Bally. Hello. How are you? I'm good.
How are you?
Are you okay?
I'm fine.
Temperature's going down today, though, which I'm not happy about.
But anyway. So cold, isn't it?
Congratulations on Allelujah.
Oh, bless you. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's.
It's lovely to hear what people are saying
about congratulations on your performance as well.
I wondered how much you actually knew about the part when you auditioned for it.
Oh, absolutely nothing.
I knew all I had, you know, like like does get
they literally have they have the name of the project.
So Allelujah, we have Alan Bennett.
And then I had Sir Richard Eyre, and I was like, I'm I'm going for this.
I'm absolutely going for these tapes.
I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to land them.
I'm going to go for it.
We're really going for it.
So I'm auditioned.
I did a couple of speeches, a couple of the speeches in it,
and then Richard rang me up
and he said, I want to I want to offer you the part personally, offer you the part.
And I was like, Wow, this is incredible.
And then he said, Do you know who else is in it?
And I said, I haven't got a clue who else would be in it anyway.
Jennifer Saunders Judi Dench And as soon as soon as he said Judi Dench
I just heard it was white noise.
It was, I don't know. Okay.
And I missed everyone else's name.
Everyone else's name I'd missed.
And I rang my mum straight away
and I said, You're never going to believe who's in this.
So what's it like going into an audition,
if you like, cold, knowing nothing, you know, it's quite petrifying.
I think it is really, really petrifying.
Because. Because
you just want to have all the information.
I think you just want to know stuff and you're playing.
You know, sometimes you're playing a scene or a character and you don't
have you know,
you don't have the rest of the scene
or what happened before, what's happened afterwards.
But I was quite fortunate with the scenes that they did choose.
They were quite meta.
So of scenes about about his actual his feelings
and the way he is as a human being.
Dr. Valentine to a play.
And so it wasn't
as it wasn't as difficult as being given, you know, certain other pieces of text.
So I felt quite fortunate that I had a little bit more.
You mentioned, you know, you're acting with Judi Dench,
and I totally understand why you had no other names on staff have been mentioned.
But of course, she does have this reputation
for being a terrible giggler and a bit of a prankster on set.
And I wondered if you had any direct experience of this.
I mean, were there
any scenes that you just to stop because she was making you corpse?
Yeah, there was a lot of there was a lot of corpsing.
There was a lot of laughing.
There was a lot of Judi telling me lovely, naughty
stories about was in the industry that she used to pull pranks on people
and stories that I cannot repeat because no one should know about them. Oh
yeah.
You have to ask Judi, just obviously to secrecy.
I will not tell anyone.
But she is she, you know, was the best thing about Judi is
that she is so down to earth
that, you know, people would walk past me and we'd be having a joke or laughing.
They're like, Do you know who you're talking to?
You know, who you're just hanging out with
and just having a crack and having a joke with?
And I go, Yeah, but you know what's she is so down to earth.
She's just she's just
she's like one of the one at one minute, you know, like one of the one of the boys.
But, you know, in that sort of same
vein of just being so approachable and so
giving as well, massively giving.
So I've got nothing but good things to say about her.
If you mentioned the character you play, Dr.
Valentine, who's a very idealistic doctor, really,
I wondered how much time you spent in hospitals talking to real doctors
and member members of staff as part of your research?
I did.
We unfortunately,
I wasn't allowed
to go into any of the hospitals because we were filming in the COVID times.
You know, those are the times where we were not allowed to go in.
They weren't having people kind of shadow or anything like that.
But I ended up speaking to a lot of specifically geriatricians and
and doctors and nurses talking about the medical profession,
a lot of research online, and then kind of like
what that that research kind of warped into the film.
But then the film really deals with the human connection of people.
It really deals with the patients and their stories and him listening to, to
and learning a lot from the people that he's treating.
So it's interesting how you get the you get the initial research
and you know, you do the character work and the accent work and the physicality,
and then you bring that into the film and then it kind of morphs and changes. So
I had a little bit of everything really.
Well, it's been great to talk to you.
Thank you so much for your time.
And I'd like to say congratulations on the film.
Thank you. No, thank you very much. Thank you so much.