The British movie Tucked is released in the UK today. It has already won, among a clutch of other awards, the Best Narrative Feature Award at the Naples International Film Festival and both a Grand Jury Prize and an Audience Award at Outfest in Los Angeles.
“Like a jewel (and) Derren Nesbitt is its biggest sparkle…”
In the UK, the Guardian calls it a “touching, unexpectedly funny end-of-life drama with a terrific performance by 83-year-old Derren Nesbitt.”
It has pretty accurately been called “a slice of life smeared with glitter, laughter and tears” and the Hollywood Reporter singled out the “two splendid performances” at the heart of it. In London, the Financial Times writes: “Tucked is small but bright and multi-faceted: like a jewel. Nesbitt is its biggest sparkle”.
The official synopsis says it is:
A raw and tender drama about an ageing 80 year old drag queen who forms an unlikely friendship with a younger queen, both struggling with their own issues of gender identity and mortality. As they discover more about each other, they realise how to truly be themselves.
Nesbitt stars with 27-year-old Jordan Stephens, one half of successful British hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks.
Comedian Steve Oram turns up as a drug dealer and comedian Brendon Burns wrote some of the on-stage gags and appears briefly as a club MC.
But the movie centres on Derren Nesbitt’s extraordinarily sensitive performance as the grumpy, foul-mouthed drag artist Jackie, diagnosed with terminal cancer, with only six or seven weeks left to live and his performance is an award-deserving revelation.
IMDB currently describes Derren as:
A rather intriguing British actor who first appeared on UK cinema & TV screens in the late 1950s, and quickly found steady work as a rather unpleasant or untrustworthy individual. His cold, yet cunning features had him appearing in guest roles on many UK TV series.
Derren Nesbitt seemed to be all over TV
It seemed like he was in everything you ever saw in the 1960s and 1970s, on TV and in movies.
His father was Harry Nesbitt, a comedian and music hall artist who came from South Africa with his brother Max and they performed as a duo on stage.
Derren’s mother was also in the music halls as a chorus girl.
Derren was trained at RADA where he won the prestigious Forbes-Robertson Shakespearian Acting award.
From there, he joined Peter Hall’s repertory company.
I met him a couple of days ago in London.
JOHN: So the casting for Tucked… Here is a film with a rather grumpy, foul-mouthed transvestite. Who is the first person I would think of to play that role? Suave, 4-times-married Derren Nesbitt? Erm. No. Not an obvious choice.
DERREN: (LAUGHS) Exactly, because I usually kill people. Jamie Patterson the writer/director and I became vaguely friendly and I thought: He’s very talented. Then he asked me: “Do you want to play a drag queen and a trans-crosser?” So I said: “This script I gotta read!” I read it and I thought: Absolutely! This is really good!
And I’m glad I’ve been proved right on two points.
One: Jamie has now been signed-up to one of the biggest agents in Hollywood.
Two: the film has done magnificently well in Los Angeles.
JOHN: Great acting. Emotion with your eyes.
DERREN: Well, you can never be anybody else. So what you have got is me as a drag queen in those circumstances. What would I be in those circumstances? And that’s what you try and do.
JOHN: He’s a grumpy old bloke, but he’s sympathetic.
DERREN: Well, he’s a human being. The hardest thing in the world is to present true reality on the screen, but that’s the name of the game.
JOHN: For your role as a nasty Nazi in the Clint Eastwood movie Where Eagles Dare, you reportedly talked to an ex-Gestapo man to get the feel for your screen character.
Did you do any research for your role in Tucked?
DERREN: Well no, not really. Everybody seems to thing you’ve gotta do an awful lot of research. But not in this particular case, because my family were very famous music hall stars. I was in theatres from the age of 5 and, later on, was seeing drag queens and all the rest. So it didn’t take very much for me to ‘become’ a drag queen.
JOHN: Your father was a comedian and your mother was a dancer.
DERREN: She was a chorus girl, but my father and his brother were the biggest stars in London in 1928. They only retired in the mid-1950s.
JOHN: You were you born in London.
DERREN: I was born at the Finsbury Park Empire. Actually born in the theatre.
JOHN: So you were bound to end up an actor…
DERREN: Well, I was very fortunate. I left RADA and I’d won everything there…
JOHN: …and then you worked for Peter Hall.
DERREN: Yes. He chose me to go to the Oxford Playhouse. But he only did one play there and moved on and then I was very fortunate. I think the movie Victim was the turning point. And I have never done an audition.
JOHN: You’ve still never done an audition?
DERREN: No. Never. People have seen me in other things and thought: He’s the one.
A film very much of its time – 1975
JOHN: You must, at some time, have wanted to be more than an actor because there was The Amorous Milkman in 1975, which you wrote, produced and directed.
DERREN: Yes, I did and, afterwards, I thought: Well, I’ve done it and that’s good enough. I wrote the novel, then wrote the screenplay from the novel. But then, afterwards, I felt: I’ve done it. So why do it again?
JOHN: Any further writing ambitions?
DERREN: So many people have asked me to write my autobiography…
JOHN: You should.
DERREN: I did. I finished it about two months ago. I thought: Who would want to read it? But I wrote it more as a cathartic thing. Whether or not anyone wants to publish it, I have no idea.
I was in the War in London. I was in the Blitz, right in the middle of it. My first memory is seeing a baby’s head in the gutter. I saw the dead bodies and god knows what else. So I start from then.
Well, in fact, the first thing I ever really remember was my mother throwing me in a bush as a German Messerschmitt came over. (LAUGHS) I never quite trusted her after that!
It is really less of an autobiography and more of a book that happens to be true.
JOHN: What’s the difference between a book and an autobiography?
DERREN: I don’t know. I think an autobiography is a little… a little bit… self…
JOHN: Navel-gazing?
DERREN: Yeah… Yeah… And I’m more interested in knowing the person. I’ve read a lot of biographies and autobiographies and I want to know the person.
JOHN: People are not interested in facts as such; they’re interested in other people.
DERREN: Yes. It’s boring (if it is just facts).
Funnily enough, years and years ago, Richard Harris – an old friend of mine who was a great drunk – was asked by someone to do an autobiography and he took an advert in The Times saying: :”If anybody could remind me what I was doing between…” (LAUGHS)
JOHN: You said your father retired in the 1950s… After that, he did nothing?
“Lew Grade had a huge affair with my mother”
DERREN: He did everything. He was involved in so many different things. Including the Grade Organisation. Lew Grade was a great, great friend of his. In fact, Lew Grade had a huge affair with my mother and told her: “If he doesn’t marry you, I will marry you and adopt him (Derren).” (LAUGHS) Maybe the biggest tragedy of my life!
Years and years later, I went to the South of France where my mother used to live – she had by then married someone richer than my father – and she asked me: ”How is Lew?”
I told her, “it’s LORD Grade now.”
“Oh,” she said, “many years ago, he asked your father to put some money into some new company he had.”
I said: “Pardon?”
“You know,” she said. “Television. You know, you sell beans and things on television.”
And I said: “Ah!… What happened?”
She said: “Well, your father wouldn’t take Lew seriously. If Leslie Grade had asked him, he would have put money in.”
JOHN: And this company was ATV?
DERREN: Yes, my father could have put £10,000 in at the beginning and…”
JOHN: … and that would have been like putting money into MicroSoft when it started up.
DERREN: Mmmmm….
… CONTINUED HERE …
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