The Stage

Brief encounters - Phil Daniels

Published Thursday 24 February 2005 at 14:25 by Rob Driscoll

Phil Daniels is currently starring as morally bankrupt solicitor Bruce Dunbar in the terrestrial debut of BBC3 hit Outlaws. Rob Driscoll hears how he is about to hit the big screen opposite The Sopranos heavyweight James Gandolfini

Over the past year Phil Daniels has played, in succession, a low life villain, a copper and a lawyer. “Maybe I’m getting more corrupt with every role I play,” he grins mischievously.

It all adds up to a particularly fruitful period in the career of this ever versatile actor, who has garnered something of a reputation for playing quirky, oddball and always colourful characters, from early classics like Scum, to Mike Leigh’s Meantime, to his unforgettable, savage food critic in Holding On.

Not that such a healthy variety of parts has come that easily to him. “It’s difficult for someone like me, who’s done a cult film like Quadrophenia,” says 46-year-old Daniels. “People don’t want you to be anything else but that film was 25 years ago, so I’m always attracted to very different parts.”

The recent hat-trick of wildly contrasting roles comprised his bad guy in The Long Firm, last summer’s acclaimed BBC2 gangster drama, a detective superintendent in BBC1’s Waking the Dead, followed by his current starring role as streetwise defence lawyer Bruce Dunbar in Outlaws, last year’s BBC3 success, now being rewarded with a terrestrial run on BBC2 on Sunday evenings.

Filmed in Bolton but set somewhere unspecifically northern, this 12-part series created by Steve Coombs is a darkly comic dissection of the criminal justice system, seen through the cynical eyes of Dunbar, a quick-witted, ambulance-chasing duty brief for whom time is of the essence and legal aid pays by the hour not by the case, so just don’t ask him to care too much about his clients.

The series is set in the fast paced world of the magistrates’ court, where offenders are processed through the system, released, fined, bailed, sentenced or referred to Crown Court. When Dunbar’s partner pops his clogs, idealistic trainee Theodore Gulliver (Ray Emmet Brown) arrives, determined to do what is morally right and not cut corners. Cue a fascinating clash of moral and ethical values between earnest rookie and world-weary mentor.

“That’s the nucleus of the show, my relationship with Ray’s character,” says Daniels. “Who’s the more effective, the seen-it-all-before veteran or his upright by-the-book junior?”

Daniels was immediately drawn to the series precisely because it isn’t the run of the mill cops and judges show. Like many of its BBC3 stablemates, it’s rude, irreverent and often politically incorrect.

“When I got the scripts, I actually went ‘Wow’,” says Daniels. “It’s about something that’s relevant and interesting. It keeps you on your toes. It’s also got something of that pacy American style lacking in a lot of British law dramas, lots of walk and talk scenes that move the action away from desks and offices - and I love all that.”

Perhaps the strongest draw for Daniels were the many scenes of interaction for his character Dunbar with his motley crew of clients, who tend to be juvenile shoplifters, bungling burglars and drunken drivers - the sad, the mad, the hardly bad and the rarely dangerous. “All the kind of characters I’ve grown up playing,” he comments with a raucous laugh.

“I also know a couple of solicitors, so I talked to them. But I kind-of had a feeling about what it would be about, knowing a lot of kids, coming from where I’m from. I’ve played a lot of the parts that the kids are playing, so that was interesting, to turn the other cheek and be on the other side of the law.”

Daniels is hoping that a second series of Outlaws will follow. “It’s all in the melting pot at the moment but they’d better tell us soon,” he says. Not that he is sitting around twiddling his thumbs - in February he starts work on a feature film called Kill, Kill, Faster, Faster, alongside Sopranos star James Gandolfini and Robert Carlyle, to be shot in Dublin.

“All I can say about that is that I play Robert Carlyle’s alter-ego,” he says. “It sounds a bit weird but I like weird.”

Daniels relishes bouncing from television to cinema to the stage. His last theatre work was a short run just before Christmas at the Royal Court Upstairs, in a play called Fresh Kills. “That was another weird one,” he smiles. “It was set in Statton Island, New Jersey and I played a guy falling in love with a young boy and his wife finds out, the kid comes to haunt him and in the end kills himself.

“Short runs are nice but that was maybe too short, just two or three weeks. It was part of a writer’s season. If the play is good, a long run is great because you get to find out more interesting things about the character. Theatre is a good discipline, it’s where it all comes from and that’s where you learn to act. You temper it for film or TV acting.”

* Outlaws is on BBC2 on Sundays at 10pm.