Lord Alan Sugar’s latest apprentice
MOST people find themselves transforming into their mother or father as they age.
Not so Martin Freeman. The Office star is destined to end up resembling Sir Alan Sugar.
The Sherlock actor, 39, reveals he had an awkward encounter with millionaire entrepreneur Lord Sugar at a party.
“I met him years ago. He said when he was younger he looked like me,” said Martin at the British Independent Film Awards at London’s Old Billingsgate.
“I took it as a compliment and I hope my bank balance will match his one day.”
Express.co.uk
December 7, 2010
My London: Martin Freeman
Hannah Nathanson
August 20, 2010
Sherlock actor and clothes addict Martin Freeman loves John Smedley, three-piece suits and the old-fashioned gentility of Claridge's...
Home is
Potters Bar. It's great because I'm close to town but when I go home there's a big sky and fields.
What was the last play you saw?
Roy Williams' Sucker Punch at the Royal Court. The play was set in a boxing ring. The actors had been training for months and it really showed.
What advice would you give a tourist?
Avoid Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. Mooch around Soho and the City on a Sunday and walk along the river. You absorb 2,000 years of history just by being near the Thames.
Which shops do you rely on?
Albam on Beak Street, a men's outfitters I use for contemporary clothes with a traditional twist. For suits I go to the tailor Mark Powell who's been in Soho for about 25 years. I'll wear John Smedley till I die so I love the flagship store on Brook Street. I sometimes pop into Richard James on Savile Row. I devote far too much time and energy to clothes.
What's the best meal you've had in London?
My wife Amanda and I celebrated our wedding anniversary at Claridge's. It's quiet, not very showbiz and people do things properly there. I like being called Mr Freeman occasionally.
What are your earliest London memories?
I grew up in the suburbs so I remember arriving at Waterloo and seeing Big Ben and the coloured lights on top of the Southbank Centre and thinking, 'Wow!' I also remember walking along the south side of the Thames by HMS Belfast with my mum and it was just a wasteland. It's amazing what's been done to that area now.
What would be on your tombstone?
I tried, Goddammit!
What are your guilty pleasures?
Sometimes, if I've been really healthy and I think I've earned a bit of chocolate, I'll go and spoil everything by eating two whole Easter eggs.
What are you most afraid of?
Being too much in my own mind, especially at four o'clock in the morning.
What would you do as Mayor for the day?
I would ban cycling on pavements and summer nudity. I'd make everyone wear a suit, no matter what the weather. It would smarten things up.
What animal would you most like to be?
A monkey because they have more fun. Some days I think I am one.
What were the last albums you bought?
I listen to a lot of soul and jazz and I bought a selection of records by Tina Turner, Don Ellis and Gladys Knight & The Pips from Retrobloke.com in Hendon. It's a treasure trove in there.
What would you save from a fire?
People not included, my records.
What makes you cry?
I cry at the drop of a hat. Recently I welled up during one of the episodes of Amish: World's Squarest Teenagers on Channel 4.
What are you up to at the moment?
I'm halfway through rehearsing for Clybourne Park at the Royal Court. It's a fantastic play by Bruce Norris, set in Chicago.
Who are your heroes?
Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and Al Pacino made me want to act. I've always been interested in men with a vulnerable side.
What do you most like wearing?
Three-piece suits with a tie.
What's the most romantic place in London?
A car park near Liverpool Street, where I first met Amanda in a make-up bus.
Where did you last go on holiday?
I went to southern Sardinia for a week with my wife and children. It rained for three days and I got stung by a jellyfish, but apart from that it was lovely. I went to Sorrento for a romantic break with my wife a couple of years ago and it was beautiful. It felt like we'd flown away to another planet.
Have you ever stolen anything?
No, I'm a pretty straight-up guy.
Martin Freeman to star in Radio 3's autumn drama season
By Emma Powell
August 12, 2010
BBC Radio 3 is set to broadcast an adaptation of B S Johnsons novel The Unfortunates, starring Sherlock actor Martin Freeman, as part of its autumn drama season.
The drama will comprise eighteen sections, which will be broadcast in a random order. The original book featured 27 chapters, with a first and last chapter specified but the remaining 25 designed to be read in any order.
Meanwhile, Radio 3 will also broadcast four plays under the title of The Great Game. The plays were originally performed at the Tricycle Theatre and trace the history of the war in Afghanistan from the 1840s to present day.
Radio 3's autumn line-up will also include new productions of Giovanni�s Room by James Baldwin, which will star Damian Lewis and Greta Scacchi, and Brian Friel's Faith Healer,starring Phil Daniels.
Radio 3 head of speech Abigail Appleton said: Radio 3 drama is the perfect medium to engage listeners' imaginations and we're delighted to have been able to cast some outstanding actors who will do justice to these stories.
Other plays in the season include new works by Sarah Daniels, who has penned Social Work, and Melissa Murray, who has written Perpetual Light.
Martin Freeman hits out at The Office
Express.co.uk
August 11, 2010
MARTIN Freeman came to fame as nice guy Tim in hit sitcom The Office written by stand-up comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, but was the actor really so fond of them behind the scenes?
The actor, who is Dr Watson in recent BBC show Sherlock Holmes, has slammed comics as being pathetically egotistical. He has also been critical of Gervais.
Freeman says: I thought actors were dodgy until I hung out with stand-up comedians. They are pathetically egotistical and make us seem like selfless wallflowers in comparison. I don't want to be around people who can't shut up.
He says of Gervais: We're an odd country in that we don't celebrate ourselves. Ricky Gervais has said we haven't made a good (British) film for 50 years so he's not the most supportive person.
However he adds of Gervais' Hollywood success: I'm not surprised by it. They like gall and what they perceive as British cheek.
A quick chat with Martin Freeman
Whats on TV
July 27, 2010
The star of Sherlock talks guns, The Office and meeting new Doctor Who Matt Smith...
What do you like most about playing Watson?
"I like playing people who are not particularly happy, and Watson isn't very happy until he meets Sherlock. He helps Watson find a purpose again, which is akin to his old life of adventure in the Army and he gets his mojo back. It's great he's not just the sidekick, too. There is no question that Sherlock is the focus, but Watson is pretty parallel."
Did you avoid other versions of Sherlock Holmes?
"Actually, before we started filming we all went to see the Guy Ritchie version and really enjoyed it. Sherlock Holmes is so famous it outstrips any one telling of it. No version is the definitive one; it's about everyone having their go."
Were the action scenes fun?
"I didn't do any real stunts, but I did enjoy the fact Watson is handy with a gun. He's not bumbling and academic or too English and repressed."
Did you learn how to fire a gun?
"I'd done it before, but not often. I'm sure people like Jason Statham are more au fait with it. I don't really like guns. I've always got in my mind an episode of Columbo and the idea that someone has tampered with the weapon. I asked the armourer about 50 times, "Is this loaded?"
Does it bother you when people talk to you about The Office?
"It happens to me daily and for the first couple of years I thought, "Enough already". I understand it now because I loved the show myself, but it's nice being in other countries where people have no idea who I am. It reminds of what life used to be like."
Have you ever met John Krasinski who plays Tim's counterpart in the American version of The Office?
"No, but I'd love to. He looks like me apart from being three feet taller. It was surreal watching him at first, but then you just get into enjoying the show, which is testament to how well they do it."
Sherlock is co-written by Stephen Moffat. Would you like to be in Doctor Who?
"I don't feel as passionate about Doctor Who as Stephen does, but I've enjoyed watching it more since being a father. We met Matt Smith while filming Sherlock in Cardiff because the Baker Street set is next to the TARDIS set. It was strange seeing Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor together. They are the perfect fictional team."
Would you like to work more in America?
"Absolutely, but it has never been my main ambition. I wouldn't want to move there, though. I'm very English."
Sherlock screens on BBC One on Sunday evenings.
MARTIN FREEMAN: I would cook Jesus pasta.
Martin Freeman tells how he would like to have Jesus over to dinner just to get to the truth and that he would cook him pasta because he does love Italian.
Martin candidly confabulates as he talks about his first love, the fear and his phobia of Radio 1.
Martin also shares how working with Ricky Gervais made it difficult to shoot a scene as he would constantly try to make him laugh.
Speaking about the campaign, he commented: Well, personally I was drawn to the project by the notion of seeing something familiar in a new light. As an actor you're often typecast as playing a particular role, or automatically associated with a specific character, so in that sense it's nice to be able to show a different side.
In a taxi with...Martin Freeman
By Maureen Paton
Mail Online
July 17, 2010
The versatile actor and thoroughly modern Dr. Watson talks Victorian tailoring and the upside of playing bad boys.
We pick up Martin Freeman from his Hertfordshire country house, to where the actor moved two years ago to escape fans of The Office ringing his doorbell in North London at all hours to say hello to his alter ego Tim Canterbury.
Although he's resigned to the fact that people will always shout Tim at me in the street, Martin couldn't be more of a contrast to that suburban everyman persona. He's a splendidly dandified sight in a velvet-collared plaid Crombie overcoat: would wear a full-length cape if I could get away with it. I do love a good swirl in a fog, he declares dramatically. And I nearly bought a Prussian pillbox hat because I wanted to look like Great Uncle Bulgaria from the Wombles, much to my wife's dismay. But she's an actor too, so she knows all about these strange urges.
Ironically, Martin couldn't indulge his passion for Victorian tailoring for his latest part as Dr Watson in the new adaptation Sherlock, since it's a modern-day reworking of Conan Doyle's detective stories by Doctor Who writers (and Holmes fanatics) Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss. But he did get to do a lot of rooftop chases in Soho alongside Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes. I loved all that action stuff,says Martin, a former teenage member of the British national squash squad after overcoming asthma and a hip disorder. There has been a sense of catch-up for him ever since.
Born in Aldershot, Martin is the son of a naval officer father who died when Martin was ten. His mother, Philomena, had always wanted to be an actress, but marriage, five children and then early widowhood got in the way, so he's fulfilling her dream.
Now 38, the versatile Martin has worked almost nonstop since leaving Central drama school nearly two decades ago, on everything from Ali G Indahouse and the remake of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Fellow Office star Patrick Baladi, who played David Brent's boss Neil, was in the same college year.
Patrick is good at looking as if he has just stepped off a yacht, whereas intensity is the story of my life, says Martin, so memorable as Machiavellian political intriguer Lord Shaftesbury in BBC1 Charles II: The Power and the Passion in 2003. As for nudity, he was cast as a porn star's embarrassed stand-in for Love Actually, a lusty Rembrandt in Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching and as a wife-swapper in the forthcoming romcom Swinging With the Finkels.
His darkest role was in Channel 4 Men Only in 2000 as a member of a gang who rape a nurse. But I will always be grateful to that job, because I met my wife [Married Single Other star Amanda Abbington, 36] in the cast and we fell in love, he adds, explaining that actors like to compensate for the heaviness of certain parts by creating a friendly atmosphere off set. When he made the midlife-crisis film The Good Night in 2006 as the unhappy husband of Gwyneth Paltrow and lover of Penelope Cruz, he bonded with Cruz by teaching her Cockney rhyming slang and British swear-words in the back of my car on set and she was up for a laugh.
But the biggest laugh of his career, he says, remains The Office, a BBC2 classic of observational comedy. I loved everything about that job, and it made a massive difference to our careers, says Martin.
His home life seems equally sorted: a son and a daughter whose names he prefers not to reveal and two long-haired dachshunds called Archie and Jodie to complete the domestic bliss. Amanda has calmed me down in the way that love does, says this self-styled grump, who admits he channels the rage in me into acting. Name anything high-definition TV, computer obsolescence and I'm pretty much annoyed by it. But I'm working on that, because if you are being paid more than anyone in your family ever earned to do something that you love, then you really should be nice.
Freeman: Film is my Bond moment
June 21, 2010
UKPA - Martin Freeman has declared his appearance in Wild Target is his "Bond moment".
The British actor plays dastardly hitman Dixon, and gets to shoot guns opposite Bill Nighy, who plays his arch-nemesis in the killing world.
"People always think of me as an assassin or a butch gun guy," he joked. "I treat this film as my showreel for Bond, this is my Bond moment."
The actor added: "It was good fun. I would do it again, I'm only going to do it again."
Martin also joked about Bill working so much.
"He's very cheap. That's why he's so universally loathed," he quipped.
Their outing in the British comedy is their fifth time on screen together, and the Nativity star is looking forward to many more.
"It'll be nice to do longer scenes with Bill. I wanted to do this because I found out Bill is in it, and I know he's got good taste," he said.
Wild Target is in cinemas now.
Martin Freeman: 'I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised'
By Stuart O'Connor
The Observer
March 28, 2010
Actor Martin Freeman might enjoy downloading, but his favourite piece of technology turns at 33rpm.
What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
It would have to be a record player, because that's the one I've used most since I was a child and the one I use most now. It's the one I use for all my music, and I thank the person who invented that.
When was the last time you used it?
I used it last night for a couple of albums I've just bought. I'm still always buying records, but finding the time to play them isn't always easy.
What additional features would you add if you could?
Tea-making? Other than that's it's pretty perfect and self explanatory. I like the fact that it doesn't do everything. I like it because it does one thing very well, and there's a certain ritual involved in it � more so than just pressing a button.
Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No, I really don't. People have been saying that about records for the past 25 years, and they're not gone. I think there will always be people like me around. And a lot of the people I know who are absolutely fanatical about music love vinyl.
What frustrates you about technology in general?
The high turnover of it. On the one hand, we're constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It's absolutely insane. We've been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We're being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think.
Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I like things that are simple, such as an alarm clock. For me, trying to program stuff is a nightmare. I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.
If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Well, I would say be simple and know what it is that you want out of whatever it is you're going to use. And don't use it to run your entire life. And talk to your cleverest friend about how to use it.
What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
Our laptops, I guess. But the amount I've spent on record players, speakers and amps is a lot more, I suppose.
Mac or PC, and why?
Mac, just because I was probably guided towards that. I have no colours to the mast on that at all I've always used Mac, but I don't care, I just want it to do what I want. I don't have any Mac smugness about it. It seems pretty good, but then I have never used a PC.
Do you still buy CDs and DVDs or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I buy DVDs. I don't really buy CDs unless they're for other people. We also download music a lot. I bought a load of jazz records the other day.
Robot butlers a good idea or not?
Yeah, OK I'll go for that. On the one hand you are taking money out of a real butler's hands but there aren't any real butlers any more, are there?
What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A robot butler
Martin Freeman stars in Peter Greenaway's film Nightwatching, now showing across the UK.
Martin Freeman is not your best mate. Got that? - Times Online
By Kevin Maher
March 26, 2010
Martin Freeman, Mr Nice Guy from The Office, taps into a well of anger as Rembrandt in Peter Greenaway's new film
Martin Freeman is not your friend. He is not your buddy. And he is not as nice as you think he is. This is probably surprising to people,� says the 38-year-old star of The Office and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I carry a lot of rage around inside me. People are always like: Oh, he's like my best mate. Well, no. I am not your f***ing best mate.
Freeman is determined to bury his nice guy legacy once and for all. Wiry, trimmed down (I don't eat like a pig any more) and hyper-animated, in jeans and stripy jumper, he makes it clear that Tim Canterbury, the lovelorn Everyman from The Office, is simply not him. Instead, he says, he's all about the rage. I don't really know how people can be alive for more than six days without rage, he says. If you live in this world, how can you not have it?
His conversation darts savagely from subject to subject, bouncing from pet peeves to btes noires and back again. About the James Bulger killers, for instance, he muses: Don't tell me that in the heat of the moment you wouldn't stone them to death. Of people who have to be the centre of attention at parties, he says: They are mentally ill and should seek help. And of his Office boss and contemporary comedy legend Ricky Gervais, he says: He's not exactly bursting with humility is he? You look at him now and you think: Are you just showing off?
Thankfully, and not a moment too soon, Freeman has found a screen outlet for his rage, in the monumental role of a carnal and cantankerous Rembrandt in Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching. The film, a welcome return to form for Greenaway, is part period biopic and part investigative drama, and examines the heady years of Rembrandt late thirties, when he painted his most famous picture, The Night Watch. Liberally mixing fact with fiction, the movie's depiction of Rembrandt is of a man locked in moral and intellectual combat with the duplicitous Dutch merchants who have commissioned the painting portraying themselves as a local militia. And he's a bawdy lover, devoted to wife Saskia.
The film is trademark Greenaway and thus lit impeccably, and in this case appropriately, like a Dutch master we're talking weeks of lighting for a single scene, Freeman says. However, it is the force of Freeman's performance that holds the entire movie together. Barely off-camera, sometimes naked, often spattered with paint, smeared with musket powder or battered to pieces with rifle butts, he is the raw, fulminating heart of a project that could have been dryly academic or self-conscious without him.
I remember reading the script for the first time, he says. Within a few pages I was already naked, having violence done to me and having sex with people, and I thought: This is interesting. Unusually, Freeman was sent the script, the offer of the part and the terms of the deal all at once. No audition necessary. Greenaway simply knew that he wanted him.
I think part of it was because he thought I looked a bit like Rembrandt, Freeman says. And also because he didn't want this Rembrandt to be too grand. He sees Rembrandt as an outsider, someone who is a bit parochial, a bit rude.
Freeman admits that he was encouraged to give full vent to his rudeness, and indeed improvised most of the expletives that fill the movie's many tantrum scenes. In one memorable part, Rembrandt stares at the plans for The Night Watch and yells: F*** this painting! F*** it! F***! F***! F***ing hell!
No one was more surprised than me to find that it was still in the finished film, Freeman says. But Peter was happy for all that stuff to stay in, because it seemed right. He adds, just to be clear, that he didn't choose to make Nightwatching solely to shift public perceptions of who he is. Yet he hopes nonetheless that as many people as possible will see it. Because that up there on screen is me. I'm way more that than anything else.
He has theories, naturally, about where his inner rage comes from. He says, for instance, that as a child I had a lot to kick against. The youngest of five children, born in Aldershot but raised in Teddington, West London , he was physically very small and suffered from asthma and Perthes Disease (a disease of the hip) at a young age. His parents separated while he was still in primary school and his father Geoffrey, an artist who joined the Navy, died of a heart attack when Freeman was 10.
I never wanted to be pitied, he says. So when my dad died I took some pride in bouncing straight back and telling everyone that I was fine. It was only when I was 18 that I thought, That really wasn't fine. And now I'm a dad myself and I'm like, That's not fine at all.
He channelled his childhood drive into sport, and was a member of the British national squash squad until he was 14. Overnight, however, he dropped squash (I didn't have the killer instinct) and began acting instead, progressing eventually from a Teddington theatre company to the Central School of Art and Drama in London. He served his TV apprenticeship on The Bill and Casualty, played a thief in This Life and a rapist in the drama Men Only, where he met his long-term partner, the actress Amanda Abbington (with whom he now has two children). He says that he knew that The Office was unique from the very first script read-through. It was one of the funniest things in my entire life. I just thought, This is hilarious, because he [Gervais] is hilarious. He's special. We were no slouches either. But he was special.
He says that these days he stays in at night at home (in Hertfordshire) and has friends round, rather than going out in public after dark. He is still plagued, he says, by drunken fans who want him to shout: You're a c**k! You're a c**k! You're a c**k! (a classic Office gag) into their phones.
He has two new movies coming out after Nightwatching, one called Wild Target, in which he plays the nemesis of an ageing assassin (Bill Nighy). The other is Swinging With the Finkels, a rom-com about a London couple, played by Freeman and the tween idol Mandy Moore, who decide to spice up their ten-year marriage with some swinging. What can I say? There should be a joke in there, but Mandy Moore is a delightful woman.
He is content with his career so far, and with the fact that he hasn't had to lie, back-stab or sell out to get where he is. But I still don't feel like I've arrived. I'm not a huge star. I'm not George Clooney.
In the meantime, though, he says he will continue working with his rage. Battling with it every day. It's the conversation I have with people I love, he says, summing up. They say: You are allowed to be happy, Martin! So shut the f*** up. And be happy. He gives a tiny it's that simple shrug and then adds the baffled topper: But how am I supposed to do that?
Amanda: Martin and I won't marry
The Press Association
February 16, 2010
Amanda Abbingdon has revealed playing a married couple in turmoil in Married Single Other has put her off ever getting married.
The former Coupling actress has two children with The Office star Martin Freeman, and in the new ITV show she and Dean Lennox Kelly play a couple on the verge of a break-up.
Amanda said: "It made me not want to get married, certainly."
She added: "That's quite cynical, it didn't really. It just made me think, you know, I don't know if, I wouldn't want to go through that whole marriage thing anyway. I mean Martin and I have both said marriage isn't really for us. It's great to play. It's great to play those parts where you're shouting and screaming and you get really angry but no I think people who get married, it's great, it's lovely. It's great for them, but it's not for me."
Married Single Other begins on Monday, February 22.
