麻豆社

In her 麻豆社 Radio 4 podcast Young Again, journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

In this episode Kirsty meets award-winning actor Peter Capaldi, famed for his TV roles as Malcolm Tucker and Doctor Who. In an honest conversation, Capaldi reflects on his journey from growing up in a tenement block in Glasgow to winning an Oscar in 1995. Along with the career highs, he describes crushing lows and the despair during the periods when he couldn’t find work.

Here are the six things we learned…

1. The word he uses to describe his career is…

“Lucky,” says Peter before going on to say, “And I don't mean that facetiously… luck plays an enormous part. I kept going, kept showing up. But I'm enormously lucky. I think I learned a lot…”

The other thing he credits with his success is one you wouldn’t expect an actor to admit: “I'm a better actor now than I was when I started out because I made a lot of mistakes. And I was lucky enough that people kept employing me, and so I could learn from my mistakes and improve.”

2. Even in the career low points he kept believing that things would work out

“The thing that makes it irresistible is the fact that a phone call can change your life,” explains Peter. “You can really be at a very low ebb professionally and things can turn around. That makes it very difficult to leave the profession when things are not going well – because there's always the hope that things will turn around.”

He also wasn’t enamoured by what he saw as the alternative: “I do remember very distinctly that I did not want to be standing in a bus stop in the rain going to an office.”

But there was a period when the feedback from castings wasn’t encouraging, “Everywhere I went when I tried to get a job or audition… I was not sellable… my voice wasn't any good, ‘You need to change that. You can't seriously think you can be an actor with that Glaswegian accent… the way you stand...’”

But Peter persisted, and now he can reflect on the earlier disappointments and what he might have done differently:

“In later life, as an actor,” Peter tells Kirsty, “I realised that the most important thing that you can bring to it is yourself. They were wrong – or the attitude that developed in myself from their negativity was wrong.”

“I shouldn't have given them the power. I shouldn't have allowed them to make me feel less secure about my own gifts,” says Peter.

So what would he say to someone starting out in acting today?

“Sometimes young actors,” says Peter, “will ask me, ‘How did you get on?’ and for advice... for when things don't work out for them. And I often say, ‘The thing that prevents you from getting that job is the thing that will get you that job. The very thing that is in the way is the thing that nobody else can do – which is to have this face, and this voice, and this posture and this way of being.’”

3. His breakthrough was alongside an American acting icon

Peter was born and brought up in Glasgow. His paternal grandfather was Italian while the rest of his ancestry is Scottish and Irish.

“I was at art school, I was in a band (because everybody was in a band in art school at that time) and [director Bill Forsyth] saw me… and said, ‘What do you think about being in a film?’”

“Well, that doesn't happen to you every day, does it? But of course, at that time I wasn't really aware of his position in the industry – I thought he was just a guy knocking about, making little 16mm movies,” Peter tells Kirsty.

“Then I got a call from the casting director of the film saying, ‘You've got to come to London for a screen test.’ So that was terrifying – I'd never been on a plane before. I just thought, ‘I can't do this. I'm a guy who drinks lager and plays in bands in Glasgow.’ But then I got a call saying, ‘You got the part.’ And that was it. And off we went.”

The film was 1983’s Local Hero, a comedy-drama directed by Forsyth and produced by David Puttnam. It’s the story of an American oil company which tries to buy a town on the west coast of Scotland to build a refinery there.

The actor who plays the businessman at the head of the company had previously played a prisoner in Alcatraz, a US Air Force General, an Italian Prince and the American lawman Wyatt Earp amongst other screen roles.

“Burt Lancaster was a real, genuine movie star,” says a still clearly impressed Peter, “Who, by six degrees of separation, connects me to the entirety of the Hollywood golden age… and he would talk about Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart and all that stuff.”

4. He won an Oscar in 1995 for Best Live Action Short Film

“I didn't even know you could get an Oscar for a short film,” says Peter. “I didn't know there was such a thing. The Scottish Film Council called and said, ‘It's been nominated for an Oscar.’”

The short comedy film directed and written by Peter is called Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life. It stars Richard E. Grant and the title refers to the writer as well as the famous 1946 Frank Capra film, It's a Wonderful Life.

“We were in our hotel on the evening of the Oscars and I got a call from Bob Weinstein, an actual call, saying, ‘Have you got your speech ready? Because you're going to win... You got to come to our party afterwards.’ And we were saying, ‘Thanks very much Bob, but we're going to meet some people for a burger afterwards’… all of that stuff we didn't know.”

At the time the Weinstein party was the biggest one on Oscar night that all the big Hollywood names showed up for.

“We ended up at the Weinsteins' party because somebody said you really should go. And all the hottest stars of the day were there… and God, they're beautiful. They really are. I mean, it's unbelievable. I'd never seen anything like it. They are just genetically sort of perfect.”

“The funniest thing was coming home. We weren't there with a lot of money, so we were travelling in economy. But I went to the BA check-in desk in LAX, and I thought, ‘Well, I'll just go up to the desk and check in and I'll plop my Oscar on the desk and see what happens.’ Which I did. And I was embarrassed doing that, but not as embarrassed as they were because they went, ‘I'm really sorry, the flight's full.’”

“But they gave us a bottle of champagne, and then we got on the flight with our Oscar... So we were in economy, but somebody saw that we had an Oscar because we had it out. We passed it back [through the plane].”

5. Peter says his career lows have made him a better actor – and provided the inspiration for his portrayal of Malcolm Tucker

“The thing I like about actors is you can see in their eyes when they've been around the block… they've all got stories of ups and downs… and they tend to be thrilled with just having a job,” reflects Peter.

“When I did The Thick of It, I couldn't have done The Thick of It ten years before that… I hadn't had those experiences. I had to have been knocked about a bit, to have stuff to use. I was able to tap into a vein of sarcasm that's quite common in Scottish people and to amplify that to give it a kind of chaotic madness.”

6. An encounter at an awards ceremony led to the role of Doctor Who

“I bumped into Steven Moffat [then a writer on Doctor Who] at the Scottish BAFTAs. Because I was a fan of Doctor Who from when I was a kid, I was asking him what was happening next – and I didn't know that Matt Smith was going to leave. I was just interested to know what monsters were coming back and what was going on and stuff like that,” remembers Peter.

Peter didn’t realise it but following this conversation he was in serious contention for the part. He was invited down to the Doctor Who set and Mark Gatiss, then also writing on the series, showed him around.

“It was Doctor Who's 50th year and Mark Gatiss was doing a dramatisation of the origin story of Doctor Who. And in the show there was a TARDIS. So I went down there and while we were doing it, he was showing me this stuff and he said, ‘How would you feel about being Doctor Who?’ And I thought, that's a bit of an odd question. And I said, ‘Well, I think that ship has sailed, hasn't it?’”

“But, of course, I was being scoped out. I remember I said, ‘Can I get my photo taken at the TARDIS control panel?’ And all these people started taking photographs of me and I thought, ‘This is odd.’”

A few weeks later Peter got the part. But he says it’s much more than a regular acting job:

“When you're Doctor Who, you're sort of the leader of the company. And there is a role that you have to play that is extracurricular, that is beyond just your acting. You have to be that character in the flesh when you meet people. You can't disappoint them. You can't moan and be miserable and all the things that I would normally do.”