The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (9 page)

It was Freeman’s partner and fellow actor, Amanda Abbington, who suggested that Martin should go for the role. When she got back home after her own audition, Freeman asked her how it went and she said it went well and that there’s
a role in the film that would be perfect for him so he should go for it. He took a look at the script, liked it and met with the director and subsequently got the part. There was a point to the film and Freeman didn’t feel as though it was written to particularly win over American audiences. There was a heart to the movie and an honesty that Martin admired. It wasn’t written with the idea of making box-office millions. Generally, Freeman enjoys home-grown products. However, there is far more opportunity for success in America, with a much wider choice of roles available to an aspiring actor.

It was a frantic eighteen-day shoot but Freeman enjoyed working with the cast and crew, especially the director. There was determination and courage in everyone. They strove to make as good a film as they possibly could. He was under no illusion that it would make him rich, but he also thought the script was truthfully written.

Speaking about the very busy set, he told Rob Carnevale of
Indie
London.co.uk
, ‘I was quite ill for some of my shoot because I had a real stinking cold. There’s no denying it was a hard shoot – not hard like being in Bosnia hard! – but it was hard by the standards of making a film. But that hardship engendered something else that was quite fun too – that Dunkirk spirit and a feeling of, “We’ve just got to do this”.’

No one in the film was of any high status, there were no major egos and the upside of having little budget and a taut shooting deadline was that there was camaraderie, a similar spirit amongst a cast as when working in the theatre or even on radio. No one had their own space so they had to get long. There was no other option but to get to know each other.

On working with his real life partner, Freeman said to BBC Movies’ Rob Carnevale, ‘We’ve done it before a few times and I do always really enjoy it. She’s a brilliant actress and I respect what she does. Obviously I love her too. So it’s easy. There’s no other politics like I’m doing the scene with someone I don’t really like. Anything we don’t like about each other we can say [laughs].’

Released in May,
The All Together
, has been long forgotten about. There are, potentially, many roles that Freeman might care to forget but such is the life of a now successful and revered actor who once took as many parts as possibly in order to make a living, as is the case with any jobbing actor in an increasingly fickle industry.

Martin believes a gangster thriller is better suited to his thespian skills than, say, an action film. ‘I can’t see that people would ever ask me to do it,’ he admitted to
Nerve.com
’s
Alexis Tirado. ‘I’m not famous enough. I’m not box-office enough. I can run and I’m fit, but there are some people better suited to that. Also, I don’t want to play the guy in the yacht with no problems. That’s certainly not a reflection of my life. As a person, I’m not smooth, do you know what I mean? I can’t do smooth very easily.’

The Guardian
’s Phelim O’Neill wrote, ‘Nothing about the situation nor the characters rings even slightly true, and no laughs ever come from the increasingly desperate attempts to shoe-horn gags in. Freeman seems to have been given no direction other than “be like that guy from
The Office
”. Utterly pointless.’

Jack Foley of
IndieLondon.co.uk
said, ‘Only Freeman emerges with any credit, somehow managing to remain endearing in
spite of the contrived nature of his own storyline (the brief scenes he shares with real-life girlfriend Amanda Abbington offer brief respite from an otherwise rotten experience).’

He continued, ‘Even a clever cine-literate monologue from Freeman that begins the movie is ruthlessly exposed as pretentious come the implausible finale.
The All Together
therefore carries with it the wretched stench of yet another disappointing farce for the British industry…’

Time Out
’s David Jenkins wrote, ‘As misanthropic TV producer Charlie, Martin Freeman reassumes all the tics that won him an army of fans in
The Office
while Danny Dyer pops up playing, well, Danny Dyer, confirming that he wouldn’t know a good script if it struck him over the head with a pool cue. The few laughs come care of Velibor Topic as wacky Bosnian housemate Bob, who harbours a penchant for combining taxidermy and pornography (you do the math).’

Freeman also appeared in two short British films in 2007. He was the voice of ‘The Pig’ in one of them, called
Lonely Hearts
. Written and directed by James Keaton,
Lonely Hearts
is set one year after Jeff’s (Ralph Haddon) wife leaves him and attempts to get over it by meeting women by way of ‘lonely-hearts’ dating. Jeff struggles to move on until he starts talking to a soft-toy pig that gives him advice on dating. Jeff meets an attractive woman in a sandwich shop and remembers that he promised to take the pig along with him on his next date.

In
Rubbish
, released in June 2007, he starred alongside Anna Friel and James Lance. The film’s estimated budget was £20,000, and it sees Freeman taking out the rubbish one morning, spotting a local woman and trying to impress her.

Martin was next seen in the Bill Kenwright theatre production of
The Last Laugh
. Before a highly publicised move to the West End, the production opened at the Theatre Royal Windsor from 30 January to 3 February 2007 and then continued to Cheltenham, Milton Keynes, Richmond and Newcastle. Freeman was last on stage in October 2005, in Toby Whithouse’s
Blue Eyes and Heels
at the Soho Theatre in London (aside from his guest role in
The Exonerated
at Riverside Studios in June 2006). By this point, his stage credits included such productions as
Kosher Harry, Jump Mr Malinoff, Jump
and
La Dispute
. Written by Richard Harris, The Last Laugh was adapted from an original play by Koki Mitani. Freeman plays a comedy writer who is forced by law to submit a script for government approval. The play follows the approval process.

Peter Lathan of the
British Theatre Guide
wrote of the play, ‘
The Last Laugh
is essentially a two-hander with Lloyd Pack (
Only Fools and Horses
) joined by Martin Freeman (
The Office
) as the Writer, and a nice cameo by Christopher Mellows as the Veteran. The performances are impeccable – even the timing of the badly timed gags is spot-on! It is played out in a large, cold, grey room which has clearly once been part of a library, designed by Michael Pavelka and subtly lit by Mark Henderson.’

Freeman was also seen in an episode of
Comedy Showcase
called ‘Other People’, which kicked off a run of six
Comedy Showcase
episodes. The programme ran from 2007 to 2012 and featured Britain’s growing comedy talent. It was inspired by the long-running comedy-sketch anthology series of the 1960s’
Comedy Playhouse
.

In Martin’s episode, which aired on 5 October 2007, he
plays Greg Wilson, a has-been child magician whose career crashed 1986 after he was humiliated on a children’s phone-in show. In his thirties, Greg now works as a sofa salesman and is recognised by a former fan (Siobhan Finneran) and is asked for an autograph.

Freeman told
The Independent
’s James Rampton in 2007, ‘When the woman in the furniture store asks for his autograph, he immediately obliges. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. He thinks, “Someone wants me, I’m in the limelight again – even if only for two seconds.” Once you’ve tasted the limelight, it’s hard to let it go. Everyone wants to be acknowledged.’

The autograph request triggers a series of events, which ends up with Greg in a courtroom facing a sentence.

Martin said he could relate to his character because he knew what it felt like to have the weight of the world on his shoulders after he found success with
The Office
. Greg’s desperate need to be famous is not something Freeman desires but rather a symptom of the modern world, as evidenced on such TV shows as
The X Factor
. Even when Greg’s career went downhill, he was still hungry for fame.

Interestingly, Freeman believes that happy people do not make great comedy, as he explained at the time to
The Independent
’s James Rampton in 2007: ‘Comedy can’t be about continuous success. The characters we get behind – whether it’s Hancock or Basil Fawlty or Captain Mainwaring – are eternally frustrated. Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.’

British Comedy Guide
wrote of the episode, ‘We thought this pilot was brilliant – one of the best things we saw in 2007. As has been mentioned by a number of people in our forum, the
episode delivered some really good laugh-out-loud moments. Nicholas Burns was particularly great as the mad lawyer. We’d love to see a full series of
Other People
but have come to accept that will never happen as it would be hard to convert the premise into a full series without overstretching it.’

Freeman was next seen on TV in December 2007 as Mr Codlin in
The Old Curiosity Shop
. Based on the Charles Dickens novel, the TV film stars Sophie Vavasseur as Nell Trent, Derek Jacobi as her grandfather and George MacKay as Nell’s friend Kit Nubbles, as well as Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Jarley, Toby Jones as Quilp, Adam Godley as Sampson Brass, Gina McKee as Sally Brass, Bryan Dick as Freddie Trent, Steve Pemberton as Mr Short, Josie Lawrence as Mrs Jiniwin, Bradley Walsh as Mr Liggers, Anna Madeley as Betsey Quilp, Geoff Breton as Dick Swiveller, Charlene McKenna as the Marchioness, Kelly Campbell as Mrs Nubbles, Katie Dunne as Baby Nubbles and Philip Noone as Rodney. It was broadcast on ITV on 26 December.

Martin was seen as himself in four episodes of
When Were We Funniest
? during the 2008 series. The comedy channel Gold got the public to decide which they thought was the funniest decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. But before the public voted, Gold picked five celebrities to represent each decade and encouraged them to convince the public that their decade was the funniest. The series kicked off with the celebrities on a panel explaining to the public why they should vote for their own decade. Each celebrity was given two episodes to convince the public. The outline was simple: in the first episode they explained why their decade was the funniest and used clips to highlight their argument and the public got to vote for
the five funniest clips. In the second episode the clips were ordered according to public popularity, based on votes from the funniest to the least funny. The public were asked to vote for the most amusing decade and the funniest clip. The top five clips and the funniest decade was revealed in the final episode and the celebrities passed comments on their place in the vote. The series was narrated by Alexander Armstrong.

Trying his hand at something entirely different, Freeman next took part in two films as Rembrandt in the 2007 narrative film
Nightwatching
and 2008’s documentary film
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse
. They are both joint Dutch, German and Finnish documentaries directed by Peter Greenaway and were released a year apart, and feature many of the same actors and sets. The films explore the two sides of Rembrandt’s romantic and professional life and the controversy surrounding the identification of a murderer in his painting ‘The Night Watch’. Rembrandt’s use of shadow, light and colour was a major source of inspiration to Greenaway. ‘The Night Watch’ itself hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The film covers the period of Rembrandt’s life in which his wife Saskia, and mother to his son Titus, dies. He then starts a self-destructive relationship with his housekeeper before moving on to another member of his housekeeping crew, who is twenty years old.

Freeman was very proud to be in the two films and the process was not something he’d experienced before. He usually gets roles about lovelorn middle-aged Surrey men, so to play a Dutch master of art was an opportunity he could not resist and working with Peter Greenaway was an opportunity not to be overlooked, especially at that stage in his career. He hoped
that films such as
The All Together
and
Nightwatching
would knock away his nice-guy-next-door persona once and for all. Working with Greenaway was an opportunity that he simply could not refuse and Martin was most impressed by the films.

‘I just hope that when you see it you get as much of the story across as I got from reading it. Not all Peter’s stuff is sequential, narrative story,’ the actor admitted to
Indie
London.co.uk
’s
Rob Carnevale. ‘Some of it is like an art installation and I’m not particularly interested in being in an art installation to be honest. I’m interested in the story and it was a story. So I hope that it’s intact when I see the film properly – that there is a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes that can easily be overlooked for the sake of cleverness. But story, for me, is really, really important whether it’s
Red Riding Hood
or
The Godfather
. Everything else has to defer to that.’

Making
Nightwatching
was not an easy experience though. Freeman rang his fellow
The Good Night
actor Michael Gambon, who had also starred in
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
, which Greenaway directed, for any advice or tips. Gambon apparently said that Greenaway leaves you alone. He does not presume to tell you how to act. He directs from a distance, but he is specific about what he wants. He’s less hands-on with his actors than he is with the crew because everything in the shot, in front of the camera, governs the progress of the film.

Freeman spoke to
Ain’t It Cool
’s Capone about his experiences: ‘Well, it wasn’t intimidating, but it wasn’t easy either. I don’t think there’s anything about him that is easy, to be honest. Not that he’s a difficult man. I never found that he was
weird or difficult with me, but his films aren’t easy, obviously, and his films are always pretty challenging.’