‘I’m a well-behaved actor and a well-choosing actor because if I choose to do something, then you better believe that I’m committed to it. If I didn’t like something and thought it needed change, I either wouldn’t do it or would want a script doctor’s fee.’
Freeman speaking to NYC Movie Guru, 2007
Working on TV shows and on independent films is often the best way to gain experience. Freeman was inspired by the directors and producers of the late 1960s and 1970s in an era of ‘New Hollywood’ after the demise of the studio system, when studios had actors and directors under contract and could dictate which films they could and could not make. The studio system was almost Orwellian in its dictatorship.
With the studio system broken and the groundbreaking ‘French New Wave’ still in mind, which brought unconventional forms of storytelling to cinema by such film-making intellectuals and scholars as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, a generation of American film students – baby boomers born in the 1940s and raised in the prosperous 1950s – out of either the suburbs of California and small-town America or, conversely, from the tough streets of New York, broke new ground with often violent and unconventional films, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and, in the 1970s, the first two Godfather films and Taxi Driver. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese worked on low-budget exploitation B-movies for Roger Corman, which gave them the experience and knowledge they needed to make their own films. They were not only film students who studied the history and theory of cinema but they were also film fanatics who were as familiar with European cinema as with what dominated the US market.
However, while such controversial auteurs as Scorsese and De Palma refused to be censored and conform to box-office needs, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg arrived in Hollywood motivated by a different school of thought, with influences that ranged from comic books to sci-fi movies and the suburban American culture of their youth, as shown in Lucas’s classic American Graffiti. Before Lucas hit gold with Star Wars in 1977, his first movie was an interesting low-budget, dystopian science-fiction tale called THX-1138 but it didn’t attract the kind of audience that Star Wars did. These blockbuster Hollywood films, however, were not to Freeman’s taste. He aligns himself more with such masterful film-makers as Coppola and Scorsese and two of their most prominent actors, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver and Scarface: these are Freeman’s inspirations as far as American cinema goes. They are jaw-droppingly outstanding films with the highest quality of directing, acting and writing. They inspired Freeman to act and they continue to inspire him to this day, as he told Jamie Watt of Ask Men in 2012: ‘I wanted to be an actor because I saw Dog Day Afternoon, you know what I mean?’
Al Pacino is one of Freeman’s acting heroes. A method actor taught by the famed thespian teacher Lee Strasberg, Pacino is a bona fide American icon. Known for playing Italian-American gangsters and mobsters, such as Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Tony Montana in Scarface, he has also appeared in a number of roles as tough-talking streetwise New York Cops, police officers and lawyers. Some of his iconic roles include Dog Day Afternoon (one of Freeman’s favourite movies), Carlito’s Way, Glengarry Glen Ross, Serpico, …And Justice for All and The Panic in Needle Park. Although Pacino isn’t known for his theatrical work, he is an avid fan of Shakespeare and made his directorial debut with the excellent documentary Looking for Richard, about Richard III, which Freeman has no doubt seen. Pacino finally won a much-deserved Oscar for his performance as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman in 1992.
Robert DeNiro, Freeman’s other American acting icon, was turned down for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather but was cast as the young Vito Carleone in the stunning sequel, The Godfather Part II. Freeman is a huge admirer of these films. DeNiro made a name for himself after his collaborations with New York director Martin Scorsese in such films as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and, later, Goodfellas and Casino. Some of his other best-known performances include roles in The Deer Hunter, Awakenings, Midnight Run and A Bronx Tale, the latter of which he also directed. DeNiro has also ventured into comedy of late, with films like Analyze This and Meet The Parents. DeNiro and Pacino teamed up for the highly revered police procedural flick Heat and later reunited in Righteous Kill, an average cop movie at best which received mixed reviews, as most critics cited disappointment that the two screen legends would appear in a fairly average cop flick after the incredible reception Heat received.
Freeman has spent much of his adult life studying his favourite actors and films and learning from them as he refines his thespian skills, frequently quoting the likes of Al Pacino in interviews to the press. ‘How I became famous was from The Office, so that’s sort of what people associate me with,’ he said to journalists at a press junket for Warner’s in 2013. ‘I am not putting myself in the same category as Al Pacino, but Al Pacino’s first scene was Michael Corleone and that casts a long shadow, if that makes sense?’
By 1997 Freeman was confident enough to begin taking on roles and attending auditions. He wasn’t successful at every audition but that’s nothing out of the ordinary in such a competitive industry, even for well-known actors.
He made his first appearance on TV at the age of twenty-six in an episode of the long-running British-TV police series The Bill, which aired on 9 January 1997 and was the third episode of series thirteen. As one of the most remembered British TV shows of all time, The Bill ran from 1984 to 2010 and chronicled the work of London Met Officers at the fictional Sun Hill police station. Though Freeman had only a minor appearance as the character Craig Parnell in an episode titled ‘Mantrap’, it was his first professional role in front of the camera and a good stepping stone to more work.
Freeman then had a cameo role as the character Stuart in an episode of the acclaimed BBC drama This Life, which aired on 17 March 1997. In the episode, entitled ‘Last Tango in Southwark’, Freeman is seen stealing money from the bedroom of Milly and Egg (these are two of the main characters) after a house party. Martin then unknowingly drinks Egg’s urine from a can, thinking it is beer. As with The Bill, This Life was one of the most popular TV series of the 1990s. Though it only ran for two series, it was highly revered and considered part of the ‘Britpop’ and ‘Cool Britannia’ era of the 1990s.
The roles were slowly coming in for Freeman as he was making contacts and attending auditions, like any other jobbing actor hoping to find that one big break to launch his career.
He was next cast in the music video for the Faith No More song ‘I Started A Joke’, a cover of the Bee Gees’ 1968 song. Faith No More’s version, though recorded in 1995, was released in 1998, after the group disbanded. It features on their greatest-hits album Who Cares A Lot?. Directed by Vito Rocco, the video also features Shaun Dingwall, performance artist David Hoyle as the karaoke singer, and Michelle Butterly of the ITV series Benidorm. It was filmed on 8 September 1998.
Following his appearances in The Bill and This Life, Freeman was cast as Ricky Beck in a 1998 episode of British TV hospital drama Casualty called ‘She Loved The Rain’, which was broadcast on 17 October. Casualty is one of Britain’s longest running TV dramas and was first broadcast on 6 September 1986. The series focuses on Holby City Hospital in Wyvern, a fictional county in south-west England.
Titanic star Kate Winslet spoke about her 1993 appearance in Casualty to the Radio Times: ‘In England, it almost seems to be part of a jobbing actor’s training [to appear in Casualty]. As far as I was concerned it was a great episode, a great part. Appearing in Casualty taught me a big lesson in how to be natural in front of the camera.’
Interestingly, a survey was carried out by the Radio Times in March 2004, which concluded that Casualty has cast more future stars than any other British television series. The list is rather impressive, as it reads like a ‘who’s who’ of contemporary British actors of stage and screen. Besides Kate Winslet, other notable actors to have appeared on the series include Orlando Bloom, Minnie Driver, Christopher Eccleston, Tom Hiddleston, Parminder Nagra, Sadie Frost, Ray Winstone, David Walliams, Jonny Lee Miller, Helen Baxendale, Robson Green, Brenda Fricker and, of course, Martin Freeman. Casualty has also featured such established actors as Norman Wisdom, Amanda Redman, Anita Dobson, Jenny Seagrove, Rula Lenska, Prunella Scales, Celia Imrie, Toyah Willcox, Maureen Lipman, Frances Barber, Andrew Sachs, Russ Abbot, Stephanie Beacham and Michelle Collins in small roles or cameos.
Freeman next cropped up as the character Brendan in an episode of the first series of Picking Up The Pieces, about a team of paramedics involved in life-or-death events, which aired on 10 December 1998. He also appeared as Frank in a 1998 short film called I Just Want to Kiss You, written and directed by Jamie Thraves, best known for his work on music videos for Radiohead, Coldplay and Blur.
Christopher Campbell of Film School Rejects wrote, ‘… this French New Wave-style throwback has Freeman looking very young and very skinny and actually quite goofy as a guy just hanging out with his mate and meeting girls and getting into trouble with his dad. The goofiness is a bit surprising if you primarily think of Freeman as the straight man of The Office and Hitchhiker’s Guide and other such gigs. I certainly don’t know of him doing a lot of voices and vocal sound effects and the sort of spry physicality he exhibits in the short these days.’
The following year he cropped up as ‘The Car Owner’ in a TV special called Exhaust.
By the turn of the century Freeman began appearing in more high-profile TV series. Actors, as with any self-employed freelance person, do not turn down jobs, because they never know when they will be next employed. Indeed, any and all freelance jobs are a gamble.
‘I wasn’t raking it in but I was raking work in,’ he admitted to Dark Horizon’s Paul Fischer. ‘I always did work that I was happy with, not work that made me famous or work that made me rich, but work that made me very happy and it was always valid work, so the first five years didn’t feel hard at all.’
In 2000 Freeman starred in a few notable TV series and he very slowly began to get noticed. He starred as various characters in the six episodes of Bruiser, a BBC2 comedy-sketch show that ran from 18 February to 12 March. Written by David Mitchell and Robert Webb of Mitchell And Webb fame, with additional writers Ricky Gervais and Richard Ayoade, Bruiser starred Olivia Colman, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Martin Freeman, Matthew Holness and Charlotte Hudson. The series showed early on just how terrific Freeman is as a character actor.
In one sketch he is a paranoid, fairly pathetic man who mulls over every situation in his life, constantly overanalysing things. He soon starts to think that that some situations he finds himself in make him look like a pervert, stalker or paedophile and he randomly shouts out to the astonishment of those around him that he isn’t such a person at all. In another sketch he is disrupted by a puppet called Sparky (voiced by Webb) as he tries to entice the bank manager on a romantic date. Freeman featured in several more hilarious sketches, including one where he constantly calls out a builder for being overly touchy so the builder attacks him. Martin also crops up in a sketch as a man in a pub who tries to impress a woman by being silly but injures himself in the process. In another sketch he plays an archaeologist on a dig, but it becomes evident that his enthusiasm far outweighs his knowledge. He also plays a pimp who behaves frivolously whenever anything sexual is mentioned, and a man who pays for photos in a photo booth, only to realise after collecting them that a man had been standing behind him, pulling silly faces.
Freeman was next cast as Jaap, a Dutch drug taker and general idiot, in two episodes of Lock, Stock, which ran for just seven episodes in 2000 and was an offshoot TV series of the acclaimed 1998 British gangster film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It was commissioned by Ginger Productions: the production company owned by TV presenter Chris Evans. The series was first shown on Channel 4 and starred Ralph Brown, Daniel Caltagirone, Del Synnott, Scott Maslen and Shaun Parkes. The rhyming slang of the London East End did not make the series exactly viewer friendly and it sunk without a trace. These sort of gritty roles were a reflection of where Freeman endeavoured to go as an actor, which stemmed from his interest in Pacino and DeNiro films. ‘I’m not particularly interested in playing the smoothie, unless something ’orrible happens or unless something really interesting happens to the smoothie,’ he admitted to Simon Houpt of The Globe And Mail. ‘You might as well just make infomercials, if you just want to be smooth, or suave. If you’re in it just because you want to, you know, ride a Harley and play James Bond, you’re basically a model. And that’s valid, as well, that’s fine – but life isn’t about that.’
Freeman had also made a return to the theatre in the early 2000 production of Jump Mr Malinoff, Jump written by first-time dramatist Toby Whithouse. The play won the Verity Bargate Award, which was founded in memory of the Soho Theatre Company’s founder where Jump Mr Malinoff, Jump was staged.
The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer wrote of the play, ‘Jonathan Lloyd’s production marvellously captures the piece’s strengths, finding both the laughs and the play’s moving undertow of pain. And there’s excellent work from Paul Chequer and Justin Salinger as the brothers, and from Laura Sadler and Martin Freeman as the brothers’ disruptive friends. You leave convinced you have encountered a distinctive and hugely sympathetic new talent.’
Despite Freeman’s interest in grittier roles and his love of Pacino and DeNiro, when he finally got his breakthrough role, it would be far removed from that genre.