party for his 40th birthday this year. “It was
amazing,” he says. “Sonia organised a Beatles tribute band, The Fab
Four — terrific. One present was a trip to the Monaco Grand Prix,
which was a real treat. I’ve since come to the conclusion that turning
40 was the easy bit. Playing comedy and getting laughs is the hard
part!”
James and his family live in Dulwich, an upmarket area of South London,
and it seems unlikely that the bright lights of Hollywood will seduce
him across the Atlantic.
“Looking for work in Los Angeles,” he says, “seems to be all about
having meetings about having meetings, sitting around the pool, waiting
for things to happen, if they ever do. I’ve got mates who have done
that and they’ve made a few good movies, but it isn’t a lifestyle
that I’d want to embrace. Hanging about is not my style, I’m very
happy as I am.”
James decided on acting after abandoning a degree course at Belfast
University, reading French. “I’d thought of teaching the language
but I realised the idea didn’t sit easily with me as I saw that,
increasingly, teaching is all about getting exam results and achieving
targets rather than inspiring kids. My dad was a fine teacher and I
think that he understood my decision not to go on with the course.
“Acting maybe runs in tandem with the best of the old-fashioned way of
teaching. That, at its very best, it’s opening windows on different
worlds and telling you about different characters. Making you think.
Well, my recent work has certainly made me think. Actually, it’s
redefined the way I think about acting . . . but hey, maybe we’re
getting a wee bit too deep here.” He takes another swig of Rolling
Rock and laughs.
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