I got asked a wonderful question in a private message from a friend called Joshua on Facebook earlier today and it really made me think. After spending several hours thinking and writing this out in a series of long private messages to Joshua, I asked him if I could post it on my blog.
“I’ve been asking a few actors this question lately and I think your input would be especially helpful because I really don’t know you and another actor who started out in the U.K.
What would you consider to be your top 5 dream roles? —a role that would inspire you—roles that you would work towards playing someday—not generic roles in films already made, but something archetypal or personal.”
I’ve never been asked this before. Great question. This might need me to think about it but I know one role straight off the bat and i’ll explain why.
As a child I had a poster on my wall of Sean Connery leaning against the hood of the Aston Martin DB5 and I looked up at that every night and desperately wanted to be James Bond. A few years ago, I bought myself an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, a real one, as this image of me as JB was still so strong in my mind. As a kid, my dad was a police officer. To me, he might as well have been James Bond himself. I looked up to him not just as a father but as a strong, male crime fighter, much like Bond.
I think if I could have any role, it would be the one that would inspire and satisfy the ten year old inside of me. James Bond is my first pick.
I suppose as an actor, my main goal is to have people look at me portraying a character on screen in a struggle that could echo their own, and triumph. I want people to believe that if I can do it, they can do it too. I want people to win out against anything that was previously defeating them and for 90 minutes or so get lost in my story and come out inspired to action and to follow their dreams. I came into this crazy career with a genuine desire to help folks out.
I’m a big fan of single-location movies. The reason is that this type of movie focuses more on the journey the actors have, rather than on flashy special effects or set-pieces. Think movies like The Cube, Elevator, Phonebooth, Dog Day Afternoon etc. These movies would really allow me to spread my acting wings and show a range all the way through.
I have yet to play a bad guy really, although I kinda did a bit in the movie where I met a mutual friend (Starina Johnson). I want to play someone who’s so downright evil yet flawed that the audience have no choice but to embrace him. Think The Joker in the Dark Knight. One of the best bad guys out there in my opinion. I’m also a huge fan of a British movie called Sexy Beast starring Ray Winstone and Sir Ben Kingsley. In that, Kingsley plays an utter bastard (in fact that’s too nice a way of referring to him) but he is the best character in there by an order of magnitude. I think Heath Ledger eclipsed Bale in The Dark Knight too. The best bad guys are the ones you empathize with and that’s down to how the actors actually get into and LOVE the role they are portraying.
Think about it, Hitler honestly didn’t think he was a bad guy. No dictator ever does. This is what translates perfectly to the screen for an actor that understands the roles they have chosen. I want to play a bad guy with exactly this mindset. I’m not the bad guy, i’m doing a job for whatever reason. Get into the role and love it for all it’s worth.
So whilst the ten year old comic book fan inside me would love to play Batman, the actor inside of me wants to play The Joker.
For every Aliens or Terminator on my resume (both of which I love, by the way), I want something like “Born on the Fourth of July” or “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The films that people go back to again and again and again and get something fresh from. the sort of role where at the end of the movie, everyone is just sat in stunned silence. Not because of the acting but because the story and the characterizations of every role within the film has made them sit back and re-evaluate things. Made them sit still and just think “wow, fuck, I want to do that.” Or “if he can do it, the sky’s the limit and I can do it too.”
I really want to make a difference to folks. I don’t just want to create incredibly good movies and be recognized for being an excellent actor, I want to make people think about their OWN lives. About how they can be nicer to other folks and to themselves. About the fact that following dreams can and will be rewarding, no matter at what stage of life you are at. That there is always another option and that anger, greed, disappointment and failure are only fleeting and you can pick yourself up from almost everything if you really WANT to.
Case in point – I had a serious accident that put me in hospital. I was in a bad way whilst I was there and honestly thought I was going to die. I vowed that I would not quit even after I made it as a successful actor and I have been doing everything since then to make that happen. It’s been hard, sure, but ultimately rewarding and I know that I will be doing this for the rest of my life. I would rather die than not do this. I’m serious.
I believe that everyone has two lives; the second one starts when you realize what you were put on this earth to do. i was put on this earth to be an actor and to inspire others through my acting to go on and follow their dreams. I will not shirk that responsibility at all. Ever. I love it. Being in front of the camera is like an orgasm for me. It’s a drug. I feel on fire, at home and full of joy like you wouldn’t believe. I study daily on my craft to get better and better because I want to be up there, rubbing shoulders with my contemporaries, on first name terms with the good and the great, inspiring others to do something amazing with their lives.
I realise I have only given you two roles so far but you kinda got me on a role here and I love just thinking about this incredible stuff and the amazing journey i’ve had to get me where I am today. Give me a bit more time and i’ll send over three more roles.
(You’re beginning to regret asking me, I bet!) 😉
Role-wise, there are a few actors who have had the sort of career I would like to emulate. These are pretty easy to spot. Christopher Lee for instance. He’s been the villain in a Bond movie, in Lord of the Rings, Dracula and Star Wars. Harrison Ford – Indiana Jones, Han Solo and so on. These guys inspired a generation of kids, myself included, to imagine the possibilities. To play in the streets, with eyes full of wonderment as they imagined they were swinging over a river full of crocodiles, or shooting a Tie Fighter out of the sky. They inspired the next generation of filmmakers.
Those are the roles I want. So for my next role, i am going to say Han Solo. Because I remember making my first film on a Super 8 cine camera, in which I starred at the age of 11, just after RotJ came out in 1983. I had a little black leather waistcoat that I was inseparable from and this weird little sci-fi gun belt thing that i got for Christmas that made different ‘pew pew’ sounds when you fiddled with dials and switches on it. For that summer, whilst we played on the hills that surrounded the area in which I grew up and filmed our cinematic masterpiece, I WAS Han Solo. That was the beginning of my love for acting and that has, without a doubt, led me right to this very moment. I first got a taste of what it was like to create something at the tender age of 11 and had no idea that it would lead me onwards towards a dream. I still wanted to be a police officer and follow in my dad’s footsteps at that point.
Moving onwards, I guess I want to play a survivor. I love the Walking Dead. In fact, i’ve had the comics for years before the tv show came out. I’ve been a fan of Batman and all manner of other anti-heroes and the one thing that binds them all together is that they are survivors.
I want to shoot zombies week after week and not get bitten. I want to be the guy who lives to the end of the movies, whilst everyone else falls to the contagion, disease, zombie attacks or whatever around us. I want to be the moral compass of a group that finds itself in a bad way, covered in blood, with ripped clothing, but ultimately surviving. Think MacCready in The Thing (Huge John Carpenter fan right here) or Arnie in Predator and so on.
My favorite director is John Carpenter and his movies occupy more of my top ten favorite films than anyone else. I would so love to be in a sequel to ‘The Thing’, much like the recent prequel. Ideally obviously I want the lead role, and one day I will have that, but for now, one of the ensemble cast in a Thing sequel would be perfect. I won’t count that as one of my picks though.
As I mentioned above, i’m a comic book fan. Apart from the batman comics, the one other one I loved back in the day was 2000AD, a British comic that largely didn’t travel over the Atlantic much, although you could get it in comic shops here and there (it was available in corner stores in the UK). 2000AD was a sci-fi comic and I attribute that to my love of sci-fi and horror movies and books (which leads me on to my fifth choice which i’ll get to after this fourth one). The main comic strip in these comics was Judge Dredd. A lantern jawed, no-nonsense hero who rigidly enforced the law. Being the son of one of the counties top policemen, I saw my dad in that role and it was something that I aspired to be. I loved the new Karl Urban version rather than the Stallone version of the movie and I would LOVE to play Judge Dredd in a sequel involving my favorite bad guys, the Dark Judges.
My penultimate pick (if I have got the numbers right) is based on my favorite author whilst growing up. I think I have more of his books than an other author by an order of magnitude. This is Stephen King. Up to about Gerald’s Game, I had every one of his books and devoured them nightly. I used to sit under my bedsheets at night as a pre-teen, with a torch and a Stephen King book and red until the early hours of the morning, unless my parents caught me of course. I devoured his movies (as you probably know, Christine was directed by John Carpenter – double win there). I love his Gunslinger ‘Dark tower’ books and I think I would want to play Roland Deschain. King cites everything from Arthurian Legend (which I studied) to the Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood westerns (which I love) and The Lord of the Rings as his sources, and as someone who started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1977, these books fueled a lot of my childhood fantasies and D&D games too.
My last pick, and this is the biggie as far as I am concerned, is based on my favorite movie of all time. No movie will ever surpass it in my world, ever. My favourite movie is Blade Runner and whilst Harrison Ford is and will always be Rick Deckard, given the chance of playing Deckard in a sequel that Ford could not do, I would move heaven and earth to make it so. I mean this. I would do whatever it takes to make this a reality. The scenery and world in Blade Runner are perfect. They breathe just like a real city breathes. The life and richness in them is incredible as the people weave about the backgrounds seemingly getting on with their lives. This is a movie that is more than the sum of its parts for me. It’s about humanity and what happens when humanity is taken for granted. Back in ’82, it was a box office flop. Critics cited it as being too thin in plot with a wishy-washy humanocentric story. I think they missed the point. Robots, ultimately made by us, come full circle and teach us what it is to be human. I saw echoes of this in ‘AI’, ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Chappie’ amongst others too. The special effects were years ahead of their time and still hold up today (he said through rose-tinted glasses). it is one of the most complete movie of modern times and along with Stephen King shaping my love of horror, Ridley Scott shaped my love of sci-fi. Because of Blade Runner, I went on to read books like Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero and Johnny Mnemonic, amongst others, by William Gibson, Vurt and Pollen by Jeff Noon, Spares by Michael Marshall Smith, Cryptonomicon, Zodiac and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace by Douglas Rushkoff. This led me onwards to listen to industrial music such as Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Fear Factory etc and because of Blade Runner and these books, I really embraced the ‘Cyberpunk’ side of the counter culture.
So there you have it. You actually got six from me. Apologies. If you want to stick to five and remove any from the list, then I would remove Roland Deschain. He’s on there mainly because Stephen King has had a such an impact on my formative years.
James Bond
Han Solo
The Joker
Judge Dredd
Roland Deschain
Rick Deckard
I really enjoyed thinking about this and writing this out. Thank you for the opportunity to do so and sorry for the wall of text!
In summary though, these characters really were the formation of my love of movies and my desire to be an actor. With the exception of the Joker, the others were all good guys who fought for the common man, even indirectly, and were all of a certain moral compass that although swinging back and forth, ultimately always swung towards good rather than bad.
I know I didn’t answer the question perfecly but I did provide a personal response and reasoning for each one of my picks that I think was born out of more than just “b ecause he’s a cool character.’
Damien Gerard 