February 6, 2001

by Acorn Media Publishing Inc.

London-born Derek Jacobi doesn't think of himself as famous, even though the stage, screen and television star has been winning accolades as an actor since he was a schoolboy. After graduating from Cambridge, Jacobi trained at the Birmingham Repertory Company until Sir Lawrence Olivier invited him, at age 24, to become one of the eight founding members of the National Theatre Company. His most high-profile television roles include the title role in the landmark series I, Claudius as well as in the PBS Mystery! favorite Cadfael. Like Olivier, Jacobi is a "Sir" two times over, having been knighted in both England and Denmark. Other honors and awards include a Tony for Much Ado About Nothing, a Lawrence Olivier Award for Cyrano de Bergerac, a BAFTA for I, Claudius and the 2000 Outer Critics Circle Award for Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. He credits "luck" for his steady employment as an actor and wants nothing more than for the parts to keep coming. Acorn caught up with Jacobi in London and chatted with him about the making of Cadfael, the tedium of not getting thrown to the lions and his personal definition of the best kind of fame.

Location, Location, Location

Acorn: For Cadfael, 12th Century Shrewsbury, England, was created in 20th century Budapest, Hungary, mostly outdoors, and often in inclement weather. Was it one of the more challenging locations you've ever worked in?

DJ: Yes, but I loved doing it. I still miss it, really. I went there for five seasons and it was lovely to spend 10 to 12 weeks at a time in Budapest, which is a beautiful city and to see it develop. This was in the early 1990s when Cadfael started and the revolution had taken place in 1989, so the city was still kind of clawing its way out of the Communist era. And to see it coming to flower again was absolutely fascinating. The people were so lovely and it was a marvelous location. The set built at the studio in Budapest at first looked a bit new and a bit false and the costumes were all highly colored but as time went on everything became much more realistic because the set itself was added to over the four or five years of filming. It weathered and by the end you really thought you were working in a little medieval village.

Acorn: It must have enhanced the atmosphere for the actors.

DJ: It certainly did. The weather was inclement a lot of the time and a lot of the weather was part of the plot. Snow for The Virgin in the Ice, there was one episode about the river flooding [The Holy Thief], there were storms and rain, and so we were very conscious of the seasons.

Acorn: How did that experience compare to, say, working on Gladiator in Malta?

DJ: That was 11 weeks on a rather barren and not very beautiful island. It was rather like being on a very large crumbling biscuit for three months. It was hot, very hot. There was a lot of sitting around. The big fighting scenes in the arena took days and days and we just sat there for hours. It frankly got rather boring. Then when I saw it, of course, it was all very classy. And it was lovely to be part of a big Hollywood epic, which I'd never been in before — that was exciting, to see all the others working — Russell Crowe and everybody. It is a bit too bloody for me. I saw it in New York last year and I spent most of the time with my hands over my eyes.

Acorn: The next Cadfael story we're about to release on DVD is The Leper of St. Giles and as usual, Cadfael shows great sensitivity and empathy — in the way he deals with the young lovers, for example. Do you think Cadfael owes this very appealing side of his character to his origin at the hands of a female author [Edith Pargeter writing under the nom de plume Ellis Peters]?

DJ: Yes, I think that's highly probable.

Acorn: I know you got to know her a little bit when you were working on Cadfael.

DJ: Yes, I met Edith Pargeter on a couple of occasions. She came out to Budapest twice and, of course, I'd met her in London before because I had to be vetted and approved before I was given the part. I had lunch with her one day when I was being eyed up for whether I could be her Cadfael because I wasn't physically exactly the Cadfael she described in the books, but she didn't seem to mind that. We got on very well. And she said, "I'd love it if you could play it." But I think she was a great romantic at heart. One of the reasons I loved reading the books is that there are many, many subplots, many strands to the books, which to fit in an hour-long episode, a lot had to go, a lot of characters had to be deleted. That hurt her a bit. But that was inevitable because we only had a certain time in which to do the pieces.

Acorn: Did you ever talk with her about how she created the character of Cadfael?

DJ: She'd written many other things and she'd written other crime stories and this character just suddenly popped into her mind. She was a very well-read lady. She was very keen on historical details in all of her novels before Cadfael and it was that historical detail that directed her towards this particular period. It was a period that fascinated her because it is one period (the first English civil war) that doesn't feature very strongly in literature. The King Stephen/Maud era is not that well known and not that often used in historical drama. It's one of the periods that Shakespeare didn't touch. And it fascinated her and it was a great idea, I think, to set a detective series in that particular era, which was way before forensic science so that dear old Cadfael had no fingerprints or any of the forensic nonsense to help him. So there were no car chases, it was all to be done by smell and instinct and touch, which made it very fascinating to do.

Acorn: Despite being a series on a limited budget, Cadfael has some impressive visual effects. The "finding-the-body" scene in The Virgin in the Ice, of course, comes immediately to mind. How did they do that?

DJ: There was a river, it was a stream actually, it wasn't that big, they covered a section of it with plastic glass and then they had these wonderful snow machines, which blew snow over trees and fields and really made it look as if the whole place was snowbound and then they covered over the river with the snow, the ice being the plastic glass, and they put the dummy body under that, then they put it into a real block of ice and let it melt. That was my favorite, actually. I think it's the best story, because it's the story also where he meets his son. That was a lovely scene.

Acting in Cyberspace

Acorn: Computer-generated images are more and more of a factor in films like Gladiator. Does that change the actor's job?

DJ: In a sense it does. One is slightly worried that eventually they'll be able to digitalize us – they won't need a flesh and blood actor, they'll make us digitally, which is a scary thought. I hope it doesn't come to that. Today, actually — I'm about to do TV here and there's a lot of prosthetics in this thing — I had to have my face done and the make-up woman was saying, "In time this will all be done digitally and I'll be out of a job."

Acorn: Do you find yourself increasingly playing against computer-generated images rather than other actors?

DJ: Yes, you do, there's all that blue-screen acting you have to do where you are in a completely empty set against a blue screen at the back. I remember I did it when I played Hitler [Inside the Third Reich] and I was supposed to be walking around the Chancellery when it had been built by Albert Speer and I was walking around an empty set and I put my hand out at a certain level to stroke the top of a table. When you see the film, I am stroking the top of a table but when I was doing it there was nothing there at all, I was in a completely empty space. We didn't have to do any of that with Cadfael. There was no blue-screen acting.

Acorn: Is blue-screen acting more like stage acting?

DJ: No. They build a physical environment with a camera around you so you are in fact in space, but you have to behave as if you are whatever they want you to be — on top of a mountain, in a room, in a crowded department store — and they put that set on digitally around you.

Acorn: That sounds very challenging.

DJ: It's very frustrating. Not much job satisfaction in those scenes, not for the actor. It's acting by numbers.

A Hairy Victorian Role

Acorn: Another new Acorn release, The Pallisers, includes a wonderful performance by you as Lord Fawn, the only son and hope of a cash-poor aristocratic family.

DJ: It was really lovely to do. I know the thing that I hated about it was my whiskers. I had these things that in England are called dundrearies. They were named after a man, a Victorian gentleman called Dundreary. He started this fashion of whiskers that grew on your cheek, just below your cheek bone.

Acorn: I think we call them mutton chops.

DJ: That's right. They grew sometimes at great length and they were very difficult to wear, particularly outdoors when the wind caught them or it rained and they had to put plastic bags over them.

Acorn: So you actually grew them?

DJ: I didn't grow them, they were stuck on.

Acorn: Do you remember playing opposite Penelope Keith in The Pallisers? That very funny scene where she's commanding you into battle to land a rich wife.

DJ: I do remember that. That was the first time I ever worked with Penny. The Pallisers was full of lovely ladies, Susan Hampshire and Sarah Badel.

Acorn: It was an enormous cast.

DJ: It was. It was one of the early BBC classic serials, which basically followed hard on the heels of The Forsyte Saga, which was probably the first of those big classic BBC serials and The Pallisers was the second one.

Acorn: Those epic series that keep people coming back week after week for months seem to be something that viewers remember for the rest of their lives.

DJ: They were so well done. Those heavy, enormous Victorian novels, which are a bit daunting to digest unless you actually see the characters up there and follow them each week, like a soap opera. It's very attractive.

Acorn: Are they being done anymore, these epic serials?

DJ: Some of them are. There's been a spate of Jane Austen recently, but they're not done as much as they used to be. Actually, nowadays they cost too much. We did I, Claudius over seven months at the BBC. You couldn't do that now. It would be ruinously expensive to do something like an I, Claudius now. And that was done in the studio, no locations. The coliseum in that was just a rostrum ten feet off the ground. The camera was put on the floor looking up at the actors sitting on the rostrum who were looking down as if they were looking into the coliseum. And there were crosses on the floor where we were supposed to look when a lion or something would be attacking a Christian. We had to look at that cross and react. That was how it was done. On the cheap. But it was very effective.

Acorn: And better for the actor than a blue screen.

DJ: Much, yes.

Acorn: Do you remember if the cast of The Pallisers was ever together in one place?

DJ: No, I don't think so except probably right at the end at the wrap party. With I, Claudius, when each new emperor came in, the exiting emperor gave a lunch for the new emperor and his cohorts. They were looked forward to very much. A Roman feast.

Role Reversal on Frasier

Acorn: The U.S. critics used to say that you were best known for your roles in I, Claudius and Cadfael, but with your sweeps week guest appearance on Frasier, you might be breaking through to a whole new U.S. star stratosphere.

DJ: Oh heavens, I play a very bad Shakespearean actor, which came very easily to me. I could see immediately why they cast me. It was such fun.

Acorn: How did that role come about?

DJ: Out of the blue, my agent in Los Angeles said, "Would you be free to come over to do a Frasier?" It was just before Christmas, last December. I was going to do one about a year ago but the date didn't work. With a mixture of excitement and fear and trepidation I went over and they were so nice. I was a bit frightened that I'd be the new boy, you know, on a well-oiled team, but they were so kind and so helpful and put me under their wings. They were lovely. I had a great time.

Acorn: Was this your first appearance on a U.S. sitcom or a sitcom ever?

DJ: Yes, on a sitcom anywhere.

Acorn: Bob Larbey, whose classic sitcom Good Neighbors [The Good Life in the U.K.] is also an Acorn title, told us in a recent interview that he doesn't admire too much current U.S. comedy but he never misses Frasier. Is there something about the show, perhaps, that bridges the gap between British humor and American humor?

DJ: It's done, how can I put it, there were at least, I think, ten scriptwriters, there seemed to be, and it changed all the time. The scriptwriters were there for the five or six days that we were rehearsing and performing it and then it was done live in the end, in front of an audience in the studio. They're changing the script all the time. They're putting new gags in and changing gags that they think don't work and they're changing scenes. So they're working on it the whole time and honing it the whole time. There are so many intelligent and funny and clever minds that work on it, of course the people who are doing it, Kelsey and David, they all are brilliant, but those two particularly have such a rapport, such a relationship on screen, it's wonderful. They're masters of timing. And they're both such wonderful personalities. You just love them.

On the Future and Fame

Acorn: Last spring you were back on Broadway playing Vanya in a Roundabout Theater production of Uncle Vanya and it was your first time back on the New York stage since Breaking the Code in 1988. And then you were recently back on the London stage?

DJ: I came back after Vanya and I had a holiday and then I started rehearsing a new play by the same dramatist who wrote Breaking the Code, Hugh Whitmore, who has written a new play called God Only Knows. We did that on tour and we were coming into London but there was no theatre available, so we had to put it on ice for a couple of months and I'm about to start re-rehearsing it and we open in London in five weeks time.

Acorn: What's it about?

DJ: The bottom line is, I play a man who's on the run, he's escaped from a clinic where he's been incarcerated and he tells the story of the reason for his incarceration. He's been working at the Vatican, he's an expert in ancient documents and early printing. And he had discovered documentary evidence that the resurrection, the so-called resurrection didn't happen. So if Jesus is not the son of God and didn't rise from the dead what happens to religion and faith and everything else? Is he for real or is he not? Does he really know this? It leads into a discussion of, really, the fragile basis of Christianity.

Acorn: Sounds like it might be controversial.

DJ: Yes, it might be. But I'd love it to be a success, then perhaps we can bring it to New York.

Acorn: Any other plans for the future you can share with us, any film roles or TV roles?

DJ: Robert Altman's over here about to do a film in April, which I'm going to be in. Fortunately, he's asked me to be in it although I'll be performing in the evening in the play. It's something I can do during the day. So, things are quite busy.

Acorn: I've read that like your mentor Sir Lawrence Olivier, you like being a famous actor who in everyday life is fairly anonymous.

DJ: Oh yes, absolutely.

Acorn: But with the continuing popularity of Cadfael here not to mention Gladiator and Frasier within the space of a year, do you ever worry about becoming too famous here, being mobbed in airports, that sort of thing?

DJ: No, I don't think that would ever happen. I would hate the kind of fame where you are in a sense prevented from leading a normal life in public, which is why I always say that Olivier had the classiest kind of fame. There he was, the acknowledged greatest actor in the world and he could walk down the street and nobody would know it was him. That's classy fame, I think, that's the best sort of fame. That's the sort of fame, if it did happen, that's what I would like. But really, I just want to keep working. I have the natural instinct of actors who always think that the next job's going to be the last. I've been really fortunate, I really have, I've had a lot of luck.