A class act - Joseph Beattie

Published Friday 10 December 2004 at 13:00

Joseph Beattie relished the chance to play foppish school bully Flashman opposite Stephen Fry in ITV’s lavish drama Tom Brown’s Schooldays this Christmas, drawing on his own experiences at sixth-form to create the posturing villain

Actor Joseph Beattie is something of a rising star on the small screen, performing in a new adaptation of Colditz and Malice Afterthought as well as playing violent bully Harry Flashman in Christmas drama Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

He is the ultimate brute - nasty, vicious, bullying and vile. “All of that, and more,” agrees Beattie, “totally unpleasant and with absolutely no scruples at all, which makes Flashman marvellous to play. It’s my first lead role and it’s all been incredibly exciting, especially acting opposite Stephen Fry, who plays Dr Arnold, the new headmaster of Rugby School”.

Beattie, only 26, went for just two auditions for the role in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and admits that he was overjoyed when his agent called him to say that he’d landed the part. “I did a sort of jig in the middle of the pavement - people must have thought I was totally crazy. But I’ve long known that all you can do in an audition situation is to give it your very best shot. It’s you and you alone who is up there and it’s all down to luck if the producers or the director like you - or not. If you don’t get the part, well, it’s just a case of shrugging your shoulders and getting on with life and trying again.”

In ITV’s opulent and often very violent account of the Thomas Hughes novel which became an immediate bestseller in 1857, Flashman is the preening dandy to end all dandies. “The costumes were absolutely sublime,” admits Beattie, who today is dressed rather more conservatively in blue jeans, brown lace-ups, a horizontally striped V-neck jumper and an old jacket that has clearly seen better days. The only adornment is a small red metal school badge, labelled ‘hockey’. He grins and reveals: “It belonged to my mum, who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and we found it at the back of a drawer when she was having a good old clear out the other week. I’m wearing it for a bit of luck. And for the sheer fun of it”.

He says: “The clothes they gave me were fantastic - elegant and very brightly patterned fitted waistcoats, full top hats, tailored frock coats and some amazing silver canes, which Flashman uses to beat the younger boys. He’s the height of young fashion, elegant and bejewelled. He’s supposed to be in the fifth form but he’s far too grown up for his own good. He smokes, he drinks, he gambles and he knows no fear - even standing up to and being insolent to Dr Arnold himself.

“He fancies himself as a real cock of the walk, the ruler of the roost. And sadly, I had to hand back every single item of clothing at the end of the filming. The costumes - seriously - wouldn’t look out of place in a hip-hop video and next to Snoop Dogg. He’s such a fastidious perfectionist that he also wears a corset to give him extra posture. When I put it on, I immediately stood up a lot straighter and was actually about three inches taller than normal.”

At the core of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is Flashman’s appalling treatment of younger boys and his unrelenting bullying. “I can totally relate to that,” says Beattie, “because I’ve experienced a bit of bulling myself, being on the receiving end. I went to King Alfred’s School in Hampstead in London until I got my GCSEs and then for some reason best known to myself, I decided to leave and to go to a new place in north London. At King Alfred’s it was all extremely liberal and you could call the teachers by their first names, that sort of thing. Bob Hoskins sends his kids there and so does Sting. It’s not quite a hippy collective but it’s along those lines and learning is by encouragement. I was very happy there and did quite well. But then - foolishly - I decided to spread my wings. At the new place there was a very cliquey atmosphere and you had to fit in with one group or another.

“The emphasis from the kids was on what you wore - the right trainers, Armani jeans, that sort of thing and the lads weren’t that keen on people who didn’t really give a hoot about how you dressed. I made a few mates, thank God and they saved my bacon on a couple of occasions. It didn’t get into a fight thing - but almost.

“Really, it was a lot of posturing and attitude and it really reminded me of the way that male peacocks square up to each other. All in all a very good preparation indeed for our friend Harry Flashman.”

Taking a year out after school, and wondering if he really wanted to be an actor (he finally won a place at London’s Guildhall), he went to see an old friend, a casting director who told him that the best thing he could do was to get as many placements as he could with film companies and “to do any job I was offered, however menial I might think it was”.

He adds: “Before that, I’d been working in bars, scratching a living and mixing - and drinking - a lot of cocktails. And then one day it hit me - I had £25 left in the bank and three week’s rent to pay. So I took my friend’s advice and I did the lot. I ran messages, I made the tea, and I never stopped learning. I watched people setting up lights and sound and it was a vast learning curve for me. I loved every second of it. And I learned that those people work their backsides off.”

Joseph had landed a small but key role in the Albert Finney film The Browning Version, “playing a cocky schoolboy,” while in his teens and then, at Guildhall, he was cast in Velvet Underground. Now he’s on a winning streak with not only Tom Brown but a major part in the new Colditz TV series as First Lieutenant Johnny Barnes “who is everything that Flashman is not” and in the new film Malice Aforethought with Ben Miller, which is currently being shot in Dublin.

“But Flashman has been the springboard,” says Beattie. “He’s hateful - but then playing the villain is always the best part in any show.”

He says: “I actually read the first of the George MacDonald Fraser series of novels about him, which tell you what happened to him after his departure from Harrow. I found that very informative, because they do continue his immediate story. As for the original book itself, well I have to admit that I read up to the point where Flashman gets his comeuppance and then I gave up. I’m afraid that Hughes, typical of his time and class and upbringing, gets very very moralistic and he starts to preach at his readers. I couldn’t be doing with that. Sure, it’s a morality piece, but enough was enough for me.

“But what was fascinating was that I began to get inside his mind and started to see what made him the way he was, which I thought was important. I thought that here was this guy who was sent away from home at about the age of six, unwanted and unloved by his parents. He probably had very little indeed to do with his parents. And then I realised that, in order to survive in this nasty little almost exclusively male world, you either bully or get bullied yourself. And Flashman decided on the former course. He is the root of all that is evil at Rugby but when he leaves, everything that he knows which is familiar to him is taken away from him. He’s a bit of a lost soul at that point and you can almost - but not quite - feel sorry for him.”