The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (3 page)

Freeman had also made a return to the theatre in the early 2000 production of
Jump Mr Malinoff, Jump
written by first-time dramatist Toby Whithouse. The play won the Verity Bargate Award, which was founded in memory of the Soho Theatre Company’s founder where
Jump Mr Malinoff, Jump
was staged.

The
Daily Telegraph
’s Charles Spencer wrote of the play, ‘Jonathan Lloyd’s production marvellously captures the piece’s strengths, finding both the laughs and the play’s moving undertow of pain. And there’s excellent work from Paul Chequer and Justin Salinger as the brothers, and from Laura Sadler and Martin Freeman as the brothers’ disruptive friends. You leave convinced you have encountered a distinctive and hugely sympathetic new talent.’

Despite Freeman’s interest in grittier roles and his love of Pacino and DeNiro, when he finally got his breakthrough role, it would be far removed from that genre.

F
reeman was concerned that he would be typecast as an actor, so he tried his hand at various roles. He was cast as Solomon in the 2000 film
The Low Down
from the writer and director of the 1998 short film
I Just Want to Kiss You
, which also happened to star Freeman.

The Low Down
was his debut role in a feature-length film. The film, released on 27 January 2001, is essentially a story about real-life relationships. BBC’s Michael Thomson wrote, ‘Director Jamie Thraves (who made the video for Radiohead’s ‘Just’) knows how to create power from an accumulation of detail, wee asides, and glances but also forgets that daily drabness can be rather dull to watch. Neither are his hand-held camera or preference for short scenes always easy on the eye, but well-acted authenticity from the cast makes up for it.’

Freeman then had a cameo as ‘the Doctor’ in an episode of
Black
Books
called ‘Cooking The Books’, which was broadcast on 29 September 2000. The episode sees bookshop owner Bernard Black struggle with the everyday tasks of running a shop. A hilarious BAFTA-winning comedy,
Black Books
was created by Dylan Moran (who stars in the lead role of bookshop owner Bernard Black) and Graham Linehan. It ran for three series and focuses on the London bookshop Black Books and follows Black and his assistant Manny Bianco, played by comedian Bill Bailey, and their friend Fran Katzenjammer, played by Tamsin Greig. The DVD audio commentary for
Shaun of the Dead
makes a reference to the series, saying that
Black Books
is thought of as a sister show to the cult 1999 Channel 4 series
Spaced
, which was also produced by Nira Park.
Black Books
features cameos by
Spaced
actors Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Peter Serafinowicz and Jessica Stevenson.

2001 was not just a big year professionally for Freeman but also personally. It was when he met his long-term partner, actress Amanda Abbington, on the set of Channel 4’s TV film
Men Only
. The two-part film, which was broadcast on 3 June in the UK, centres around five football players who rape a nurse on a horrible, ketamine-fuelled night and sees Freeman play a deeply unpleasant sex offender called Jamie.

Never too far from each other, Abbington later appeared in several more productions alongside Freeman, most notably
Sherlock, Swinging with the Finkels, The Debt
and
The All Together
.

Abbington spoke to the
Daily Mail
’s Vicki Power about seeing Freeman for the first time: ‘I’d seen him in a TV sketch show and thought he was gorgeous. My ideal man. As I sat
watching I said to my friend “He’s lovely, isn’t he? I’d love to meet him.” Then a couple of months later I did.’ One day, while in a make-up bus on the set of
Men Only
, she complained to her make-up girl that she didn’t have a boyfriend, to which the make-up girl replied that there was a man on set who had been whining about a similar thing because he didn’t have a girlfriend. ‘At that minute Martin walked in and I just had a thunderbolt,’ Abbington continued. ‘It dawned on me, “Oh, God it’s him!” We flirted with each other all day and when I went home he texted me, saying, “You left and I wasn’t done flirting with you. That’s a bit rude,” which I thought was really smooth.’ Freeman invited her out for a drink the next day and a few months later they were living together.

Following his appearance in
Men Only
, Freeman played various characters in five episodes of the seemingly now forgotten
World of Pub
. The comedy ran for six thirty-minute episodes from June to July of 2001 and was originally broadcast on BBC2. It had initially been a radio series that aired on Radio 4 from March 1998 to January 1999 and lasted for two series. It is set in an unpopular pub in London’s East End and each episode ends up in a disaster of some sort.

The
British Comedy Guide
said, ‘The series had previously run on BBC Radio 4 and did have some interesting ideas, but it did not have the legs to earn a second TV series. While the TV series was not successful, it did give some early TV appearances for future comedy stars including Peter Serafinowicz, Martin Freeman, Tamsin Greig and David Walliams.’

Total Film
reviewed the DVD release and summarised, ‘Cockney rhyming slang is well funny. But before you and the
trouble and strife put up your plates for a butcher’s at this 2001 sitcom featuring a pre-fame Martin Freeman, David Walliams and Tamsin Greig, pause a moment. Essentially a pub version of
Father Ted
, Tony Roche’s wilfully silly show is one of the glut of early noughties comedies that hits just wide of the mark, complete with canned laughter echoing in the background.’

Freeman returned to the theatre in 1999 for a production of
La Dispute
, a staging of Pierre Marivaux’s eighteenth-century play, co-produced by the RSC and Neil Bartlett’s own Lyric Hammersmith, where the play was staged. Bartlett translated the original French and directed and designed the play, which, following its Hammersmith date on 15 April 1999, travelled north for showings in Brighton and Poole. Freeman won praise from critics for his performance as Azor. It was another string to his bow.

Martin Freeman’s breakthrough TV role was undoubtedly the character of Tim Canterbury in
The Office
. He was dubious about going for the role initially because it was such a departure from what he’d done in the past but he reasoned that change is good, especially for a jobbing actor. He originally read for the part of Gareth, which ultimately went to Mackenzie Crook, and it was only as he was leaving the audition that Gervais offered him the part of Tim.

‘There’s a brilliant ordinariness to Martin’s character, an endearing low-level grumpiness, and he was able to tap into that [in
The Office
],’ said the show’s producer, Ash Atalla, to
Guardian
journalist John Plunkett. ‘He is a very charming, slightly grouchy man-next-door who has become a superstar.’

Freeman appeared in fourteen episodes of the acclaimed series between 2001 and 2003. His first appearance was in the pilot and his last was in the
Christmas Special Part 2
, which aired on 27 December 2003. The
Christmas Specials
were hugely successful.

The Office
has become one of the most popular and respected programmes in the history of British comedy on television. It was first broadcast on 9 July 2001 on BBC2 and, due to low ratings, it was almost cancelled. However, word of mouth and positive reviews gained it a consistent fan base. Entirely fictional and scripted,
The Office
was filmed in a documentary-style (often called ‘mockumentary’), as the camera is acknowledged by the actors. It was created, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and follows the day-to-day lives of a group of office employees in the Slough branch of the fictional Wernham Hogg Paper Company. Gervais plays the main character, David Brent, the office manager. A successful US remake ran from 2005 to 2013.

It is interesting that the Americans eventually took such a liking to
The Office
and decided to remake it. Often, US audiences can be very curious about non-home-grown TV shows, as they are an insular country by nature. They may know such shows as the detective drama series
Inspector Morse
or the comedy
Keeping Up Appearances
and a few others but these are set in lovely English towns and villages where everyone has a well-do-do accent. Americans know little – if anything – about the working class areas of Britain and the TV series that come out of it. Brits know about rock ’n’ roll, jazz, blues, comic books, Hollywood movies and American TV but
it’s not something that is reciprocal. Americans know fewer British TV shows. Also, America is so big that it could claim to know about
The Office
but perhaps it’s only really New York and California and not the Mid-West or the South. Americans tend to take things they don’t quite understand and totally remake them into something else they can comprehend. When Americans remake British films (
Get Carter, The Italian Job
) and TV shows (
Cracker, Prime Suspect
) the results are usually bad.
The Office US
only worked after season one because the writers made it something other than a literal remake of the original British version.

Freeman’s personality suited the role of the straight man in
The Office
; he’s an actor who has never begged to be liked or laughed at.

He explained to
IGN
Filmforce
’s Ken P., ‘I suppose the tone of
The Office
fits that, absolutely, and I guess that’s why I’m in it – why they wanted me in it and why I wanted to be in it. Because it’s so subtle, and that’s the kind of sketch comedy I like. The Marx Brothers isn’t subtle, and that’s hilarious. There are a lot of things that aren’t subtle but work just as well, but I think I’m best suited to stuff that is…’

Freeman’s character in the show, Tim Canterbury, is a thirty-year-old sales representative whose sense of humour is very self-deprecating and ironic. He often jokes and flirts with the receptionist Dawn Tinsley (Lucy Davis). His office enemy is Gareth Kennan (Mackenzie Crook), whom Tim often plays practical jokes on to brighten up his otherwise tedious day. Tim, who seems to get along with everyone due to his sense of humour, humility and some good-natured traits, often jokes
with his boss, David Brent, although their relationship has mixed results, as Brent is an extreme character with childlike behaviour and narcissism. However, Tim is something of a pathetic and insecure character who lives a shallow life. He lives with his parents and dropped out of university, only to end up in a job he feels no passion or zest for.

The flirtatious relationship between Tim and Dawn goes through several transitions throughout the series and becomes something of a ‘will they/won’t they’ situation as the series progresses. However, Dawn is engaged to Lee (Joel Beckett), which prevents the work colleagues from deepening the feelings they have for each other. In the episode ‘Training Day’ Dawn and Lee have some relationship trouble, which Tim mistakenly believes means the end of their engagement, so he asks Dawn out and discovers that he was mistaken in his assumption. Tim jumps to his own defence by saying that he was only asking her out ‘as friends’. Tim and Dawn seem to drift apart during series two, especially as Tim gets a promotion and begins to take his job more seriously. He starts to date Rachel, a former Swindon employee. It’s obvious that Dawn becomes jealous over his new relationship and even his nemesis Gareth is jealous because he had feelings for Rachel before she started going out with Tim.

During the fifth episode of the second series, Dawn sells kisses for Red Nose Day and Tim makes a donation and they kiss. He is torn between his feelings for both Dawn and Rachel but he is not aware that Dawn and Lee plan to move to the US. Tim breaks up with Rachel and admits to Dawn his feelings for her but his confession is kept private from the cameras as he takes his mic off. Both characters are left depressed by the end
of the series.

As time passes, Tim becomes unhappy in his job, while Dawn and Lee are equally unhappy living in Florida. They fly back for the office reunion and she reignites her friendship with Tim. They finally become a couple after she receives a Christmas present from Tim telling her to hold on to her dream of becoming an illustrator. She returns to the Christmas party without Lee.

The Office
was an accurate representation of Freeman’s sardonic sense of humour, although he admitted to
Dark Horizon
’s Paul Fischer that he also adores old-school slapstick comedy: ‘It was certainly pretty close,’ he said in the interview. ‘I mean, my taste in humour does go from slapping you around the face in
Tom and Jerry
, to
The Office
, Larry Sanders, or to Harold Lloyd, from the silly to the clever. I love physical shtick, and all sorts of things that are done well.’

Freeman was nominated for Best Comedy Actor at the 2002 British Comedy Awards and then nominated for a BAFTA at the 2004 awards for Best Comedy Performance for his role in
The Office Christmas Specials
, for which he also won a British Comedy Award nomination.

‘I don’t like affectation,’ he said to
Esquire
’s Michael Holden in 2012. ‘I think my job is to help tell the story and anything else is just showing off, trying to win awards and I truly do think that’s silly.’

No one knew
The Office
was going to be so successful and have such an impact on modern popular culture. Freeman thoroughly enjoyed his time in
The Office
and said he knew from the minute he saw the rough cut that it was going to be a
great series: ‘It’s a funny thing,
The Office
, because millions and millions and millions and millions of people didn’t watch it,’ he said to the
Washington Post
’s Alona Wartofsky. ‘But culturally, it is more of a phenomenon than almost anything else I can remember as far as British television is concerned.

‘I think it had a bit more guts than other shows that have gone into that format,’ he added. ‘It was more uncomfortable to watch than a lot of things on television are.’

The Office
had picked up some famous fans. On a trip to LA – his first visit to Hollywood – for the Golden Globes in 2004, he met Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest of
This Is Spinal Tap
. ‘… how many people do they meet and say, “Oh, I loved your show”?’ Freeman said to
The Guardian
’s Stephanie Merritt. ‘I mean, I heard that Paul McCartney always taped
The Office
, but that doesn’t mean he feels the same way about me that I feel about the Beatles.’

His first trip to Hollywood freaked him out. He felt like it was its own planet, alien to the rest of the US, let alone the world. Hollywood represents fantasy; it is a world of its own making. Freeman is English and he loves London and his family and does not wish to pursue an LA lifestyle. One would imagine that life in LA can be very emotional. ‘If I began to like it out there, I’d think I was going mad,’ he admitted to Andrew Duncan of
Reader’s Digest
, ‘rather than chilling out and not having a chip on my shoulder. I give myself chips. It’s my way of keeping myself in check. There’s a streak in me that says, “Life is not all great. Keep vigilant”.’