Anything Goes (25 page)

I’ve organized a number of vacations so that Scott and I can put in some quality diving time. I even once accepted an acting job in part because of the scuba-diving possibilities. As it turned out, my diving skills actually saved my life. Seriously.

In the autumn of 2001, the producers of the
Shark Attack
DVD film series made me an offer that, frankly, at the time was hard to refuse.
Titans
had been cancelled and my first cabaret booking in New York was a few mortgage payments away, so I accepted the male lead in the movie
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon,
which was set to film in Varna, Bulgaria. The film has since become a cult classic in this fishy genre because, among other things, it has one of the most famous awful lines of movie dialogue ever.

When I left to film
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon,
from LAX on a 747 bound for Munich, it was the first day that planes in the United States were cleared to fly again after the tragedy of 9/11. I thought about not flying, but, along with lots of other folks that year, I made a decision that I wasn’t going to live in fear. Fly in fear, maybe, but not live in it. When I boarded the aircraft, the attendant checked my ticket and directed me to the back of the plane.
Normally, a 747 seats close to 200 passengers; there were five of us on board. I looked at the huge expanse of empty seats and turned back to the attendant.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘given everything that’s happened this month, I’m not sitting in the back by myself. I’m sitting here in business class.’ She didn’t argue.

I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times. This flight was taking off during one of the worst of times. I had everything that could be tightly clenched, clenched. I was having my own wee panic attack. As the plane began barrelling down the runway, the woman sitting in front of me turned and asked, ‘Have you found Jesus?’

Jesus! I could have punched her. She’s saying this to me, Mr Superstition. We’re taking off after the most horrific terrorist attack in history, and she wanted to know if I’d found Jesus. If I said ‘no’, I’d panic even more.

‘Jesus isn’t lost,’ I shouted at her. ‘Mind your own fucking business!’

From Munich, I boarded a plane to Varna, a resort in the Black Sea. This second plane was like a prop from the cartoon
The Flintstones.
All it was missing was the space for our feet to stick through the floor so we could assist the take-off. Inside, the seating was cramped and oppressive. Although an attendant was present, she didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to the fact that there were oxygen canisters hanging exposed from the overhead compartments and that all the passengers, except me, were smoking like chimneys.

The plane looked as if it was held together with pipe cleaners – and everyone inside was puffing away on the bloody pipes. I was a basket case once again. I did not want to sit in an aircraft filled with smoke, and despite signs designating this as a no-smoking flight, nobody gave a shit.

Eventually, I sucked it up and the plane took off safely. But as we were levelling off, I suddenly collapsed to the floor, gasping, wheezing and tearing at my chest. The flight attendant rushed down the aisle to help me. She immediately insisted everyone put out their cigarettes. She opened one of the canisters of oxygen, flipped the face mask over my mouth and nose, and after my body stopped wrenching from the apparent asthma attack, she helped me back to my seat. The plane soon cleared of smoke and I got a little high from the oxygen. My performance was Academy Award calibre. Norma Desmond would have been proud.

Varna is one of the oldest cities in Europe and it’s a beautiful place – but in 2001, it was still reeling from the last vestiges of Communist rule, plus it was fucking freezing. In fact, if you look carefully at the movie’s opening scene of sunbathers frolicking in the so-called Californian surf, you’ll see that all the slapping of arms and bobbing in the water was from the frigid sea and not the pleasure of the setting.

The majority of the movie was filmed at a holiday resort in a huge swimming pool, which was made to look like the ocean. This setting made it easier to manipulate the special effects, the model shark and the underwater camerawork, all of which would have been far too dangerous to execute in the sea. For one of the crucial action sequences, I needed to get into a kind of submarine-like shell, close the top panel, open the other side, and swim out. The camera would capture me in close-up swimming out, and later the shark would be superimposed on the scene so it would look like I was swimming through the shark.

Before any actor performs a scene that has any degree of danger, the stunt crew must clear it as safe. Stunts cleared the equipment above and under the water. I couldn’t take my big oxygen caddy, so I had a small handheld canister with about two minutes of air, which under good circumstances should have been adequate.

I swam down into the submarine and, once inside, I let the top close. I now had no choice but to swim forward to the other exit. Seconds later, I heard ‘Action’ on my comms unit. I let go of the air canister and swam to the other opening. It was locked. I couldn’t get out the way I came in anymore and because the entire crew was watching from the pool deck, I couldn’t be heard banging from this far underwater.

One of the first and most important lessons taught in scuba-diving is not to panic. I swam back and retrieved my air canister. I figured I’d sit down, breathe lightly, and hope the director would eventually see nothing was happening on the shot, and the stunt crew would come down and open the door.

Those were the longest and the shortest two minutes of my life. I was slowly running out of air when the stunt crew finally realized something was wrong. They dived down to release me. I gave the hand signal that I was okay and swam back up to the pool deck. When I got back on dry land, I completely lost it with the crew and reamed all of them new ones.

The actress playing my love interest in
Megalodon
wasn’t the most expressive woman I’d ever met. In fact, she gave new meaning to the term ‘cold fish’. In every scene, she had two shades of the same expression – deadpan, and deadpan with a thin smile. Even in our sex scene in the bathtub, there was more life in the bar of soap. The director kept asking me to do things to get her to react to the camera with some passion. As a result, in many of our scenes together, I improvised a lot.

One day, after we’d finished shooting the scene where I’d been stalking the shark, I was supposed to come up to my love interest and say, ‘I’m wired. Let’s go home and make love.’ Since I’d already been ad-libbing in other scenes, the director egged me on and told me to say something, anything, to try to provoke a reaction from her.

She stepped towards me and instead of my scripted line, I said, wait for it, ‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?’

Her reaction was priceless. Her face turned every shade of red, but she took the line and went forward, and the director got his reaction and his scene. Meanwhile, the crew was in hysterics. I’m surprised you can’t hear them howling on the DVD. The director agreed the line would be cut during ADR, which is the acronym for ‘automatic dialogue replacement’ – the process of going into a studio and doing voice-overs for dialogue that the mics have not picked up clearly, as well as adding any necessary sound effects.

Months later, I went into a studio to do the ADR for the film, and the sound was so crappy that I basically had to redo the whole script. I got to the line, wait for it again, ‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?’ and discovered they’d kept it in for the DVD after all.

However, I had to dub the line for television because in most markets you can’t say ‘pussy’ unless it’s meowing. What they’d written for me to say was priceless. Keep in mind, my character has been chasing Megalodon, the biggest motherfucking badass shark you’ve ever seen, and my character’s looking for some serious action. This was the line I had to say to dub for TV.

‘God, I’m so wired. What do you say I take you home and watch
I Love Lucy
?’

Over the years, like many of us, I’ve made decisions that didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, and I’ve listened to people I probably shouldn’t have, but I’ve never regretted anything I’ve done. I take responsibility for all my choices, even the not so great ones.
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon
may be one of those dubious decisions, but in America it continues to be one of Blockbuster’s more popular B-movie rentals, which is a good thing for, well, Blockbuster.

During a family gathering after the release of
Megalodon,
someone was giving me grief about the film. Turner butted into the conversation and said to them, ‘Hey, how many movies have you made?’ I gave him fifty bucks.

‘Being Alive’

O
n the afternoon of my first rehearsal for
Anything Goes
in 1989, as I walked down Wardour Street in London towards the Prince Edward Theatre, I was shitting myself. I knew the cast had already settled into their rhythms and not only was I arriving as the new American kid, but I was also the somewhat inexperienced American kid. I was ready for the challenge, but at that moment it did not escape me that as soon as I stepped through the door, my life would become very much like the musicals I loved so much.

Relative unknown, handsome and amiable,
¹    
travels to England to study Shakespeare. Gets job offer within forty-eight hours, performs well on opening night, becomes established leading man, gets the girl – oops, not that part – gets the handsome man, never returns to the schoolroom. Applause. Curtain. Lights.

When I stopped outside the stage door of the Prince Edward Theatre, that plot was still to unfold. The notice above the door read, ‘The World’s Greatest Artistes Have Passed and Will Pass Through These Doors.’ My throat went dry and I had to take a deep
breath to stop myself shaking visibly. The sign’s implications were slightly overwhelming, but at the same time incredibly exciting. I imagined a host of twentieth-century performers crossing this same threshold: Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, Josephine Baker, Elaine Paige, Bernard Cribbins, Arthur Askey … I’m serious. Askey was an entertainment genius in his day, a terrific comedian and the king of pantomime dames. He appeared at the Prince Edward off and on for many years, and during the time when it was known as the London Casino, Askey and performers like him kept London laughing through the Second World War.

I was about to head on in when I spotted another historic plaque on the brick wall directly above the stage door. This one read, ‘In a house on this site in 1764–5, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756–91, lived, played and composed.’ Now I was thoroughly intimidated. Talk about music legends. Given his amazing productivity and his enduring melodies, I’ve always thought that if Mozart were alive today, he’d be competing with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the musical theatre composer crown. I’d watch that talent show, wouldn’t you?

I backed up into Wardour Street, just missed getting swiped by a messenger bike, and looked to my right in the direction of Old Compton Street. I walked a few paces towards the clusters of men and women, okay, mostly men, to loosen my tense muscles a little and stopped again when another blue sign caught my eye: ‘In 1926 in this house, John Logie Baird, 1888–1946, first demonstrated television.’ This had to be fate. Two doors away from where I was about to make my West End debut was the place where a fellow Scotsman, Baird, had successfully transmitted the first television images, a medium I knew I wanted to be part of, even in the early days of my career.

It’s easy now to look back on those few awe-inspiring minutes outside the Prince Edward Theatre and interpret those historic signs
as being prophetic in some way. It gets even weirder. As I turned back to the theatre, a black cat crossed my path, which in my family is a sign of good luck.

I passed through the stage door, my hands no longer clammy, my head clear and my determination to succeed in this business utterly stoked. The rush of adrenalin I felt when I read those inscriptions and prepared myself to cross the theatre threshold has repeated itself a few times in my career. Moments when I’ve said to myself, ‘If this is as good as it gets, and it’s pretty fucking good, I could leave all of this and be happy.’

Over the years, I’ve developed a theory about the path my musical theatre career has taken and it’s a little like what happens on TV talent shows such as
Any Dream Will Do
and
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
My theory is that from the beginning of my West End career, Cameron Mackintosh has been supporting and training me to be a leading man. I think he’s done the same for other performers, like my friend Ruthie Henshall, for example. Early in my career, Cameron encouraged, mentored and auditioned me in different roles in a variety of musicals –
Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, The Fix –
until he felt that I was ready to handle the master, Sondheim.

For those of us in musical theatre, the pinnacle of the game is to perform in a Stephen Sondheim show, especially one in which Stephen himself is directly involved. I’ve done two Sondheim productions,
Putting It Together
(first in Los Angeles in 1998, and then at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway in 2000) and
Company
(at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2002). Both of these shows were particular favourites of Stephen’s and with each one he was personally involved.

Putting It Together
is a revue of many of Sondheim’s songs from other musicals, organized around a loose plot about two couples,
one at the beginning of their relationship, ‘The Younger Man (whom I played) and ‘The Younger Woman’, and an older couple, ‘The Husband’ and ‘The Wife’, who’ve been together for decades.

I met Stephen for the first time during the one of the early rehearsals for
Putting It Together,
which had its initial run in 1998 at the Mark Taper Forum in LA. The theatre world is a lot like an extended family, but despite me already knowing many of the players on the team, including Cameron, who was producing the show, I was still in jaw-dropping awe of Sondheim. For me, those first few rehearsals were like being back at Opryland as a student again, asking to be pushed, to be stretched, to be taught by someone who was
the
’master of the house’. When we began the run of
Putting It Together,
I believed that my career still remained in London in the West End, but all of us had an inkling Broadway was a possibility for this production.