Vincent Franklin on playing a gay man: ‘Nobody asked me if I was really a Tory’
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Version 0 of 1. At the end of his time studying drama at Bristol Old Vic, Vincent Franklin found himself listening to a bloke from the BBC, who’d been brought in for a couple of days to give the students an inkling as to how they might fare in the spangly world of telly. For Franklin, a market trader’s son from Bradford who was supporting himself by working shifts in a Clifton restaurant, it didn’t go very well. Even though he was still a young man, he was, the kindly eminence grise pointed out, already balding, a bit overweight, and in possession of a weak chin and “a very flabby lip”. What, then, could he expect? Well, Franklin remembers being told, “you could probably be the third or fourth one of a group of friends, or you could be that person in a war series that doesn’t come back because the audience won’t mind too much”. Tough love it might have been, but one person’s spirit-sapping critique is another’s spur to action, and it obviously didn’t put Franklin off too much: he went on to forge a career first and, continuingly, in the theatre; he has appeared in both Hollywood blockbusters such as The Bourne Identity and The Illusionist and in indies including Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake and, most recently, Mr Turner; and among many television roles, he most tickled our fancy as nonsense-spewing Tory PR machine Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It. He has, though, been very much a supporting actor; aside from theatrical parts such as Charles Laughton, whom he played in 2013 in Scarborough, he has not been a leading man. Not, that is, until now – when no less a luminary than Russell T Davies has picked him to play Henry, the central role in a new eight-part drama called Cucumber, which will also star Julie Hesmondhalgh, Cyril Nri and Freddie Fox. Henry will also feature in an accompanying E4 series, Banana, which follows the lives of the younger cast members; and, online, there’s a factual series about sexual mores, Tofu. Cucumber, banana, tofu. Need a clue? Well, they’re not vegan-friendly, health-based food programmes of the new year, new you variety. In fact, they are shorthand descriptors for the various stages of penile erection (banana can also be subdivided into peeled and un-, but I guess they weren’t making four shows). Cucumber is, undoubtedly, the most substantial piece of the interlocking trio, and at its heart is a middle-aged insurance executive who, feeling that life might be about to pass him by, lobs a metaphorical hand grenade into the middle of his own. But why? Why does Henry reject a marriage proposal from Lance, his terribly nice boyfriend of 10 years? Why does he turn his back on the beautifully appointed home they share in a leafy Manchester suburb, which even comes with a neighbour so enthusiastically pro-gay that when she lets Henry know she can see him masturbating through his skimpy window blinds merely suggests a thicker fabric lest she “spoil the fun”? And why does he allow himself to be drawn into the febrile, unstable world of two young gay men who live, with uncertain tenancy rights, in a freezing cold, inner-city warehouse? “What I like about him,” explains Franklin, “is he likes lighting little fires and seeing what they’ll do. One of his redeeming features is his honesty… he says what he’s thinking and feeling in that moment, in a slightly childlike, immature way, in that not-understanding or never having had to face terrible consequences way. And that’s sort of refreshing – but it’s also brutal.” This is partly true: Henry tells his gay male friends that he can’t stand gay men, and he rejects Lance with chillingly straightforward frankness. But a lack of honesty is also Henry’s undoing: one of the core problems in his relationship with Lance – and one addressed with zero coyness or euphemism – is the fact that the couple don’t have penetrative sex. Lance wants to, Henry doesn’t. But when we’re talking about the plotline and I refer to Henry’s sexual dysfunction, Franklin immediately pulls me up. “You’re absolutely right but I’m also going to challenge it. Because everyone’s talked about this sexual dysfunction. The only dysfunction he has is a lack of honesty.” If he’d been clear about his sexual preferences at the beginning, in other words, all might have been very different. But Henry is a man caught between dangerous candour and self-defeating concealment. “The problem he has is a lack of honesty in that relationship, which is probably at the bottom of most relationship problems. It’s OK to be whatever you want. If you want to marry this woman but go and have sex with a different woman every weekend, that in itself isn’t necessarily wrong, as long as you’re upfront about that. That’s why I think this is in some ways a gay drama but I hope in other ways not.” I think he’s right. Cucumber crackles with the suppressed tension of middle-aged disappointment, which knows no bounds of sexuality, gender, race or class; and it switches deftly between generations, balancing the affluence and comfort of its older, largely professional cast with the world of zero-hours contracts and financial instability inhabited by its younger characters. Like Davies’s Queer as Folk, which first aired 15 years ago but seems, in many ways, to inhabit an entirely different world, it is an accomplished, energetic ensemble comedy whose audience is unlikely to be confined to the gay community simply because the majority of the characters it depicts are gay. Of Queer as Folk, Franklin says: “It made us realise that not every gay man was a window-dresser. A relationship is a relationship, and what you go through is what you go through.” And, he argues, Cucumber’s setting also gives it a greater freedom: “What’s great about using gay characters is that the rules aren’t so clear. This was my feeling when I read it. I know from drama on television and in books what the schema is for a heterosexual relationship, because we’ve had thousands of years of heterosexual relationships being codified, basically to control women and money. But until 1967, being gay was actually illegal, so those relationships are not codified in the same way.” Franklin himself is not gay; he met his wife, also an actor, when he was starting out in rep in Harrogate, and the couple have a son and a daughter. He auditioned for the part of Henry because, after the first page of the script, he thought “this is a different league of writing from anything I’ve read for a long time”, and because the chance to work with Davies was “a bit like somebody saying there’s music by some guy called Wolfgang Amadeus something or other” But he didn’t think he’d get it “because they’re seeing the world and his wife – actually, not his wife, because that would be inappropriate”. He was called back for a second audition and given a soliloquy – intense, lengthy, highly sexually charged – that appears in the first episode. He was told later that a lot of actors couldn’t get through it. “I think I got it on the grounds that if I could do this I was up for just about anything.” Had he assumed the part would go to a gay actor? He is cagey as he starts to answer, just as I was cagey asking: the question is full of assumptions about the nature of gay art and entertainment, about the ghettoising of identity, about what, and who, defines the marginal and the mainstream. “No,” he replies, swiftly followed by, “I don’t know.” He did expect it to go to someone whose name he recognised, “because it’s the best part I’ve ever read, so why would you not think it would go to somebody else?” But, he says, he finds this question tricky; as have the interviewers who have asked him whether he’s gay, and immediately added “I probably shouldn’t ask that”. No, he thinks, you probably shouldn’t, “but actually the fact that you want to is one of the reasons I think this show is great. We’re all probably more interested in sex than anything else, if we’re really honest.” He wants to answer the question truthfully, he says, but doesn’t want to be in the position of having to declare himself “not a gay actor”. “It’s irrelevant. Henry is gay. I played a Tory party spin doctor for five years and nobody said to me, are you really a Tory? But as soon as you play a gay character, people want to know if you’re really gay. It’s all just acting. What I do is pretending to be other people. They’re never me. I am 46, I have been in love, I have been unhappy, I have worried about the future, and all of these things that Henry’s doing. And if anybody from the straight or gay community says you’re an unconvincing homosexual, then that would be terrible, and I can only apologise.” He has also been asked what it’s like to kiss a man, to which – as Davies has advised him – the only sensible answer is “fine”. In the end, he says, he has reduced what he wants to say on the subject to its essence: “I think it’s important that straight actors play gay characters until there’s no need for anyone to ask me that question.” Cucumber has absorbed most of Franklin’s time in recent months; it has also given him an unexpected makeover as, installed in a flat in Manchester, far away from the family home in St Albans, he took to going to the gym in his block and living on protein, brown rice and “vegetable concoctions”. Channel 4 (not Davies, who told him to “tell them to fuck right off”) had asked whether he might lose half a stone or so, but he kept going and lost two more besides, despite his natural propensity to gravitate towards a curry. Now he’s back home, his wife has said that’s enough. Aside from Cucumber and Banana, TV viewers will also see him in the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s 19th-century fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which he plays the fop Christopher Drawlight. He’s also just made a pilot for a Channel 4 comedy written by Guy Jenkin called Bug Splats, about a group of drone pilots. Whether or not the life of a leading man beckons, it’s hard to say: he’s certainly got the acting chops but he’s also clearly a team player. When he landed the part of Henry, he says, he was pleased because “you do always want to have a go at driving the bus”, but he was also conscious that he had to earn his keep by leading the company – knowing his lines back to front, turning up on time, keeping everyone together. “If you get the chance, do not take that for granted,” he told himself. “A lot of people are working really hard on this. Don’t be in the middle being flaky.” |