The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (7 page)

Hilariously, the DVD release features scenes that were filmed but were never actually meant for the movie.

‘We did, yeah,’ admitted Freeman to
Empire
magazine when asked about the scenes that were not included. ‘It was a nod towards the people who thought it was going to be ruined because it was American. So we just shot some ridiculously Hollywood-y, horrible, over-the-top, clichéd, action-movie style portrayals … but Garth’s idea was “Let’s just have some fun and pretend that these were the ones we edited out.” That was good fun.’

A sequel,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
, was originally planned but Martin Freeman confirmed to MTV
Movie Blog in 2007 that a sequel was unlikely to happen, saying, ‘I found that out from the horse’s mouth, [director] Garth Jennings. I had dinner with him and he said [the first one] just didn’t do well enough.’

There was a little bit of room for improvisation but not a great deal and it was unnecessary, anyway, because it was Adams’s story, dialogue and humour that made the film what it was. The creative team were careful not to dilute the film with their own ideas. Freeman wasn’t interested in starring in films with special effects and action scenes, which is ironic considering the trilogy of films he would later be known for, so
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
did not change his career path but rather his bank balance. He got into acting to star in films like
Twelve Angry Men
– serious, realistic dramas.

Perhaps playing Arthur Dent did not do much to dissuade people from naturally assuming Freeman to be an everyday bloke. After all, Tim Canterbury and Arthur Dent are, in their own ways, normal guys. He was pigeonholed as an actor and it would be quite some time before that would change.

‘Compared to a lot of people, I’m a big-mouth show-off, d’you know what I mean?’ Martin admitted to the
Globe And Mail
’s Simon Houpt. ‘But in show-biz terms I don’t think I am, because I don’t go to every event and I don’t particularly want people to know everything about my life, and I don’t live my life through that medium. I could be on the telly all the time and I could be everywhere all the time and I certainly don’t want to be, because I do think only a… moron wants that, or someone with a bigger hole in their lives than I ever would want to have.’

With two major films under his belt in
Love Actually
and
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, one might now think that Freeman was interested in achieving success on the other side of the Atlantic. Not so. He didn’t even have an American agent, preferring to stick with his London one.

‘I’m not interested in living that life,’ Freeman confessed to the
London Evening Standard
’s Bruce Dessau in 2005. ‘I’ve never wanted to go to lovely LA. I was a well-respected actor before
The Office
and there’s lots of other work I’ve been proud of that is less well known. I consider myself primarily a stage actor and if people were only giving me work now because of Tim I’d feel a bit of a fraud. It’s funny because until I became the nicest man in Britain I tended to be cast as villains, drug dealers, rent boys and bare-knuckle fighters.’

Further TV work continued as he was cast in the comedy TV film
Not Tonight with John Sergeant
, which was broadcast on 22 May 2005.

Freeman admitted to Bruce Dessau of the
London Evening Standard
in 2004 that he is tired of seeing comedians who think they are actors. ‘It’s hard enough for actors anyway,’ he said. ‘There’s a roller coaster of dreadful casting that no one has the guts to stop. There’s nothing more painful than seeing comics who can’t act – it makes me want to set fire to people’s fucking houses.’

Martin’s choice of roles tended to be very safe; almost middle-of-the-road. He admitted that sometimes it is better not to know why actors get cast in certain roles, as he explained to Tom Cardy of New Zealand’s
Stuff
: ‘I think, sometimes you gotta be careful what you wish for. Of course we all want to be told we’re brilliant for various ways, however we hope we’re brilliant. And then, if
someone thinks we’re brilliant for a reason we find unflattering, then we’d rather not hear it. ’Cause of course there’s a difference, like with any actor, between the parts that I play, and… For a start, no one’s seen everything I’ve done, apart from me. And I’ve played a lot of parts over seventeen years.

‘There’s a difference between the parts that I play, and who I am, and who people think I am,’ he added. ‘There’s quite a big discrepancy sometimes, between those things.’

Freeman was then cast in the role of Ed Robinson in the six-episode 2005 series of
The Robinsons
, which began airing in May. The series was written and directed by Mark Bussell and Justin Sbresni, with executive producers that included Jon Plowman and Michele Buck.

‘It didn’t feel like a return to telly to me because I’d always done lots of TV and I just follow whatever script is good at the time,’ he told
Dark Horizon
’s Paul Fischer. ‘An awful lot of film scripts are dreadful while a lot of telly scripts are really good. So I just want to be involved in things that I like. I’m as proud of
The Robinsons
as anything else I’ve done. I mean I love it. But again, whether anyone else loves it, I hope they do.’

The Robinsons
is a British comedy about lead character Ed Robinson’s (Freeman) relationship with his family, including his parents (played by Anna Massey and Richard Johnson), who are constantly nagging at each other, his successful older brother George (Hugh Bonneville) and his sister Vicky (Abigail Cruttenden), who has to have everything perfect. Ed is a divorced reinsurance actuary but gets fired and moves in with his aunt. He begins to rethink his life and looks to find a career that he has a passion for and a steady girlfriend.

Kathryn Flett wrote in
The Observer
, ‘Freeman gets the star billing and the cute voice-overs but despite being enormously likeable – to the point where, if our paths ever cross, I will have to restrain myself from pinching his cheeks, ruffling his hair and pulling the sort of face I normally reserve for winsome toddlers – Freeman is almost outshone by an awesomely fine supporting cast.’

But back to Hitchikers, the bigger the film, the more expansive the marketing campaign. As it was Freeman’s first Hollywood movie, he had a great deal of promotional work to fulfil in the wake of the film’s release.

Martin has always found the whirlwind press junkets a laborious but obligatory task; a necessary evil of the job, ‘answering the same questions over and over again. With some exceptions, and with the best will in the world, you do get tired. Obviously you just have to pinch yourself,’ he told reporters, including
Dark Horizon
’s Paul Fischer, at a junket for
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, ‘you have to make it interesting for yourself, hopefully make it interesting for the press, but also to a certain extent, that’s only part of the job.’

Freeman continued to dip his toes into the odd left-field venture. He played ‘The Man’ in
Round About Five
, a long-forgotten short film that was released on 22 August 2005. Freeman’s character is desperate to get across London to meet his girlfriend (Lena Headey) off the Eurostar and pursues an attractive bicycle courier (Jodhi May) to take him on the back of her bike, which ultimately creates a romantic predicament for him.

The actor had been in many TV and film productions but
he struggled to find the time to explore his thespian talents in the theatre, so it was a delight when he was offered a chance to star in a London theatre production. Freeman committed to a three-and-a-half-week run of
Blue Eyes and Heels
(written by Toby Whithouse) at Soho Theatre in October 2005.

‘Career-wise,’ Freeman admitted to the
London Evening Standard
’s Bruce Dessau at the time, ‘this is not what I should be doing, but I really like the play and there aren’t many things that I really like. I wanted to avoid anything that was too commercial. It’s not that I want to be poor, it’s just that I don’t want money to be the main thing.’

The play follows Duncan (Freeman), an ambitious young TV producer looking for his next hit to secure a career at an independent TV-production company. He plans to bring wrestling back to TV screens and meets Victor (John McNeill), an actor best known for his role as the Count of Monte Cristo. Past his best and looking to reclaim his prime, Victor is perfect fodder for Duncan’s plan to climb the media-industry ladder and secure a promotion. Along the way, Duncan meets a career-obsessive PA played by Sandra Eldridge. However, they clash, as Duncan believes in the trash he is peddling, while the PA believes in quality. Such are the times, where trash sells and quality sinks.
Blues Eyes and Heels
attempts to be a satire on modern times of trashy tabloid TV.

Theatre pundit Michael Billington was critical of the play in his two out of five-star review in
The Guardian
but he praised Freeman: ‘The real pleasure lies in watching Martin Freeman, late of
The Office
, who reminds us what a brilliant comic actor he is. His Duncan is a bundle of staccato gestures and panic-stricken
smiles, confirming that TV companies thrive on a hierarchy of insecurity. And his vain attempt to leap athletically into the wrestling ring is worthy of Woody Allen.’

John Thaxter of the
British Theatre Guide
wrote, ‘Toby Whithouse’s superbly written three-hander reminded me strongly of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, sustained dialogue replacing Friel’s extended solo pieces but with equal impact, both comic and sad. It could make a brilliant one-off play for television, except that in a multichannel world we no longer enjoy the luxury of one-off plays.’

Stage Noise
’s Gabby Bermingham enthused, ‘The play provides valid and insightful commentary on what I assume is modern media morality. One feature I particularly loved was the development of Duncan’s character. On the one hand he is supercilious, insincere and heartless. Hand in hand with these undesirable qualities is the fact that he is also a true believer. He is the voice of popular culture, he believes his own spin, and the value of what he ‘creates’. I also could not let this go without noting that Whithouse chooses the female character to give voice to the arguments for taste, intelligence and ethics.’

Freeman also took part in a Marks & Spencer celebrity ad campaign, which was shot by renowned photographer David Bailey. At this point a Martin’s intolerance for things earned him the nickname ‘Uncle Joe’ among his friends. It is a reference to Stalin. Freeman was doing rather well for himself by this point and things would only get bigger and better.

Martin admitted to
Empire
in 2005, ‘I’m not exactly a well-seasoned, great screen actor, you know. I’m still learning the ropes, but as far as I see it my job doesn’t change that much. You
certainly don’t act bigger. If anything, you act smaller because the screen is going to be so much bigger. It’s very easy to look like you’re overdoing it on a big screen, you know, because the raising of an eyebrow says so much more than it would do on a television screen.’

Freeman and his wife had their first child, Joe, in 2006. Despite Martin’s brief venture into Hollywood and his success in
The Office
, the actor was still searching for that all-elusive break. With a wife and a newborn baby, he needed a steady pay cheque and regular work to tend to his family on a financial level.

As previously mentioned, Freeman is a connoisseur of classic R&B and soul music and has an extensive record collection in his home. He hosted a semi-regular 2006 BBC Radio 2 show called
The Great Unknown
, which aired in six episodes over October and November and saw each instalment focus on a different recording artist. He began with the Staple Singers and moved on to Boz Scaggs, Ramsey Lewis, Traffic, Roberta Flack and The Band.

He’d been making mix tapes all his life – mostly on cassette – but had recently moved on to CDs. Making a mix tape was one of the first things he always did for a woman prior to meeting his lifelong partner. He would use it as a sort of a test to see how a woman would respond to the music and to judge whether they’d get on well with each other. He said he found that women can be more direct than men – they’ll simply say whether they like it or not but men can be snobbish about music.

‘If I’m making a tape for Amanda, my other half, she won’t
be impressed if I’ve got an original pressing of a song, or some B-side that’s been out of print for years,’ he said to
Tiny Mix Tapes
in 2007. ‘When I pick songs for her, all I think about is, “She’d really like this and it’ll make her happy.”’

As soon as he’d met Abbington, he’d stopped making mix tapes for his friends because it is such a personal thing to do. He usually centred the songs around a theme, which made it even more personal. He always waited with apprehensive eagerness to see to how his partner/friend would respond to the songs.

His main passion is vinyl as he prefers the feel and look of a record over a CD. He appreciates the cover artwork, which he feels looks more impressive on the cover of a vinyl record. As with many music aficionados, Freeman doesn’t feel as though he owns a piece of music until he has the vinyl copy. There are CDs and iPods in his house but the process of putting the needle down on the record and sitting in a room surrounded by thousands of records is a ritual that he enjoys greatly.

‘And that’s especially true for me, because 70 per cent of the music I enjoy came out originally on analog,’ he explained to
Tiny Mix Tapes
. ‘If you get a good copy, that’s how it should be heard. Obviously, if you’re listening to a really scratchy record, then of course a CD will sound better. But it’ll never compare with a pressing on vinyl. As I’ve gotten older and have a bit more money, I can afford to be more anal about that kinda stuff. I know I’m entering into mental territory, but I like it. I like thinking, “Well, I’ve got that record already, but I only have the reissue, and it’s not great and I’d like to find the original.”’