We haven’t seen a great deal of Trevor Eve lately, but the 73-year-old actor is back on TV screens next week in I, Jack Wright playing the drama’s eponymous hard-hearted and capricious businessman, whose death in the opening minutes leaves a spiralling family saga in his wake. The scriptwriter Chris Lang wanted someone who could command the screen for a few minutes and then loom menacingly over the action for the remaining six episodes.
It’s great casting because Eve could probably loom in his sleep. He has been a powerful presence in British theatre, film and television for more than 50 years and has been working consistently since he landed his first job at the Liverpool Everyman on December 31, 1973 (a date he has not forgotten).
His talent was spotted early by Laurence Olivier, who encouraged Eve, then in his early twenties, setting him on his way to winning two Olivier awards (for Children of a Lesser God in 1982 and Uncle Vanya in 1997) and an array of successful film and TV roles, including the down-at-heel PI in the late-1970s drama Shoestring and DSI Peter Boyd in the Noughties hit Waking the Dead.
It has been quite the career for a Birmingham boy, who was raised by his Welsh mother, Elsie, and his dad, Stewart, a drinks wholesaler. The handsome, suntanned face, beautifully coiffed grey hair and smart jacket and trousers of the man sitting before me in the offices of his publicist in Hammersmith, west London, shows how far he has come since he ditched architecture training for acting.
He has also been married for 45 years to the actress Sharon Maughan (star, among other things, of those famous Gold Blend coffee ads), who now runs her own skincare company. They have three grown-up children: two sons, Jack and George, who work in the creative industries and one daughter, the actress Alice Eve.
Life is good, you might think. But with a long career in the gossipy world of acting comes a reputation. Driven and uncompromising, some say, others use less flattering words. Perfectionist is the one I have heard a lot. Is that a badge he is happy with?
“Well, it’s a badge that I take, if it’s in the positive sense. It’s when it gets transferred into ‘difficult’ that I take objection, because the people who describe me as difficult in the past have usually been incompetent at what they do.”
Ah, yes, the d-word. Eve admits to scrutinising scripts and asking for reshoots on many of his TV projects. And while he knows it isn’t always appreciated, he’s not sorry. “Considering the money that is spent, sometimes people say there’s no need to shoot something again and you think, ‘Wow, I wonder if the British public could hear that when they are paying their licence fee?’”
It’s a subject he warms to, with the pugilistic relish of a man who, while making a documentary for BBC Wales in 2011, discovered that his Welsh grandpa Charlie was a bare-knuckle fighter who often found himself on the wrong side of the law. Eve is law-abiding, but he’s certainly a fighter. Does his reputation irritate him? “It really, really f***ing annoys me. Yeah. Irritating? No. It really annoys me because it’s wrong.”
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Olivier remains his guiding light. He took Eve under his wing after the young actor graduated from Rada in 1973, introducing him to directors such as Franco Zeffirelli and actors like Paul Newman and hosting long lunches where he would hold court and young Trevor would mainly listen.
Their friendship was warm and inspiring and helped him secure parts, including in John Badham’s 1979 film Dracula, where he played Jonathan Harker to Olivier’s Van Helsing. Eve loved him. Still does. What did he teach him?
“Hard work, diligence, a kind of perfectionism, and he was like a tiger, to get through what he believed in. It set me in certain areas on the wrong course, because I just fought my corner for what I believed. He really respected acting.”
He remembers a moment while filming Dracula when Olivier “went absolutely berserk” after Eve was told to get on with a scene because the film was “not f***ing Hamlet”. For Olivier, every part had value, Eve says.
“You have the right … if you’re doing something then do it to the absolute best of your ability. If you could actually spend 20 minutes making something better, then spend the time and make it better. I don’t do it any more. For the last ten years I haven’t opened my mouth … because I like to work. It’s very easy to get not employed in the industry.”
Does he think he has lost roles because of his reputation? “Oh, do I think so!” he says with indignant, sarcastic emphasis. “Yeah. And I regret it hugely, which is why I’ve kept my mouth shut for ten years. I don’t listen to rumour, reputation and all those things. People go, ‘They’re really awful, they’re so rude,’ [then] you get to work with them and they’re usually delightful.’’
He still runs his own small production company, Projector Pictures, which has four projects in development, so he hears gossip about other actors in his casting meetings. People enjoy bringing others down, he suggests. “It is much better for someone to be awful than really lovely. It’s staggering what people say. She’s difficult, or she’s unpleasant, he’s unpleasant. It’s rotten to get a label and then it sticks.”
He was happy to walk away from Waking the Dead in 2011 after nine series. He says the BBC got a new head of drama who had their own agenda and proposed cuts to the budget that he believes would have compromised the show’s quality.
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“If you’re the lead actor in something … you are the face on the screen. So really your investment is huge compared to somebody who’s coming on just for two weeks or three or four weeks and they’re gone. If you go on someone’s job and they’ve written a script and they’re directing or whatever, and they’ve got the vision … you’ve got someone else who’s maintaining the standard, that’s bliss.”
He is less sanguine about ITV’s decision not to recommission the drama series Kidnap and Ransom (in which he played the hostage negotiator Dominic King) in 2012 after two series. Given the vogue for reboots, would he resurrect any of his old dramas?
“You’d need someone with a lot of energy to do a Waking the Dead now,” he sighs, but says he has not lost his passion for acting. He had an epiphany while filming the Sky drama A Discovery of Witches during lockdown and was put into isolation twice at a time when people were dying of Covid.
“I thought, so actually acting is now a matter of life and death. I’m acting and it’s not just my job. I’m actually risking my life because that was the point. And then I had a grandchild …. born a year later. And I just had a kind of epiphany about how much acting has meant to me in my life. It’s an enormous amount, really, to the detriment of everything else. Not detriment, [but] it’s been massive.”
He has also changed agents, returning to Duncan Heath, the Independent Talent Group bigwig who first represented him in the 1970s after things “went wrong” with his former representative. “There’s a lot of things cleared out of my life that haven’t functioned,” he says.
He is keen to take on more work in film, theatre and TV but, while he certainly has the grey beard for King Lear, the role he gets asked a lot about, it won’t be happening any time soon. “I did 30 years in the theatre playing all those big guns, and I’m not one of those people who can go on and just drift through. I wake up in the morning and I put 100 per cent into it. I’m wiped. I didn’t have a life for years.
“I have a different attitude … I could never take the responsibility for something like Waking the Dead now. I wouldn’t have the energy to do it six days a week, every day for months, nor would I have the energy to take on the people that you have to, pushing it all uphill. I’m a different person now,” he says. “I have kind of mellowed.”
I, Jack Wright is on U&Alibi on Apr 23 at 9pm
