You've got to have a bit of craziness in this business...
| Published date | 19 January 2022 |
| Publication title | Loughborough Echo |
Talk about pressure. A hundred million books sold, movies, lords of the theatre... and Danny John- Jules. They have created this world on stage and a touring version... Everything you heard about it, you think 'these people are crazy'.
But these are my kind of people.
I'm sorry but you've got to have a bit of craziness in this business otherwise we'll be doing Pride And Prejudice all our lives - version 1,750.
You're known as Red Dwarf's cool Cat and Dwayne Myers in Death In Paradise on TV, but do you feel most at home in the theatre? I've done so many fantastic roles that have been long-running roles and people know me from TV, even though I've done more theatre than TV. Few people know anything I've done in theatre. People would ask why did I leave Death In Paradise? Such a fantastic job, going to the Caribbean every year for seven years, but you go seven years and your theatre bones start aching.
I'm a song-and-dance man and that never goes away and that's why I put on my one-man show afterwards about Sammy Davis Jr. I wrote it and put it on because there was nothing I could do in the theatre that I thought 'I want to be in that', whereas with the Da Vinci Code you go the opposite and say 'I'd love to be in that', but oooh it's a challenge because we've only ever seen one person play it, Sir Ian McKellen, and he's a lord of the theatre. I do love a good mystery though, well, I spent seven years playing a policeman.
I'm a that goes Danny on (Laughs) I've gone from Caribbean nights in Death In Paradise to a Caribbean knight playing Sir Leigh. Playing a billionaire lord is what everyone always wants to do, isn't it?
What was your first acting role? My first job was actually a crime prevention film made by Scotland Yard called Seven Green Bottles. That was 1974, and it was basically about juvenile delinquency and that was my first foray into the business, but I never thought 'Oh, I want to be in showbusiness'.
I still see about five of those kids that were in that film although some may have no teeth now. After that I remember there used to be a show called Boy From Space that used to be on schools television and it was the first time I had seen a black...
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