Moving Wallpaper: Interview With Ben Miller

This is an interview with actor Ben Miller on his new ITV show, Moving Wallpaper.

“Jonathan Pope is the puppeteer of Echo Beach. If you see Moving Wallpaper first, you see Echo Beach in a completely different light. Suddenly, little things that seem completely insignificant become significant – for example, Susie Amy from Moving Wallpaper is desperate to get a line in Echo Beach. Eventually, she tracks down Jonathan Pope, and says, “If you give me a line in Echo Beach, I’ll give you …” and you never know quite what that something is but you see a big smile on his face in the next scene. Then you watch Echo Beach and suddenly Susie comes into the bar and asks for a drink.

“There are about 50 crossovers per show. When you see the scripts, there will be something like half a dozen to a dozen props that you’ve seen in Moving Wallpaper ending up in Echo Beach, whether it is a picture on a notice board a writer has drawn or something you see the props department buying. The first time you see the show you might notice four or five things, but it’s like looking for pebbles on a beach – you see more and more of them as you look. It becomes richer and richer as it goes on.

“Jonathan is an extraordinary character. He has been a producer since he was very young and is very successful - in fact he has just come back from LA. He’s not just thick skinned, he’s armour-plated, and says things to people’s faces that other people wouldn’t even say behind their backs. He is a coward in some respects and absolutely fearless in others. He’s incredibly arrogant and, at the same time, incredibly vulnerable. You feel oddly protective of him and sorry for him sometimes. I think the reason we like him is that the one virtue he has above all else is that he is honest. He is not a nice person, but he doesn’t pretend to be one. He is aware that he is spiritually bankrupt but he is hoping that Sam will save him.

“Echo Beach is about two warring families – the Romeo and Juliet story: two families in a tiny fishing village who have a lot of history together – romantic, personal grudges, vendettas. The relationship between Susan and Daniel is a mirror of the relationship between Jonathan and Sam. Sam is the perfect woman for him if only Jonathan could see it. Sam is everything Jonathan is not - she is humble, she has soul, she is decent, she works for next to no money and loves her job. They both love their jobs but he is pretty much the opposite in character.

“One of the things which intrigues me about showbusiness is that pretty much anyone you pick is the opposite of what you think they will be. Actors tend not to be larger than life in real life - they tend to be quite unassuming people. One of the things the writer David Mamet says is that ‘the most glamorous people on set are the stuntmen, but the most showbiz people are the producers.’ They are the ones who have to get people to invest millions of pounds in the show. They have to be able to pick up the phone and convince Jason Donovan to be in it. And those people are incredibly charismatic. One thing that we have in this country is a large number of incredibly charismatic producers - who shall remain nameless - and forget the actors: they really are showmen. They are magnetic and, under the right circumstances, they are sadists for the programmes they believe in and despots to the underlings who work under them. I don’t think Jonathan is any exaggeration at all. I have never seen anybody in real life do things madder, but I have seen people do things as mad. So Jonathan is pretty truthful. I could never be a producer in real life - they’re far too ruthless and I just want to be liked by people. Producers have this remarkable ability of not caring how they come across as long as they make the show a success.

“Working ‘behind the scenes’, so to speak, was quite an eye opener. As an actor you are only ever involved in a tiny bit of the process. You might be there for some rehearsals before filming, but your work is pretty much only the shoot. You might pop in for a bit of recording afterwards but everyone else is there for the whole time, so the actors become a bit of a joke. For everyone else it must be really annoying: you spend all of your time grafting away to create this show and these flouncing ninnies come in, read a few lines, cause everyone a load of trouble for a few weeks and then go off again. At the same time, there is a real love of actors on the part of production – it is a very double-edged sword. They might never see or speak to the actors, but they become very much involved in the world and the characters the actors are playing. The actors start to take on significance for them as the embodiment of this thing they have all been working so hard on.”