Here’s a great interview with Peter Capaldi, star of The Thick of It and In The Loop (one of my favorite (black) comedies ever), and a supporting actor in Local Hero (one of the most wonderful movies ever).
This little bit — not indicative of the level of humor that permeates the interview — puts me in mind of my own anxieties-of-voice and that riff yesterday about the audience:
It was around this time that Capaldi says he started becoming chippy about not being English. “It was clear that people would have preferred me to be Daniel Day Lewis,” he says. “I just kept thinking there is no market for me, so I would become this other thing… a young, English, middle-class man. But that didn’t work either, because there’s plenty of those.
“For a long time I carried this… it’s not resentment, it’s fear. It was a fear of not being good enough, not being Daniel, or not being Hugh Grant or not being Colin Firth. It took me years to realise it was me bringing that stuff to the table – that when I would get into a situation if I was working with people, I’d blame them. Once I realised that it was a great eye-opener.” When did that happen? “Probably not until I was about 40.”
Go read it, and watch In The Loop and Local Hero. That’s my advice for a Sunday morning.