It’s funny how life works out. Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann had left school and was working in a shoe shop when he bumped into his old schoolteacher, Joe Hartley, who had given him the lead role in a school production of Antony and Cleopatra. Feeling McGann was wasting his talents fitting shoes, Hartley suggested he apply to Rada – which lead to a part in the snooker drama Give Us a Break opposite Robert Lindsay, then the lead role in Alan Bleasdale’s controversial first world war drama The Monocled Mutineer.
The rest is history. McGann went on to star as Marwood, the eponymous I to Richard E Grant’s Withnail in 1987 and then was cast as the eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV film, Doctor Who (the first attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation).
McGann is now starring in a period gothic gangster thriller, The Undertaker, opposite Tara Fitzgerald and Lily Frazer, as a mild-mannered funeral director who gets caught up in a power-grab by a local gangster. To that end, McGann will be here to take your questions. Do ask about Withnail and Doctor Who, but don’t forget all his other roles. On TV he has been in everything from the ITV historical war drama Hornblower to Jonathan Creek, Holby City and Waking the Dead. In the theatre, he has done Much Ado About Nothing and The Seagull. And definitely ask him about Lesbian Vampire Killers from 2009. He’ll like that for sure. *wink emoji* Leave your questions in the comments below, and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music.
• The Undertaker is released on 3 November, with a special screening at Watershed in Bristol on 17 October
