Ahead of this year’s WALES COMIC CON, we caught up with CLIVE MANTLE to discuss his beginnings as an actor, ROBIN OF SHERWOOD, ALIEN 3, and GAME OF THRONES, as well as his latest time travelling books THE TREASURE AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD and A JEWEL IN THE SANDS OF TIME…
STARBURST: How and when did you first get into acting?
Clive Mantle: Well I’ve always done school productions. The first sort of serious foray into acting, was when I was lucky enough to get into the National Youth Theatre when I was 17. A notice went up on the school noticeboard, and I applied because I knew that I enjoyed doing it. It was something to do during that summer holiday. I was lucky enough to get in, because thousands of people applied from all over the country. They took a hundred new people for the summer, I was one of them. From that moment on my life absolutely changed. It was literally like a light switch going on. I was suddenly amongst people who were all interested in the same sort of thing. I fit in for the first time in my life. I’d always been a bit of an “odd bod” at school. Not terribly weird, I just didn’t fit into any particular group/gang. I was just randomly walking around myself a lot of time. Acting rescued me.
What was your first major acting project, and what do you remember the most about this time?
Well around about that time, I was lucky enough to go to Kimbolton school, where part of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is set, Catherine of Aragon, was actually imprisoned for a large part of her ending years in Kimbolton Castle. One of the scenes in Henry VIII is set there. Every year the school would do a production of Henry VIII in the courtyard of the castle. I was there at the right time. I had a false beard stuck on, and just managed to learn my lines in time, by the skin of my teeth. I played Henry VIII in the Kimbolton courtyard. So I think that was the first time that I realised the weight of responsibility of playing a huge part in something. Having it be all eyes focused on you. It was up to you to deliver the goods. That was a huge milestone. Then various parts of the National Youth Theatre that followed. You were just building confidence, and you get to work with wonderful playwrights. I was privileged. I got to around the age of 21, and then your life clicks on another couple of gears, as you are honed, and ready to be thrust out into the profession. To be honest, you’re never more capable than when you leave drama school, as you’ve been rehearsing and playing three or four plays at a time. Your mind is never crowded with that many roles again because you tend to be tackling one thing at a time. At drama school, your mind is split into so many different ways, and you’ve got to be brilliant at them all to stay there.
Robin of Sherwood
How did you get involved with playing Little John, in Robin of Sherwood, and what do you remember the most about working on this series?
I was very lucky. Talking of the National Youth Theatre, an amazing woman called Esta Charkham who was the casting director, was in the country at the time. She was part of the National Youth Theatre, and she used to come back to watch our productions. She was casting Robin of Sherwood, and I was the only name in the frame. She only put me forward to the producers. Had they not been happy with me, they would have obviously looked elsewhere. So she brought them down, and I was playing Little John in a wonderful production of Robin Hood at the Young Vic Theatre. A lovely treatment of the Robin Hood legend by Dave and Toni Arthur. Esta brought Paul Knight and Richard Carpenter down to the Young Vic to see me play Little John, and then a couple of weeks later I was called to a meeting at Pinewood. For all intents and purposes, it was a casting session. I walked in and Paul Knight, who is about the same size as me, got up from behind the desk and gave me a great big hug, and more or less said welcome aboard. I’ve never ever had an audition like that before, I was just given the part. It was absolutely wonderful. Again, that changed life dramatically. To have a solid run in a TV show, and not only that but a brilliant and high profile TV show, was just obviously a fantastic leg up. Still to this day, it’s probably one of the things that I’m best known for. Being in touch with all of the Robin of Sherwood fan groups, as I think most of the cast is. We are reminded on a daily basis what the show meant to thousands of people. It still does, and they’re showing their children, and their children’s children now. I think it’s 35 years ago this year that it was transmitted, which means that we were making it 36 years ago! That’s a long, long time. People still love and remember it. They’re watching it to this day. I’m a little scared to watch it, just in case it’s dated. I watch it very sparingly; I watch clips, tiny little bits. I just want to remember the memories that I have from making the series. The effect it’s had on people is good enough for me.
It’s a role that you’ve considered to be “one of the most enjoyable in your whole career?” Why do you think that is, and just what did you love so much about playing this character?
Without a doubt. It’s fantastic to be part of a group like that. Each of us very distinct and different. Each of us served a different purpose within the group. Richard Carpenter, who wrote the bulk of the series and whose vision it was, he was clever enough to come down to Bristol and go out for drinks with us. He’d just watch how we joke with each other, and how we responded with each other. He’d use that in his writing, and played up to it. He knew that they were our strengths. The important thing for me was to try and create a fully rounded character. He was headstrong, wonderfully powerful, a brilliant fighter, a close and loyal, right-hand man of Robin Hood. It was also important he was fallible, that he was wrong, and could make wrong decisions. He could make headstrong decisions that lead them into trouble. I didn’t mind the fact that Little John made mistakes, and that he was terribly sorry about it all afterwards. Or would rectify his mistakes. I wanted to present as many facets of the character as I could, and I was allowed to do so.
Game of Thrones
You got to play Lord Greatjon Umber in Game of Thrones – can you tell us a little bit about what this was like, and how it compared overall to anything else that you’ve done before as an actor?
Yeah, so you enter into all of these things with great goodwill. With the hope and belief that they’re going to be wonderful feasts for the audience. I have to say that that rarely happens. You are lucky enough in your career to be a part of one series that fulfils all of those criteria, and Robin of Sherwood had certainly done that. With Game of Thrones, I was in the first series, and at that point no one really knew what kind of effect it was going to have. They had certainly thrown a pile of money at the production. It was amazing to be a part of that. There were over 300 speaking parts in the first ten episodes, and it was a huge undertaking. It was like throwing mud at a wall and seeing if it would stick. You just never know if these great endeavours are going to take off. Obviously Game of Thrones did, maybe more than any other show has in the history of TV. With a lot of hard work and expertise from hundreds and thousands of people, they did something right. They created something absolutely wonderful and lasting. It can be watched again and again for decades. It’s not just a one-hit-wonder. People will be able to go back to it in 20-30 years, in the same way that people are going back to Robin of Sherwood now. It was an amazing thing to be a part of. It wasn’t necessarily the most comfortable filming experience that I’d ever had. It ended up being -22 temperature-wise. I was on the edge of Strangford Lough, out there in Northern Ireland. The most beautiful location. It was cold, I can tell you that. I had just got back from Everest, and the coldest I had got there was -15. Which is plenty cold enough. So for it to be colder in Belfast than it was high up in the Himalayas was a source of great joy! I can remember having a chat with some of the Night’s Watch. It was their first major TV experience, and I was saying to them how they should just grab it with both hands. Enjoy the ride, like we enjoyed Robin of Sherwood all those years ago. Enjoy the work, the scripts, and make the most of it all. As it’s gone on, I think the performances throughout the series are universally pretty brilliant!
STARBURST, of course, loves to cover sci-fi, so you weren’t going to get away without us asking you questions about Alien 3! So, first off, how did you get involved in this classic franchise?
Again, there’s so much luck involved in getting work. When I was at my drama school, I was part of a wonderful production called East by Steven Berkoff. I played a middle-aged man. I had my head shaved for the part. A mate of mine said, “While you’ve got your head shaved, let me take a couple of photos, you never know when they’ll come in useful.” So he took a couple of me walking through the street with my head shaved, then a couple of me looking through a chain-link fence, looking like a prisoner. When I left drama school I went to my agent and said look “Just in case these ever come in useful, here are some bald photos” she said “Oh yes, thank you very much!” and put them at the bottom of a filing cabinet somewhere. Cut to years later, David Fincher is looking for a whole cast of bald actors to play the most desperate villains in the universe. My agent dusted off the photos, took them out, and sent them off to Fincher. When I went into the casting at Pinewood, there was my picture up on the noticeboard. He turned around smiled, pointed at it and said: “I told the casting department, get me 20 more like that!” That photo literally got me the part in Alien 3. Well, had I messed up the interview, it would have been curtains of course. It just shows the amount of luck, the tenuous strings on which our careers hang, and the decisions that people make. It’s so far out of our hands at times, but it doesn’t really bear thinking about. Rejection, there’s no rhyme or reason why you don’t get the part. You can’t torture yourself for weeks or months after you get turned down for the part that you are absolutely right for. You just can’t trace back the root in regards to why one person gets the part and one person doesn’t. Anyway, that was Alien 3 which was a glorious experience, just a whole load of British actors sitting around getting our heads shaved at 7 in the morning. A whole lot of sitting around playing scrabble I seem to remember. Having a very good laugh with the wonderful Sigourney Weaver. She threw herself into it, and it was very fun. We had a lovely time.
Alien 3
So leading on nicely from that, can you tell us a bit about what director David Fincher – who was just 28 years old at the time – was like to work with?
It was incredible. You’re right, I think that it was his first major film. He had the whole of 20th Century Fox on his shoulders, watching every penny that he spent. He had banks of monitors in front of him, computer units, main units, etc. It was like a technological exercise more so than anything else. He was very funny, calm, cool. He got excited about acting performances. He could have a laugh, a smile. I had a line where it says “I don’t give a fuck what she says!” and I was staring at Sigourney in front of me with her shaved head. For some reason, on the last camera rehearsal I said “I don’t give a fuck what Shirley Temple says!” and the whole set just stopped. Sigourney Weaver looked at me with a slight sort of look in her eyes, and I thought “Oh dear, have I overstepped the mark?” People started scuttling around for a minute or two in a brief hiatus. Fincher just came up and gave me a great big thumbs up. He was obviously checking to see if it was OK for me to say Shirley Temple, and he came back and said “Yes!” so it was in. Fincher was excited by that, he loved extra stuff. Also, because we all looked the same, Peter Guinness and I, for example, kept calling each other by our names, otherwise no one would have known who we were when the credits went up. Fincher looked at us one day, and he said “Guys, I know what you’re doing! Stop calling each other by your names!” We were like “Okay!” [Laughs] He could spot the tricks. Even Sigourney Weaver’s picture to me, looking at it now on the wall of my study, it says To Clive, a rapist, a convict, a swell guy all in all. Much love, Shirley Temple. I had a great time.
For those who haven’t checked them out just yet, what can you tell us about your books The Treasure at the Top of the World and A Jewel in the Sands of Time?
They are time travelling stories. My time-traveling hero gets a map for his 13th birthday through which he can disappear, or he is actually called through to various places in the world, at various points in history. He lives an adventure while he’s among real, historical events. He comes back to report to his friends; it’s obviously partly set in present-day where he’s facing trials and tribulations, bullies, the nightmare scenarios that kids are faced with day to day in our present time. But also juxtaposed with historical events. I’m halfway through writing book three now, which is Freddie and Me, The Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London. I can put him anywhere in history, and report back. It’s a fantastic thing to do, and each book takes me about a year to write because I have to research them thoroughly, as I have to weave an adventure around real settings. Also, they’re going down very well. They are on recommended reading lists, and the first one won the Peoples Book Prize. That’s great, and it supplements my acting work. You’re never 100% busy as an actor, so it’s great when I’m not working, I just disappear up to my study and work on the book.
It seems like the story has been a lifelong passion of yours? With your father telling you many tales of Everest, so that must of been very rewarding for you to work on?
Yeah! In fact, the idea came as I was walking away from Everest. Your head is cleared, by the simplicity of walking in the Himalayas, your life becomes about keeping warm, fed, and keeping watered. Looking after the people around you. They’re the things that life actually revolves around. You get rid of all the rubbish in your head like, when car insurance is due, have I sent an email to so and so, etc. All of that gets put in the junk file, and it gives you wonderful freedom in your head to realise who you are, where you are in your life, and what you’re going to do when you get back. So yeah, the idea for Freddie going through a map to anywhere in history came to me as I was walking away from Everest. It was 4-5 years later when I actually had time to sit down to start writing it. I was in South Africa, working on a long job, and I had many days off between filming days, and it just took too long to go home and come back again. So I was out there, and I sat and started writing the book. It was a long time after Everest that I did that, but it meant so much to me. When I was born in 1957, it was only four years after Everest had first been climbed, by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. The more you read about Everest, the more you found out about Mallory and Irvine in 1924, being spotted less than a thousand feet from the top, dressed in tweeds, and stout walking boots. It’s incredible really, to think of them up there. Your mind goes to all the possibilities, I had read a lot of books about Everest, and I had to go to Everest myself, go and touch it, and hug it. Pay my respects to the brave men and women who had been there and not come back. Also, the brave people who have got to the top. Now, I’m passionately involved in it not becoming a circus. It’s a holy mountain really. It should be treated with great respect. Every year now people are buying their way to the top, and that’s not what I approve of. I approve of the expeditionary force, the amazing spirit of man and woman pitching themselves against the elements, against themselves to achieve something. Standing at the top of the world seems to be quite an amazing thing to do. However, buying your way into doing that seems to be a slightly distorted way of doing things.
You recently took on voice acting work for the game Anthem! Can you tell us about what this sci-fi adventure was like to work on, and maybe how working on video games differs for you as an actor?
It’s very different. You do have to throw yourself into the hour-two hour session. They give you a few quick notes about the character that they want you to do. Obviously, there are non-disclosure agreements that you have to sign. So no one tells you a lot about the part, characters, or even what the game is. You just have to throw yourself into it, and rely on their feedback. Luckily because I’ve done a lot of voice work in my time, for adverts, audio-books, dramas, etc, you get a very quick shorthand about what people want. You can’t sit down for half an hour and discuss the character, you have to give an immediate reading, and then if it’s not quite what they want, you just slightly adjust it. I’ve not seen or played the game yet, and I haven’t heard the result of my work, but I hope it’s OK and that people are enjoying it! It’s not something that you get involved with, because I don’t think that you’re allowed to. They’re so scared that the premise of the game will get out into the world before they’re ready to launch it. I’ve just dubbed a series for Netflix, but I don’t know the title! So, people say to me “What are you working on?” and I say “I’ve just done a series for Netflix that I’ve just dubbed, but I’m not allowed to know the title!” This is the world in which we live.
How excited are you for your upcoming appearance at Wales Comic Con, and what can attending fans expect?
I’m very excited! It’s a big one. It’ll be delightful to see people and have a chat. I always enjoy that. You can always tell the mega fans of Robin of Sherwood, Game of Thrones, Vicar of Dibley, because they’ve got a look in their eye, and talk about the project in a completely different way. The devoted fans are just glorious, and I’ll give them as much time as possible. If there’s a large queue then that limits that time. I always say to people, “Look, come back later when the rush is gone, and we’ll have a proper chat.” What’s lovely is that I’ll have my books with me, and be able to talk to people about those, it’s very handy for Christmas, getting a signed copy of the book for their loved ones. It couldn’t be better timed. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of the Game of Thrones people. Quite a lot of the gang are there, like David Bradley. It’ll be lovely to catch up with some old mates. We are a very tight-knit bunch, all of the people that are lucky enough to get invited to conventions. In the evening we’ll have a beer and reminisce and then in the day we’ll chat to anyone who presents themselves for a picture, autograph, whatever. It’s going to be a very happy couple of days, and I’m looking forward to it.
What else can we expect to see from you in 2020 as an actor?
I’m going back to the English National Opera, later on in 2020. A wonderful production of Iolanthe that I was involved with a couple of years ago is coming back into the repertoire. That’s very exciting. If you spoke to me last week, I would have said that I was taking part in a theatre tour from February – June, but I think that’s folded, as is the way at the moment. In the old days, if you were contacted about a theatre tour, and you said “Yes”, that was it! However, now theatre tours can fold very quickly and last minute. So I’ve been left with a gap in my diary for the first part of the year, but, to be honest, I’ll be finishing this third book, over Christmas, and early into the new year. I’ll send that off to my publishers, where they’ll sit on it for a week, or six weeks while they all make notes, and then it’ll come back to me so I can do the amendments. Then hopefully it gets published in June. So I won’t be sitting on my hands waiting for things to happen, I’ve got plenty of things to keep me busy!
For more information on CLIVE MANTLE and his work, visit his official website www.clivemantle.com. To meet him in person, head to the next WALES COMIC CON on December 7th – 8th.
