Nicholas Rowe Interview

Nicholas Rowe is a Scottish actor (born in Edinburgh) who lives in London. Although he is perhaps best known as the lead character in the 1985 fantasy movie Young Sherlock Holmes, he went on to enjoy a varied career both in theatre and film.

Projects of note include Shackleton, The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in which he played the part of ‘J’. His latest film is Delicious – a low budget UK production by first time director Tammy Riley-Smith, in which Nicholas plays an angry sous chef called ‘Adolf’.

Film-News’ Claudia A. met up with the sympathetic and interesting actor (who doesn’t look his 47 years of age whatsoever) to discuss cooking, Time Lords, and adventures in Greenland…

Film-News:
Nicholas, how did you land the lead role in “Young Sherlock Holmes”?

Nicholas Rowe:
I loved acting at school; I was very keen on it. I had one or two quite big roles and one or two real boring roles, but I had no idea that I would necessarily end up doing it as a career. But when Young Sherlock came along, which was two years later, they had given up finding the right Sherlock at drama schools. They couldn’t find any young boy actor as far as I know to play the part. It’s a lottery, and I ended up auditioning for the part five times. I was doing my last winter term there, and before Christmas I ended up going for a screen test. There were three of us up for a part. Alan Cox, I think, was already cast as young Watson. And he put in a word for me (Nicholas laughs) saying “I like him”. And Hugh Grant was there, and somebody else was there though I can’t remember who it was. Yes, Hugh Grant… who is older than I am if you don’t mind me saying. And look what’s happened to his career… nothing happened to him (as Nicholas explains with a twinkle in his eye)! Then I heard that I got the part shortly before or after Christmas, and they started filming in January.

FN:
So what was it like after you got the part?

NR:
I had four months of the greatest time of my life, it was an adventure and I think it was all done on instinct. “Young Sherlock Holmes” is a wonderful story but I think our performances get swallowed up in the adventure. I am proud of the film as a general whole and I think it’s fantastic, and I love the fact that it continues to do well. I’m quite moved at how people respond to it… it seems to have this lasting thing, although some of the effects which were mind-blowing at the time now seem dated. Of course, it didn’t do well at the box office, it bombed at the box office! It didn’t have big name actors in it, though the film has some wonderful English actors in it. I think they just didn’t know how to sell it, and they spent a lot of money on trying to sell it. Although it went all around the world it just didn’t pick up in the cinemas. And since then, on TV it’s been shown all the time, and that’s what has kept it alive. The Sherlock Holmes story is such a lasting story, it can be re-shaped any way you want and it still has tremendous interest everywhere!

FN:
Despite parts in various TV productions, after “Young Sherlock Homes” you didn’t actually appear in another cinema release until eleven years later, in a movie called “True Blue”…

NR:
You know, I didn’t know what to expect. I went into this first movie adventure quite naïve, and I had asked Bristol University to keep my place on hold. Also, I needed to take another year off because I went around the world for press junkets selling Sherlock. I went to LA to promote the film and got myself an agent there, and I went up for strange things! “The Name Of The Rose” was one of them, which was at least within my steer, but the part went, quite rightly, to Christian Slater. Or “The Secret Of My Success”, you know, Michael J. Fox… strange things that I simply wasn’t right for. People were really nice about the Sherlock movie and whatever, but nothing came of that, and I’m not sure whether they really knew quite where to place me. I didn’t sell myself very hard, and as I said, I very much had decided to go on to university. So after that, I stayed in Bristol and went on to do two years of drama school and training. Whether or not it’s a good thing to do, I still don’t know. I might have learned a job, but sadly we have a situation in Britain where we lost the repertory history that we once had. We had the opportunities for actors to learn while on the job and to make mistakes and succeed or fail while discovering your craft, but those opportunities weren’t there anymore when I started. So I really lunged myself into the jobbing actor situation – doing some good jobs and some shitty jobs. All I wanted to do after I’d left drama school was continue to keep working, and so I never thought too far beyond the next stage. I didn’t have a burning ambition to go out there and aim to be the best actor in the world! And how do we judge that anyway?

FN:
Your TV work is extremely varied. Do you pick and chose according to script, or do you look upon it as a job that pays the bills?

NR:
Sometimes it is a job and it doesn’t pay, and a lot of the time I do a job just because I love the script or it involves working with some people I like. Or yes, when it does pay I just do it and then I go away, you know, bite the bullet. It may not be very good but I take the money.

FN:
You also played ‘Professor Gibbern’ in the wonderful mini series “The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells”, and provided the voice of ‘Rivesh Mantilax’ for the “Dr. Who: Dreamland” anime. Are you interested in the concept of time travel and different dimensions?

NR:
Yes. I think they filmed about six of those H.G. Wells ones and I’m in about four of them, and I absolutely love them! Again, we haven’t really seen them, they show them once and again on some TV channel which is a shame. They are very nicely eccentric and the effects are wonderful. Each episode tells a great story, like the one about a poison put into a reservoir and the danger of the whole population of London going down, it looks like a modern terror attack. You know, it’s H.G. Wells being brilliant and full of foresight, as he was.

FN:
So your voiceover part for the Dr. Who anime, did that come about as a result from having featured in the H.G. Wells series?

NR:
No, not at all! It came about because of a producer that I had worked with on radio before. I also had worked with David Tennant before on stage, then years later we had done one or two radio plays together, Shakespeare or something. Then one day, we found ourselves in the studio together with quite a few other actors just doing this thing and I didn’t really know what it was. It turned out I was there for the morning, and ended up playing a character whose name I even didn’t know until somebody produced a photograph of this strange character at the stage door of the theatre I was at. I went “Who is that?” and the person said “It’s Rivesh Mantilax, whom you played in this thing!” So I was a member of the Dr. Who family through pure accident, and I had no idea. So I’d never done a Dr. Who on TV.

FN:
That’s a shame, as I could imagine you very well as the Time Lord…

NR:
(Laughs) You know, a reporter once came to my door saying “Congratulations! Do you have anything to say about it?” and this was before Peter Capaldi was announced as the next Doctor. And I said “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and the reporter replied “We have it on very good authority that you are the next Dr. Who” and I said “It’s wrong. It’s just wrong!”

FN:
You had bit parts in “Beau Brummell: This Charming Man” and “A Harlot’s Progress”, furthermore “Shackleton”, “Nicholas Nickleby” and so forth… all of them period dramas of one kind or another. Do you favour period dramas, or do you simply get a lot of offers for this genre?

NR:
Yes, there’s something going on with my hair… I don’t do as much modern stuff as I like to do, but it’s true I do like period and I say period because it covers a huge area, basically anything that’s not contemporary. In particular “Shackleton” and “Longitude”, these are things I am very proud of and I think they’re just wonderful. “Shackleton” was one of my all time favourite experiences! It was such an adventure and it was with a whole lot of very good actors, led by Kenneth Branagh who was brilliant as Shackleton, and directed by Charles Sturridge. And I think he is an extremely good director. He’s not scared by scale, and so he’s always ambitious. And “Gulliver’s Travels”, which I wasn’t part of, it was amazing what TV could produce with that. As for “Shackleton”, it was a huge undertaking and it took us to Greenland. So we were on this boat for about a month, commuting to a small boat going a few hundred yards on a little dinghy to the old boat that stood in as the Endurance ship. It was just a phenomenal experience and strange as it sounds, we weren’t fully pretending but at times working quite hard physically. So we had at least some small idea of imagining what life must have been like, even though we were on the wrong side of the world. It was a real landscape, though we were at Shepperton Studios as well.

FN:
You recently appeared in a BBC4 drama called “Loving Miss Hatto”. Did you know who she was, or were you familiar with her piano music before you got the script?

NR:
I’m afraid no. It was a totally new thing to me. I was brought up with classical music to a certain extend thanks to my mother who is very musical, but I had no idea who Joyce Hatto really was. But then I read a little bit more about her and thought “Gosh, what a moving story!” What I loved about it is the way it was done, and that no one was a villain, her husband wasn’t a villain in any way. His love, and to a certain degree the boldness and eccentricity, it’s such an interesting deception. Of course, we are really interested in deception! I emphasized with it, I thought it was all delicately handled and beautifully done. Actually I just played this little cameo in it. For me it was a day in Dublin, with an actor called Ned Dennehy, who played the reporter. Usually he always plays lunatics or mass murderers, but here he was playing a reporter, haha. I enjoyed working with him, and with Aisling Walsh the director, and with Francesca Annis.

FN:
Tell me about your latest role in “Delicious”.

NR:
Well, it was shown at a film festival in South Korea and they loved it! Now, I have no idea what’s going to happen to the movie, it is quite a nice movie with some very good people in it. Louise Brealey is in it, she plays the main woman who is an obsessive dieter. Then there is Nico Rogner, who is a French / German guy I think, and Sheila Hancock, and Adrian Scarborough. I play Adrian’s sous-chef, an angry man called Adolf! I mean, it is slightly a cartoon cameo, but it’s quite fun to play. Any excuse to play something slightly different is obviously welcome. It was written and directed by somebody I know; Tammy Riley-Smith. She just asked me to do it and I said I would love to do it. So we filmed it for a few days in a kitchen. I think it is quite a gentle film with a hard edge, and it tells a story that a lot of people probably will relate to. I hope that it gets seen on a broader level than just at international film festivals. It would be nice if we could get a release for the film here, but as you know, it is very difficult to secure those things. It was done on a very low budget, it was done as a labour of love to a certain extend, and it is Tammy’s first job as a film director. It is quite an intriguing film that draws you in.

FN:
Many thanks for the interview, Nicholas, and best wishes for your future projects.