David Suchet on the darker side of Hercule Poirot, and finding faith | One Plus One

[Music] hi I'm Jane Hutchins and in July 2010 I created one plus one and up until September 2019 recorded nearly 500 interviews in this series I'm bringing together my top ten they're the conversations which have taken me by surprise or somehow had an impact on me I hope you enjoyed this interview with actor David Suchet [Music] David Suchet welcome to 1+1 thank you your grandfather was quite a famous photographer and he encouraged you and your brothers to take photographs do you recall the first photo you ever took yes I do IQ but it wasn't under his tutelage the first photograph I ever took was with a brownie box camera when I was seven and a half years of age when I was first sent to boarding school my grandfather gave it to me as a birthday present and said see how you get on with this and I took a picture of my brother because he was at the same school did it come out yes it did come out not very well but it came out was that an instant fascination for you yes because mainly I love the man my late grandfather was the closest to me of any male in my family including my father he was the most extraordinary human being and really influential on my whole life and the fact that he was a photographer and we got on so well I wanted to know everything about him and he taught me photography uh with me almost sitting on his knee why didn't he take photographs he took photographs because his father was a photographer actually his father was a photographer he worked for the police force in the very late 1880s or 1890s he was Victorian photographer and he took photographs of dead bodies and my my grandfather used to go with him and he learnt photography there was a sort of natural thing for him to do he said earlier that your grandfather was the closest male figure to you even closer than your father why was that was your father a remote man my father was a typical Edwardian he was also a very very busy and successful gynecologist and obstetrician and in the day in London in the 50s and as when he was really settling into his career I'm sure everybody will know that to be a gynecologist and obstetrician you don't lead a nine to five and he was out most of the time and then we were sent to boarding school at the age of seven so and I would didn't come back till I was 18 except for school holidays and I would see more of my grandfather during that time than I would my own father your father had quite an influential role in the development of penicillin with Sir Alexander Fleming how did he see his own part in that well he was a lab technician at the time if he was a very young man with used to know him in the family's phlegm and he was there he was the unnamed doctor with Fleming's team that the photographs a famous photograph that was actually taken by my grandfather he was the young doctor in the back there that was never really named and he was with phlegm at that time your father Jack he didn't approve of you becoming an actor didn't you know why not not many fathers do even today I meet young boys and girls who come to me and say I want to be an actor but my dad doesn't want me to it's because mainly I think it's an insecure profession and my father came from an insecure background and didn't want that for me I think it's as simple as that really and what about your mum did she like the fact that you were going into the theatre yeah she was thrilled to bits because her mum was a musical artist in the early days what not the early days about 1912 me Edwardian musical woman she used to do what we call the Empire circuit which was all the big empires theaters around England and she was a sand dancer and a song and dance Co and my mum when before she married and that after she did amateur dramatics but she was a dancer with evening lay in the West End and a singer so I come from very much on that side of the family my English side are very much from the entertainment industry I read that when you were 16 you went around making documentaries about poor people in London yeah did that last a long time that that phase yeah if I'd have managed to get a job as an independent film camera operator and to my my dream was to do documentaries and my first cine camera was an 8 millimeter and I went round the the poor parts of London I was always very concerned about the poor in London and how they lived and I did a little documentary I don't know where it is now I haven't got a clue but I loved doing that and what was it about the poor that attracted your concern I don't know except that I always felt very sorry and my heart went out to them and I would sit with them I used to film I was a very young I was only about 17 18 but I'd always sit with them and talk to the kids and talk to the parents and they want to know what I was doing and I've showed them what I was doing I Anna it was just I felt very easy with them and I felt that they were at that time in London certainly was we were still in very much class system they were sort of pushed to the side the sidelines and it was after the war so they were really having a hard time now those areas I have to tell you are really classic and you will know there was Notting Hill Gate and Paddington and all around there though it's very in Kensington and now it's very very posh did you ever feel sidelined by the class system no although I've always felt in my life because I think of my background and I think of my own bloodline being Russian Jewish on one side and being completely British on the other side but I've always felt with all the roles that I've played as well something of an outsider in my own industry and yet I'm considered part of the establishment in my own country and I'm very proud to be a you know to be a CBE and part of a part of my own culture and part of my own country I feel very proud to be British but there's something inside me that feels strangely separate and I do as I say I've played so most of my career Outsiders including wattle will go on to pothole in in a short while but first of all I was interested to find out from you when did you begin to feel like an outsider was that an early feeling or is that something new I think I probably started at school because I felt in outside of them because I was very very small I was a Prem baby and I was small and I and I the only way I could get in and be it's what I call an insight it was to really work hard at my sport which is what I did you were with the Royal Shakespeare Company for about was it 13 years at what stage did you begin to describe yourself as a character actor that's a very good question when I left drama school in 1969 strangely having won the Best Drama prize playing a character not not being myself I thought at one point I may have a career as a leading man that was soon quenched when I discovered that I was suddenly playing 50 year olds when I was 23 in Repertory Theater in England and my makeup bag was probably larger than the role that I had to play and I have very rarely ever since I think because of my voice and my my physique ever played a leading man I've always been character and I've always enjoyed being and developing roles that are different from myself and in so doing serving my writer that's what I like to do I like to serve my writer so when you first decided that you were going to go into the theatre what was the production that made the penny drop well it wasn't a production I was in the National Youth Theatre playing in Bartholomew fair at the Royal Court and I was 18 years of age and we'd had a lovely time and I hadn't decided what I wanted to do with my life at that point at all and when I picked up my makeup bag and as I said it was probably larger than the role I was playing I went I thought I'd like to go down to the side of the stage because it was the end of the run and watch all the scenery being pulled down and I I'd never never never watched that and I went and I stood at the side of the Royal Court stage I remember exactly where I was standing in fact I've been back there recently before it's been refurbished and stood on the very same spot and I watched all the scenery coming down and I looked at the empty seats in the auditorium and I looked at the stage and I remembered that we were all up there performing playing for an audience that were seating everyone was sitting over there I thought this is the most extraordinary atmosphere this is this is where I want to spend my life had nothing to do with the role that nothing to do with a performance have nothing to do with the play it was to do with theatre it's interesting because you talk about the sets and the flats being taken down do you have a similar feeling of I suppose being dressed down from a character when you finish a performance you mean after each night yeah it takes me a long time to come down from a character every night I tend to be an actor that gets very deeply involved in the character and the performance I'm given so at the end of every night I do a very small quick deprogramming for myself that was actually given to me by a psychologist in London when he said you can't carry on acting the way you do unless you get rid of your character and he showed me how to do that and why was he concerned for your presumably your mental health yeah because I was playing in Timon of Athens at that time and playing time was of great psychological struggle with that role the character goes mad yeah he does it almost goes crazy and he was concerned for me because he said you he came backstage and he said how are you feeling I said fine fine he said you think you're out of character and I said yes and he asked me a certain kind of questions being a psychologist and I couldn't answer them when he said you still there so he showed me her when you first were asked to play the role of a keel Poirot you were I think you were 43 at the time had you had a sense of life so far as you know hadn't quite made it or were you very happy doing Shakespeare and doing what you did well I was unfortunately I was already what we could call a successful actor if I hadn't have had that profile they wouldn't have come to me in the first place with with quarry so it wasn't an overnight success I started acting in 1968 and they came to me with the offer in 1987 so that's 2021 nearly 20 years later so I'd already quite established but how did you see in a sense I suppose Poirot took you to to new heights alike did you actually foresee that the role was going to take you there in no way at all I knew nothing about the future for Poirot I was offered one year for one summer of film shooting of 10 short stories and and my agent on my behalf agreed to an option for 10 more if it was successful and it was the hardest six months of my career I'd never worked so many hours and got up so early for so many days in six months but we did finish on time and I was interviewed by several newspapers of the Prix publicity and I used I remember being wrapped over the knuckles by ITV ITN at the time now ITV at the time because when asked what I thought it would be like I said I don't know I'm frightened it might be real rather boring because he solves the cases in every single one so I just hope it will be acceptable I knew nothing about its future success at all an option was taken out and there every time from then on it was just contract by contract by contract I was never never commissioned on a long contract ever looking back on it now I consider myself very fortunate because if I was asked to sign a twenty five-year contract playing one character I would have turned it down because the one thing I am is the character actor so I had great gaps there was one time when I had a gap of four years there was another gap of two years there was another gap when I thought would finish the series and I was able therefore to take on other theater commitments are the film commitments and other television commitments and as important to me at the time radio drama as well so I suppose it may not have survived 25 years if you hadn't had those options it wouldn't because I would have considered myself then totally typecast and I would have removed myself from it but the fact that I was continuing to do and play every 18 months or two years in the West End while I was filming Poirot at the same time as doing big Hollywood movies and different series on television as well I just considered myself the most fortunate person as I do now how did your design of the character of the Belgian detective change from the first few years to the last few years well there's a something that happens naturally that no one can help which is ageing and if you play a character over 25 years the first thing you'll notice if you go back to the 1988 shoot young young even though he was supposed to be retired but I'm a very young man there and I only finished eighteen two years ago so I'm quite an old man when I finished that's the main well what we did develop or the writers developed because they saw me moving that way because the more I read like Anna Christie the more I was able to understand what she was writing is his is is the darker side of his character and the lone of the more lonely side of his character and also his as we moved into the big books where he would or she would imply in her stories that he had died with his Catholic faith for example like in Murder on the Orient Express how does he let so many people go when he knows them all guilty of murder there is a moral dilemma that he faces so all these little little things I give the Christie world right that he looks at Hastings when Hastings is going off with a very beautiful young girl and Poirot would look longingly and would contemplate the fact that he had never married say there are clues in Agatha Christie which I sort of developed in a way so that he did develop there and change borrow probably like a lot of other characters you've played wasn't completely likable did you have to like the characters to perform them you'll hear a lot of actors say that they have to like a character ident for me it's not a question of liking a character it's understanding a character and understanding it not from my point of view but understanding it from their point of view Who am I is the great question of our lives Who am I and I asked that from the character's point of view looking at their life who are they like when I played Nagi Hassan in executive decision when I played an Islamic terrorist not a likable man but I gave him the commitment necessary from his point of view because he believed what he was doing was absolutely right so it's having that sort of understanding and empathy for a character rather than a liking in my case can you have empathy for a character who is bad or evil yes you can because from their point of view they're not and if they don't believe they're evil then that I have to look at it subjectively rather than from your statement which would be objective you're currently touring Australia in the play the last confession tell me about the part you play I played Giovanni Benelli who was a dear friend of John Paul the first as we know him as the Pope who came into the papal seat in 1978 and he he died 33 days having been elected or crowned if you like in in the coronation ceremony as Pope he was a darling man he was known as the people's Pope he was more like a parish priest he was warm and gentle and very liberal and there was a huge conservative right-wing element in the Vatican and when John Paul was found dead after only 33 days well I had a friend in Rome at the time and every single person in Rome thought he'd been poisoned and the conspiracy theories went absolutely haywire my character Giovanni Benelli went through in real life a crises of faith as well how can God let a pope and his his best friend and a pope the you know the direct sesor to some peter died after only 33 days knowing that he was going to do so much good so my character actually went through that crisis and he died only four years later with a massive heart attack at the age of 60 and this play is as much about this journey of faith as it is about an inquiry into this very mysterious death of an extraordinary Pope John Paul the first because of course you've had your own journey into faith yes were you a doubter for your life before you you found God I was always let me say I had always asked questions I was always searching for something I never thought that what we have is just it I thought if this is it it's not very good that there must be more I sort of grow up I grew up believing that although I came from a Jewish background we were never brought up Jewish and although my mother was Christian I was never brought up Christian I went to a Church of England school but I never had a solid faith so I was searching and searching and searching and then at the age of 40 in 1986 and it's far too long a story now but I did in fact read some Paul's letter to the Romans and that gave me by the end of it the worldview that I was looking for and then I had to question where this worldview came for some Paul and then I found of course it's Christian and that was my movement into Christianity I like to go into the story a little bit because you you found that section of the Bible and there wasn't a Bible in your room at the time while you were making one of my favorite films which was Harry and the Hendersons and you played the Jacques Lafleur you were the Bigfoot hunter I was the Bigfoot once you were a baddie I often play baddies in movies and I loved that film and I can't watch it without crying oh so I rather and I was fascinated to find out that that's when you had your in the hotel room yeah and I was thinking of my grandfather who had always thought of as a spiritual guide and then I thought you know I'm an adult I'm 40 years of age why do I still think he's with me if I don't believe in life after death so there was a dichotomy for me to deal with and I decided to get out and go to a book that I knew would had to do with life after death which was the Bible and I opened the drawer next to my bed to find it to start reading and it wasn't there so then the next morning I had to try and find a Bible shop because I was still very keen on finding I don't know why I can't explain these things so I rather furtively rang a religious bookshop I can remember as always as though I was asking for pornography I have whispered down the phone I said yeah that's what we do so that's when I got got it and when I brought that Bible back to my room I thought well I won't read it now my room had just been made for the day and I put it in my drawer and there was there was the Bible that should have been there the night before so I had two translations and so I started comparing the two translations which I love doing with text being a classical actor and that took me into Romans because I knew some Paul lived I wasn't sure about Jesus at the time but I knew simple lived I knew he wrote to the Romans and I wanted to read that and that by the end of it I'd found my worldview what was it in in that whole chapter well let me say first of all that so many people of the Christian faith going right back to the early centuries have been converted by Romans it's an extraordinary including st. Augustine I don't know what it is about that book but that's where I was taken anyway and it's to do with how you relate to people is to do that's the world view and the world view that I read was very simple it has to do with one word which is love and generosity and kindness it had nothing to do with the rules and regulations and anything either I would have run a mile from all that but it had to do with love and have to do with people and it had to do with how to relate in that way and that's what converted me when you leave Australia I think your next big part is going to be as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest where did the idea of having a man playing that role come from goes back apparently quite a long way goes right back into the early part of the 20th century I haven't done my research yet so I don't know who the first person was who actually the first male who actually played the role but there has been a movement for the odd time is not regular for a man to play that role well I've been doing a little bit of research to you and oh thank you book about Oscar Wilde and Oscar Wilde say good people are artistically uninteresting bad people are fascinating studies and stir one's imagination I wonder if you can have a look and see who wrote it and whether you recognize the name Vivian Holland do you know who that that was no tell me Vivian Holland was the youngest son of Oscar Wilde and he only reveals himself as the author in the last lime is that right and when I saw this book I thought books find you for a reason yeah and the book has found you well that is such a wonderful gift thank you so much right now and read it thank you this would be part of the beginning of my preparation for Lady Bracknell I hope it's helpful thank you and I have two more questions to us you have spoken a couple of times about your obituary and you've said and you've said it would have a big picture of Hercule Poirot that's what I visit yes and a small picture of you yes do you think often about the body of work that you will leave behind I don't accept that I am told by others you know I forget my career I suppose looking back on my career my CV seems to be getting longer and longer and longer but all I think of when I look back on my career is the variety of roles that I've played but I've never looked on it as a huge wonderful body of work which I'm told that's how I find out that I'm told it is I dare I never aware of it I just do one job at a time really will you find that a burden that the picture of one of your characters is larger than your picture no because it sums up my whole career as a character actor I've never wanted to be me ever I'm not interested in me in any way at all even in life or as a performer I don't really count it's what I do and how I serve my writer in the character there playing and if he's up there then I'd be very proud not only for him especially for agatha christie but also for my own philosophy that he will be there and hey aren't they lucky to be remembered at all David Suchet it's been a great pleasure thank you for speaking with 1+1 it's been such a pleasure thank you thank you for this and that's one of my top ten thanks for watching you can watch again on I view see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 283,946

Rating: 4.9269743 out of 5

Keywords: news, abc, abc news, australia, actor, david suchet, hercule poirot, interview, one plus one, jane hutcheon

Id: 63sn3Gr09E0

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020