The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (11 page)

He continued, ‘If we are watching films who do we get behind? The underdog. What the flip was Jesus if he wasn’t an underdog, born in a bleedin’ manger, you know what I mean? I’ve always loved the story because of that. Because whether you believe or not, that is a more succinct lesson about how we should be looking at the world than anything else. The trouble is we stop looking at the world like that when we take it out
of that context. We don’t then look at a homeless person and think “what can I do for you?” we think he must deserve it in some way. It’s hard to take out those parallels from something specific and put them into the wider world.’

The British nativity play at the end of the year nearing Christmas is sort of like the American high-school musical but much less glamorous and more accessible. The children are not little Hollywood stars; in the film the viewer gets to see the kids messing up and falling around. The idea for the film was to make it children-friendly, which Isitt was adamant about. Freeman was not at all concerned about being upstaged by children.

The actor says he doesn’t just turn up on set and act; there is a process. If it looks effortless on-screen, he’s evidently done his job.

‘I’m not interested in, “What can I do to impress?”’ he admitted to
The Guardian
’s Alice Wignall in 2009. ‘Well, play the role. I hate it when people show you what they’re doing. No one wants to see the cogs. But very often that’s what’s lauded as great acting: “Look at me working! Look at my false nose!”’

Because the script was improvised and Freeman swears so much, the director had to keep reminding him that it was a children’s film. Martin concluded that he would not have the patience or tolerance to be a teacher in real life. Those high-pitched shouts at the start of the film came from his own experiences as a father.
Peep Show
’s Robert Webb does not have fond memories of the filming: ‘just an unhappy experience,’ he said to
The Guardian
’s Alexis Petridis. ‘Improvising, in May, while naked, standing around in a garden. So cold.’

Freeman, however, enjoyed working with Debbie Isitt, otherwise he would not have gone back for
Nativity!
.

Watching school plays can often be a cringe-worthy experience but as a parent there is something very forgivable and enjoyable about it. There’s an innocence about seeing children doing their best and having fun with acting. That’s partly why Freeman was attracted to the film’s premise. It’s real, the kids are not pretending to be kids. They’re doing their best and there’s something very moving and emotional about that.

The process of making
Confetti
was less explained. The actors could go in any direction they liked, within reason and as long as it led the story in the right direction.

‘… it was more “you have to get from A to Z, saying this, we need to plot that, and at some point someone needs to say that,”’ Freeman explained to
Future
Movies.co.uk
’s
Paul Gallagher about
Nativity!
, ‘Debbie likes the uncertainty, and I think she has enough respect for actors, as good a screenwriter as she is, and she likes to let unexpected things happen that may be, hopefully, better than what she would have had in mind.’

They had to rehearse a great deal more than what is shown in the final film. They spent hours going through the choreography and rehearsing the songs. During some stints in filming Freeman tried to appeal to the older children to set a good example and, at times, it worked but there were some points during this time when the children were just being children and messing about.

The film was released only in the UK and was a surprise success, both critically and commercially, and has since become something of a cult classic of its kind.

There is much cynicism in America – especially Middle America – about non-domestic films, which is frustrating for an actor such as Freeman. But it is a huge country where there is plenty of money to be made.

Tim Robey wrote in his lukewarm review in the
Daily Telegraph
‘… it improves, big-time, partly because Freeman and Jensen play the pathos so well, and partly because the actual show is a genuine delight, catchily penned by Isitt herself, and asking the kids to be kids, in all their cloying, charming, Britain’s Got Not Enough Talent glory.’

The Guardian
’s Jason Solomons wrote, ‘Another British comedy limps into cinemas having inexplicably wrestled its way out of a television script meeting. Martin Freeman deserves an endurance medal for helping this over the finish line as primary school teacher and failed actor Mr Maddens, who puts on a musical nativity play after promising his ex-girlfriend will be coming from Hollywood to Coventry to see it.’

A sequel called
Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger
was released in 2012 and a third film began filming in 2013. Neither of these star Freeman.

Martin was working obsessively by this point and, given the comfortable state of his finances, had the option of taking a break if he’d so wished. There weren’t that many scripts that he liked and he has always been picky about which ones he wants to commit to. He had built up a steady stream of acting credentials in both film and TV. He was becoming more recognised as each year passed but the roles he took did not dispel the notion in many people’s minds that he was still ‘Tim from
The Office
’.

‘
The Office
is mostly what people recognise me from,’ he said
to
The Scotsman
at the time, ‘and I’m only glad that it wasn’t as a murderer in a soap that I became famous. But it’s a bit disconcerting when you read about yourself in the newspaper and it says, “This is what Tim did next,” and people think I am going to be avuncular and jovial when they meet me because that’s the way Tim was in
The Office
.’

Freeman had finally given in and hired an American agent to look after his affairs in LA. For years he had resisted and been a little suspicious about Hollywood, given its reputation as a fickle town of faded hopes and dreams, but he accepted that there was certainly a great deal more work available in the US than in his native UK. Success in America could make a major difference to any actor’s career.

‘Obviously, there are also people in America that I absolutely love,’ he admitted to BBC Movies’ Rob Carnevale on the subject.

He’d certainly made the right decisions switching to more dramatic roles in recent years in the UK and, with a hired hand over in the States, his sights were set high. Freeman does not equate money with success. ‘If an actor has a huge bank balance and fifty-three cars, good for them,’ he told Andrew Duncan of
Reader’s Digest
. ‘They’re a great business person, but their work may mean nothing. I have much more in common with Tom Courtenay – one of the people who made me want to act as a kid – than someone who can buy planet earth four times over.’

With such varied roles to his name, Freeman was soon to be cast in one of the most famous roles in the whole of English literature, which would turn around his career and make him one of the most well-known actors in Britain, but not before another home-grown success hit the UK’s screens.

‘
T
o be honest, I don’t really know what that means,’ he said to the
Sunday Times’s
Benji Wilson. ‘It’s like when people say something is quintessentially English. I don’t think the people saying it know what it means, either.’

‘It sounds like a backhanded compliment, because I think, “What, you don’t think I’m exciting? You don’t think I’m dangerous?”’ he later elaborated to Josh Rottenberg of
Entertainment Weekly
. ‘Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against. When people say, “You’re a normal Everyman,” I go, “Well, you fucking find five of me in the street then! There aren’t many of me walking around, you know!”’

On the plus side, had he played a villain in a TV soap, strangers may not have been so nice to him when they approached him in the street. It’s often the case that members of the public forget that there’s a line between fiction and reality and what an actor
may be like on camera is not necessarily how they are in real life. Most of Freeman’s fans and admirers were courteous and polite.

His most successful roles, however, were just around the corner.

‘If someone had a pint with me, they’d find out pretty quickly I’m not so nice,’ he confessed to
The Independent
’s Emma Jones in 2013. ‘I’m not Tim from
The Office
, although a lot of people still think I am. I have absolutely no problem telling someone to fuck off.’

He becomes infuriated when people think he can only play one character and that’s himself. He’s done much to dispel that misconceived notion since
The Office
, as he explained to Alice Wignall of
The Guardian
in 2009: ‘If you mean I look a bit like him and I sound a bit like him – yeah, that’s because I’m playing him and it didn’t say “He’s Somalian” on the script, otherwise I would have tried an accent. If the script says, “Guy in his 30s, my generation, lives in England” what am I going to do? Start acting like I’m half-lizard? There’s no point, because no one wants to see it.’

Freeman was cast as the legendary Doctor John Watson in the acclaimed BBC drama
Sherlock
with Benedict Cumberbatch. He knew it would be a success from the get-go, as he told
The Guardian
’s Euan Ferguson: ‘Look, it sounds arrogant to hell, but I remember reading an
NME
interview with McCartney and they’d been in Abbey Road, doing
Sgt Pepper
, when everyone was saying. “What’s happened to the Beatles?” and it was, “Just you wait, just you fucking wait until this comes out.” Same thing happened. I knew it was great, writing great, Benedict fucking great… I really must stop swearing.’

Sherlock
came around at the right time. The roles that he was getting offered were much less exciting and, although he was famous as a result of his role in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, there was a point when it caused him to worry about his talent. Freeman even asked a friend of his if he thought he was a good actor, but then he simply accepted another part and moved on. He was living in a new house said to be worth £900,000, in Hertfordshire near his birthplace in Aldershot, on the outskirts of London, with his partner Abbie Abbington and their two children Joe and Grace, who was born in 2008, and he had a huge tax bill to pay so it was important to keep busy.

Aldershot is a quiet leafy area that is a far cry from the busy suburbs of his previous home in Potters Bar, Crouch End and, before then, Bethnal Green – but he moved from there in 1993 when the BNP were voted in. As a leftie, Freeman believes that the term ‘multiculturalism’ polarises people – and that we shouldn’t notice what ethnicity a person is. People are people regardless of their ethnic background.

‘There is no country in the world like this,’ he told Chris Sullivan of the
Daily Mail
. ‘If all of a sudden all the traffic wardens in Ghana were Welsh, they’d really notice and might not love it? We give ourselves a hard time in this country in a sort of mea culpa way. But if we were that racist, people wouldn’t come. Very simple.’

Things have not changed all that much for him since he found fame. He’s got an extensive DVD library, a precious record collection, dislikes computers and still prefers his agent to send him scripts by post rather than email. He is not a fan of social media either. He loves clothes and fashion and, being
a fastidious dresser, drives his partner crazy when he pulls out the ironing board just to nip to the shops.

He’s never learned to drive because he thinks there are better things to spend his money on – such as clothes and records.

Freeman is a family man. Despite his wealth, success and growing critical stature, he is a father first and foremost and has succeeded thus far in keeping his children out of the limelight. ‘Obviously they’re what I’m proudest of, but when I grew up I thought all actors were [private] like De Niro,’ he said to
Reader’s Digest
’s Andrew Duncan. ‘All I’ve read about him is that he likes black women. These days you have to know everything, and it’s tedious.’

When asked if his tiny long-haired dog Archie compromises his manliness, he replied to
Metro
journalist Andrew Williams about the family dachshund, ‘Occasionally. Fortunately though I am already an actor and wear nicely tailored coats, so it doesn’t make much difference. It can get a bit too much though. One day recently I was wearing quite a poncey coat and walking Archie around Old Compton Street and suddenly thought “Oh Christ!” I felt like such a lord. Where would fashion be without the feminine touch, though? You need that in art, fashion, everything. No one I know is a jock, I don’t have any jock friends, that’s why I went into fucking acting to begin with.’

Curiously, Freeman and Abbington have not chosen to marry and Abbington admits that she is not sure why. ‘We don’t want to spoil it. We’ve got two children together, two dogs and a cat and a house, and that’s such a big commitment,’ she said to the
Daily Mail
’s Vicki Power in 2011. ‘Maybe one day
we will, but we wouldn’t want a huge hoopla; we’d run away and do it on our own and have a party afterwards.’

The one downer for Freeman of being so busy in both his personal and professional life is that he finds little time to make it to the country – notably, to his native Hampshire, as he explained to
Hampshire Life
’s Frank Grice: ‘I don’t make it back to Hampshire an awful lot. I’d rather have my family come to me if at all possible. But I love the times when I am back in the county. The peace and pace of the countryside – it’s incredibly nurturing and therapeutic for me. That’s really not one of those things you can search out and find. It has to be special to you.’

The
Sherlock
series was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, both of whom had prior experience with adapting Victorian literature. Moffat had adapted
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in 2007 for the series
Jekyll
, while noted writer and actor Gatiss had penned the Dickensian
Doctor Who
episode ‘The Unquiet Dead’. They had discussed the idea of a Sherlock Holmes adaptation on various train journeys to Cardiff, where
Doctor Who
is filmed. They finally decided to go ahead with the idea after Moffat’s wife, producer Sue Vertue, encouraged them to develop the project while they were away at an awards show in Monte Carlo. Moffat and Gatiss roped in writer Stephen Thompson in September 2008. It was then just a matter of casting.

Moffat and Vertue were keen to cast Cumberbatch after seeing him the 2007 film
Atonement
. He did a brilliant audition for the creative team – his voice, look and attitude was perfect for the role of Holmes, who is far from your everyday person.

The creative team admitted that Cumberbatch was the only actor they originally envisaged for Holmes and discovered that finding the right actor to play Watson was a far more difficult task. Of course, they had to find not only someone who could play Watson to a T but an actor who had on-screen chemistry with Cumberbatch. Matt Smith reportedly auditioned for Watson but was turned down and later cast by Moffat as the eleventh
Doctor Who
. Ironically, Freeman is reported to have been considered for
Doctor Who
at one point as a successor to David Tennant but Smith got the gig.

‘The points for it would have been that it would have been a laugh being Doctor Who, plus the money,’ Freeman told
The Scotsman
. ‘But against that would have been being on jigsaw puzzles and lunch boxes.’

Martin was admittedly dubious about the idea of updating Holmes for the twenty-first century but, as one of the writers pointed out, each of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels had been updated, so why would it not work with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories? Freeman did not like the idea that it would pretend to be ‘cool’ but by page two of the script he was hooked.

‘I was sent the script,’ Martin told Mark Gatiss in a special feature for the
Radio Times
. ‘When I was told there was going to be an updated Sherlock Holmes, I thought, “That could be risky, but it’s going to be Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, so OK – show it to me!” So I went in for it. But it’s probably fair to say I wasn’t in the best frame of mind.’ Freeman added, ‘A week later my agent rang and said, “Listen, this
Sherlock
thing, they’re sort of under the impression you weren’t that into it.”
And I said, “Oh… I am really interested. Please call them and let them know that I am interested.” I wasn’t being blasé about it at all. I just wasn’t on my best day. So I came in again, read with Benedict and it instantly worked, it seemed to me. I always liked Ben’s work. I thought he was a fantastic actor and there was something about our rhythms, similarities and differences that meant that it just happened.’

The reason why the creative team assumed Freeman was not really interested in the part was because his initial interview and audition with them did not go down so well. Freeman had had his wallet stolen on the way to the meeting, which infuriated him.

He told the
Daily Telegraph
’s Craig McLean about the audition, ‘I know I was in a bad mood. And I’m sometimes not very good at hiding that. So I wasn’t really doing the dance. And that was probably being reflected back at me in the audition.’

Freeman read for them again and read with Cumberbatch and it went down a storm and that’s what won it for him – his chemistry with his fellow lead actor. Cumberbatch has a very assured way with words and is excellent at handling mercurial, eccentric characters.

‘We had seen a lot of very good people, but when we paired Martin with Benedict it was stellar instantly, you could see the show,’ said Moffat to
The Guardian
’s John Plunkett. ‘Martin is very responsive to the performances around him and once they started bouncing off each other, I said to Mark, “That’s the show right there.”’

As a fan of the Big Smoke, Freeman was keen to see the city shown in all its beauty in front of the camera – after all
Sherlock Holmes is to London what Philip Marlowe is to Los Angeles in Raymond Chandler’s gritty noir novels.

‘And it’s that whole London thing, isn’t it – it’s the thrill of doing something that is pivotal to the artistic history of this great city,’ he said to Anthony Pearce of
London
Calling.com
.
‘When you get to explore something like that, I feel it makes it even more special.’

In the series, after coming back from Afghanistan, Watson is damaged both internally and externally and, upon meeting Holmes, he is introduced to a far more exciting world than he was living as a civilian. Holmes takes him away from his books and laptop and offers him something challenging and fun.

The Scottish-born writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on Dr Joseph Bell, who was a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Doyle worked for Bell as a clerk and was mesmerised by his powers of deduction. Holmes first appeared in print in 1887 with the publication of the novel
A Study in Scarlet
, which first appeared in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual
. In total, Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories stretching to 1927. Only four of the stories are not narrated by Watson – ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’ and ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mare’ are narrated by Holmes, while ‘The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual’ and ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’ are written in the third person.

The friendship and love between Holmes and Watson is what appealed to Moffat and Gatiss as they developed the characters for the new version of the Conan Doyle stories. They did not want Watson to come across as the bumbling idiot that
Nigel Bruce portrayed him as in the Basil Rathbone adaptions. Watson comes across as a more down-to-earth character in the latest adaptation; someone who humbles Holmes and acts as his moral compass, as some of the things Holmes does are certainly morally dubious. Colin Blakely, in Billy Wilder’s 1970 film
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
, was an influence on the new version. David Burke and Raymond Francis have also portrayed Watson in the past.

Freeman spoke to
Den of Geek
’s Louisa Mellor about the various on-screen incarnations: ‘The ITV ones in the eighties and the nineties with Jeremy Brett were fantastic, they were really really fantastic and I occasionally watch them now when they’re on and am amazed still by how well they hold up, they’re really good pieces of work. But this is contemporary, that’s not been done for ages.’

He continued, ‘Benedict’s a very good Sherlock. He looks like Sherlock Holmes, he sounds like Sherlock Holmes, he’s really good. I suppose they’ve highlighted the relationship between Sherlock and John more than many others. I think John is less of a passenger in this than he has been in other incarnations. That in itself wouldn’t necessarily make it more popular, but I think people like to see two people having to rub up against each other and find their way around life. I like the friendly conflict between them.’