Behind the scenes of The Lazarus Experiment (Part One)
Excerpts from Benjamin Cook’s article in DWM 383
David Tennant arrives. He’s wearing a tux, and black Converse trainers. The director, Richard Clark, wants him to dash across to the control area, and sonic the main panel. “So,” repeats David, “I say the line, something explodes, then I jump over there…”
“We’ll rehearse a few times before we do the explosion,” clarifies Richard. “You’re going to have to jump as quickly as possible.”
“You any good at parkour, then?” asks Julian Howarth, the sound recordist.
“Oh yes,” smiles David. “I base all of my work on that.”
“Bang! Bang! Bang!” calls out Dan Mumford, the First Assistant director, because the pyrotechnics get saved for the final take.
“Something’s wrong!” screams David. “It’s overloading!”
“This is the panel that’s exploding,” explains Richard, afterwards, “so this is the one to be on, David. Another rehearsal, please.”
DWM asks David whether he knows what all of these buttons do. “Of course,” he insists. “I recognise some of them: they were on Sanctuary Base Six!”
[after Mark Gatiss arrives on set, and they discuss the extra (whom they have nicknamed “Helga”) whose acting is rather unconvincing] A take. At last. Sparks spurt over Helga. “Helga doesn’t feel pain,” murmurs Mark.
But David does. He catches his hand on the control panel. “Ouch!” he yells, only a bit ruder.
As he nurses his finger, DWM distracts David from the painful throbbing sensation by asking him inane questions. For instance, what age he would revert to if he had his own Genetic Manipulation Device? “There are things that I’d like to do better in my teenage years,” he admits, “but that’d mean living through them all again. It’s tempting, isn’t it? But I suspect that way utter, utter madness probably lies. No, I’m quite happy being where I am right now. I don’t feel a yearning for a lost youth. Maybe that’ll come?”
“Perhaps,” suggests DWM, “you aren’t old enough to yearn for your youth?”
David chuckles. “Well, I don’t know…! I’m past the first flush.” He considers this. “I’m past the second flush, probably.”
Other parts of this post: [one] [two] [three] [four] All of my previous behind-the-scenes photoset posts can be found here.
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