Christopher Eccleston on playing John Lennon in new BBC4 biopic Lennon Naked

Jun 16 2010 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

 

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Playing John Lennon for BBC4’s new biopic brought Christopher Eccleston to tears, he tells Kate Whiting

 

MOST actors would understandably be nervous about portraying one of their icons stark naked.

 

Yet when Christopher Eccleston was approached about stripping off in a one-off TV drama about John Lennon, he had no such qualms. Instead, he dived right in, quite literally, as BBC Four’s Lennon Naked opens with a shot of a long-haired Eccleston swimming, albeit fully clothed, in Lennon’s indoor pool.

 

“I think you have to just look at him as a human being, as a character and not worry too much about the fact that he’s a godhead,” says Eccleston matter-of-factly, about tackling the role.

 

The 90-minute film covers a huge period of Lennon’s life, from the height of Beatlemania in the 1960s and meeting Yoko Ono, to the band’s break-up and John and Yoko finally leaving the UK for New York, in September, 1971.

 

Much has been written about the anti-Yoko sentiment in the UK, and the fans who blamed her for breaking up the band, but the film looks sympathetically on her plight as a Japanese woman in post-war UK, and shows the natural love between her and Liverpool’s best-known musical son.

 

It also recreates the naked photo shoot they did for the infamous Two Virgins picture which became the cover of their 1968 experimental album.

 

While John and Yoko shot the pictures themselves in private, Eccleston and his co-star Naoko Mori had no such luxury, with a camera crew up close and extremely personal. The fact that the pair had worked together on an episode of Doctor Who, back when Eccleston was the Time Lord, must have eased the tension . . .

 

“Yeah, it did . . . well, we weren’t naked in Doctor Who,” says the 46-year-old, grinning.

“We are preparing a version for the late-night audience and I will be taking my sonic screwdriver,” he jokes.

“No, we had a good rapport. When I met Robert (Jones, the writer) and the director Ed (Coulthard) and they asked me about Yoko, she was my first idea. They had other ideas for her, but I said Naoko. She’s pretty extraordinary.

“With nudity, actors always watch each others’ backs . . . literally, so you’re not looking anywhere else,” he quips. “You always look after each other because it’s not a normal job.”

 

As part of the BBC’s Fatherhood season, the film also lays bare the relationship Lennon had with his absentee father Alfred, who asked his son to choose between him and his mother, Julia, when Lennon was only five.

Although he picked his father, Lennon ended up following his mother, who handed him over to her sister Mimi, living in Woolton, and he didn’t see his father again for another 17 years.

In the drama, the scene where a young Lennon has to choose between his parents, on a day out in Blackpool, is shown as a flashback, and juxtaposed against his indifferent treatment of his own son, Julian, by his first wife, Cynthia.

“Having to do the scene and to dwell on the fact of what happened to him as a five-year-old with his mother and father, when they said, ‘You choose’, I felt sympathetic for him,” says Eccleston.

“That really hit home and it was an insight because I felt that that incident drove him on both in good ways and bad ways.”

 

Although the film shows Lennon’s darker side – the drugs, erratic behaviour and choosing Yoko over Cynthia and Julian – Eccleston maintains he’s always stuck up for John and Yoko.

“I remember having one family set-to, where I was confronting somebody about the fact that a lot of the vitriol towards Yoko was racially based, and as an 18-year-old I thought that was wrong. I had an instinctive empathy for her because she was an outsider and I did pick up that they loved each other.

“I think what’s interesting is that John has been taken on as a lad icon and I think he probably struggled with that all his life. He was constrained by that macho culture and he was such a feminine man in the way he expressed himself and in his music.”

 

He admits that filming the drama has confirmed what he felt was Lennon’s “contradictory nature”.

“The first time I remember Lennon registering with me was the press conference that he gave in defence of saying, ‘We’re bigger than Jesus’. For a pop star to be talking about issues like that and not kow-towing to the press . . . He was offered endless opportunities to apologise and it wasn’t an apology. But at the time he was mortified that he’d spoilt it for the other three, one rumour is that he was in tears because he’d ruined it for them.”

 

The actor, dressed today in a simple black jumper and jeans which reflect his down-to-earth personality, was keen to play Lennon, but only if the script was right.

“Because I was interested in John, I certainly wasn’t going to do a drama that I thought didn’t do him credit or Yoko credit, or The Beatles. It would be such a mistake,” he says.

 

“Any old poxy writer who wants to get some attention, will write something about John Lennon, so the important thing was the script. I thought it was very original the way Robert captured John’s voice. I think John would love it. There’s all these versions of him running around, he’d love it, it’s like performance art. ‘Oh there’s another me’,” he says, in Lennon’s nasal Liverpudlian twang.

 

So how did Eccleston begin to play someone he admired so much?

 

“At the beginning,” he jokes. “You’ve got all this resource of how he walked and talked and it’s mindless repetition in terms of watching video, listening to audio tape, reading books. And you begin by relying on Robert’s talent and imagination. In the end, it wasn’t those videos and audio tapes that got me through, they were a side issue to what he’d given me to say.”

 

And then of course, there’s the accent. Eccleston was born in Salford, which may be close to Liverpool geographically, but certainly not vocally.

 

“It starts with impersonation, then I worked with a dialect coach and they break it down a bit,” he explains. “They might tell you where the tongue is when they say a certain word and how much they open their mouth.

 

“The voice is as important with John, you know there’s the accent and then there’s the voice, ‘the very thing, there’,” he says, sounding like Lennon again, “and of course his accent changed, because he was a shape-shifter, he had a number of personas. There was macho John, sensitive peacenik John and there was this nice complicated middle-class boy in there.”

 

At the end of a hard day’s work pretending to be Lennon, Eccleston admits he found it difficult to leave him behind.

“If you play a character like that and you’re dealing with very dark episodes of their life, which this script does, I think you carry a bit of it with you. Not intentionally.

 

“The night before we shot the final day, I happened to read a fantastic interview with Paul McCartney where he talks about never intentionally sitting down to write a song about John’s death, and he said if a song came he would write it.

“He mentioned this song, Here Today, and I was in the pub on my day off having something to eat, reading this article. I went home, downloaded Here Today and cried my eyes out. I think that was because I was finishing and I was not going to be able to be him any more.”

 

LENNON Naked is on BBC Four, on Wednesday, June 23.

John Lennon: Here, there and everywhere

 

There's nothing wrong with rock biopics – but how many more John Lennon dramas do we need? By Gerard Gilbert

Independent.co.uk

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

 

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A day in his life: Christopher Eccleston and NaokoMoriin BBC4's 'Lennon Naked'

 

Is everybody looking forward to the new John Lennon biopic on BBC4 next week? It's called Lennon Naked and stars a slightly too old Christopher Eccleston as the acerbic mop-top, in a drama charting the demise of Lennon's marriage to Cynthia, his bonding with Yoko Ono, and his tricky relationships with son Julian and absentee father Alfred – a merchant seaman played by Christopher Fairbank of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet immortality. But then maybe you still haven't got round to watching Sam Taylor-Wood's 2009 Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, which harked back to John's boyhood and the influence of his mother substitute, Aunt Mimi (a slightly too posh Kristin Scott Thomas).

 

Or perhaps you're thinking that Lennon has enjoyed more than his fair share of biopics – a canon that also includes Backbeat, a film admittedly about the so-called "fifth Beatle", Stuart Sutcliffe, but dominated by Ian Hart's uncanny portrayal of a pre-stardom Lennon.

 

Hart was reprising a role he had played three years earlier in The Hours and Times, Christopher Munch's drama about a holiday to Spain that Lennon took with his manager, the gay and besotted Brian Epstein, in the summer of 1963. Did he give way to Epstein's advances?

 

Just about every stage of Lennon's life and career has now been turned into a movie or TV drama – all except the "lost weekend", when Lennon temporarily split from Yoko, decamped to California with their personal assistant, May Pang, and spent 18 months bar-crawling with Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon. A script about this episode is probably already in development.

 

Indeed, irony of irony, the only "celebrity" recently seeming to challenge Lennon's pre-eminence on the biopic front is Mark Chapman, the Catcher in the Rye-obsessed psychopath who gunned Lennon down in December 1980 (both The Killing of John Lennon and Chapter 27 give Chapman the starring role). Oh, and Jesus Christ. Lennon once provocatively declared that the Beatles were bigger than Christianity, but Jesus is probably edging Lennon in the biopic count.

 

But then wasn't Lennon a sort of atheist messiah, or John the Baptist? He certainly had the looks – and there was something divine about that white suit. Or can his seemingly endless fascination to film-makers be explained by something more earthbound – the way he gives such good backchat, especially when facing the press, such pithy, ready-made dialogue. Caustic, complex and compelling, Lennon still bewitches in a way that Paul, George and Ringo never will. But aren't other music legends being unfairly ignored?

 

Bob Dylan is a more poetic singer-songwriter every bit as "important" as Lennon, and a cultural phenomenon whose story is just as entwined with those heady times. Of course Dylan is still alive, a drawback for dramatists with libel laws to consider, while a premature end is a short-cut to movie immortality – see Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis and Brian Jones. So what about Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin? Penelope Spheeris's Joplin biopic, The Gospel According to Janis, remains stuck in development hell – but the rock'n'roll hall of fame and infamy is full of terrific stories.

 

Personally, I think there is a good film to be made about Led Zeppelin, or rather about their ruthless manager Peter Grant, who also looked after the Yardbirds. Which reminds me – what about Clapton? And there is comedy to be had, surely, with the Gallagher brothers, or a tragi-comedy with Keith Moon. As for Lennon, he's becoming almost too closely observed; it's beginning to feel uncomfortably fetishistic. That's not to say that Lennon Naked is a bad drama – it isn't – and Robert Jones's script is particularly good at illustrating the emptiness of the late Beatle's life. But isn't it time, to paraphrase the title of the band's final studio album, to let him be?

 

'Lennon Naked' screens on Wednesday 23 June at 9.30pm on BBC4.

BBC Press Pack

Date: 15.06.2010

Category: TV Drama; BBC Four

 

Writer Robert Jones and director/producer Edmund Coulthard explain why one of the icons in British music became a fascinating subject, in a new 90-minute drama for BBC Four.

 

"Robert (Jones) and I spent over two years researching the story of John Lennon and developing the script," says director/producer Edmund Coulthard. "The material is already out there – most of the key players have written books, and Yoko and John did really live their lives in public in a strikingly unmediated way. There is a huge amount available in the public arena – you can spend a long time just watching interviews on You Tube."

 

"All the research I did was from my desk," continues writer, Robert Jones. "I read everything I could on, or by, John Lennon. I scoured websites, I read and listened to dozens of interviews and press conferences and chat shows. I listened with a new ear to his music, both solo and The Beatles.

 

"I decided early on that opinions amongst those closest to John seemed to differ so widely on the salient points of his life that I wouldn't base 'my' Lennon on any one version. Because of this, I didn't set out to interview Yoko (Ono) or Paul (McCartney) or Cynthia (Lennon) or Ringo (Starr), etc. I soaked up everything I could on the man, let the material settle in my mind and then went with my instincts."

 

Ed continues: "As the title card says, the film is based on fact – but it's not a documentary or a drama documentary. It's an interpretation – principally by Robert as writer, but by me as director and by Chris Eccleston as the leading actor. It's a drama which dares to reach inside Lennon's mind during a very turbulent period in his life.

 

"Lennon is fascinating," Robert continues. "He divides opinion but one way or another people feel strongly about him. Even those born long after his death seem to have a strong sense of the man, and of Yoko. The Sixties is the decade that has most influenced post-war Britain – and Lennon was arguably that decade's most influential figure.

 

"Lennon grew in my estimation the longer the project went on. When I was a kid, it was cooler to like the Rolling Stones than The Beatles, but it was The Beatle's music that permeated the culture. They were more than a band – they were like a national touchstone. And Lennon, marginally more than McCartney, I'd say was the driving force behind them. His contribution is hard to ignore.

 

"Ed and I had talked a lot about our recollections of reading the famous interview John gave to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. Lennon had just been through Primal Therapy and released Plastic Ono Band, often referred to as 'the primal album.' The music, and the interview were spontaneous, raw and outspoken."

 

"I'm a lifelong fan of Lennon," continues Ed. "But what really inspired this idea is listening to tapes of that interview to Rolling Stone magazine, soon after Lennon had arrived to live in America. Lennon decided to completely open up for the first time – and reveal the truth about how he felt about everyone – and tell the story of what really happened during the time he met Yoko and The Beatles started to break up. This was clearly a time when he struggled to reinvent himself as a solo artist – and once I started talking to Robert, it began to feel like the basis for a film."

 

Robert continues: "I hope the audience will take away the idea of a complex man who didn't always do the right thing but who confronted with dignity, humanity and integrity an existence the like of which would have been unimaginable before he set out and lived it."

 

"I think the greatest compliment to any film about an artist is that it sends the viewer back to the work," says Ed. "This is a film about a man I think was one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. He was also the man who wrote Mother – and I think if nothing else, it might help you understand more about the forces which led him to write that amazing song."

 

Are any of you going to watch this Bio TV Pic or not?

Will be watching this, looking forward to him. Eccleston doesn't seem an obvious choice for Lennon, but it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

I will watch it, not sure what it will be like. I think because Lennon died so young, there is a thirst to know more about him. I am sure if he was still alive it might be totally different as there would be no mystery or untold story.

I will watch it, not sure what it will be like. I think because Lennon died so young, there is a thirst to know more about him. I am sure if he was still alive it might be totally different as there would be no mystery or untold story.

 

I agree.

 

Knowing that in 1974 (during his "Lost weekend") he actually appeared as a guest judge on a US talent show; so if Ozzy Osbourne could do a TV reality show; John Lydon could sell butter; and Iggy Pop could sell insurance; then I can easily imagine him as a judge on America's Got Talent or American Idol had he been alive today.

Lennon Naked

 

Hats (and indeed every other garment) off to Christopher Eccleston's performance as the legendary Beatle

 

* Sam Wollaston

o The Guardian, Thursday 24 June 2010

 

 

I used to know someone who was obsessed with either/or questions, and thought people could be defined by a series of them. You know: Corrie or EastEnders, pasta or rice, Pele or Maradona, red or white (wine), friends or family, town or country? That kind of thing. Pretty much all of his conversations started like that, followed by a debate. Friendships and relationships were based on the amount of common ground shared (I think ours petered out after I went for mountains over the beach). In some key questions a disagreement meant an immediate dealbreaker – red or blue (politics), Israel or Palestine, Lennon or McCartney.

 

The correct answer to the last is obviously Lennon. Paul may have been more melodious, but John was the enigmatic, interesting one. Hence the continued obsession (though being gunned down in New York aged 40 instead of turning into an irritating old granny with too much money and too many chins certainly helps).

 

Lennon Naked (BBC4) takes on the baton from Sam Taylor-Wood's recent film Nowhere Boy, dealing with the period from the height of Beatlemania in 1964 to the band's split, the start of his solo career and his total immersion in Yoko Ono. But central to the drama is an earlier moment in John's life, a day on the beach as a child when he is forced to choose between his mother and father and ends up being abandoned by both. This tearing apart is key to the rest of his life, and comes up again and again – when his father, beautifully played by Christopher Fairbank, reappears in his life, and when John in turn abandons his own son Julian. Not just Julian, but everything – first wife Cynthia, Paul, the Beatles, the ridiculous mock Tudor Surrey mansion/prison, England, clothes, everything except Yoko.

 

This continual looking back over the shoulder to childood, to his mother and father, takes Lennon Naked beyond the merely biographical: it gives it a depth and a Freudian quality. We're talking naked, as in laid bare, as well as the well-documented, well-photographed, stark-bollock kind of naked, which – hats off to him – Christopher Eccleston does too, bits'n'all.

 

Before the praise for Eccleston as Lennon, of which there is heaps, a couple of little moans. First, there's his accent, which comes and goes; sometimes it's spot on, then he seems to forget about it. And he's way too old. Eccleston is 46, 15 years older than Lennon is supposed to be at the end off the film, and 22 years older than he is at the start. You can probably lose 22 years on stage, through makeup and swagger, but not in front of a camera. For these reasons, Eccleston didn't quite become John Lennon for me as, for example, Julie Walters recently became Mo Mowlam.

 

It's still a brilliant performance, in a brilliant film, because what Eccleston does get spot-on is the spirit of Lennon, with all his complications, contradictions and demons. It's certainly no whitewash. He's cruel to everyone – Brian Epstein, Cynthia, little Julian, the rest of the band, everyone except Yoko. He's bitter and troubled, yet also idealistic. Very funny too, full of acerbic putdowns. The press conferences, where he returns caustic one-liners with top spin at the assembled press, are fabulous.

 

The music's not bad either of course. The soundtrack to the latter part of the film comes from the first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. It's the perfect accompaniment, dealing as it does with all John's feelings of abandonment and isolation, all the stuff he was going through with his therapist at the time. I hadn't heard it for ages, and immediately went and listened to the whole ablum. Maybe you should too; it's stark and beautiful, with not too much experimental Yoko madness and spoon-banging in there.

 

Naoko Mori is believable as Yoko, though she doesn't have to do very much to be honest – just have a lot of hair, wail a bit, play kitchen utensils, and think of acorns. And get her kit off too of course – further hats off. There are other fine performances in this fine piece of television, such as Rory Kinnear as a troubled and thoughtful Brian Epstein before his premature demise. Maybe Andrew Scott didn't really convince me as McCartney, but then he's hardly in it. And anyway, who cares about Paul?

Last Night's TV: Lennon Naked, BBC4

 

Reviewed by Tom Sutcliffe

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk

Thursday, 24 June 2010

 

 

Lennon Naked began with a splash – a late-period John in what appeared to be mint condition plunging into the pool of his stockbroker belt mansion to the sound of "Come Together". The device might have felt a little overfamiliar (how many times has the off-the-peg transcendence of an underwater shot been employed in such things?), but it was all but impossible to resist the jolt of that music – a cameo appearance by the real thing in a drama that was largely going to be a triumph of similitude. Even more reassuringly, Robert Jones's script instantly showed that it had got the weight of Lennon's wordplay. A jump cut deprived us of the final resolving cadence of the song and plunged us again, back to Beatlemania, as John and Brian Epstein made a scrambled getaway down a fire escape and John demonstrated the rasp of his wit. "Kiss 'im," he says as fans beg for contact. "'E's never been kissed by womankind... or unkind." And the joke scrapes close to unkindness itself, a teasing poke with just enough thrust in it to hurt, but not enough to make the malice deniable should things turn nasty.

 

Jones's biopic has been scheduled as a contribution to the BBC's Fatherhood season and you could take it as male companion piece to Sam Taylor-Wood's recent film, Nowhere Boy, which traced the origins of Lennon's discontent and disruptive talent down the matrilineal line, through his relationship with his Aunt Mimi and his erratic mother, Julia. Both films feature Lennon's Merseyside version of Sophie's Choice – taken to Blackpool by his warring parents and forced to choose between them by the father. The five-year-old John first took his father's hand but then turned to his weeping mother, only to see his father walk out of frame for 20 years. Jones's drama began with the first awkward reunion with Freddie Lennon, as they met up in a London hotel room, where Freddie's inadequate clichés were given a brisk roughing up by Lennon: "You look after yourself, John," his father says as they part. "I do... that's right," replies Lennon bitterly.

 

The bitterness was the top note in Christopher Eccleston's performance – vocally pretty sharp to my ear, though I wasn't listening with a worshipper's vigilance. This was a Lennon exasperated to find himself one of "the nation's little pets" and venting his unresolved anger against anyone available. On the rare occasions when his father is on hand he's the recipient: "Who do you think this disreputable get is Julian?" is the question that introduces Lennon's son to his grandfather, when the latter arrives to stay in his Surrey country house. But Cynthia, Lennon's first wife, gets worse, verbally needled by John until he finally delivers the legal coup de grâce: "'I must have loved you once, but I don't anymore.' Will you communicate that to her?" Lennon tells his divorce lawyer, unremarkable as marital bile but for the fact that Cynthia is sitting three feet away from him when he says it. And his friend Pete – one of the few people prepared to tell him how badly he's behaving – is rewarded for his honesty with a cruel sneer ("You're a shopkeeper, Pete... keep your little thoughts to yourself"). It wasn't a flattering portrait, to put it mildly, though it came with the fierce mitigation of Lennon's insecurity, which can't be eased by the generalised adoration of stardom: "Everybody loves me?" he says at one point. "That's like saying nobody does." In the end, though, impressively performed and tightly written as it was, it wasn't clear that it took you any deeper into Lennon's pain than his own songs have been doing for years. Lennon Naked, perhaps, but still not much more than skin deep.

I watched it. Not the easiest of viewings, and Christopher Eccleston is too old to play John Lennon - he looks more like The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, and sounded more like Paul O'Grady than the late Beatle IMHO, (whilst the actress who played Yoko was too young and too pretty), but a great acting warts and all performance nonetheless.

 

Story wise it was really good, but I thought his relationship with his father was over played somewhat.