Tom Cantrell

Acting in British Television

This book offers the first in-depth exploration of acting processes in contemporary British television production. Centred around sixteen new interviews with celebrated British actors, including Rebecca Front, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ken Stott, Penelope Wilton and John Hannah, this rich resource delves behind the scenes of a range of British television programmes in order to examine how actors build their characters for television, how they work on set and on location, and how they create their critically acclaimed portrayals for the screen. The book investigates actors’ work across five diverse but popular television genres: soap opera, police drama, medical drama, comedy, and period drama. The books discussion of landmark television productions and its critical and contextual post-interview analysis of actor insights makes a valuable contribution to scholarship across Television Studies; the study of theatre, performance and acting; as well as Cultural Studies and Media Studies more broadly.

Directing actors in continuing drama: Meaning-making and creative labour

This article examines how three directors approach working with actors in one of the most exacting creative contexts – long-running television. Via new interviews with three directors of the flagship BBC continuing drama, EastEnders (1985–), this article explores their approaches in the context of the time constraints in production which preclude rehearsal and where directors and actors alike must work with great speed and precision. The three directors interviewed, Sophie Lifschutz, Kate Saxon and Rebecca Gatward, all trained in and have significant experience of theatre. This article thus explores the elements of their theatre training and experience that translated to their television work with actors, elements that required remodelling, and what was completely new to them and thus can be classified as medium specific. ‘Emotional action’ and ‘physical action’ emerge as key terms in the directors’ work, and the article explores how these directors worked to afford the actor creative space within such a formidable shooting schedule. With reference to Stanislavski’s writing on the ‘Method of Physical Action’ and the theatre technique of ‘actioning’, this article brings to light the hidden processes of television direction and locates the directors’ approach to working with actors as a creative labour which is a significant meaning-making component in continuing drama.