Before any actor performs a scene that has any degree of danger, the stunt crew must clear it as safe. Stunts cleared the equipment above and under the water. I couldn’t take my big oxygen caddy, so I had a small handheld canister with about two minutes of air, which under good circumstances should have been adequate.
I swam down into the submarine and, once inside, I let the top close. I now had no choice but to swim forward to the other exit. Seconds later, I heard ‘Action’ on my comms unit. I let go of the air canister and swam to the other opening. It was locked. I couldn’t get out the way I came in anymore and because the entire crew was watching from the pool deck, I couldn’t be heard banging from this far underwater.
One of the first and most important lessons taught in scuba-diving is not to panic. I swam back and retrieved my air canister. I figured I’d sit down, breathe lightly, and hope the director would eventually see nothing was happening on the shot, and the stunt crew would come down and open the door.
Those were the longest and the shortest two minutes of my life. I was slowly running out of air when the stunt crew finally realized something was wrong. They dived down to release me. I gave the hand signal that I was okay and swam back up to the pool deck. When I got back on dry land, I completely lost it with the crew and reamed all of them new ones.
The actress playing my love interest in Megalodon wasn’t the most expressive woman I’d ever met. In fact, she gave new meaning to the term ‘cold fish’. In every scene, she had two shades of the same expression – deadpan, and deadpan with a thin smile. Even in our sex scene in the bathtub, there was more life in the bar of soap. The director kept asking me to do things to get her to react to the camera with some passion. As a result, in many of our scenes together, I improvised a lot.
One day, after we’d finished shooting the scene where I’d been stalking the shark, I was supposed to come up to my love interest and say, ‘I’m wired. Let’s go home and make love.’ Since I’d already been ad-libbing in other scenes, the director egged me on and told me to say something, anything, to try to provoke a reaction from her.
She stepped towards me and instead of my scripted line, I said, wait for it, ‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?’
Her reaction was priceless. Her face turned every shade of red, but she took the line and went forward, and the director got his reaction and his scene. Meanwhile, the crew was in hysterics. I’m surprised you can’t hear them howling on the DVD. The director agreed the line would be cut during ADR, which is the acronym for ‘automatic dialogue replacement’ – the process of going into a studio and doing voice-overs for dialogue that the mics have not picked up clearly, as well as adding any necessary sound effects.
Months later, I went into a studio to do the ADR for the film, and the sound was so crappy that I basically had to redo the whole script. I got to the line, wait for it again, ‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?’ and discovered they’d kept it in for the DVD after all.
However, I had to dub the line for television because in most markets you can’t say ‘pussy’ unless it’s meowing. What they’d written for me to say was priceless. Keep in mind, my character has been chasing Megalodon, the biggest motherfucking badass shark you’ve ever seen, and my character’s looking for some serious action. This was the line I had to say to dub for TV.
‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and watch I Love Lucy?’
Over the years, like many of us, I’ve made decisions that didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, and I’ve listened to people I probably shouldn’t have, but I’ve never regretted anything I’ve done. I take responsibility for all my choices, even the not so great ones. Shark Attack 3: Megalodon may be one of those dubious decisions, but in America it continues to be one of Blockbuster’s more popular B-movie rentals, which is a good thing for, well, Blockbuster.
During a family gathering after the release of Megalodon, someone was giving me grief about the film. Turner butted into the conversation and said to them, ‘Hey, how many movies have you made?’ I gave him fifty bucks.
‘Being Alive’
On the afternoon of my first rehearsal for Anything Goes in 1989, as I walked down Wardour Street in London towards the Prince Edward Theatre, I was shitting myself. I knew the cast had already settled into their rhythms and not only was I arriving as the new American kid, but I was also the somewhat inexperienced American kid. I was ready for the challenge, but at that moment it did not escape me that as soon as I stepped through the door, my life would become very much like the musicals I loved so much.
Relative unknown, handsome and amiable,1 travels to England to study Shakespeare. Gets job offer within forty-eight hours, performs well on opening night, becomes established leading man, gets the girl – oops, not that part – gets the handsome man, never returns to the schoolroom. Applause. Curtain. Lights.
When I stopped outside the stage door of the Prince Edward Theatre, that plot was still to unfold. The notice above the door read, ‘The World’s Greatest Artistes Have Passed and Will Pass Through These Doors.’ My throat went dry and I had to take a deep breath to stop myself shaking visibly. The sign’s implications were slightly overwhelming, but at the same time incredibly exciting. I imagined a host of twentieth-century performers crossing this same threshold: Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, Josephine Baker, Elaine Paige, Bernard Cribbins, Arthur Askey … I’m serious. Askey was an entertainment genius in his day, a terrific comedian and the king of pantomime dames. He appeared at the Prince Edward off and on for many years, and during the time when it was known as the London Casino, Askey and performers like him kept London laughing through the Second World War.
I was about to head on in when I spotted another historic plaque on the brick wall directly above the stage door. This one read, ‘In a house on this site in 1764–5, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756–91, lived, played and composed.’ Now I was thoroughly intimidated. Talk about music legends. Given his amazing productivity and his enduring melodies, I’ve always thought that if Mozart were alive today, he’d be competing with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the musical theatre composer crown. I’d watch that talent show, wouldn’t you?
I backed up into Wardour Street, just missed getting swiped by a messenger bike, and looked to my right in the direction of Old Compton Street. I walked a few paces towards the clusters of men and women, okay, mostly men, to loosen my tense muscles a little and stopped again when another blue sign caught my eye: ‘In 1926 in this house, John Logie Baird, 1888–1946, first demonstrated television.’ This had to be fate. Two doors away from where I was about to make my West End debut was the place where a fellow Scotsman, Baird, had successfully transmitted the first television images, a medium I knew I wanted to be part of, even in the early days of my career.
It’s easy now to look back on those few awe-inspiring minutes outside the Prince Edward Theatre and interpret those historic signs as being prophetic in some way. It gets even weirder. As I turned back to the theatre, a black cat crossed my path, which in my family is a sign of good luck.
I passed through the stage door, my hands no longer clammy, my head clear and my determination to succeed in this business utterly stoked. The rush of adrenalin I felt when I read those inscriptions and prepared myself to cross the theatre threshold has repeated itself a few times in my career. Moments when I’ve said to myself, ‘If this is as good as it gets, and it’s pretty fucking good, I could leave all of this and be happy.’
Over the years, I’ve developed a theory about the path my musical theatre career has taken and it’s a little like what happens on TV talent shows such as Any Dream Will Do and How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? My theory is that from the beginning of my West End career, Cameron Mackintosh has been supporting and training me to be a leading man. I think he’s done the same for other performers, like my friend Ruthie Henshall, for example. Early in my career, Cameron encouraged, mentored
and auditioned me in different roles in a variety of musicals – Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, The Fix – until he felt that I was ready to handle the master, Sondheim.
For those of us in musical theatre, the pinnacle of the game is to perform in a Stephen Sondheim show, especially one in which Stephen himself is directly involved. I’ve done two Sondheim productions, Putting It Together (first in Los Angeles in 1998, and then at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway in 2000) and Company (at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2002). Both of these shows were particular favourites of Stephen’s and with each one he was personally involved.
Putting It Together is a revue of many of Sondheim’s songs from other musicals, organized around a loose plot about two couples, one at the beginning of their relationship, ‘The Younger Man (whom I played) and ‘The Younger Woman’, and an older couple, ‘The Husband’ and ‘The Wife’, who’ve been together for decades.
I met Stephen for the first time during the one of the early rehearsals for Putting It Together, which had its initial run in 1998 at the Mark Taper Forum in LA. The theatre world is a lot like an extended family, but despite me already knowing many of the players on the team, including Cameron, who was producing the show, I was still in jaw-dropping awe of Sondheim. For me, those first few rehearsals were like being back at Opryland as a student again, asking to be pushed, to be stretched, to be taught by someone who was the ’master of the house’. When we began the run of Putting It Together, I believed that my career still remained in London in the West End, but all of us had an inkling Broadway was a possibility for this production.
The cast for the LA run included Susan Egan, Bronson Pinchot and Carol Burnett, the latter of whom I’d adored as a performer since I was a kid. When my family had settled in Joliet, Illinois, back in the early eighties, sometimes on Friday nights my mum and dad would go out to dinner or to a party with friends, and they’d ask if I’d stay home with Murn. Every time, I said I would. She always thought she was babysitting me on those nights. Even though by that time in her life she was in a diminished state following a series of strokes, Murn and I would have a blast together. After Murn went to bed, which was usually pretty early in the evening, my friends and I, with my parents’ full knowledge, would gather in the basement rec room and we’d have our own shindig.
On nights like this, Murn and I would eat loads of sweeties, drink lots of shandies, and watch reruns of The Carol Burnett Show. Murn would laugh at anything Carol did, while I loved watching the moments in the show when one of the other performers was clearly about to crack up, but couldn’t and was trying desperately to hang on to his or her dignity in front of the live audience. The Carol Burnett Show was sketch comedy at its best. Some day, I plan to produce and perform in a similar format, a desire I’ve had since my youth.
The other cool thing about working with Carol was that I was able to meet the designer Bob Mackie, who has dressed Carol and a load of other glamorous performers, including Cher, for years. One afternoon, I dragged two boxes of my collectible Barbie dolls into my dressing room and asked Bob to sign them for me, which he did, and then we spent an hour or so talking dolls, clothes, fabulous dresses and the women who wear them.
The night we opened Putting It Together at the Mark Taper Forum in LA was one of the first times I experienced the Hollywood red-carpet treatment for a show in which I was one of the leads – and let me tell you, I could learn to love that glamorous sort of occasion. For the opening night, I flew my parents out to California. The show was a terrific success, and at the premiere party my mum and dad swapped family stories with The Golden Girls star Betty White and had a good laugh with Doris Roberts from Everybody Loves Raymond.
I’ve since enjoyed a few other opening nights of this style. One of my particular favourites was the New York premiere of the film De-Lovely with Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, which took place in 2003. Scott was not able to join me for that event and so I invited Clare instead.
We flew first class to the Big Apple and walked the red carpet together. Who knew all those years of dressing up my niece at Barrowman holiday parties would pay off? She was a pro at walking in stiletto heels down the carpet and into the cinema. At the party after the premiere, I performed a couple of Cole Porter songs for all in attendance, while Clare and Ashley Judd compared stories about Milwaukee, where Ashley’s husband, the racing-car driver Dario Franchitti, has spent many hours speeding round the track at the Milwaukee Mile.
In the hiatus between Putting It Together finishing its run in LA and its subsequent move to Broadway in 2000, I finally accepted a job with Disney, in the West End production of Beauty and the Beast. The show itself was a treat to be in, and Clare and Turner (Andrew’s children weren’t old enough) flew over to see the production and hang out for a while with their Beast of an uncle.
When the Broadway production of Putting It Together eventually went into rehearsals in New York, because most of the cast and crew knew each other, it was like a family reunion. There were a couple of cast changes for the transfer. The legendary Broadway actor of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles fame, George Hearn, came in to play the husband of Carol Burnett’s character, and because Susan Egan had other commitments, Cameron recommended Ruthie Henshall for the part of ‘The Younger Woman’. Together again, Ruthie and I had a blast. We called ourselves the ‘Two Brits on Broadway’. In fact, many of us involved in the show had worked together before.
The theatre world is small. Loyalty and family are important. If you play well with others, they ask you to come back and play again. For example, Eric Schaeffer, who made his Broadway directorial debut with this production of Putting It Together, and I later worked together. Eric went on to be the Artistic Director of the Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in 2002, of which I was also a part with my role in Company, and which was the first retrospective of Sondheim’s work at the Kennedy Center and a singular event.
During Putting It Together’s run on Broadway, I lived in a brownstone owned by Cameron Mackintosh in the centre of Manhattan, about three blocks from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where the show was running, and next door to the Actor’s Studio.2 If London was my ‘moveable feast’, New York was a delicious dessert: decadent, not always good for you, but filled with everything I love about a city: theatres, good restaurants, and loads of fabulous shops.
For my second time3 working with Sondheim, in Company, many of the same crew were putting it together again. However, the director of this show was Sean Mathias, a talented playwright and actor, who also happens to be Ian McKellen’s ex. I tell you, play well together …
Company, unlike Putting It Together, is a fully realized musical, but the two shows share similar themes. Company depicts five couples at various stages of love and lust, as seen through the eyes of their single man-about-town friend Robert or ‘Bobby’, whom I played. The relationships are complicated and cynical, and the show can leave audiences not only with a melody or two in their heads, but also an idea or a question that merrily rolls around for days.
After the opening performance of Company, Stephen Sondheim came down to my dressing room. What he said to me that evening I consider to be one of the seminal moments of my entire career. Another such occasion was seeing my name in the opening credits of the third series of Doctor Who for the first time; my name spins on screen just after the spiralling TARDIS appears.
‘John,’ Stephen said to me, on the Company opening night, ‘of all the years I’ve seen this show, you’ve shown me who Bobby really is. You brought tears to my eyes.’
In this business, you don’t often get compliments like this from inside the house and I was appropriately stunned. Man, this was Stephen Sondheim speaking these words to me. His assessment of how I’d performed Bobby was incredibly affirming and I like to think that my success was partly the result of a little of my own tenacity. I’d pushed Stephen at lunch one day to talk to me about Bobby. Normally, I’m not the kind of actor who
requires a lot of subtext. I don’t need to know what a character is like beyond the page when I’m acting. This is my profession, and if I’m good and the writing is strong then I don’t need anything else. Having a genius like Stephen on hand is not to be sniffed at, though, so I took every chance I could to learn from him.
During rehearsals for the show, he and I used to head to a local restaurant and eat oysters, platters and platters of fresh raw oysters. Although I loved them, we ate so many at each sitting that I think my greed triggered the shellfish allergy I mentioned earlier. To this day, I can’t so much as look at a prawn without going into cold sweats and my throat swelling shut.
On this particular day, we were taking a rest before hoovering up the next plate when I asked Stephen directly about Bobby’s character.
‘Is Bobby gay?’
‘Definitely not,’ he adamantly replied.
I took this answer to heart and I played Bobby as a kind of Peter Pan, a man refusing to grow up, afraid to embrace the responsibilities of being an adult, of being alive.
Company happened to be the first show that my nephew Andrew saw me perform on stage. At four years old, he sat through the entire performance – didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink, and didn’t open a sweetie wrapper once.
During our run in Washington, DC, I lived in an extended-stay hotel overlooking the famous Second World War monument to Iwo Jima. Working on Company, which was part of the Sondheim Celebration, felt like being at a summer camp. The atmosphere in and around the Kennedy Center was electric because nothing of this magnitude, a run of Sondheim’s most renowned musicals showing in repertory, had ever been done before. I loved being on stage with my co-star Alice Ripley, who played Amy, and whose version of ‘I’m Not Getting Married Today’ still makes me breathless. I can’t compliment Alice enough for her sheer talent. Matt Bogart played David and was one of the sexiest guys I’ve shared a stage with. His real girlfriend let me flirt shamelessly with him. Working with this company of talented men and women proved something to me that I’d learned years ago at Opryland: if your company gets along, your show will too.