Tom Goodman-Hill
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Age: 38
Currently: Playing Sir Lancelot plus a number of other roles in Monty Python’s Spamalot. “I play all the Cleese parts,” says Goodman-Hill, referring to original Python John Cleese, “with the exception of the knight of Ni, which is a [Michael] Palin role.” Goodman-Hill is a long-established actor, but he’s fresh to musicals. “I didn’t have the guts to do one before,” he admits. “I didn’t think I was the sort of person who could pull it off, to be honest. I needed something like Spamalot to come around before my agent persuaded me it might be a good idea to try do one.”
Hometown: “I grew up in Newcastle, which I left when I was 18 to go to university,” says the actor. He trained as a primary school teacher at Warwick University, earning a BA in Drama and English with qualified teacher status. He did more drama than English or teaching: “Warwick was the most fantastic place to be if you wanted to do extra-curricular theatre. I spent four years immersing myself in that, and scraping through my teacher training.” After graduation, he taught around Coventry, as a “supply teacher” (working on temporary postings), but his best friend, Mike Punter, a playwright and director, kept sidetracking him from fulltime positions and luring him back to the theatre.
Taking the Plunge: Goodman-Hill took the plunge and moved to London when Punter invited him to do a show. Together with fellow actor Julian Rhind-Tutt (currently to be found at the National in Landscape with Weapon), Punter and Goodman-Hill formed a theatre company that was devoted exclusively to doing Punter’s plays. “It was fantastic fun doing fringe theatre,” he recalls. “But you are completely reliant on you own ability to be a good businessman as well as an actor so you can raise the money to keep it going.” They all ended up moving on professionally. “Mike was taken on by a leading literary agency, Jules finished his training at Central, and I got a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School to go and do a two-year acting course,” he says. The decision to go there was partly dictated by the fact that his wife was already training there in stage design, “so I sold everything I possessed and did bar work to get through the course,” he adds. He ended the course, he says, with a “massive debt”, but it was “instantly paid off when I did an ad and then joined the cast of An Inspector Calls.”
Full Circle: Joining that production in its acclaimed return to the West End’s Garrick Theatre made for an auspicious West End debut. “Stephen Daldry decided to revisit it and redirect it, adding the rain and the false curtain drop so it was even more cinematic, and it was nice not to take over in it but be part of it being relaunched, so everyone came to see it again,” Goodman-Hill enthuses. He followed it up by being reunited with Punter, who was commissioned by Paines Plough to write a play called The Wolves with a part especially written for Goodman-Hill. “Things came nicely full circle.” In those days, he really was a fresh face. “It’s weird to be thought of as one now,” he laughs, “but I suppose I am for musicals, and you can’t get a more high-profile one than Spamalot, so I feel I have suddenly burst onto the scene.”
Tom Goodman-Hill in Spamalot
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From Cook to Cleese: Though he’s done lots of classical work with the likes of English Touring Theatre, the Royal Exchange at Manchester, Birmingham Rep and the RSC, it was while preparing for another comic role that the one in Spamalot came up. He was about to play Peter Cook in Pete ‘n’ Dud, a play about the fraught offstage relationship of Cook and Dudley Moore, in the West End production of an Edinburgh fringe hit last year. But then a call came for Spamalot. “Cook and Mike Nichols, who directed Spamalot, had been good friendsk,” Goodman-Hill notes. “Cook had given Mike his first job directing at the Establishment Club in New York. So it seemed like serendipity that I should be asked to audition for Nichols, too. I was cast in Spamalot before we even opened Pete ‘n’ Dud.”
Something Went Right: “I walked onto the stage of the Gielgud Theate, and it was the single most terrifying experience of my life,” the actor says of his Spamalot audition. The stalls seemed half full. Mike [Nichols] and Eric [Idle] were there, grinning up at me, and there was a sea of people behind them. I was in a state of abject terror! But something went right and I had fun. I had chosen to sing ‘I’m a Gnu,’ which was suitably absurd, because my dad would jump around the living room singing it. That seemed to work.” The good times continue to roll. “It’s huge fun to do. I would have gone completely insane by now if it wasn’t because it’s exhausting, too. It’s the heaviest two hours to spend onstage, because it’s really hard work.” The hard work has affected him physically. “I’ve lost something like two stone since I joined the show,” he says. “I’ve dropped six sizes and have had to renew all my clothing, but it’s fantastic fun”. Has he met Cleese, whose roles he plays? “No, he’s the one Python who didn’t make it over for the opening. But I hear his voice onstage every night, since he plays the voice of God.”
[AD]Family Man: Goodman-Hill juggles his theatrical commitments with his responsibilities as the father of two children, Joe (who is nearly 11), and Ellen (9), with his wife Kerry. “I adore the theatre and love doing it, but when you’ve got a young family, you start to think I need to earn some proper money,” he admits. “Doing Spamalot is one of the few theatre jobs you can afford to do with a family. I don’t know how the hell I would have made it this far if I was doing purely subsidised theatre.”