claytoncast

There is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, one of many, by Alan Bennett called "Going Round".   In it he examines the process of going to visit an actor after a performance in his dressing room and as in so many cases, Mr B gets it bang on the nail.  "You have Come Round. He has performed. Now it is your turn. For that is what it is, Going Round: a performance. A performance which, if it is to convince, has to equal and indeed to surpass the one you have just seen on the stage. And whatever you thought, even if you slept through the whole of the second act, you have to go in there saying it was all marvellous. Marvellous. It was MARVELLOUS .  Never stray too far from that. " It is brilliant advice and for all non actors who have to visit a thespian after it has performed go, it is advice I would suggest that they heed. Of course the opinion that the actor really wants is that of his fellows, his peers and his mentors.  It's fine for me to te...

I'm not sure quite why, but suddenly within days of my 57th birthday, I have become a focus of attention for several camera lenses. Surprised dear reader? Let me explain A few Saturdays ago I attended "Surviving Actors" with fellow board member Anita Dobson to drum up some support for the actors Centre and to lead a seminar on how to sustain a career. We had a good day, and on a sort of royal progress around the stands at the exhibition, we encountered one Mark Davies who runs a company called M.A.D photography. He's incredibly engaging, and he offered me a free photo shoot.  I have the sort of face that has the same success in its relationship with the camera as Boris Johnson has with the bendy bus, but on this occasion I was more than happy to take up his kind offer. How strange then that only hours later an offer of another free photo shoot should pop into my twitter messages from Greg Photo (sic), or @gregphotocom as you will find him listed among the T...

It's always nice to get an unsolicited offer of work. A couple of weeks ago when I was on the train up to see my mother in Yorkshire, my agent forwarded me an email that had been sent to me from a budding producer and director in the final year of their film course at the University of Creative arts in Farnham. Having seen my work, they wondered if I might be interested in appearing in their graduation film. Unpaid of course, but their letter was interesting enough to awaken my curiosity, and there being nothing much else to do on a train journey to Doncaster, I asked my agent to forward me the script. Almost the first thing we would see of my character, Ian Morgan, ( no mean coincidence that I played "Ian Chapman" in four series of "Peep Show") was him having sex with "an attractive 24-year-old Hispanic young man" in a seedy hotel bedroom. No one has ever asked me to have sex before.  Not professionally anyway. My one previous disrobing was i...