McGann

Although best known to STARBURST readers as the Eighth Doctor, PAUL MCGANN comes from a large acting family and has a rich filmography. We caught up with him to chat about his work and returning to WHO…

- Martin Unsworth

STARBURST: We’ve come to know you through Doctor Who and Withnail and I, but you came to prominence on TV with The Monocled Mutineer. What sort of roles did you want to get when you started in the early days?

Paul McGann: When you’re a kid and you start doing it, you’re not sure what any of it’s going to be like. What you find out when you start work as an actor is that from week one you’re on a bunch of lists of people that look like you, your height, your colouring, your age, that’s what show business is. So you might go into it with a few dreams, ‘oh I might do this, I might do that’, but the reality is you’re on a list with him and him and him. And you know that because every time you go up for an audition, the same people are there and it’s people who look a bit like you, you realise you’re a little bit dispensable and if it isn’t you it will be them. Really, it’s good for you; when the penny drops that that’s what it’s going to be like, because it stops you fantasising about it.

In answer to your question, I sort of thought ‘well I don’t know what I’ll be good at, I’m not heavy because I’m a bit little’; you think like ‘I will look stupid with a gun. I look ok running because I was a runner’. So you think those things to yourself and then you get these roles anyway, maybe you hadn’t even thought of. When I started The Monocled Mutineer and things like that, I was getting imposters - that was one I never thought about. It’s an old fashioned thing, you know, he’s pretending to be so and so, he’s putting a coat on and pretending to be a blah blah blah. They are really good roles, it’s like an actor playing an actor.

More of a character role?