The
neatly-groomed, down-to-Earth Englishman sitting in a restaurant in London's Covent Garden doesn't much look like a
shaggy medieval peasant or a bald-pated inmate of a deep-space prison colony.
It's only when actor Clive Mantle stands that his uncommonly tall frame calls
to mind Little John, the part he played for three years in Robin of
Sherwood, or William, his character in Alien 3.
His two roles are worlds away from each other, literally
and figuratively. Little John, despite his outlawry, was a model of kindness,
but in Alien 3, Mantle says, "I'm playing a heinous criminal. In
fact, there are about 12 or 15 of us, the last remaining prisoners on a
prison asteroid, which is hurtling through space. It was a hard labor prison,
which is about the best place to send all your hardened, nastiest pieces of
work. We're not nice people."
Mantle's path to that prison planetoid began at age 17,
when he was accepted into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. A
stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art followed. "I was an actor who
needed drama school. I used to be so excited about being on stage that
I would just run down to the front and shout; they had to knock that out of
me. Physically, just being six-foot-five-and-a-half, I'm not one of life's
gazelles. But having said that, I was made aware that I can be
gazelle-like if I so choose. If I hadn't been to drama school, I would have
just slouched around and bent over double and apologized for my height."
The tendency of casting directors to equate height with
menace posed a certain problem early in Mantle's career. There were few small
parts for not-small actors. "Height is a very strange thing," he
muses. "If you're literally playing the milkman or the butler or
something like that, they'll all think, 'Now why is the butler so big?
There must be a reason - ah, he's gonna come back later and kill someone.'
Then, you don't. It worries an audience in a strange way if someone my height
is playing a small part."
On the other hand, height can be an asset when under
consideration as a potential merry man. "Esta Charkham, who cast Robin
of Sherwood, was heavily involved with the National Youth Theatre, I
suppose she had seen me come up through that, and then, coincidentally, I was
doing Robin Hood, a very good version by Dave and Toni Arthur, at the Young Vic Theatre. Esta
brought [Sherwood producer] Paul Knight and Kip [Sherwood
creator / writer] to see it one afternoon, completely unknownst to me - and I
got a phone call the January before the first series started to go out to
Pinewood [Studios] to meet Paul. I walked into his office, and he just hugged
me and said, 'Hi, how you doin'?' as if I was completely his best friend. We
started talking very positively about the series, its shape and mood. I was
looking to see Esta for some sort of signals and some support, 'cause it was
all going a bit too fast for me. I left with my mouth open after having
another huge bearhug from Paul Knight, and I think a day later, they rang and
said, 'We want you for the series.' As far as I know, I was the only
one seen for Little John."
Sherwood Stunts
Although his theater portrayal of Little John was a factor
in his TV casting, Mantle played the two incarnations quite differently. On
stage, "Little John wasn't quite the village idiot, but he was much
simpler than the TV version. He was a bit of a bully, undisciplined, vulgar,
not much of a sense of humor, but got away with it because he was big; not a
nasty person, but not very clever. Whereas in the TV version, he was
headstrong and would go over very belligerent and strong-willed, but he
ultimately knew that Robin had all the best ideas. And I think he was nicer,
more sentimental, had more common sense."
Mantle was also conscientious about Little John's prowess
with his weapon of choice, the quarterstaff. "[Stunt coordinator] Terry
Walsh developed a new style of quarterstaff fighting for me. He didn't like
the old bit," Mantle illustrates his point by miming someone holding a
big stick with one hand at either end, "so he said I should use it like
a rifle and bayonet. It's far more effective. If you have a 10-foot stick, no
one with a sword can come within eight or 10 feet of you. So, I used it end
on."
He only used a sword "when logically I couldn't have
taken the quarterstaff into the castle or I hadn't been seen with it climbing
the castle battlements. Thus, I had to have a sword when I got to the other
side. It would also have been unfair to the other characters - if I had a
sword, I would have wanted to be excellent at it. In a sense, the swords were
the trademarks of Will Scarlet, Nasir and Robin. Whenever anyone else had a
quarterstaff, I would make sure that they weren't as good at the quarterstaff
as Little John. Otherwise, where's his place in the pecking order?"
The quarterstaff figured in several minor mishaps during
filming. "In the famous fight with Michael Praed [who played Robin of
Loxley] on the log across the river, my quarterstaff ended up in his private
parts, so to speak." Fortunately, Praed recovered after a few minutes.
"Funnily enough, when Jason [Connery, who played Robert of Huntingdon,
the series' second Robin Hood] took over, I had a quarterstaff fight with
him. He literally forgot to put his quarterstaff above his head. I was
three-quarters of the way through the swing and I tried to pull it back, but
a little egg-shaped Tom-and-Jerry shape appeared on the top of Jason's head.
And he never forgot to put his quarterstaff up again.
"On Robin, the fights were very safe under
Terry Walsh's expert guidance - but you can't help it. If you do 26 episodes
with two fights in each episode, you end up with nicks, scapes, cuts, scabs
and sprains."
Minor wounds were sometimes handed out in sequences in
which the outlaws as a group battled large numbers of enemies simultaneously.
"Sometimes it could get a bit crowded. Directors like to pack the frame
a bit, so if they've featured your fight in close-up or mid-shot, you're then
suddenly in the back of someone else's fight that's in mid-shot and the
stuntmen [who played the merries' opponents] are completely knackered by this
time, so they say." Mantle adopts a weary, pleading tone, "'Just do
it at half-pace.' The actors always wanted to do it full-throttle. And that's
when mistakes can happen; you get two different speeds going, and that's
completely wrong. But, by and large, I think we were fairly
accident-free."
Merry Men
The on-screen camaraderie between the merry men was
mirrored off-camera. "Everyone hit it off right from the word go; it was
fantastic. Because we were on different locations all the time, our only
constant was this yellow Port-o-Cabin. We would end up in this thing for at
least an hour a day. There were no chairs in it, we just used to lie
in our costumes on the floor - it was a pitiful existence, almost like a load
of caged animals," he laughs.
"We talked about that day's scenes, how we would play
them and what we would like to do. We would rehearse them - this was all
before we had stepped before the cameras and before the cameras and before
the director knew what we were going to do. And so, we wouldn't present it as
a fait accompli but we would say, 'We've had this great idea of how
we're going to play the scene,' do it for whoever the director was and they
would either say, 'I hadn't quite seen it that way,' or 'Oh, yeah, that's
good, that's better than the way I had seen it.' Sometimes it was an
amalgamation of how they saw it and how we saw it."
The cast and crew's high spirits were preserved for
posterity on an outtake reel, which included scenes of the actors suddenly
bursting into musical numbers. "I was always too nervous that we were
wasting film or that we would be sacked. I shouldn't have been so nervous,
'cause everyone enjoyed it so much, but I was always saying, 'No, no, we
can't do that,' and Ray [Winstone, who played Will Scarlet] would say, 'Oh
shut up, of course we can. We'll do the scene, and then we'll break into the
James Bond theme.' If Ray started, then we all joined in and pretended that
we were always convinced that it was a good idea, once one person had
laughed. But you know, Ray just has no fear."
Not all memories are quite so fond. "I wore the most horrendous
wig for two episodes,"Mantle admits, "I had just come out of Of
Mice and Men, and I had a 1930s American haircut, which I don't think
would have mattered. But they said, 'You can't be Little John without long
hair and a beard.' so for two episodes, I wore this wig. It had a personality
all its own; it was like a dead poodle on my head. And it affected the whole
of my performance. I would try and hide behind Phil Rose [who played Friar
Tuck], I would be doing everything I could to have my back to the camera. I
was mortified."
Mantle and his Sherwood co-workers had
"discovered a whole new lifestyle that we became accustomed to and
really wanted to continue; we didn't want it to dry up." They were all
very sorry to see Robin of Sherwood end - and startled, to put it
mildly, to find that for many viewers, it hadn't ended. "When we
go to [conventions in] America, it's unbelievable.
There were conventions in Britain, which
were good and well-attended and people were very interested, but it's nothing
compared with the interest in America.
They're great supporters. As an Englishman, it's very humbling - also very
baffling."
Perhaps inevitably, Mantle was called in to audition for Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves. "I went in to meet [director] Kevin Reynolds, and
I read from the script and did it in my best Darbyshire accent. He said,
'Yeah, that's very good. Tell me, what accent was that?' And I said, 'Well,
it's Darbyshire.' And he said, 'Why were you doing a Darbyshire accent?' I
said, 'Well, that's where Little John was from; he's buried in Hathersage in
Darbyshire.' 'What do you mean, he's buried? Do you mean he lived?'
'Yes. Little John was a real person. He lived and has a grave that's 11 feet
long.' To 99.9 percent of the audience, it wouldn't have made a damn whether
Little John was speaking in an English, an American or Icelandic accent, as
long as it was played well and truthfully. But if Little John is known to have
lived and died in Darbyshire, it's understandable that he might by some quirk
of fate have had a Darbyshire accent." The Prince
of Thieves production company did ultimately ask whether Mantle was
available to play their Little John, but by then, he wasn't. "It's a
great shame. I would love to have done it, but I think Nick Brimble [the
Monster in Frankenstein Unbound] did a very good job," although
Little John wound up with a Bristol accent.
Super Shenangians
Mantle was otherwise engaged playing the Frankenstein
Monster in a series of commercials for the British electronic industry.
Unfortunately, his portrayal of a similar character, Nuclear Man #1, in Superman
IV was only seen by the film's makers. "I was like a Frankenstein's
Monster, created by Gene Hackman [as Lex Luthor] to rival Superman, that went
wrong. [Nuclear Man] was literally stupid. I would bump into things - I just
didn't know my own strength, I just created havoc wherever I went,
culminating in a fight between me and Chris Reeves [as Superman], which took
weeks of night shoots to film. We started at one end of a row of cars each
and just crushed 12 cars together. I was picking up a lamppost, I was
throwing waste skips at him. It was a fantastic $6 Million fight - gone.
"I've heard so many stories as to why I'm no longer in
the film. All that I can vouchsafe is the fact that it wasn't my
fault. If there was one thing I was sure about, it was that I had given an
excellent performance. It's not often that you're clapped by a complete film
unit - 100 people applauded when I did stuff in that film. I know it was good
and it got cut for some reason. That's pretty hard - when you're doing well
enough as a British actor to even get seen for a film; then to get the part,
you're doing exceptionally well, and then to play the part well, you're doing
even better. And then to get cut from it after you've done all that, is just
terrible." ;Mantle went on to happier acting
experiences. He was directed by Clint Eastwood in White Hunter, Black Heart
as a racist hotel manager, who has the distinction of being one of the very
few characters ever to beat up Eastwood and live. At the same time, Mantle
continued in his second career as a TV/radio comedy writer with fellow actor
Nick Wilton, while embarking on a film producing partnership with Sherwood
co-star Mark Ryan, Odds On Productions.
Alien Acting
With all this going on, Mantle heard through the grapevine
that "they were looking for 'bald monks' for Alien 3. Some 10, 12
years ago, I had my head shaved while I was at RADA for a play, and I had
some photographs taken and they were very good. So, I got my agent to send
some of these photographs to the production office."
Mantle describes the then 28-year-old Alien 3
director David Fincher admiringly as a "whiz kid. We used to call him
Doogie Howser. He was controlling four units - main unit, second unit, the
action unit and the computer unit. How his head didn't explode, I don't know.
He was amazingly capable."
According to Mantle, Fincher told him, "'You're the
audience saying, "Oh god, it's coming for me next." You've
got to represent the feelings of the common man were he to be in this
situation.' In other words, he blows with the breeze," Mantle laughs,
"he changes his mind in as many situations as he's confronted with and
quite willingly will go back on something he said half-an-hour ago. So, I
think I'm largely there to represent what ridiculous things people are likely
to do when faced with those sort of dangers. I'm probably overcomplicating
it. I was only a very small cog in the scheme of things."
More often than not, the Alien menacing Mantle and his
fellow cast members wasn't physically present on the set. How does one play
opposite a monster that isn't there? "To be honest with you, it's no
different than exercises you do tucked away in small rooms in drama schools.
Someone tells you you're a tree. You suspend your own disbelief, let alone
the audience's, and say, 'Yup, that's it. I accept that, I'm a tree.' Or,
'There's an Alien over there - yup, there's an Alien over there. That's where
I've got to look, that's where that Alien head is. Ok, fair enough.' There's
no point approaching that form a sort of Method standpoint. I mean, you can
recall many horrific memories from your own life to help you, but ultimately
when someone's putting a bit of blue gaffer tape on a wall and saying, 'OK,
that's where it is, react to that,' you get up there and boogie.
"The rest of the actors were new to Alien, so
Sigourney Weaver was the continuing theme. Obviously, you respect and admire
her work from the first two, and what she said went. She would bring her
knowledge to bear - she didn't bring force, just common sense or humor
to bear: 'Actually, I can't react like this because in I and II,
I reacted like that.'"
Unlike Robin of Sherwood, life didn't actually
reflect art - i.e. Mantle and company only look like quarrelsome toughs on
screen. "I don't know what your experience of people who get parts like
this normally is, but it was such a bunch of gentlemen, it was
ridiculous," Mantle smiles. "I mean, we all looked pretty
ferocious, but if you could have seen our matches, you would have a very
different idea. I've never had a better laugh than with these guys, except
for Robin of Sherwood."
Mantle plans to spend his summer writing and acting with
Nick Wilton in a new children's TV show, Wysiwyg while at night
playing multiple roles in the West
End stage production of Pocked Dream, a
radically revamped version of Midsummer Nights Dream.
And if the Robin of Sherwood reunion project should
ever materialize, would Clive Mantle return to Sherwood Forest? "I would love
to," he announces. "I've never met anyone with quite the same skill
at storytelling [as Richard Carpenter]. To be able to popularize a story in
order for 11 or 12 million people to want to watch it and also to maintain a
standard below which the never drops - full of integrity, full of humor, full
of style - it's not pap, it's not formula. I can't think of a popular
action-adventure series that has come anywhere near it since."
By Abbie Bernstein