Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
than one story – a hybrid of leading role and guest star.
McGovern is the ultimate example of a major contemporary writer who scorns the process of writing, preferring to be regarded as someone who tells stories. ‘The only way to tell stories on TV is to convince people that what they are seeing is actually happening now and is real.’ In this respect, he shared Andy Serkis’s belief that drama – whether on stage, film or television – is first and foremost about storytelling.
In each Accused film, viewers are shown a suspect about to face sentence in a trial, and are taken back through the chain of events that brought the suspect to that point. It did not concern itself with police procedure: McGovern felt that side of crime was being explored quite enough, to the point of being overused. It wasn’t so much ‘Whodunit?’ as ‘What have they done?’ The diverse storylines were powerful. One film, starring Christopher Eccleston, recounts how a plumber, who is conducting an extramarital affair with a much-younger woman, is plunged into serious debt just as his daughter’s wedding is nearing. Another, featuring Mackenzie Crook as a terrifyingly sadistic corporal, is set in Afghanistan. The suspects were not habitual criminals. In the case of Liam Black, he ‘just snapped’: ‘I didn’t mean to kill anyone. Couldn’t kill time. Couldn’t murder a pint.’
Liam’s Story, co-written by McGovern and Danny Brocklehurst, was the fourth of Accused’s six stories, and was broadcast on BBC1 on 6 December 2010. Liam (Serkis) is a taxi driver with a gambling addiction. He is married to Roz (Neve McIntosh), who has been battling multiple sclerosis for many years. After the couple’s daughter Katy passes the entrance exam for a new school with flying colours, Liam struggles to scrape the money together to buy her a present. When he is giving an airport-bound taxi journey to a twentysomething estate agent called Emma, he is so smitten by her that he cannot help sneaking back to her home in her absence out of the country. Snooping around her living room, he steals a necklace to pass off as a present for his daughter. As he uncovers more and more about her – through private email correspondence and the contents of her iPod – and becomes her regular taxi service, his growing and corrosive obsession with her leads to disaster and tragedy.
Jodie Whittaker, who played the part of Emma, found it a privilege to work with Andy but found that their dramatic interplay had a quite specific focus, because many of their scenes took place in Liam’s taxi cab. ‘Many of our scenes in the cab were static, with Liam driving and Emma in the back seat, which does make performing quite challenging,’ said Whittaker. ‘What happens is the focus goes to their eyes. They’re communicating through eye contact via his rear-view mirror.’
Liam’s Story is a hugely emotive piece. Dominated by Serkis (he is scarcely off the screen for the full hour), we see how a troubled, though in many ways good, man falls further into calamity and criminality. Lorraine Ashbourne, who has herself appeared in McGovern series, spoke for many when she described McGovern as one of the most important contemporary writers in Britain. ‘What he writes looks simple on the page, but, when you perform it, it really comes to life. He knows how to write about people we all care about and understand.’
As Longford was about to air on Channel 4 in 2006, Andy Serkis told the Stage newspaper that his television appearances were becoming less frequent for a quite specific reason. ‘There are too many compromises in television drama, particularly in series and serials. I think it’s something to do with the repetitiveness of it. I like one-off projects because they have a passion and a drive. They are their own entity – they are films, really.’ By the time he said those words, to say that he was well established in cinema was an understatement. But his breakthrough in film would be no overnight success.
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