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FHM MAGAZINE

In your new movie ‘The Criminal’ you play a pathologist with a rather strange RAF moustache. Officer-style moustache. Have you always wanted to sport extravagant facial hair?
I look a bit like my dad in the sixties, actually. I think I’ve got the type of face where if I change hair colour and put a moustache on I look quite different. At this stage I think I actually look too different and people go, ‘Oh you were in that, were you? – they don’t recognise me.

Your mum died when you were six, and you and your brother were shipped off to boarding school. Not a happy time then?
I hated it. It was in South Wales and I didn’t think the school was much good. Then I went to another one at seven and it wasn’t until I was about 11 that I shut down emotionally and just got on with it- five times I had the major deal on the backside from the teachers. Actually I think some were on the hand, some kneed in the groin – occasionally they would shoot at you, once with a flame-thrower, which I thought was a bit strong.

I see. So were you picked on by the other kids for being so young?
No, I wasn’t picked on because I was an arguer, and I would pretend to be a fighter if there was any aggro going. I couldn’t really fight, but I could argue like hell, until they got bored and went ‘Oh fuck it, we’re not going to fight him’.

Is it true that one member of your family was in the SAS?
My stepmum was in the SAS between 1944 and 1945. She was one of eight signal operators who took messages from northern France and Norway. She was an expert in Morse Code – she can talk in Morse if she wants to.

Didn’t you have plans to join the SAS at one point?
I was into the boy-racer, action transvestite thing, but I didn’t really like the idea of killing people. They had outward-bound courses and I was more into the climbing and canoeing and throwing yourself into water. I was looking into becoming an officer and I went on a special course where they ambushed your camp and you had to escape and run away with bits of wood. It was quite hysterical. But then I was walking along and I said to this paratrooper, ‘What’s it like being in the army?’ and he just turned around and said ‘Fuck off!’ and I thought ‘Hmm, I’m going to be a transvestite then’.

What’s the worst thing someone’s said to you when you’ve been wearing and dress?
There was a guy who said ‘Oh Tracy’, continuously for five minutes – so I unleashed the hardest swear words I could think of at him. I was trying to hurt him with words and slap him out of this stupid attitude. I took him to court for assault and won £100 damages that I blew at a Happy Eater.

When you were a child, did you used to dress your Action Men in Barbie gear?
It doesn’t work as a look. I wasn’t really into dolls because I’m a straight transvestite, which is slightly different from a gay transvestite. I was much more into Emma Peel.

Talking of Emma Peel, you starred in the ill-fated movie version of ‘The Avengers’…
Yeah, me and Shaun Ryder in a mini shooting Uzis out of the window. Vic Armstrong, who is the top guy in the world doing stunts for films, was sitting in a trailer in front driving us along because Shaun had smashed up ten cars and he wasn’t allowed to drive anymore. It was a bonkers day. Him driving and me pressing those buttons in this gizmo that’s supposed to control killer bees. When I first got the script for ‘The Avengers’ my character didn’t say a word, so we filmed it and then they dubbed on the ‘Oh fuck!’ at the end.

The film was a flop, but at least you got to work with one of your heroes, Sean Connery. Did you resist the temptation to do a Connery impersonation in front of him?
I didn’t do one while we were filming ‘The Avengers’, but I got to know actress Julia Ormond and we met Sean Connery in New York. We were both sitting there doing Sean Connery impressions to Sean Connery but he just said ‘So when are you going to do these impressions then?’ and we thought ‘oh fuck’. I don’t know whether that was his way of dealing with it.

When you are performing on stage, how do you deal with hecklers?
I was playing in York and I’d finished and came back on for an encore and one guy shouted ‘Say something funny’, which after you’ve been performing for two hours is difficult to come back to. You have to be very dismissive. If they say anything more, you impose this scenario on them like ‘ This is Jim and he’s never done heckles before, it’s part of his therapy as he murdered his pet dog the other day, so be supportive and just knee him in the bollocks on the way home’ I’ve walked hecklers out of the theatre as well. I said to them ‘This is not the show for you, get up, get out, walk’ and I refuse to continue.

And they left?
They had to. It was at the Edinburgh festival. I had this big microphone and I was saying, ‘Stand up, stand up, you’re brave, go on’

You’ve just finished filming ‘All the Queen’s Men’ in which you play one of a group of World War II soldiers who dress up as women. That must have been a stretch?
Initially, the part was a gay drag queen and I thought it wasn’t exactly me and I said ‘Instead of a gay drag queen, can I play him as a bisexual transvestite?’ I just wanted to play and the director went for it. The film is ‘Some like it hot’ meets ‘Raiders of the lost ark’ meets ‘The guns of Navarone’

You are also playing Charlie Chaplin in the movie ‘The Cat’s Meow’ alongside Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Tilly. Do you wear the bowler hat and twirl a cane?
Yeah, it’s Chaplin when he was just starting to chase women. It’s two days of his life on a boat off the coast of California. We filmed it off the coast of Greece and there were a lot of people chucking their guts up. Normally I’m the first person in the gut-chucking area but I’ve learned all the tricks for when you start feeling it coming on – staring at the horizon, hitting pressure points on your body, hitting yourself with a brick.

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by comedy groupies?
I’ve taken a certain amount of advantage but I haven’t taken a liberty. I’ve had stalkers though. Two stalkers. Well, one semi-stalker. She kept turning up saying, ‘Where are you going tonight? Can I come with you? Can I follow you?’ She did follow me for about a month on tour in America. She got hold of my phone number, but when she called me I denied it and gave her my tour manager’s number and said that’s where I was. Then he spent hours talking on the phone with her.

Didn’t one of your early routines see you escape from a woolly jumper and cornflakes?
All the tricks were just stupid. The woolly jumper is an old street gag – you get strapped into a jumper and then escape from it. I didn’t escape from the cornflakes – I made them disappear.

You just ate them then?
Um, yeah. My partner would fling this cloth bag over my head – ‘The blanket of death’ – and then I would obviously start eating them and spilling them everywhere. The blanket would be pulled away and there was me with big hamster cheeks.

Is it true you auditioned to be part of the in-flight entertainment on Virgin Atlantic as a knife-throwing act?
We’d do fake knife throwing. We’d pretend to throw them, and just stick them in the target next to the blindfold volunteer. We went down to Virgin headquarters, near Gatwick, and said what we wanted to do on their flights and they said ‘But you’re throwing knives on a plane?’ It never struck us that going on a plane with six knives would be a problem. They went with the ‘showing films’ idea instead.