I've got a part in a short film next month in which I play a mashed potato eating man in an unhappy relationship with an alcoholic. We had a read through of the script this evening in a spooky flat in Baker St in a building that might have been used as a location for "The Shining" were it not in such a heavily populated area.
I was offered the part about a month ago, without having to do an audition, which is great, but was a slight cause for concern. Because the script makes it clear that the character I play is pretty fat and the director had not seen me recently and obviously I've been exercising a lot, so I had worries that I'd walk into the room and their faces would fall and they'd say, "But you're nowhere near fat enough to play this part. I thought you were much fatter than this. You're hardly fat at all. Get out of here. You have wasted our time."
However this didn't happen. Instead everyone just said hello and looked at me with a sense of satisfaction as if thinking, "Phew, he is exactly as fat as we were hoping. ie quite fat." My Demi Moore style belly just won't disappear no matter how much swimming I do or how healthily I eat, so I guess I shouldn't be too worried. But I don't really have any perspective on how I appear in these terms.
I don't do much acting and the rest of the cast are all successful actors from recent sit-coms and sketch shows and I had been a little bit nervous about them all scoffing at me during the read through for not being professional and brilliant like them, but I seemed to get away with it. The script mainly calls for me to eat a lot of potato, which I think I can manage and to be embarrassed and angry with my dipsomaniac girlfriend (again something that life has given me a fair share of experience in), so it'll probably be OK. We had quite a laugh eating dinner and getting a bit drunk, which is essentially what happens in the film and I think the actually filming next month should be quite good fun.
We went to the pub and I revealed to the director and assistant director that I had been worried that I might have lost too much weight, but the assistant director laughed and said, "No, you don't have to worry about that. You're fine." So that told me.
I guess that I am ever destined to be the fat mate character and can quite reasonably say to myself, "I shall never play the Dane." Though I think my ambition failed to exist some time ago on this score. And I should probably say "Thank fuck for that. Hamlet is a miserable git anyway." Always the grave-digger, never the grave.
