Born in Bath in 1973, Kris Marshall landed his first major screen role in 2000, as layabout Nick Harper in the sitcom My Family. He went on to play Colin Frissell in romcom Love Actually and joined the cast of the cosy crime drama Death in Paradise as DI Humphrey Goodman in 2013. Marshall left the show in 2017 but later reprised the role in the BBC spin-off Beyond Paradise, which returned for a third series this month.
This photo was taken on Easter day and is one of my first ever memories. I was standing in the dining room of my grandparents’ house near Newark, Nottinghamshire. My dad spent 30 minutes trying to get me to sit still so he could take this picture. The moment I stopped fidgeting, my grandfather popped up behind him with a camera and said: “Click! Got it!”
My little navy suit would have been made by mum. Until I was nine, she made all my clothes. There was one particular Lincoln green suit I would wear quite a bit, but deep down I craved a pair of jeans. The Marshalls were neatly turned out in general. I come from a military family – my father, uncle and grandfather flew in the RAF. This meant my father was often away for long periods of time, working abroad. Because of his career, we were quite a disciplined household. Everything changed when my parents got divorced when I was 12. The shackles were thrown off!
Aged six, I was cherubic and naive. I lived in the countryside and went to a very small, rural school. There were about 90 children in total and I was not particularly worldly, even for a young child. All of which made my experience of boarding school a real baptism of fire. Being a force kid, my parents wanted me to have a base – somewhere steady so I wouldn’t have to move around if they got posted anywhere else in the world. Hence, Wells Cathedral boarding school. Suddenly I was surrounded by 700 kids. I had to find my feet fast and wise up.
This all happened around the time my parents divorced, and with that loss of naivety I became a bit more rebellious, which led to me getting expelled. It wasn’t a single major incident but rather a gradual buildup of resistance against the system. Although, there was the time I hid a motorbike at the top of the rugby field in the rhododendron bushes so I could disappear to London for a weekend to visit some friends. That didn’t go down too well.
My academic achievements were dwindling too. While I managed to cram all of my GSCE revision and sail through those exams, I couldn’t exactly wing my A-levels. Especially as I chose maths, economics and French.
It was a classic case of pushing against the institution again and again, to the point where the school had no option but to ask me to leave. Which they did seven weeks before my final exams. My parents weren’t particularly impressed, but they quickly became supportive when they saw how serious I was about acting.
I was never the kid who performed plays for the family – my sister was that sibling, and my parents did amateur dramatics. I only became aware of how much I enjoyed being on stage when my studies started to fall apart. I had romanticised the idea of being an actor, as if I was James Dean. If anything, being chucked out of school was just part of “my story”. Whenever something went wrong, I’d think: “That’s fine. It’s all good material for the autobiography!”
After being expelled, I had two options: retake exams, with my tail between my legs. Or say “sod all that” and try to become an actor. The only problem was, I had no idea how to get into the industry. Instead, I worked the odd crazy job to make ends meet – doing shifts in a toothpaste factory or in the laundry of an abattoir. That one was pretty grim – the smell will never leave me. I was once fired from Iceland for wearing blue sunglasses on the till, and for a while I knocked on the doors of people who hadn’t paid their TV licences.
I was serving snake bites in a bar when I met a guy who said: “You seem like a pretty stand up guy. You can’t just want to work here for the rest of your life?” After confiding my ambitions to be an actor, he said he worked in the industry and gave me a couple of numbers. I called up the first one and it was an agent based on Charing Cross Road, like something out of Withnail and I. I assumed I would get the brush off. But he got me a job at one of the last travelling rep companies – which I did for seven years, not really making any money, but touring the country putting on plays.
I was tenacious in those days. I had a rule that I would do one small thing per day that would help towards my goal. Being an unemployed actor is not like being an unemployed musician or artist – there is no painting or song to work on, and quite easily your days could drift into months, into years. I didn’t take no for an answer either. I used to fax the National Theatre in London every week with my CV, then phone them up afterwards. They’d say: “Yes, we got your CV, you called us last week. What’s that? You’ll call again next week? Fine.” Eventually, that determination paid off. In 1997, I went from hiding under my bed from the landlord because I couldn’t pay my rent, to flying over to the Toronto film festival to promote my first lead role in a film 18 months later.
My first screen job was a day’s work and a couple of scenes in a film with Jane Asher. I was absolutely over the moon – another chapter for the autobiography! However, I overslept my alarm on my first and only day of filming. It’s a cardinal sin to be late when you are shooting, never mind if you are some bit-part actor. I was absolutely mortified, but I’ve never been late since. In fact, I did a movie with Jane called Death at A Funeral about 10 years later. Thankfully, she had no recollection of the incident.
The first time I got recognised was after I did a show called Metropolis in 2000. It was exciting enough that I was in the paper the next day, but then a guy stopped me on the street and said: “I saw you on TV last night – really good!” My feet didn’t touch the ground for days. It became more frequent after My Family – the show had 13 million viewers a week, and I would get recognised daily. Since then, it hasn’t stopped, but I don’t mind – it’s a small price to pay for what is a wonderful job.
Now I’m a dad I’ve become more risk-averse, compared with the motorbike days. But I still enjoy extreme sports – sailing, surfing and throwing myself down mountains. I like to do my own stunts. Part of me never really grew up or lost that teenage sense of adventure.
As for my aesthetic choices, I wouldn’t say I dress quite as smart as I did when I was six. I mainly mess around in clothes I would have worn in my 20s. Unless of course I am playing DI Humphrey Goodman, a man who wears a lot of linen. You wouldn’t catch me dead in linen.
