![]() ![]() I think it was just one of those things where they’d already decided before I went in for the second audition. I’d been for two or three different parts, and each time I didn’t get them I’d think “I’m not getting these parts, they obviously think I’m rubbish.” Eventually I auditioned for Gendry and I thought the initial audition went quite well, but the recall was probably one of the worst auditions I’d ever done. Down the line I got called in again for different roles. I initially auditioned for the part of Jon Snow, and obviously didn’t get it. It’s a medieval drama, so they need a lot of British actors. How did Game of Thrones come about, then? Skins was never as outrageous as people made out, though kids have been doing those things for years. If I’d been at the younger end of the demographic - the fourteen or fifteen-year-olds who would sneak upstairs to watch it because you knew everyone would be talking about it at school the next day - I would have been thinking “God, are they the sort of parties I’m supposed to be having? Are those the drugs I’m supposed to be taking?” I’m sure we encouraged loads of kids to do things they probably shouldn’t have. In reality, and in retrospect, we absolutely would have influenced kids. ![]() Whenever we were asked if we were a bad influence on teenagers, I had what I thought was a really smart-arse answer, which was that Skins is a heightened version of reality and I think we need to give teenagers more credit for knowing the difference between a TV programme and real life. When the series came out we were doing quite a few interviews - there was the ad campaign, and it was causing a bit of a stir. Do you wonder about the influence the show had on them? There are loads of people hitting drinking age now who secretly watched Skins on their bedroom portables when they were younger. Not that Skins wasn’t always an exaggerated sense of reality, but it maybe went a touch too far. ![]() People are quite resistant to change, so the problem with the second generation of cast members was that the writers felt that they really had to pull out all the stops to win people over and I think it lost touch with reality a bit. It’s good that they took that decision out of our hands. I knew that even if Skins was successful I only wanted to do two seasons, but we had such a good time making it that if they’d offered a third season to us it would have been really hard to turn that down. It was such a bold move, getting rid of the first cast. I watched a couple of the generation that immediately followed us because Jack O’Connell - a fellow Television Workshop lad from Derby - was in it and I wanted to see how he was doing. I’m glad I did it, but I didn’t get any work out of it, basically. But really, when you’re there you still spend every day in a room with a casting director and a camcorder and the director is still just watching a video tape. I’m better at getting jobs if I’m actually in the room”. I had been sending audition tapes out there for six months or so you spend hours on them, send them with hope and excitement, and it feels like you’re just sending them off into this black hole. The great thing about the internet is that you can do auditions by Skype. I didn’t want to sacrifice that just because it was America - I wanted to hold out for something quality.ĭo you have to be based out there to get work? America is held up as the Holy Grail of the acting world, but at home I only wanted to do good stuff and I had a strong idea about what I wanted to do. You get one go at a scene, and you come out of it a bit bewildered, wondering what’s happened. You get to the audition, it’s packed and they’re running behind. You realise that there is a lot of shit - loads of really mediocre, rushed pilots - and you have to read three or four of them a day. So not only are you vying to get picked up, but you’re hoping to be picked up by something that’s going to actually get produced. So many pilots get made, and only a very small percentage of them actually get picked up and made into a series. ![]() I went during pilot season, when there’s an exodus of British actors who all go over to LA it’s a cattle market, really. You have to do that first trip out there to see what it’s like, and to give you a better understanding of what you want from your career and how to go about achieving it. LA can be such an intimidating place, especially when you’re twenty one. I had a great time, which was mostly down to bumping into Tony Kebbell on the street on my second day there – how weird is that? He took me under his wing, showed me round, took me out. When we last interviewed you, three years ago, you were in LA touting your wares off the back of Skins. ![]()
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