![]() ![]() Now, after a rather odd spell in Los Angeles in which he appeared in five episodes of Heroes, he's produced another outstanding performance in his favoured milieu, British television, this time as John Lennon. He may have modernised Doctor Who in 2005 by insisting on playing him as a resolute northerner in contemporary costume but then, for fear of being typecast (as an alien, one imagines, and not a northerner), walked away after just one series. In this country at least, he has been typecast as the brooding, frustrated working-class hero, in everything from Michael Winterbottom's Jude and Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough to one of the most venerated TV dramas of the 90s, Our Friends In The North. The problem is that Eccleston is one of the best when it comes to being dour and northern on screen. My first role was as Bandy Bertha the transvestite in a primary school musical I played it for laughs." As for the northern thing? He adds, with mild irritation, that he is "not covered in black puddings". I didn't stand on my desk at school doing Hamlet soliloquies. "I have always been extroverted I like the attention. ![]() Eccleston is a funny guy.Įccleston says his family and friends back home in Salford have, for the last 20 years, been asking why he hasn't done comedy. His image as a professional northerner – a chippy one at that – falls away. And, best of all, when the story is told he pushes himself back into the chair and roars with laughter. Yet his lean, runner's body barely moves it's all in the steady, passionate eye contact. He tips forward on the edge of his chair – we're drinking water in the bar in a dreary London hotel – and emotes. It's the physical intensity with which he tells the story. It's not even the idea of a shivering Eccleston keeping a random disembodied head company. It's not so much the perfect Glaswegian accent, all muscular and heightened, that pleases. ![]()
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