As a child of no more than seven or eight, Christopher Eccleston saw an animated version of A Christmas Carol. It was his introduction to the Dickens classic and he was so taken with it, he says, that he started to draw it “quite obsessively. The scene where Scrooge arrives home and passes the Scrooge & Marley sign.” What was it that grabbed him? “The unpleasantness of him. I presume that all of us are aware of our duality. I think, from an early age, I was very aware of it. I thought I could be very good or I could be very nasty. I dwelled on that as a child quite a lot.”
Eccleston is about to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Jack Thorne’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, first performed at the Old Vic in 2017 and every year since. He has not seen previous productions, which he is thankful for. “I think I’d have been too intimidated.” We meet in a rehearsal room on the top floor of the London theatre. Eccleston is intense. It is not aggression: he is warm and funny, but there is something hawk-like about the planes of his face and his direct gaze. Partly because of his roles, his image has been one of either bristling male anger or forlornness, but the way he looks and the way he feels often don’t match up: there is a low-key joy to him that does not always come across. In 2016, he was hospitalised with severe clinical depression, but says he is content now. “Very happy with my relationship with my children, and very happy with this work. And happy to have got to nearly 60 in one piece.”
Eccleston, 59, has had a long day, but he is loving it, even if – having spent most of his career in TV and film – he is a little out of his comfort zone. “I always feel quite unfamiliar with theatre, a bit like I’m starting again,” he says. “This has been a very positive experience.” Most of the cast are 20 or 30 years younger than him. “And they can sing, dance and act – that kind of talent.” There is only admiration, no envy.
His career has spanned everything from landmark TV (including Our Friends in the North), to Hollywood films (Gone in 60 Seconds and Thor: The Dark World), to prestige theatre and rebooting Doctor Who. Yet in the past, he has admitted to impostor syndrome and spoken about feeling like an outsider. Does he still? “No, I have accepted finally that I’m an actor.” He laughs. “I seem to have kept working, by and large. It’s also about getting a sense of humour about it and realising perfection … it’s not possible.” Was there a moment when he accepted it? Perhaps as he was about to go on stage as Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company? “Well, we didn’t really deliver and I’m definitely trying to erase some Macbeth memories with this play,” he says with a smile. The 2018 production garnered middling reviews and during one performance, Eccleston fell off the stage. “But yeah, I think you have to pat yourself on the back.” He says becoming a father (he has two children, who are 11 and 10) pushed work into second place, and in doing so, brought a new lightness. “It’s not life or death. It was.”
Scrooge’s salvation gives us all hope, maybe more so now in an era that finds it hard to forgive. Does Eccleston believe in redemption? He exhales and pauses for so long that I think he is not going to answer: “I don’t know, yet,” he says, eventually. “I believe in a sort of reinvention, a rebirth, from my own experiences, being given a different … from the breakdown. Definitely, I’m a very different animal than I was, and I’ve drawn on that for this play. But whether that’s redemption …”
In 2020, he published his memoir, I Love the Bones of You, unflinching in places – he flays himself, almost, with his description of his body dysmorphia, the eating disorder he developed, and his subsequent breakdown – but also a wonderful insight into growing up in a working-class family in 1970s Salford, Greater Manchester, and the inequalities that kept generations of people down. His dad worked in a factory and his mum was a cleaner. His parents, clever and curious, had left school at 14, and their potential was never realised. Eccleston noticed that the women around him were also trapped. “I was terrified of marriage, I was terrified of factory work,” he says now. “It was just blackness to me – I know I sound melodramatic, but it was real.”
He wanted to be an actor, he says, because: “I wanted to show off. I wanted to drink, I wanted to meet women, I wanted to wear eyeliner. I definitely am a frustrated lead singer. Somebody should write a thesis on the influence of lead singers in rock bands on working-class actors. That element of theatre that they brought into the living room on Top of the Pops, all of them, men, women. What was Bowie doing but theatre?”
His parents supported his ambitions, and he has been vocal about the opportunities that are no longer open to people from his background. “Inevitably, capitalism has marched relentlessly on, and things like culture and accessibility have been monetised.” He had a grant and graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama with no student debt. “I’m kind of a dinosaur in that way, and that does inform the work you do.” Eccleston has always seen work, especially TV, as political, and has put in brilliant performances in the roles that mean the most to him, such as several Jimmy McGovern projects, including Hillsborough and Accused. He says it is “devastating” that generations coming after him don’t have the same opportunities. “I wish I’d been a little more canny about my career, a little more political, and got myself a stronger platform to do more about it.”
Does he think only working-class actors should play working-class parts? “No, but I think there should be a bit of positive discrimination. It’s far more acceptable for them to come down than for us to go up. But it’s the death of things, isn’t it?” He plays Fagin in the BBC series Dodger, and says that about the time the first series was broadcast last year, his casting as a Jewish character was questioned. He says that at least one Jewish actor “noted they didn’t object to non-Jewish people playing Jewish roles, [they would] just like it to be spoken about. Which I completely agree with. But if I could only play people like me, what’s the point? What Salman Rushdie recently said – that it’s the death of art.”
He hopes a Labour government would restore the arts, and access to them. “I mean, clearly we have to get the Tories out, and then see if Labour delivers.” Earlier this year, Eccleston performed at the final show at the Oldham Coliseum before it closed, stripped of Arts Council England funding. “It’s death to a sense of community,” he says of regional theatre closures. “Theatre is physically a place of coming together, and it’s spiritually a place to look at who we are and where we come from. And now theatre is becoming like opera.” A Christmas Carol is no different, he says; the most expensive tickets are more than £150. “We’re strangled, but fortunately we’re going to be rattling the bucket at the end,” he says. The money will go to City Harvest London, which redistributes food to vulnerable people.
There is an uncompromising side to Eccleston’s personality, and he hasn’t been afraid to challenge authority, to the point, he wrote in his book, where: “There are plenty of people in this industry who will never work with me again.” (Equally, he says, there are others who work with him repeatedly.) He was always acutely aware of different levels of power, including his own. “I always felt I was in a battle with some kind of morality,” he says now. “As soon as you interact with any kind of fame, and any smoke being blown up your backside, you’re in a moral territory.” And if people in positions of power were “being unpleasant to other people, you have a choice to make. Do I look the other way? I would always have to say something.” Sometimes it was almost “self-sabotaging”, he says. “I think I know how to pick my battles a bit more now, but I’d do the same again.”
Would he have had a different career if he had played the game, been more agreeable? “Yeah, but I would be an entirely different person. I think it’s present in the work if you’ve betrayed yourself, and other people. There’s a few vertebrae missing, some spine gone. Not that I haven’t sold out – I’ve done jobs for money, and I’ve done shite, and I’ve been in bad films and given bad performances.” But he says he hasn’t done the schmoozing or gone for easy advertising money. Did he never want fame? “Oh, I’m sure I did. I’m sure I’m still telling myself I’ll get an Oscar at 80. But starting to feel like you might be a decent actor, and you might get better, is far more valuable to me.”
One of the things that is so striking about Eccleston’s memoir is how hard he is on himself. “Yeah, public flagellation. I regret some of that,” he says. He isn’t sure he would have written the book if he had his time again. “I was still quite ill. I’ve only just realised that it’s taken till probably this spring to put that behind me. I was still very much in recovery.” Is he kinder to himself now? “Probably, yes.”
The collapse of Eccleston’s marriage was the catalyst for his breakdown, but he had been experiencing mental health issues for a long time. He had developed body dysmorphia and, by the time he was a young adult at drama school, living in London, he was anorexic. Looking back, it was partly about not feeling comfortable with himself. He was attracted to androgyny. “I always felt big, burly, obvious, and I wanted to make myself smaller. And that was about class as well.”
He felt crushed by stereotypes about being northern and working class, and not allowed to show his sensitivity and vulnerability. “I am very stereotypically male – or was, in terms of the conditioning that went on from society, though not so much my parents. Part of my running away from factory work and all that was about saying: ‘I may look like this, but I feel like this.’”
What happened this year to help him feel that he had moved on? It was partly time, he says, with his stay on a psychiatric ward receding into the distance. “I mean, I live a gilded life, but there are a lot of aftershocks when you’ve been hospitalised.” As well as high insurance premiums, there was concern that he would be seen as a liability, career-wise, but Eccleston put in typically storming performances in a wide range of roles, including on the HBO series The Leftovers, in which he starred between 2014 and 2017 and the 2016 BBC series The A Word. In January, he returns to HBO to star in the fourth series of HBO’s True Detective alongside Jodie Foster.
He had thought “quite a lot about the Hamlet quote: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ I did that thing of having a look at stoicism, and loving your fate.” He accepted that his fear that he might lose his children – either through his period of mental illness, or divorce – wasn’t real.
Being open about his mental health has helped him, he says. “And having had the experience of a breakdown, and recovering from it, does give you a great deal of self-respect. It definitely humanised me, and made me a lot more empathic about others.” Did it make him a better actor? “Possibly. Most of all I think it’s made me a better parent, being more at peace with myself.”
Being open about his experience of an eating disorder has also helped. “I realised the shame was more debilitating, especially being male.” He has to be aware of his body dysmorphia “a little bit”. Watching himself on screen, even publicity posters, can put him in danger of entering the wrong mindset. When a tabloid ran photographs of him topless while running, in the summer, it was difficult. “That was very triggering. But don’t take your shirt off when you’re running, and you’re my age, and you’ve got that history.” But he is now, “very good with it. I eat normally, although I probably exercise more than most people of my age, but it’s good for my mental health.”
Is it hard to be in an industry where physical appearance is scrutinised? “Not as hard as it was. I think I’ve accepted my imperfections.” Also, the world has changed, he says, with more openness, even if he is still one of the few famous men to have talked publicly about having an eating disorder. When people thank him for speaking out, it’s usually women who have experienced it with their sons or partners. “But still with blokes, no.” There remains a taboo about men admitting to it.
Is he happier now? “I am happy,” he says. “And excited about life. Certainly there was a lot of life-denying before. The eating disorder was imprisoning. Being in an industry and feeling like you shouldn’t be in it was imprisoning. I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for me, but it felt quite solitary.”
In A Christmas Carol, embodying an enlightened man with a second chance, Eccleston will be on stage, surrounded by a glorious ensemble, with singing and dancing. Does he need that audience, that applause? He thinks for a moment. Not since he had children, he says, but he adds that maybe he never did. “Only from myself really. I wanted to get free of my own punishment.”
• Christopher Eccleston is playing Scrooge in the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol, and Fagin in BBC’s Dodger, which is available on BBC iPlayer.
• In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808 801 0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
