Britain’s cast of leading actors is needlessly laden with “smooth” fakers, who “are not the real thing”, according to Peter Capaldi, who speaks out to the Observer this weekend about the limited talent pool that theatre, film and television have to draw upon.
In an uncompromising interview, the Scottish actor and director, best known as the BBC’s 12th Doctor Who and as foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, in The Thick of It, bemoans the lack of financial support for working- class would-be performers.
He believes that the lack leaves the way clear for under-equipped, well-heeled actors to grab many of the plum roles. “It’s not their fault,” he tells The Observer Magazine. “It’s just that there’s less and less of my lot in the arts.”
It is the British entertainment industry that suffers, Capaldi argues: “Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.”
The 65-year-old actor, who grew up in a Glasgow tenement building , says there is a real problem because many great potential artists and performers are being left out.
“We had nothing. We had zilch,” he says. “All this highfalutin life I’ve had is because I went to art school. My parents couldn’t afford to send me.
“I went because the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back.
“There was a thrusting society then, a society that tried to improve itself. Yes, of course, it cost money. But so what? It allowed people from any kind of background to learn about Shakespeare, or Vermeer.”
The actor, appearing opposite Cush Jumbo in the Apple TV+ crime drama Criminal Record, blames the “gatekeepers and Aztecs” who still decide who can be admitted to the acting world, ignoring the potential of those who cannot afford to be repeatedly knocking at culture’s door.
Capaldi says this unlevel playing field, means that “this business is full of people who are not the real thing”. He says he meets “people I perceived to be artists ’cos they had posh accents, but who didn’t have it, they just sounded like they did.”
He adds: “There’s a kind of smoothness, a kind of confidence that comes from a good school. That’s what you’re struck by: they seem to know how to move through the world recognising which battle to fight, where to press their attentions. But it can make the acting smooth, which to me is tedious. I like more neurosis.”
The former Doctor Who’s words of protest have been backed this weekend by campaigners such as David Mumeni, the founder of the Open Door programme for actors who lack financial support, and by Maria Artool, the founder of International Body of Art, set up last year to promote the work of visual artists who are disadvantaged or unconnected with the affluent art world.
“The arts can, and should, reach every single human and open our eyes to things,” says Artool, whose recent research has suggested that almost a third of working-class artists are unable to break through. “There are so many talented people out there who never get the opportunities to be seen and to show what they can do.”
Mumeni believes that, while there has been change – Dionne Brown, a graduate of his Open Door free training, is appearing alongside Capaldi in the new crime series – much more remains to be done.
“The talent was never the issue. Cost is the barrier. What we need to do now is to improve the problem outside London,” he said.
Capaldi’s complaint has also won support from the popular actor Julie Hesmondhalgh, seen most recently in ITV’s powerful Post Office scandal drama. Hesmondhalgh, formerly of Coronation Street, pointed out that private schools clearly now understand the value of teaching drama and the wider arts to their pupils.
“The imbalance is due to the erosion of support for arts in state schools over the last 20 years,” she said. “Eton, like many top schools, spends millions on this area.
“And that is not because they want to necessarily produce the next generation of Eddies and Benedicts, it is because they know the arts are good for mental health, self confidence, creative thinking and the ability to communicate.”
Hesmondhalgh, like Capaldi, says she now sees herself as a relic of “the dog end of the postwar programme to help working-class people contribute to the artistic world.”
