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A bit of a quieter day for me today as we tried to film all the scenes involving an actor who is leaving for another job at 2am on Thursday. We had to do the topless dance scene from another angle and I also had to (spoiler alert) eat a chocolate mousse using a piece of pizza as a spoon (which I also ate) and then smear the pizza and mousse all over my face. I have a feeling that I won’t be in the finished film and that the director just doesn’t like me much. The joke’s on him because I love pizza and chocolate mousse. Though as it turns out I don’t much care for eating them simultaneously.
I am also a producer on this movie and even though I am more accommodating and less dictatorial than most producers would be, I think it must be quite cathartic for the director to make me humiliate myself on screen. This is for all the executives who told you you had to cast a certain actor or they wanted you to change the ending. That mouthful of chocolate pizza and that face dripping with three day old Angel Delight is revenge for everything you suffered.
Luckily I enjoy being humiliated so it’s a symbiotic relationship.
It’s interesting that I have minimal embarrassment about this kind of thing. Some chubby 54 year old men might not want to be filmed topless or have to pretend to be a pterodactyl with absolutely no warning. I don’t seem to have any vanity about stuff like this. I will chuck myself in. I think it’s because, for me, getting a laugh has always been the top priority. I am quite easily embarrassed in real life, but during a performance that more or less evaporates. After I’d thrown myself into the dance last night and filming had stopped, I did feel a bit more coy and concerned about how I might come across. Weirdly I probably feel more awkward in some of the quieter acting bits. Worried that I am fucking it up and not holding my own amongst the fabulous people I’m working with. I will be more embarrassed that I might have done a clumsy bit of reacting, than if I’d got pepperoni up my nostril.
I think it was Mark Watson who observed that people fear public speaking more than they do death, meaning that at a funeral most of you would prefer to be in the box than delivering the eulogy. But whilst doing stand up is a heightened situation with some nerves coming into play, I would rather do that than have to go into a restaurant alone in a foreign country where I don’t know how things are done.
I guess we all work differently.
This job is a weird combination of holiday, prison and insane employment. We eat our breakfast in a little annexe overlooking the Welsh sea (as I write this it’s sunny, which is a first for Wales and everything looks lovely), but I haven’t stepped outside of the property since I got here (what feels like a month ago) and our meals arrive at very odd times (even though I am waking up at the time I would if I was at home we don’t get breakfast until midday - and it was 1pm today) which we have little choice about and we then work for twelve hours before collapsing into bed.
I made the most of not being in absolutely every scene by having a snooze on the sofa and then risking lying down on my bed at 10pm (though was woken by a knock at the door saying it was time for dinner at about 10.45pm).
There’s a very The Prisoner vibe to it all. It does feel like we might be in a prank show or part of a psychological experiment.
But as long as I get to smear chocolate mousse on myself then I can’t complain.
And a surprise RHLSTP which I recorded a few weeks back, with the brilliant US comedian and actor, David Cross.
Listen here
