Rafe Spall plays Sean Harding
How would you describe Sean?
He cares more about making people laugh than doing anything else.
But there is also a more subversive, darker, sadder side of him, which
comes out in a couple of scenes.
He has got a lot of family problems and this comes out in his joke
telling, which is a defence mechanism.
He reminds me of myself, not that I was a sad kid at all, but I was
the kid who would try to get the laughs in the class rather than anything
else and it got me in quite a lot of trouble.
It gets Sean in quite a lot of trouble as well. But he doesn't care
because in his mind, when he leaves, he is going to be a great man and
he can do whatever he wants to do.
What are your thoughts about the Seventies as a decade?
All I can draw from it is the fact that you have the whole 20-year
cycle thing. In the Nineties, and I'm a Nineties kid, the Seventies
were really fashionable. And now in the 2000s, the Eighties are fashionable.
I remember in the Nineties my parents were like, "I can't believe people
are wearing flares again. It's ridiculous."
I remember Seventies comedy and watching Porridge and The Likely Lads
with my Mum and Dad when I was younger - I used to love it.
Do you have anything else coming up?
I have just been in Romania for two and a half months doing a Second
World War movie called The Drop with Billy Zane, Nick Moran and Sean
Pertwee.
I've also got a film coming up which a really good friend of mine,
Noel Clarke, has written.
It's a dark representation of today's youth culture called Kidulthood.
In April 2005 I'm shooting a film called Triumph in Cape Town.
How and why did you get in to acting?
My father is an actor and I have always been surrounded by actors and
actresses and to be quite honest I have never contemplated doing anything
else.
I have got two sisters who both have nothing to do with acting and
so I don't know why it has passed them by, but for me there was just
nothing else I was ever going to do.
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