Within a couple of months I was in Muppet Treasure Island! It was an incredible experience: working with Tim Curry, Jennifer Saunders, Billy Connolly, Kermit The Frog and Miss Piggy. I remember all the kids saying that was it, my career was over, you’ve been sacked. They sacked me from Grange Hill, and I remember my parents were really embarrassed that I’d been sacked from this school. I worked on Grange Hill for two years, and I was so unruly that they expelled me from a fictional school. It came from Grange Hill for you, didn’t it? I’m trying to get back there, I peaked too soon! That was my biggest gig – it’s been downhill ever since. I have to ask you about your Muppet days, and your starring role in Muppet Treasure Island. She never told me to be quiet! She’s just so used to being ribbed, and she’s up for a laugh. Oh yeah, she will! I would quite often break into songs from Grease, and she would just sing along most of the time. A wicked sense of humour, so lovely, and we got on really well. She’s one of the most down to earth actresses I’ve ever worked with. But she just blew all of that away completely. You know when you work with someone, they’re a big name, especially a woman of a certain age with a huge amount of experience? I thought this could be a real nightmare, she could be a total diva, we could be spending a lot of time twiddling our thumbs on set waiting for her to come out of her trailer. But I know she’s incredibly famous, and she’s almost a regal figure in Australia. I’m not sure what Olivia has been up to before A Few Best Men. On this set, of course, you have Olivia Newton-John, who hasn’t been on the set of too many movies in the past decade or two… But I’ve been on jobs where literally the lights have gone out, and the sparkies have pulled the plugs and gone home. That’s brilliant production teams, they never overran. I’ve been on set, and despite the workload on my show, we always finished on time. I have heard horror stories of people working 18 hour days on films, and all the crew have been broken. He’s the one who tends to go 17-18 hours a day I think. I just think, fucking hell! This is a walk in the park!Īpparently, Brett Ratner sets are amongst the most gruelling. It’s a really big ask, we want everyone to dig deep”. And then I walk onto film sets and they say, “It’s going to be a big day today, we’re going to do two and a half pages of dialogue. And I see what they’re doing, and think, this is nothing! On my show we used to do ten pages of dialogue a day, or eight to ten sketches. People come up to me and say, “We have to warn you, this is a very gruelling schedule”. Yeah, I mean I walk onto all sorts of jobs now. It must have been for you, though, a bit more of a relaxed schedule, considering the number of sketches you used to have to film in a given day? That’s where the precision of the job comes into play. I think most of the work is done in the casting process. But what Stephan was very good at was casting actors, and actors who could improvise if they wanted to, or who were robust enough to take new ideas, or new direction. The schedules on these films anyway are always so gruelling, and they tend to be a huge ask.
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