Andy Nyman speaks to Yahoo UK about his career in acting, writing, magic and more for Origin Story.
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00:00 The news every day is just full of horrors that you can't begin to let into your head.
00:05 What first sparked your interest in acting?
00:15 I always loved doing school plays and stuff, so I always had that bug.
00:20 I was lazy at school and it used to drive everybody a bit mad
00:26 because I sort of had ability but never wanted to use it.
00:29 And my mum, when I was probably 13, 14 or something,
00:35 had seen there was a little local drama group in Leicester.
00:40 So she said, "Why don't you go there and see if that suits you?"
00:45 And I did and it did. And that was it, then the bug bit.
00:49 And I knew... I already had a feeling that I loved drama and stuff.
00:56 I'd done little shows at the other youth club I'd been to.
01:01 But the real change for me was when I went to see Jools at the Pictures.
01:06 And as a little curly-haired Jewish kid with glasses,
01:11 sitting watching this incredible film and seeing up on the big screen
01:15 this little curly-haired Jewish guy with glasses, Richard Dreyfuss,
01:19 and I just saw that and thought, "Oh my God.
01:22 "Oh my God, you can be in films and you don't have to look like
01:27 "Paul Newman or Robert Redford as it would have been then,
01:29 "or Brad Pitt or, you know, pick a ludicrously God-like human being now
01:35 "who stars in films."
01:37 I suddenly realised, "Oh my God, you don't have to look like that.
01:40 "You can look like that."
01:42 Which I kind of did.
01:43 So that was the moment then that I knew, "Oh, I want to be in action,
01:47 "I want to be in films."
01:48 You've worked in lots of films and TV,
01:50 but you've also worked significantly on stage and in theatre.
01:53 So I wanted to ask, how would you describe your early experiences on stage?
01:58 Well, stage is just thrilling.
01:59 I mean, I'm very blessed to be an actor and I love it.
02:05 And I always feel incredibly grateful that it works.
02:09 Any time I get to act, I just love it so much.
02:13 Being on stage is so wonderful because it's such an immediate form.
02:17 So to get to the last big stage thing that I did
02:19 was Fiddler on the Roof.
02:21 So to play Tevye on a West End stage is just the most amazing feeling.
02:29 Next year I'm going to be doing another musical, actually.
02:32 I'm going to be doing Hello Dolly at the Palladium.
02:34 So it's the whole package.
02:37 Walking through a stage door as an actor, it never gets boring.
02:43 It's always a thrill, let alone being in the wings
02:47 and walking out on stage and just feeling like, wow.
02:51 Is there any role that you've played in film, TV, theatre, etc,
02:56 that you would approach differently now, you think?
03:00 That's a really good question.
03:01 I actually, the honest truth is no.
03:04 Not because I think I've done them perfectly.
03:06 But what's interesting is I remember when I left drama school,
03:10 so I'd have been 21, and you sort of think, come on, I'm brilliant.
03:14 Let me play King Lear.
03:15 I can act.
03:15 I know everything about life.
03:17 But the reality is you kind of play the parts,
03:23 seem to, as long as you're drawing from yourself,
03:26 it's always the right time.
03:28 So the fact that, again, to talk about Tevye for a minute,
03:31 the fact I played Tevye, who's married for 25 years
03:36 and his children are leaving home.
03:38 Well, the fact I managed to play that as a man who was married for 30 years
03:42 or 29 years at that point, whose children are leaving home,
03:47 just means you're playing it in a different way
03:49 than you would have done if you'd have got the role 15 years earlier.
03:53 Equally, I think that it's easy to beat yourself up over things
04:00 and look at them and think, oh, you blew that.
04:02 You could have done it like that.
04:03 Why didn't you do that?
04:04 And of course, if you're forensic about things, you can do that.
04:09 But I've sort of tried to retrain myself to just only choose work
04:15 that I think I can be proud of and then work really hard
04:20 and hope that the results show when you do it.
04:24 I don't mean, oh, they show what a hard worker he is,
04:28 but so that you can walk away from it.
04:30 And when you're asked a question like that, not think, yeah,
04:32 I wish I could do that again because I blew that.
04:35 I just feel like I played an unbelievable variety of roles
04:40 and blessed to have done that and feel like I've given them all my best shot.
04:45 You also work with magic, which I think is so cool.
04:50 I wonder, when did you kind of first begin getting interested in magic
04:56 and wanting to perform it?
04:57 Well, I loved magic when I was a kid.
05:00 My uncle bought me a magic set and I kind of got into that and practical jokes.
05:05 The two sort of go hand in hand.
05:06 You know, often a magic shop would sell jokes as well,
05:08 they'd have jokes and tricks.
05:10 So I always loved that.
05:11 But then I really properly got into it about 30 years ago,
05:15 about the same time I left drama school.
05:17 And Jeremy Dyson, who is my co-writer, co-director on Ghost Stories
05:23 and our novel, The Warlock Effect, he's always done magic.
05:27 And he moved to London and said, oh, let's go to this magic shop.
05:29 And I was like, I'm 22.
05:30 I don't want to go to a magic shop.
05:31 I'm not a kid.
05:32 And of course, I walked in and it was like, oh, my God.
05:36 So I just fell in love with it then and then I've done it ever since.
05:41 And, you know, it's a major obsession in my life.
05:44 I absolutely love it.
05:45 My son loves it and he's very good at it as well.
05:47 And he also creates.
05:48 So it's a great shared passion for us.
05:51 And how did your collaboration with Derren Brown first start?
05:54 I got a phone call out the blue from a guy called Andrew O'Connor,
05:58 who had a company called Objective.
06:00 And they said at that time nobody was doing mind reading magic.
06:03 It was something apart from like three of us.
06:05 It was not in fashion.
06:07 So I was quite well known in the magic world for the stuff I was doing.
06:10 And I got this phone call out the blue saying, we want to offer you
06:13 a one hour special on Channel 4 doing mind reading magic.
06:16 To which I said, thank you, but no, thank you.
06:20 I'm an actor. That's what I love.
06:21 That's I'm not interested in in getting famous as a magician.
06:26 But whoever you find, I work with them and I write for them.
06:31 And that they came back about six months later,
06:36 it was a slightly longer process than that.
06:38 But they came back and said, we found this guy, Derren Brown.
06:41 Had you ever seen him?
06:42 And I had seen him at a magic convention.
06:44 He was incredible.
06:46 And they said, well, we want you to work together.
06:48 And that's how it happened.
06:49 And that is 24 years ago, something mad like that.
06:53 So we worked together.
06:55 I wrote and directed with Derren
06:57 the first 10 years of the telly up until the lottery prediction.
07:01 I sort of wrote everything.
07:03 Derren and I wrote everything up until then.
07:06 And then I've written and directed all of the stage shows apart from one.
07:09 And how would you describe your experience writing for the stage?
07:12 You know, you've got these magic shows, of course, and you will go stories play
07:16 as well. But how would you find your experience writing?
07:18 I love it.
07:20 I've always worked in collaborations, Roxy.
07:23 It's the best way for me to work.
07:26 And it's funny, I don't.
07:29 It's hard work, creating anything is hard, hard work.
07:34 And you have to learn to kill your darlings and ideas
07:39 that you love that you realize aren't going to work.
07:41 You have to let go of them or ideas that you love that the other person doesn't.
07:44 You have to either compromise or let go of those.
07:46 But I really love it.
07:47 It's endlessly tricky and challenging.
07:50 But when it works, the results are really rewarding and exciting.
07:56 You know, I mean,
07:56 the pride of going to see something like Showman, the last Derren Brown show.
08:01 Or Ghost Stories, you know,
08:05 hearing an audience reacting to the play of Ghost Stories
08:09 or the film of Ghost Stories, and there's just nothing like it.
08:11 What were the movies that you loved growing up, but also
08:16 do you remember your first cinema experience if Jaws wasn't the one?
08:20 We were a big film going and theater going family, you know.
08:23 So I have very, very fond memories of all
08:28 going to the ABC or the Odeon in Leicester, you know, to see whatever that,
08:33 you know, the big Disney release would have been or we went all the time.
08:38 So I don't have there are lots of sort of memories within there.
08:43 You know, Jaws is an absolute banger of a memory
08:47 just because, again, it's easy to forget that that film changed cinema.
08:52 Literally, you know, if you think cinema is only 100 plus years old
08:56 and that film is, I don't know, how old is it?
09:00 Forty five, 50 years old now, something mental like that.
09:03 So literally halfway through how long cinema existed.
09:08 Here comes a film that transforms the way cinema is released.
09:16 And invented what a blockbuster was, you know, everything,
09:21 everything led on from that, it's quite incredible.
09:24 So to be able to have seen that, let alone
09:28 the Richard Dreyfuss connection, let alone as a kid
09:34 who was scared of horror films and stuff to have to go and see what is basically
09:40 a horror, you know, a monster film, a monster movie that had some proper
09:44 horror jumps in it, I mean, you know, and then the other absolutely
09:49 massive one was The Fog, John Carpenter's The Fog.
09:52 My sister wanted to go see it, but as I said, I was a scared kid.
09:56 So I'd have been 14.
09:57 It was a double A as the rating used to be.
09:59 And I didn't want to go see it.
10:02 And she said, Oh, come with me.
10:03 It'll be fine.
10:04 It's not scary.
10:05 It has to be an X if it's scary.
10:07 So we went to see it.
10:10 And of course, I mean, it is an absolute banger.
10:13 An absolute roller coaster ride, masterpiece of sort of
10:18 thrilling ghost story.
10:21 And I was terrified, but loved it.
10:25 Loved it.
10:26 You kind of touched on it just now, but I wanted to kind of ask
10:30 about your experiences with horror, like growing up and how that kind of
10:34 interest in the genre, I guess, developed because you kind of talked about
10:38 how it started.
10:39 I can't underestimate.
10:43 No, wrong.
10:44 Overestimate, overstate what horror has meant in my life.
10:49 And that is a real surprise to me, because I was, as I keep saying,
10:55 a scared kid.
10:56 You know, I did not watch anything.
10:58 I'd run away from it.
10:59 Anything that scared me.
11:00 And so I can't quite believe that horror has become this,
11:06 you know, sort of obsession in my life.
11:12 But it's funny as you grow and change, because when you're younger
11:16 around the video, nasty, you want to see the worst thing
11:19 you can possibly imagine.
11:21 You know, the most violent.
11:24 There are no taboos.
11:26 You just want to see anything and everything you can.
11:29 But as you get older and you become more aware of your mortality
11:33 and you get married and have kids and there are people around you
11:37 that you worry about, worry for.
11:40 Your tastes change.
11:42 You don't want to see.
11:43 I mean, I saw a film recently, Speak No Evil.
11:46 I don't know if you've seen that.
11:49 I wish I'd never seen it.
11:51 I mean, it's so I mean, it's an incredible piece of work,
11:54 but it's so wretched and so profoundly upsetting and haunting.
12:01 Well, that would have meant nothing to me when I was a kid.
12:06 The news every day is just full of horrors that you can't begin to
12:10 let into your head.
12:11 I mean, I don't really watch the news.
12:13 I don't really go on social media.
12:14 It's just too much.
12:15 Asian horror
12:17 is very akin to British ghost stories I've always found,
12:23 because as culture, you know, they're sort of there's nothing
12:27 within Asian horror or the British ghost story
12:30 that feels akin to America or Americans.
12:34 It is a completely different sensibility because.
12:38 The sensibility of the Asian cultures,
12:41 and I realize that's as a broad generalization.
12:44 But it's the same as the British culture,
12:48 which is terrible fear of embarrassment,
12:52 terrible fear of being judged publicly,
12:57 absolutely being buttoned down and private.
13:01 You could epitomize both of those cultures like that,
13:06 as generalizations.
13:08 Consequently, a lot of the horror that comes out of those two cultures,
13:12 I think, you know, if you look at Dark Water, that could be an M.R.
13:16 James story.
13:18 Old Boy has sort of
13:23 Hitchcock's Britishness stamped all over it.
13:28 You could go back in time and give young Andy any advice
13:34 to change his origin story or change his story.
13:37 What would it be and why?
13:40 I wouldn't change anything.
13:42 I wouldn't change anything.
13:44 I'd love to come out with some wise thing.
13:47 I would tell him not to worry.
13:49 Everything will be fine.
13:51 But no, life is what it is.
13:53 I've had a fantastic life, you know, ups and downs like all of us.
13:57 Pain, happiness like all of us.
14:00 That's what life is. It's unavoidable.
14:02 But I wouldn't change a thing.
14:04 And I love that I still get to swim in the same sea
14:07 that I have loved since I was a kid.
14:10 Still get to do all the same things.
14:12 My God, that is a blessing and a half.
14:15 A blessing and a half.
14:16 (upbeat music)
14:18 (upbeat music)