CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. Our guest today is the film and TV star Jack Davenport. Jack burst onto the scene with the era-defining drama This Life and the comedy Coupling. Since then he's been a familiar face, starring in the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean films, and most recently, the comedy-drama Ten Percent.

JACK

I have lived and worked in a world for three decades in which people have to be a weird combination of an open wound and bulletproof.

CRAIG

What's extraordinary about Jack is how balanced he is, negotiating - with apparent ease - the pitfalls of the notoriously difficult entertainment industry. How does he do it? Stand by for some great stories and insights.

Jack, it's great to see you. How are you? And where are you?

JACK

I'm good, thank you. I'm in my apartment in New York City. The sun is shining and it's a reasonable 70 degrees which makes it very easy to love New York on those days.

CRAIG

That's your permanent residence now. How how is it being an Englishman in New York?

JACK

I've been an Englishman in New York for a long time, partly because I had this sense as a teenager that this was where the action was. And then very rashly, less than a month after I left school, I got on a plane to New York with no plan and no money and just gave it a go. And apart from university back in the UK, I've really been here more on than off.

CRAIG

Do you miss things about the UK? Or are you just fully naturalised now?

JACK

Yes, I do. Of course I do. The thing I miss, I suppose the most, is a peculiarly British thing of like how British people take the piss. I miss that. The codes of that are, you know, what's that, quote? England and America are two cultures divided by a common language. It's the nuance of what I can only describe as good old-fashioned British piss-taking.

CRAIG

The Americans think that you're being hurtful when you take the piss, when it's our way of showing affection.

JACK

That's exactly it. The fact that it is a form of affection can get lost in translation. Yes, you're quite right. I've learned to avoid those sticky moments where I was trying to say something nice, but they thought I was being mean.

CRAIG

I go back and forth to the US a fair bit. And it feels that it's becoming more and more divided. It's quite angry. Is that fair? Or is that just me noticing that when I do pop over?

JACK

Gosh, yes. On some levels. You know, let's not forget that America has always been ungovernably large, and so many competing realities. I blame more or less everything, in terms of social ills at this point on social media, which is clearly doing the absolute opposite of what it says it does. And certainly in this country, there is a danger that now people really don't have a shared reality, which is a big problem. I mean, I think that's also true, frankly, of the UK. You know, I think a lot of the social upheaval, I mean, Brexit analogue is Trump, as you know, I mean, it's like the same, the same impulses.

CRAIG

Yeah, very similar. As an actor, do you have to sort of, just because of the nature of your job, and you need to publicise what you're doing, do you feel you have to venture onto it? Or do you try and stay away?

JACK

I despise it so completely that I have never had a social media account in my life. I've been asked to, because it's, you know, it's a means of promotion-

CRAIG

Because they want you to push whichever movie you're in or TV show or..?

JACK

Look, I’m showing my age as well, here. That's the truth. And in a way, that's the thing that's allowed me to just avoid it.

CRAIG

But it's interesting. I mean, so many people that I talk to, by no means everybody, but I speak to a lot of people who just say, look, I've just had to have a detox or I'm actually turning off my Twitter or whatever, because they actually felt that it was sort of poisoning them in some way.

JACK

I think it definitely does. And I said to my son the other day, I've got a 12-year-old so obviously it like this stuff is like right at the top of the agenda-

CRAIG

Being on Tik Tok?

JACK

Yeah, he's not allowed Tik Tok, watching Tik Tok is, it's like Thomas de Quincey. It's like the opium eaters. They lie on sofas with the phone like an inch and a half from their face, immobile for hours.

CRAIG

And it's like constant, sort of sugar hits, isn't it?

JACK

And it is decontextualized. You know, what do they call it? Snackable content - a more hateful phrase I can barely…

CRAIG

I could feel your contempt radiating.

JACK

I think it is tearing the fabric of society quite considerably. I said to my son the other day, I said, oh, I'm reading this absolutely terrifying book about social media. Pause. And he just went, another one? And I was like, yeah!

CRAIG

Do you think though, because I remember when I was a kid, that there was stuff like people saying, like, you're watching too much TV. And there were certain shows, I remember Grange Hill was considered a terrible show for a kid of my age to watch. Is there a sense in which we have a kind of moral panic about these things, or you think it's just completely different?

JACK

I think it's worse, because social media and frankly, smartphones, but let’s just stick with social media, it's just a race to the bottom of the brainstem, isn't it? All they care- the only metric that any of those companies care about is time on device, time on platform. That's all they care about. So their only priority is to keep you entranced for as long as possible, because that way they can shove as many ads down your brainstem at the same time, basically. It's also not shared, at least television was shared. And there's a lot of research actually, I have read books about this, like, the bigger the screen, the less problematic it is. It's when you see, you know, like these little kids just like with their faces aglow with the little uplighting from the thing.

CRAIG

I find it so interesting. I mean, the younger kids that I know, they watch these kind of videos of people commentating on themselves building things on Minecraft and stuff. And it's like literally somebody spending an hour explaining how they're building something. And they love all that kind of stuff. And it's not, there's no story to it. It's just-

JACK

That's not so bad. Like my son uses YouTube a lot because he likes making stuff, right? And it's a bit like having Radio 4 on for him, he's like doing some things and there is his laptop with somebody going, this is how you do this, that and the other. However, he's still young. But YouTube, which, in many ways, is the worst of them all, the way they keep you there ultimately, is because the algorithm at this point understands that the thing that keeps you there, that keeps you engaged, is stuff that agitates you.

CRAIG

So I think we've probably safely established for our children that we are a couple of old farts who don't get any part of this.

JACK

100%, I am a complete old fart. But I am, I'm horrified by what these companies are allowed to do.

CRAIG

I think you're making a very serious point. I totally agree with you. So I want to go to something, during the research with this somebody had a little chat to you, and you described yourself as having had a ‘baroque series of life experiences’. And I've been very curious to ask you about what you meant about that.

JACK

Well, you know, I grew up around showbusiness my whole life. I have other relatives who are public figures, who've gone on some quite circuitous journeys, close members of my family have, you know, flirted with prison time, have done prison time. You know, these are all things that, you know, were sort of adjacent to me.

CRAIG

And you alluded to your uncle there, Jonathan Aitken, who was a politician in the Thatcher government. Basically, you said he came close, had prison time, he did actually go to prison, that sort of thing. And it was a major scandal at the time and there was a lot of shame brought on him and he's had a very interesting story, hasn't he, because he, I think he came back to his faith. Talk about that because you brought it up as something that you were adjacent to but obviously had an impact on you.

JACK

I know, his story is beautiful, actually.

CRAIG

I mean, it sounds to me like you feel close to him, protective, you know, want to acknowledge the fact that he learned some key lessons from it and changed from it. Was that true across the family? Or was it difficult as well? I've seen this close up because I've worked in journalism and politics. And you can see the division that these sorts of things sometimes cause.

JACK

It's my mother's brother. And, you know, shame is the right word, like when the tabloids really want to get going, you know, he was kicked around good and proper. Now, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he was the last in a very long line of Tories who sailed pretty close to the wind over that 18-year stretch. I think he was unfortunate to be, as it were, right at the end of that continuum. And I think he took a kicking that was not entirely to do with his own transgressions, but a build up of, you know, frustration in the country that, you know, this happens all the time. If one party is in power for a really long time, people are fed up with it. The finer points of what constitutes a political scandal is frankly, neither here nor there. The point is that he was going to have to pay the piper. And, you know, we love him, because he's a close member of my maternal side of my family. Sure, he did wrong by the book, but I would venture that his own particular story was on the mild end of the spectrum. Foolish, perhaps, but he only hurt himself. He didn't hurt anyone else. And I think he handled that with real elegance and frankly, humility. And I'm very moved by his life now. He's a prison chaplain. He's not a young man these days, and you can't keep him out of Pentonville. No, really. And the thing is that because he's, you know, done time, he's like, the people in there going through all the terrible experiences they're going through are like, he's legit. Like, he's not just some dude with a dog collar. He's like, he was in their shoes at one point, and talk about paying it back. I mean, I think that's frankly, awe-inspiring in a way, I really do. I think it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I mean, for what is worth.

CRAIG

Yeah. Well, it's great to hear you say that. I'm just moving back to you saying about being an actor, you describe it as being vulnerable in public. And I think that that's a real theme of the people that we've been talking to on this podcast is that sense of being vulnerable.

JACK

For a very long time, you know, having grown up in all of this, I had, you know, pretty significant imposter syndrome. And you're kind of like, oh, god… and in a way, I think it keeps one honest. Like one's always slightly waiting for the tap on the shoulder and like, okay, thank you very much, you can go now.

CRAIG

I think you were the only child of two-well known actors. So you know, I mean, your father was in Chariots of Fire, your mum was in A Fish Called Wanda, you know, they were well-known around that scene. And your father, I think was a bit older, as well. So it sounds to me like a fascinating environment to be brought up in, what was it like?

JACK

I loved it. Like the reason I'm an actor is nothing to do with ambition whatsoever. Because that, by the way, if I learned anything growing up in it, it's like, don't go into show business if you're ambitious, [it will] just punch you in the face repeatedly. But I grew up surrounded by actors. And if you're a child, actors are fun, because they're quite childish. They're an unusual kind of adult because they don't condescend to you. On some level, I realised that I wanted to follow my parents into the same profession because I just wanted to be in the tribe. I love the company of other actors. It's a strange fellowship. We do a very strange job of you know, dressing up in rented clothes and doing some pretending. You're also forged together in a fire of - I mean, forged in a fire, it's a bit overdramatic, but then…

CRAIG

You were in situations I, you know, I read something like you were in Ibiza, and like John Hurt would pop in and that kind of thing. That's quite unusual, I mean, he's such a major actor in, you know, the history of acting now and he's just popping by.

JACK

You have to remember that it's that thing of like, you having drinks with a co-worker, you know, it's just like that, that was my parents’ co-workers. I should add that the whole Ibiza thing is also that in the late 60s, I'm guessing, a whole bunch of writers, actors, painters, sculptors, artists in general, all made for Ibiza because your houses cost nearly nothing. And there was this kind of nascent colony. And so of course, some of it is a familiarity that I find quite comforting in a way I think, even though you know, that's undergirded by the fact that it's also the single most insecure profession known to humanity.

CRAIG

Were they quite secure in themselves? The famous thing for people outside is you know that the resting moments where you're not doing it, did they feel secure?

JACK

Resting is one of those terms, which, you know, is lobbed at actors as a way to underscore our essential kind of flighty, bubble-headed nature, apparently. You know, call it what it is: unemployed. And they were secure in the sense that they were skilled enough that they had long and successful careers, which is a hard thing to do. I mean, when my father passed away about a decade ago, he was 85. And he had had a career in show business for more than half a century. And that is really, really hard to do. He put three kids through private school and university and owned his own house by the end, you know, I mean, there's like, that's really difficult to do. And my mother, similarly, my mother's career trajectory is more complex only because she's not just been an actor. She's a writer, she's a producer, she's an award-winning director of theatre. She's, you know, she's a fantastic teacher, she's taught drama at like, Yale and Juilliard, and I'm incredibly proud of that, actually. I mean, I've been doing this for 31 years now, and I understand how difficult it is to like, keep the show on the road, quite honestly. And so my eyes were open, I guess, when I went into it.

CRAIG

I mean, and I think of how important drama has been in my life in terms of watching things and, as you say, understanding the world or, you know, going to places, why do people behave in the way they do? That kind of thing. I think we are, we really are in a golden age, and there's also just like, the sheer sophistication of drama series, which go on over series, and that you know, that they tell a story in a much more rich and-

JACK

Sure. I mean, sometimes I say like, we do the feeling so you don't have to kind of thing, like we do the emoting so you, you know, you the audience have some, sometimes a sense of identification, or horror, or amusement or whatever it is. And that's, you know, that's the nature of the job. I mean, it's like, I was saying to a friend last night, it's just basically shadow puppets on the cave wall, just much more expensive. And because we are a storytelling species, you know, it's how we make sense of the world. It's always been that way, that's, you know, that's how civilizations exist, because we all have these shared fictions of morality, you know, some codified words about how you should or shouldn't behave. These all stories, and look at the lockdowns, what did people do? They watch Netflix for - or whatever - for 22 hours a day. Because the need for narrative, to make sense of the world - it’s incredibly easy to mock showbusiness, and I would be the first, we're not brain surgeons, let's be honest - but we do provide a service. And it's a necessary human need. And so the vulnerability in public thing is, you know, actors know how to access uncomfortable emotions, or at least a facsimile of them.

CRAIG

I think what’s also interesting though, is that sometimes it sort of presents a view of the world where everything is sorted out and tied up in a bow at the end, whereas actually the reality of our lives is that they continue and move on and there's things that edge in and out but don't necessarily end up in the right place. Do you think that there's something in that?

JACK

I think there is, I think. I think that was truer in the not so distant past, when quite honestly, there were less platforms in which storytelling could happen. I mean, you know, when we grew up, there were three channels, or maybe two. You know, I remember Channel 4 arriving, it was a huge deal.

CRAIG

I'm a little older than you and I also remember some of the waiting for some of the channels to actually come on air. I was so bored.

JACK

Right, and then they'd get off again at 11 and there'll be the girl with the dolly in front of the blackboard. Her, look it up kids. It'll be on YouTube, like everything else.

CRAIG

I suppose the massive breakthrough for you was This Life, which I do remember, you know, you were a 24-year-old. It was everywhere, it was talked about everywhere. It was sort of a kind of voice of the next generation.

JACK

Well, it was quite bizarre when it really sort of got some momentum, which it didn't to begin with, the first season, nobody watched it. And we barely staggered to getting recommissioned, and then they recommissioned because we were cheap as chips, that when they recommissioned it, they commissioned like 21 episodes for the second series, which, as you know, by British Standards, is about five seasons worth, right? And then they re-ran the first season into the second and repeated it. So we were on for 32 straight weeks, twice a week. And if that isn't going to get people's attention, I don't know what is. And also, the other thing that's critical to remember, is pre-internet, and to what we were just saying, when This Life came out, okay, there were five channels, and I think Sky was a nascent thing - I don't really know, because I've never had Sky - but you know, it was a much smaller playing field. And the pre-internet thing is important, because in those days, the only way something was written about or responded to, in the kind of, you know, pop culture conversation, was in newspapers and magazines, really. And a lot of journalists decided, like, this was the thing. And it was, you know, defining of a generation and this, and all these terms that I did not come up with in relation to a show, which was really - that's the other thing. It wasn't about anything. That was the point, it was about who took my yoghurt out of the fridge, you know, it was all about us being in the pub or doing drugs and that was the thing. The thing I think that got people's attention was that it took no moral position on any of that.

CRAIG

And it felt quite an authentic representation of, like-

JACK

Because there was no moral position, because people had casual sex and didn't immediately get some terrible life-threatening STD, or they took drugs and didn't die, which in like soap opera world, that's what happens. Again: the stories we tell ourselves, you know, like, these kind of weird moral universes that television used to be in.

CRAIG

So it felt refreshing and challenging. I do remember thinking about you know, your picture was in every newspaper, you were talked about a huge amount. Did you feel at that stage, I've made it, at the age of 24? Did you really not, you thought, this was incredibly fragile stuff?

JACK

It's always incredibly fragile. I was watching a wonderful documentary recently, a six-hour documentary, no less, about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

CRAIG

I've been watching that.

JACK

Isn't it wonderful?

CRAIG

It's very good. It's very in-depth. It's good.

JACK

For someone like myself, it's obviously… and I'm also married to an actress.

CRAIG

I can imagine it's meat and drink to you. It's just so - if anybody who hasn't seen it, it's Ethan Hawke, who's obviously a very well-known film star, basically taking apart the relationship between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward over a series of decades, and there are six episodes. And there are a series of stars that voice their parts or things that they've said. So George Clooney is-

JACK

Is Paul. [crosstalk] very good, Sam Rock. I mean, it's a measure of the reverence that Paul and Joanne were held in, the lineup of people who agreed to like, do some cold readings of old letter-, of old transcripts is pretty impressive, but the reason I mentioned it is that Paul Newman talks a lot about luck. And how absolutely central luck is, in certainly, I mean, in most careers, quite frankly, but certainly in showbusiness and like, the moment you forget that and you start going, I did that, that was all me - you're in trouble. And honestly, when This Life started to kind of happen, I'm pretty confident my view was, well, that was lucky. Let's see if I can ride this piece of luck for a while. Trying to put together a multi-decade career in showbusiness is about trying to kind of hitch yourself to the next piece of good luck. See how far that drags you, You know, talent alone will get you somewhere-

CRAIG

Do you wake up in cold sweat thinking, oh, it might end?

JACK

I mean, that's a baseline fact of existence for any actor. Because the truth is, it could all end yesterday, you don't even - you might not even know it's ended. And I guess, I suppose this comes back to the being vulnerable in public thing, lots of things have to line up just to get hired quite honestly. But I've lost my train of thought.

CRAIG

That's okay. Because I was just gonna say you don't, you don't have to say, obviously, there is talent too, and you have talent. But anyway, I'm going to spare your blushes on that one, because I also recently watched The Talented Mr. Ripley and your very significant role in the final act of that film. And what's interesting about that film, watching it again now, is the sheer ambition of that film on lots of levels. So it's saying lots of things about human psychology and the way people interact each other, but also the ambition of, you know, doing a movie where key scenes are at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome. What's it like being on a film, which has that kind of scale of ambition, which I imagine is extraordinary, trying to deliver it and make it good, and have the impact that they obviously ambition as?

JACK

At that point, it was really difficult, because I was only about 25, when I made that film. And, you know, I'm not a fool, I was aware of like, the stakes. I mean, you just only have to look at my fellow actors in that movie. It's, I mean, it's a Murderers’ Row of some of the most revered actors of my generation, quite honestly.

CRAIG

And then extraordinary writer and director, Anthony Minghella.

JACK

Extraordinary writer and director. And also, there's a scene I shot in it with Matt Damon in, what's the name of the big square in Venice, St. Mark's Square, right? We were filming in the middle of St. Mark's Square, right. And I always say it's like trying to do street theatre with a Beatle - ie. John, Paul, George and Ringo, not a small insect - because everywhere we would go, we were the biggest show in town, obviously.

CRAIG

So through their crowds of tourists?

JACK

Crowds, 20 deep, you know, roped off, and you're trying to kind of do your thing in the middle of it. It's also really hot and I was invariably wearing a duffle coat in that film.

CRAIG

You do have a very, very thick, long coat all the way through the film.

JACK

I wear really incredibly thick clothes. It's a million degrees. I mean, that scene on the Spanish Steps, that was my first day on the whole movie. It was a long scene, like three and a half pages, a lot of moving parts. And we rehearsed it at like seven in the morning. It's still quite cool. And then we were taken off to like a holding area across the square there. And the windows were quite high, high that like you couldn't see through them. And by the time we were called back out, there were like 6000 people. It was like walking into a football pitch or something. And you know, they're Italian, so they're not, they're quite vocal. And so it was quite intimidating.

CRAIG

I can imagine that as an actor that is intimidating. Just getting your lines across coherently and effectively. But I also sort of imagine the director trying to like, organise this thing. It must have been an extraordinary—

JACK

Listen, you only get to make, I don't know what the budget of that film was, but let's just call it a big budget arthouse film, the protagonist is, shall we say complex, not necessarily entirely sympathetic. Anthony Minghella, the writer-director would never have been allowed to make that film if his previous film, The English Patient, had not won nine Oscars. Like Anthony's, obviously his family's originally from Italy, called Minghella. You know, it was his love letter to his father, you know, his father left Italy I think during the war. There was a lot of kind of homecomings.

CRAIG

It's a great film, and you are great in it. So I recommend that anybody who gets a chance can go back and look at it. I think it's on Netflix. Anyway, the other thing that I think is a big scale in another way is you play Norrington in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, that seems to me to be on almost a completely different level of insanity, I mean—

JACK

It's bigger still, it's as big as it gets.

CRAIG

It's like this mega-franchise, makes billions of dollars. And the scale of those movies was extraordinary. It must be hard to act in that, in the set, I’m not being [unintelligible] saying they're crap films, but actually just finding the space to be convincing

JACK

Completely. I mean, and to be honest, I think I got my reps in doing Ripley, because in the first one of those, of the pirate films, on a simple level, you know, I'm playing a senior naval officer. So every time I say something, 300 people just do all the things I just said, you know, like, there's people out there rigging these huge boats, you know, like, it's an hour and a half to reset, if I say the wrong thing, or I don't hit my mark, or whatever it is. And you have to sort of embrace the insanity of it, and block all that out. And they, in a way, represent what is now history in terms of how films are made, because, computer-generated images - and now, you know, most stuff that looks incredible isn't even there, it's all painted on digitally. In this first pirate film - and the second, to a degree - it's period. And it was all real, except for the walking skeletons. But like, all the boats were real, all the numbers of people were real. If stuff blew up, well, we blew shit up.

CRAIG

And what's the ratio of like, time to deliver your line to hanging around?

JACK

Oh, in a movie like that it's I mean, sometimes you're waiting for two hours for them to light. I mean, and you know, the technical requirements are vast. But that's the job. It's my favourite thing about filmmaking, a friend of mine, who's a unit stills photographer, calls a film unit the circus of the unemployable, which seems about right to me. And it's, first of all filmmakers, film and TV, it's the most collaborative art form that there is, I mean, symphony orchestras have got nothing on us, a film unit is like four symphony orchestras, in terms of manpower. And you've got all these wildly divergent skill sets from the set deck to the camera people to the sound guy to the actors to the whatever it is, costume, make up. And everyone is like having to pull in one direction so that you can get to a point in the day where the actors basically start doing their thing. And they record some behaving, basically, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. It's this extraordinary dance, where everyone has to pick up their bit of the rope, or it just doesn't happen. I was doing a film in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and someone was saying that the military now get people like line producers and stuff from film and TV to talk about, like, how you do instant team building. I mean, yes, we actors in all of this, of course, are like closeted show ponies, but I love that, just the team sense of it.

CRAIG

I want to move on to Ten Percent, which is the British version of the highly successful French show, it's been highly successful in the UK as well, about a talent agency in London. And, you know, for those who haven't seen it, I imagine most people listening have, but the idea is the agents in it deal with real life stars playing versions of themselves. So Dominic West or Helena Bonham Carter or any number of people. Tell us about the character you play in that because I think it's interesting.

JACK

Yeah, I play a character called Jonathan Nightingale, who is, at the beginning of the show, the sort of de facto sort of second in command. And then, one of the two senior partners, one’s played by Maggie Steed, the other by Jim Broadbent, and Jim's character is also my dad, and he promptly - not much of a spoiler here - drops dead at the end of the first episode. And then you're, it's like, it's – and he also has a complicated repercussions of his straying love life over the years. And so he has these enormous forces kind of pushing in on him from different directions, as well as the not simple business of looking after people's careers who, again, whose job it is to be vulnerable in public. And, and that, there's a complicated dance.

CRAIG

Exactly. I think it's a very funny comedy. But what I think os interesting in it as well is how the writer and director, you know, smuggles in quite a few deeper themes.

JACK

I mean, John Morton, people might know his work from things like 2012 and W1A, that sort of BBC satire. And he's a rare bird, John, in so much as a) he's unbelievably funny writer, but as you say, he also has this tenderness about sort of human frailty. And he knows it's also a) funny, but also something that we all recognise because we're all flawed in some way, shape, or form,

CRAIG

Well, exactly right, and I think that the first thing that I think that he's sort of, on to and is quite interesting to think about is, a lot of the comedy and the drama comes out of the tangled web of when we first practice to deceive sort of thing. You know, there's a situation where it's too painful to tell an actor the truth, but you can't lie to them. And a lot of the sort of comedy comes out of that, but it is about when do you tell the truth, when are you blunt with people, that kind of thing. And that seems to me to be quite a big theme of it.

JACK

I heard John say, in some press thing, he's always more eloquent than I could ever be, that, you know, when he has a conversation with his agent about project x, and then his agent goes to speak to the producers about the same project and is now in the middle, she or he does not say exactly the same things to that entity that they might have said to John. I interviewed my own agent of, gotta be the easiest research I've ever done, I just took him for lunch. But you know, at one point, I quite bluntly was like, so, lying. Let’s talk about that, shall we? And quick as a flash, he was like, honestly, you can't, because if you get caught, you're done. Talk about Shades of Grey. I mean, it's, you know, getting, as we were talking about earlier, kind of a large group of creative people with all of their vanities, and, you know, vulnerabilities and whatever you want to call them, to the starting line of something in which, you know, then lots of money's being spent every day. It's complicated.

CRAIG

I mean, the other thing I thought was, what's interesting about your character, and don't take this the wrong way, is that quite often at the big-, certainly the beginning, he is a bit of a shit. And then what I think keeps happening is, he's constantly forced to face up to the reality that if he were kinder or more empathetic, things would go better. So there's a daughter that you alluded to who, you know, he hasn't seen for a long time. And there's also a character played by Tim McInnerney, who's just the world's most useless actor, but actually deserves attention and kindness.

JACK

He does and actually, you know, Tim's character is an addition to the original one, there wasn't a character like that in the French one. And I think, you know, while the French one was all sorts of Gallic shrugs and Je ne sais quoi, our one is more about sort of, squandered potential, and is a bit sadder. And the thing about Tim's character, I mean, as an actor, I can hardly watch because, like the character’s called Simon Gould and basically we’re all Simon Gould on some level.

CRAIG

So to be clear, he's desperate to be an actor, but when it comes to the key moment of delivering, he either flunks it or fluffs it or runs away, or his alcoholism takes over.

JACK

Well, first of all, it's implied that, at the beginning, he was like, the best graduating actor in his year at RADA. And so that's why he got signed up by this agency. And then, I mean, look, it's not coal mining, being an actor, but it does have its own set of pressures and if people don't necessarily know what they're signing up for, I think, and in a way, because some of the greatest actors are those people who are in tune with, you know, to go back to that word, their vulnerability in general or their own vulnerabilities, they can be, to some extent, really quite fragile people. Not all actors are like that.

CRAIG

And it's interesting though, that I think that how he's used as a foil for your character, though, which is, it's like, it's almost like he's constantly, your character is constantly being told, be kind, be empathetic, there's a human being here with pains and needs and wants. And if you just took time to do that, life would go so much easier on you. And I suppose we're getting to this is all more serious wisdom side of things here.

JACK

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think Tim's character is indisputably the moral centre of our version of this show, in part, because, what - and this goes back to what I was saying about John’s sort of tenderness about human frailty, we're not widgets, we’re humans who have to be in touch with some ability to like, you know, get emotional behaviour across in a way that's both, you know, either funny or moving, or whatever it is, but you've got to be in touch with something. I don't question it too much. I just sort of get on with it when I do it myself. But something happens. I mean, I'm not going to try and deconstruct what, how I do what I do, I just do it.

CRAIG

Do you feel in your life, that sort of sense of like, you know, I certainly do, like that certain people are difficult or hard. But actually, when I try it, it makes a difference. I mean, is that something you noticed in your life? Or is it?

JACK

I mean, look, I have lived and worked in a world for three decades, in which people have to be a weird combination of an open wound and bulletproof. And it's quite an unusual combo. And not everyone has that in balance. I think, you know, over time, you learn how to sort of make your peace with how it is you think you're going to kind of navigate life and..

CRAIG

And that bullet proof side, is that about because you're inevitably going to be rejected because you couldn't possibly not be rejected?

JACK

Certainly, the rejection, you know, for even, apart from like, the 0.1% of my profession, which I am not a part of. All the rest of us get nine no-s for every, or more for every one yes, sometimes 99 no-s. So there's that part of it. But also, I think just, I mean, we sort of alluded to it earlier. When I've done things that are huge scale, you've got to hold your nerve, you know, like I said, 250 people all turned up in this remote corner of an island in the Caribbean. And now the only person that can fuck it up is me.

CRAIG

And you see – exactly, exactly that — but you seem very, very balanced and thoughtful about it. Was there a moment where you were less so or found it more difficult?

JACK

Yeah, sure. I mean, only in the last half decade or so, it wasn't like some great Damascene moment, I was just like, you know what, I mean, have been doing this now for 25 years, or whatever it was back then, I mean, I may not be God's gift to my profession, but I guess I'm doing something that's vaguely in the ballpark. Because I'm still here. And also, I have now got, you know, a huge amount of experience. But it does mean that like all the things that actors get asked to do, pretty much, I've done them at least once. And many of them many, many times. So my sort of imposter syndrome just got offset by just time served, I suppose. So if that's bulletproof.. it's not really bulletproof, it's just kind of slightly less neurotic, I think probably.

CRAIG

That's good to hear. You've been incredibly generous with your time. We're coming towards the end of our chat. The one question we always ask people at the end is, you know, if there's one piece of wisdom that you’d give to people, what would it be? What would yours be?

JACK

Live in gratitude. The fact of being alive, you know, across the oceans of time that you know, constitutes the universe, the fact that we even get to have consciousness is pretty fucking remarkable. And it like, for you or I, who were born in the era we were, in the country we were at the time – you know, we won the lottery, already, We won. And I think people can get so caught up when they have setbacks of one kind or another, and that they tend, you know, they tend to overwhelm people. And I understand that completely, I mean, life is hard, often, but when I remember to be grateful for all of the unbelievable good fortune and privilege and –- I mean, the laundry list of my good fortune is embarrassingly long, and as soon as I remember to kind of check in with that, nothing seems that bad, to be honest.

CRAIG

Yeah. I mean, somebody said that to me once, and it really, really shifted my perspective, was that you've won lottery on lottery just to even be aware of this wonderful planet that you're on. And frankly, all you do is bitch and moan. And I was like, yeah, I do just bitch and moan, and actually, that's not a great way. And actually, I should, and once you step back and go, even if it all ended tomorrow, what an amazing experience.

JACK

It's very easy to get wrapped up in one’s sense of misery, or injustice, or whatever it is, I mean, I get it, like, things can go very wrong for people. I'm not blind to that. But in my own experience, I have found that when I got a more consistent handle on just going, hang on a minute, let's just wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, like, we only go around once. And, you know, as you say, you know, let's just zoom out a bit here. And really consider the picture as it is for you. And you should be so lucky Jack, my God. Fingers crossed. You never do know in this strange business, but this may be the last PR I ever do in my life, or the beginning of a whole other run. Who knows?

CRAIG

One of the things I do every day is, somebody taught me to do, to try and make a list of the things you're grateful for. And I'm incredibly grateful.

JACK

It's a good exercise.

CRAIG

Brilliant. And thank you very much. What are you off to do now Jack?

JACK

I'm going to go and exercise now Craig, because it's a requirement of my job.

CRAIG

And I'm incredibly grateful that you gave your time today. It's been fantastic talking to you.

Huge thanks to Jack Davenport for some great stories and proving that it's possible to be both a big star and a thoroughly decent person. Next week, we have another exceptional guest. Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is one of the world's leading clinical psychologists.

Simon Baron-Cohen

You know, this idea of an internal pot of gold, this idea that an infant needs to form a secure attachment with a caregiver, it's all about sort of the young child feeling loved. So that as you grow up, you can, you know, you've got the resources to also show love to others.

CRAIG

I was drawn to his work because he isn't afraid to tackle the big questions, including the nature of good and evil and why we're built the way we are. You really don't want to miss it. His insights have helped me change the way I see the world. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, please do, and why not leave a review? Desperately Seeking Wisdom was produced by Sarah Parker for Creators Inc. The researcher for this episode was Charlotte Mulford. Until next time, goodbye.