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Right, come on, folks, gather round, grab your cheesy nachos and your fucking vuvuzelas: this is the malcola content (pp. 180–181) that's been waiting for US:

Interview with Rebecca Front on acting in The Thick of It, in: Cantrell, T., & Hogg, C. (2017). Acting in British television. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 171–182.

(Plain text version see below)

Rebecca Front

London, 18 March 2016

Rebecca Front is one of Britain’s most celebrated television actors, and is particularly known for her work on comedy. She has worked on a wide range of comedies since her television career began in the early 1990s, including The Day Today (BBC 1994), Knowing Me, Knowing You (BBC 1994–1995), Big Train (BBC 2002), Nighty Night (BBC 2004–2005) and Up The Women (BBC 2013–2015). She has also worked on a range of high-profile dramas, such as War and Peace (BBC 2016), Doctor Thorne (ITV 2016) and Lewis (ITV 2006–2014).

Front played Nicola Murray MP in Series 3 and 4 of The Thick of It (BBC 2009–2012). She won a BAFTA and British Comedy Award for her work on the show. This interview focuses on her portrayal of the MP, who ran the Department for Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC) and later became Leader of the Opposition.

How did you first become involved in The Thick of It?

I had worked with Armando Iannucci on quite a lot of his early work. We’d worked on radio together and then on television; on Knowing Me, Knowing You which was a multi-camera audience sitcom/sketch show. We’d also worked on The Day Today which was filmed more like The Thick of It. I was a great fan of The Thick of It and so was delighted when he rang me about it. I knew that Chris Langham had left the series and he rang up and talked about what they were going to do with the series. I was working with Armando as a writer at the time and so I assumed that he was asking me to join the writing team. Then he asked if I wanted to be in it, at which point I was quite shocked. According to him I just said ‘Oh, that sounds fun’ whereas I was thinking ‘Yes! Fantastic! That sounds amazing!’

How much were you told about the character and how the series would play out?

That’s one of the really interesting things about working on The Thick of It. When I first became involved, there were no scripts and actually there was no character. All they knew is that she had to be a government minister and the comedy would come from how Malcolm Tucker [played by Peter Capaldi] and the team react to that minister. There was going to be a cabinet reshuffle and she would be brought in. For comedic purposes she had to be an outsider and she had to be rubbish to some extent. I think they had quite a few ideas already about what they’d like to do because so much of it comes from Malcolm, from Joanna Scanlan’s character [Terri Coverley] and from Chris Addison’s character [Ollie Reeder]. But fundamentally they didn’t know who she was; she didn’t have a name or anything. We talked in an early discussion about how she could be a lawyer. I quite liked the idea of this because we know a lot of politicians go into it from law and it seems like the sort of career, given that Armando didn’t want her particularly posh, that was a meritocracy where you could rise up whilst not being from a particularly privileged background. I’ve got a friend who is a lawyer called Nicola so I told them that Nicola was a good name, it’s not too posh and it’s not too working class, too old or too long. It really was that basic. So that’s where we started from. Then, very early on, they got me into a room to improvise with Peter Capaldi, Chris Addison and Jo Scanlan. There were also a whole load of writers and that was my first experience. I’d done some improv but improvising in front of the writing team and then seeing how that process worked was a unique way of working.

Were you given rough scenarios?

I didn’t know I was going to be improvising. We were chatting and it was lovely. Then I noticed a camera in the room and they asked if I minded doing a bit of improv, which I didn’t. They said: ‘Let’s just say you’re a back-bencher, you’re the last person in the world that Malcolm would have picked to be his new minister and try that.’

So we stood up, me and Peter, and he immediately went into Malcolm which is terrifying. He’s such a gentle and sweet man, so that is so scary. You have to think on your feet really fast when you’re improvising. He’d immediately backed me against a wall and had started screaming at me, and I remember thinking that comedically I have to do something unexpected and there are two ways I could go. I could either crumble and cry but I feel that as I’m playing a woman I don’t want to go down that route, or I could do the unexpected and start fighting back. So that’s what I did, I squared up to him and started batting it back at him and he reacted brilliantly because he’s a fantastic improviser. He reared back and said ‘How dare you?’ and I thought that’s it, that’s what she’s going to do. When she feels beaten down, she’ll just come back fighting. The way the writers ran with that was brilliant: she is hopeless and that’s what’s so pathetic about her fighting back. I remember going home on the bus afterwards, my mind racing and just thinking that this was going to be amazing, it’s going to be unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

What was the process from this early stage to recording it?

The next stage was my own research. I talked to a woman who had been a cabinet minister who was brilliant and gave me loads of insight; several of the things she told me ended up in the programme. For example, she gave me the detail of the character changing into trainers when she comes into the office. That came from this cabinet minister saying that one of the things she remembered most about being elevated from MP to cabinet minister was that she was constantly in and out of meetings and presentations in front of the press; so she was expected to dress smartly and wear heels and she said she was always in agony so she got into the habit of wearing trainers the minute she could. That gave us a lot of farcical moments to play with. I’m 5’4 and Peter is not far off six foot. So Peter squaring up to me when I’m in heels is one thing, squaring up to me when I’m in trainers is a whole different dynamic because he’s right over my head and I’m looking up at him. I would feed this back to Armando: ‘It might be funny if she wears trainers,’ ‘It might be funny if she’s got lots of kids.’

Was the material that came from this research phase shared in meetings with the writers or was it more informal than that?

I would text and email Armando, and there would be a lot of meetings and they introduced me to various other people who were advisors on the show. They would give me phone numbers that I could call if I wanted to know a bit of background detail about how I would have got to a meeting or those sort of things that would have mattered to an actor that don’t necessarily appear in the show. For example, there was an early scene that didn’t make it in the final cut, where Nicola is on a bus and she gets the phone call that she needs to go back to Number 10 because she has been given a place in the cabinet as part of a reshuffle. She’s on the bus home, she’s trying to juggle the nanny and the kids’ birthdays and things and she gets this phone call and she tries to stop the bus. Understanding those kinds of things for an actor is very valuable as once she’s in the cabinet, she’s not going to be allowed on a bus anymore. Is she always going to be in the back of a limo? Will that be taken away from her the minute she gets sacked? All of those things are really useful to get a sense of what is at stake for her, and what she loses if she loses her job.

If we’re talking about the process of how much comes from the actors and how much comes from the writers, a key point is that Armando and the team are incredibly responsive. During one of my early chats with Armando, he said: ‘Of course, you’ve seen the show, you know we don’t like to do too many office scenes where you’re just sitting talking, we like to keep it dynamic, we shoot with a handheld camera. Quite often when we’ve got information to impart we do it in a corridor or you running into a lift for example.’ I’m claustrophobic, so I said, ‘Well, obviously not in a lift in my case.’ So he then took that back to the writers and the plot of a whole episode is based on Nicola leaking information to the press because she’s gone down the stairs with them rather than going with her colleagues in a lift. They are really clever about that sort of thing.

So you have this two-way process, was the next stage then rehearsals?

Yes, rehearsals again were very different from my other work. You didn’t get the script in advance. At the read-through they would hand out scripts to everybody. These scripts are watermarked for security because by that time the show was quite a hit show and people were mindful of the fact that they didn’t want stories leaking out. Not least because the government had a habit of copying the things we did throughout the show — it was quite a big risk, we didn’t want to bring the country down! We read through cold, literally just turning the pages and reading which is so exciting because as you’re turning the pages everyone is surprised at the same time. Then, having read it through once, we’d put the scripts down and all the writers would position themselves around the room and the actors improvised a loose version of what they had just read. Armando would say that he didn’t need you to remember any of the lines we’ve just read, for now those are totally unimportant, you’d only need the scenario — that in this scene Malcolm is about to be fired and you’ve just overheard the conversation. We’d improvise that for maybe an hour and then we’d move onto another scene and the writers would sit there and make notes. Certain things would come out of that, sometimes funny lines but more often it would be the way your character reacts and the dynamic between you and the status changes between characters. Then they go away and write the next draft of the script and it becomes more like a normal script process. You get sent the script that you’re going to rehearse with which you then stick to (although it changes the whole time because the writers are in the room). Then you get sent the final script which you film.

It is interesting that you have an input at so many points in the process.

In a normal process, I’d be analysing the script by asking, ‘How would I get from that point to that point?’ and ‘How do I play that?’ There’s a little bit of room in the way you choose to deliver lines, but with The Thick of It you have the chance of influencing the direction of the whole piece. You learn to not focus on making the writers laugh but just being true to your character and do what you think they would genuinely do. The writers are the ones who need to worry about whether it’s funny. The improvisations at the script development stage also mean that you have less work to do to make the thought processes link together because you’ve already done that bit of work by the time you get to it. You'd receive the final draft very close to the wire, often the day before, but you've contributed to those thought processes and you know what they are going to be.

I remember a couple of improvised responses that stayed in the final cut. There's an episode where we're all holed up in a hotel for the party conference and I'm about to give a speech and suddenly all the content has to change. I was just genuinely getting really frustrated and I felt that, as Nicola, I couldn't do it. Everything was being taken out of my control and there was an armchair in the room and I remember picking up a cushion to punch it and then I think I dropped it and I just carried on jumping up and down on it. Similarly there was an improvised line of Peter's that I remember stayed in the final thing, which didn't actually come up until the shooting day. In the same episode, he comes into the hotel room and I can't bear to be near him so I just run off and lock myself in the bathroom. Peter suddenly ran over to the door, hammered on it and shouted 'Wilma!' like in The Flintstones. I remember being in the bathroom falling about thinking that was genius and I knew that was going to stay in. Generally, the script is 99 per cent written by the writers, but that's our input.

Would there be rehearsals before you started filming it?

Yes, that was another difference with The Thick of It. You'd have a few days of rehearsal which you very often don't get on something like Lewis [in which Rebecca played Lewis's boss, Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent]. It would be a fairly brief period with a few days here and there. We'd actually get to rehearse the scenes as they were written but the writers would still be finessing it. Nothing is set in stone, but you're not really improvising at that point.

So then you get on set and the way Armando likes to work is that you then film what's written as close to verbatim as you can get it, very much as you would with any normal filming. Usually you do two or three versions as written and then if there's time and you feel that there's something else you can bring out of it then you do a completely improvised version. At that point you can go completely off piste. You'd always be mindful of that fact that you know where they're going with the rest of the plot, but I was able to run into the bathroom in the scene I talked about earlier, for example.

The other thing which is very different is that with normal single and multi-camera filming, when you've blocked it, you have to stick with that blocking because all of the lighting and focusing is dependent on you hitting your mark. There's absolutely none of that in The Thick of It. I remember on my first day, James Smith [who plays Glenn Cullen] told me that I was going to have so much fun on this that I'd never want to film anything any other way. The first scene we did was me coming into the office and being briefed. Armando came in and asked if I could go in and take my trainers off in the outer office so that we could establish that as well. So I said, 'OK, which line do you want me to leave the room on?' and he said, 'Whatever you want.' That was so unusual. He said that the cameras would just follow me. To this day I have no idea how they edit it. The camera guys are running backwards the whole time and you're encouraged just to get up and go without any warning at all and they'll follow. Usually, filming for television is so static and quiet and you're focused on continuity and props and 'when did I put my hand on my face — I must make sure I do that the second time round'. 'When did I have my arms folded?' There was none of that in The Thick of It. I could just completely break all of those conventions.

Did you have discussions with Armando about things like reaction shots? There are so many moments where the cameras capture really small things which add to the comedy.

That's the benefit of working with two cameras. The two handheld cameras are on all the time on different people. By doing it again and again means they've got everything. I think that's why Armando can afford to be a bit more gung-ho about continuity. In single camera they will shoot you right the way through the scene whether you're doing anything interesting or not. So they have always got it but I think the difference here is that because they've got two cameras going, they are going to get different reactions each time. So if Peter is shouting at us and he is really loud on one take then they are going to get a different reaction than they would have got if he'd just been whispering right in my face.

Does that change the kind of performance you are giving? Do you have a sense of this being a mockumentary or something else?

I never thought of it as a mockumentary. There was never any reference to the cameras whereas with The Office you have someone looking into the camera and they know it's going to be broadcast as a documentary about David Brent. This isn't, this is just something else. As with a real film, you would forget the camera was there. So for me, I was that cabinet minister being bullied by someone; I wasn't remotely conscious of whether the camera was catching that. How much you heighten moments for a laugh is an interesting point with comedy, and I suppose instinctively you do with everything. There's always a little bit of your brain that's thinking, 'It would be funnier if I did this actually' while at the same time trying to be completely truthful to that character in that situation which is all that you can do as an actor. Try and be that person in that situation but with maybe ten per cent of your brain thinking, 'On the other hand it will really make Armando laugh if I do this.' So there's always that little bit of you thinking, 'I know what will be quite funny' and occasionally you will scupper yourself doing these things because you make yourself laugh.

I imagine that happens quite a lot. It sounds more unpredictable in comparison to other projects.

Absolutely, particularly when you're working with people who are so quick. I remember the episode at The Guardian offices in which I'm trying to think of things to announce and Chris Addison mentions that we can always pitch the idea of encouraging people to buy wooden toys for their children. I say something along the lines of: 'We're not going to pitch the wooden toys. Nothing would entice me to mention the wooden toys, it's a rubbish idea,' which is a classic sitcom set up. Of course Armando cuts to me announcing wooden toys. This was one of the hardest things for me to shoot, I barely got through it. If you watch it you can see that I was really struggling with it, I was constantly corpsing. In the same scene, Jo and Chris had to remind me to smile, and at one point Jo draws a little smiley face and pushes it across the table and she's got it the wrong way round and I think she's telling me to look serious. Chris then leans forward and turns it round and that got me every time. That was something that had just come up at the last minute but I wasn't quite prepared for it, so a lot of things do get added, and yes, it is unpredictable and I kept corpsing. It's incredibly exciting, it's the sort of feeling that you get on stage and you don't usually get it with normal filming. What you hope for in normal filming are moments when the scene transcends the restrictions of the blocking and the lighting. The scene just lifts and then you get that amazing feeling of, 'Oh that went really well and I felt like I have forgotten that those cameras were there' and that's brilliant. The great thing with The Thick of It and that guerrilla filming style is that you're feeling like that almost all the time.

I suppose that adrenaline suits the story you're telling, doesn't it?

Yes, it plays beautifully to it. We had a screening in Westminster and we had all these cabinet ministers and MPs watching it which was fascinating because they were all telling us their stories afterwards. A woman who had been a junior minister told me about a speech she had to deliver about a new initiative. She was sitting on the stage with a room full of journalists; somebody else from her party was up there and introducing her saying: 'We are delighted to have so and so here tonight, she's about to announce this new initiative' and as she sat there, one of her aides came up and whispered to her, 'I'm afraid you've been fired.' The aide took the speech off her and somebody else gave it and that was it, she had just lost her job. So this sort of guerrilla filming style is the style you need. They're on the precipice the whole time, an inch away from falling off the cliff.

So you said you got the script not long before you started filming, did you get an overview of the series as well?

Yes, I think with that series we did. We knew certain events but not how it would play out. We knew in the series that there was going to be a running storyline of a guy who was going to be camping out because he had lost his house. He was a male nurse; the storyline was going to reflect badly on both parties. I think I knew that I was going to be sacked at the end and that Malcolm was going to be sacked. We had these certain pointers but we didn't know all of the details until we were in this process of first draft scripts and rehearsals. But by the time you turn up on set you know roughly what is going to happen in the next few episodes.

Is that useful to know that?

To some extent. In Method Acting terms it probably would be quite nice to not know anything, but no I think it is useful. As long as you and Armando are confident that you can put all that away and not play it. That's the important thing: it's remembering not to play 'you're doomed', you've got to keep playing it as if you're hopeful and that you're not aware of that information. I think it is quite helpful to know that.

Were there any moments where information was kept from you, like the real life MP who was suddenly told she was sacked?

Yes. Armando likes doing that occasionally. Every now and then he'll scuttle in and whisper to somebody, which again I really like. In my first episode when I had just arrived, apparently there was a scene where Chris Addison is outside talking to James [Smith] and Jo [Scanlan] and he does an impression of Nicola. In a later scene in which I'm talking to Chris, Armando came in and whispered to me, 'He does an impression of you. Let's say you've heard that he does this impression.' So we do the next take and mid-way through it I just stopped as if I'd forgotten my next line and said, 'I hear you do an impression of me' and he just froze. I had to keep pushing until I got him to do it. Things like that are great.

There are other things that you know or decide upon but choose to withhold as an actor. For example, I was really struggling with why Nicola puts up with the treatment that she receives. Of course, she's holding onto that bit of power, I get that. But why does she so often put herself into situations where she knows she's going to be confronted by Malcolm? The only thing that I can think of is that she likes it. He's rather nice looking and alright he's shouting at her and being unpleasant, but at least he's paying her some attention. So he walks into that big open-plan office and he's coming to see her and she might like that in a weird way. That, to me, started to make sense of what was there in the scripts. So when, in the last series, Malcolm is sacked, it meant that it gave me something quite interesting to play because what they had originally planned was that Nicola, like everybody else, was originally relieved that Malcolm has gone. She comes back into the office and they are all saying 'ding-dong the witch is dead', but actually the way I played it was that she's really disturbed by it. For me, the reason that she is disturbed is that she feels that she has lost this one connection that she had. She was actually a little bit in love with him. My instinct in the next rehearsal was to say, 'You know what I think, I think she's in love with Malcolm' and then I thought that actually in real life there's no way that Malcolm would know that and he's too involved with himself and what he's doing to be aware of it. It's actually slightly unhelpful for Peter to know that. Actually, I'm not sure I told Armando. Sometimes you make those decisions that are just for you and it will impact on what you're doing. In that case no one had asked me why I was looking like that or why I got a bit shaky when he got in the room; it seemed to be working. So they're useful things to play but not useful things to share.

The series ends with a Leveson-style inquiry which feels very different from the rest of the series.

That was really extraordinary because Armando really cranked it up to the next level. We all knew that there was going to be this Leveson-style tribunal, but the last two scripts were withheld from all of us and we were only given the information that we could conceivably have seen if that tribunal was being televised. So I could see the transcript of what Jo had said because that had happened the day before in the story order, but I wasn't allowed to know what Peter was going to say. When we went in, we didn't know who was on the bench. Armando wanted to make it a terrifying ordeal so that our experience as actors was similar to our characters'. We knew our scripts, and we did two normal versions and then a loosened-up version, but we hadn't seen the room until we walked into it, intentionally again because he wanted us to look out of our comfort zones. As you know from acting there's a difference between walking into a room that you're familiar with and walking into a room that you don't know. It just gave us that feeling walking in and wondering, 'Where should I put my coat?' I remember getting there was very cloak and dagger. They took me up to my dressing room and I sat there for a bit and got into costume and I remember Peter was in the next dressing room and we had a little chat. Someone told us, 'I'm sorry, but you're not allowed to talk. Well, you are but you're not allowed to know what Peter's been saying.' I got taken down to the room and somebody briefed me outside saying that in a minute we'll open the curtain and you'll go in and from that moment on you're on camera. We're not going to show you the room until then. It was brilliant, again it was really thrilling, and quite hilarious. I remember I was really shaking doing it which is quite hard to recreate. When you're about to do an interview or something that really matters to you, it's quite hard to recreate that feeling of absolutely being on edge and your palms sweating and I remember actually genuinely feeling that.

#rebecca front #nicola murray #ding-dong the witch is dead #well that really is one of his lines #the thick of it #ttoi #malcola #armando iannucci #malcolm tucker #peter capaldi #ollie reeder #chris addison #terri coverley #joanna scanlan #inter-library loan thank you so much

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