For the Love of Fantasy takes place at Edinburgh Academy, Stockbridge, on July 26-28th. You can buy tickets here. Chris Rankin is the host. He played Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. James Cosmo and David Bradley are there too. Both from Game Of Thrones.
A chance to meet lots of other actors from some of your favourite movies and television series.
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There will be wand duelling classes, broomstick rodeo, owl handling, live stage entertainment, children’s wand making and spell classes, merchandise stalls, cosplay contests and prop building expos.
Clive Russell will be there.
Brynden ‘Blackfish’ Tully.
Glasgowist called him for a chat.
When you read a script and get involved with a show like Game of Thrones, do you know instantly that it’s going to be something that is going to be a success, or follow you around for the rest of your career?
No, not like that. I think, in that particular instance, by the time I went up for it, you got a sense that it was going to be something big. But, I was actually working in Northern Ireland in 2009, and a part of the cast had gone out for parts, and the cast are sitting around going… “And the Americans think it’s going to last for five years, ha, ha, ha.”
Because, obviously, nobody had any idea whatsoever what was going to happen, but broadly you sometimes go into shows which are long running and think this is going to be good.
Or you go into shows near the beginning. I was in the first series of Ripper Street. You go in thinking, “well, that’s going to be one series”
You don’t think, this is really going to go somewhere.
You watch things and you maybe think it’s really good, but script wise, no I don’t think so.
I’m not like an astute reader of scripts anyway
I was up for Rob Roy and… what was the Mel Gibson film that won the Oscar?
Braveheart.
Braveheart. And frankly the Braveheart script was unreadable, it was a pretend version.
It was an L.A. writer trying to sound like he knew what Scottish people say.
I think all that got sorted during the movie, but the script was nothing like as good as the Rob Roy script, which was frankly, brilliant, but it kind of went, nowhere.
You can never tell, but that might be to do with my incompetence at reading, but lots of other people said exactly the same thing.
It was a Scottish writer who wrote Rob Roy, he was based in America, and it was brilliant.
So in terms of doing events and having that feedback with folk that have responded to your work, is that something that you enjoy?
It’s very enjoyable, I remember the very very first time I went to one, it was one of the big ones in London, and I arrived half-an-hour early and I went into a café and there were all these people sitting there in costumes and I thought I was in some kind of other mad world.
You very quickly realise that these are people who really love all the things that lots of us are involved with, and know about it.
In relation to Game of Thrones it’s a bit threatening, because these people not only know the series, they know the books [laughs].
They’re passionate about it. And it might be Game of Thrones, it might be Doctor Who, it might be Harry Potter.
People will have a different take on what they remember you’ve done.
For me, the nice thing is, nobody spits at you, and nobody punches you so… [laughs]
Are there other roles that you’ve had that you find people really respond to? Like, when peope see you, what do they recognise you for?
Well, I live in a village in Fife, and I went up to the shops to get some biscuits and milk, and a bloke comes out and he says “Oh, you’re that guy”.
I said “Yeah,”
and he said “Big Innes, Still Game”.
And I get that all the time, that’s the thing up here, lots of people recognise me for it, and in its own way, in Scotland, that’s a kind of legend.
One of those things that everybody engages with.
Clive, when you look back over your body of work, what are the roles that you are really glad that you actually did?
I can’t think of any that I wasn’t glad I did.
That’s the Michael Caine answer.
No, it’s kind of true, there’s a level at which you need to keep working to pay for your life, and there are also jobs you do which have just been fantastic fun but have gone nowhere, or jobs which have not been fantastic fun but have gone somewhere.
I can’t think of anything where I’ve gone “I wish I wasn’t doing this-
I haven’t got to that stage where I think “I don’t really want to be doing this anymore”, never got anywhere near it.
I know guys of my generation who, because they’d stopped working, they worked less and less, because they get more rebuffs than they did when they were younger, do feel like that. “Ugh, maybe I should stop.”
I’m nowhere near thinking that. At some point the business will stop it for me. It won’t be a matter of my saying “stop it”. That’s all about the age I am –
Are you going for more interesting roles at this stage?
I think probably I came to film quite late.
When I was on television I was in my late thirties, I’ve done theatre all the way up until then, all kinds of different things.
And so from then on I’ve got kind of, I don’t know how you described the age groups, but if I can put it this way: You get a script and it says “tall, athletic, middle-aged man strides through the door” [laughs]
The last thing I did was, “we come across a rattled old Russian sailor”
And that kind of sums it up.
I’m doing to appear on the show Doc Martin, to die, in a fortnight.
There’s a question actually. I’m tall too. Is it challenging to be a tall actor? I’ve met a lot of actors and not many of them could stride through a door like we could Clive.
Man strides through a door [laughs]. No I don’t think so. It’s played well for me.
There are a number of us. Clive Mantell. Clive Owens. We are not all named Clive. But when they are looking for somebody of a certain physical stature, you meet the same people at the casting.
Now that’s not every role in the world. I’ve yet to be asked for the “smartly dressed small lawyer” role, put it that way.
It plays to different people in different ways, and I think probably having a definite physique and presence has played for me rather than against me. That’s the way I see it anyway.
Last question would be: In relation to your role in Game of Thrones, you actually had a lot of chances there to stand, and to talk and to deliver the lines. Are you happy about the way that television’s gone, where they’re giving the opportunity for actors to actually “act”, I suppose.
It’s a double-edged thing, as it happens, I think probably because of Game of Thrones I’ve done a lot of stuff for the streaming services: HBO, Netflix particularly, Amazon.
They’re running the table now, it’s arguable whether in the long term that’s a good thing, I mean, it’s simply that the Americans will take a chance on something, so the Northern Irish actors laughing at the notion of five years. They have the bollocks to put a lot of money, you know they cancelled the first pilot…
And this is another six million dollars to get it right. We don’t do that kind of thing and fair play to them. But it’s kind of an American cultural imperialism.
I did a Netflix series where I was the only English-speaking person in Poland, and it’s perfectly clear that part of Netflix’s model to go to countries all around the world and to use, particularly countries like Poland, which have a terrific film culture and then use the fact they have terrific technicians and actors, and do stuff in their language.
The downside of that is, that, like all kinds of American business, they do it as cheaply as they can.
That’s part of the problem. We’re working a lot more – particularly, British character actors are getting a lot more work, I think.
Really good, well-written series. I think, I’m being paid properly, but the truth is the Americans go in and the Polish actors I was working with who were really fantastic, terrific background and everything else were getting paid nothing like as much as what I was getting paid.
And so it’s a double-edged thing, there’s a lot of fantastic creativity but works being done in the American kind of business model.