Sean, with co-star Alex Kingston, in Essex Boys
| I ask about acting. Is he one of those actors who carries the character around with him 24 hours a day while he's filming? |
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Sean, with co-star Alex Kingston, in Essex Boys |
"No...I sort of leave the character at the end of the day. I don't carry anything around with me - no excess baggage or unnecessary thoughts. I think it's too exhausting to do that. To put things into perspective - your work is your work, and your leisure time is something else. You don't actually constantly think about your character 24 hours a day. It's probably detrimental - it would have been in my case, with the character of Jason Locke in Essex Boys. I think everybody's got different methods of working which suit the particular individual. Mine is to sort of play the part, and give 100%, to concentrate and focus on it while I'm actually working, but then leave it behind until the next day." |
| I'm intrigued by the actual process of acting. How, I wonder, does he do it? |
| "If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it," Sean replies, driving the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other. "Like that. In a few moments. The most difficult part is when you first start off, and you start shooting a scene in the middle of the film, so you've not really got an anchor to begin with. It's a bit like painting on a white sheet of paper...knowing where to start. But once you've got something down, then you've got a sort of rope to hang onto, and you can go in different directions and experiment. Quite early on you develop and establish a character, and I find it quite easy to go into it and come out of it as I wish." |
| How does he come down from a very intense moment, such as the scene in the garden in Essex Boys, when Jason Locke has to be physically abusive to his wife, played by Alex Kingston? |
| "That scene was shot in the small hours of the morning...around two o'clock in the morning...and we did it in somebody's garden - a nice couple who lent us their house to film in. With something like that, your adrenalin starts pumping, and it's like running a race or a fight or something...it takes a while for your adrenalin level to come back to normal...but we had a few brandies afterwards." He smiles. "That helped." |
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I remark that I thought Jason Locke was so stupid that at times he was funny. "He was a man bloated by his own sense of self-worth," Sean says. "It was very interesting to play that role, though. I think everybody's got that kind of rage in them." |
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| I know Sean has said, in the past, that he sometimes bases his characters' behaviour on people that he knows. Does he know anyone like Jason Locke? |
| "I do know people who are similar, who can sort of lose it very quickly and become very violent. Jason Locke is a combination of characters, really...it's not about one specific person." |