The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
David Tennant has scooped the Best Actor prize in the 2020 Scottish Comedy Awards for his role as Crowley in Good Omens. The awards were originally planned to be announced at a live ceremony in June, but this was postponed due to the coronavirus crisis.
David saw off competition from Jack Docherty (Scot Squad), Ncuti Gatwa (Sex Education) and Susan Riddle (The State Of It) to win his category.
A few photos from my phone, backstage at Good Omens. I’ll try and get the time to do a few more of these. For now, lots of lovely David Tennant and a 1941 David and Michael…
beebofrank13-deactivated2020031 asked: hi I wanted to know if you ever met David and if so what was he like? iv'e been a huge fan of Tennant for a while and to see him play as Crowley is really amazing. also I own the book good omens its good so far keep up the good work man
You’re also a part of the Amazon TV series Good Omens, which I’m very excited about!
TENNANT: Good, I’m glad!
What was the attraction to that? Was it Neil Gaiman, specifically, or was it the story and character?
TENNANT: Obviously, a Neil Gaiman story, in itself, is appealing. The fact that Neil was so involved, as the showrunner and he’s written all the scripts, and I knew that Michael Sheen was involved, and Douglas Mackinnon, a director I knew of old, was directing, and just the sweep and scope of the story and the resources that we had to make the story with, just felt like this was a project that was going to be very exciting, and I wanted to be a part of it.
What did you enjoy about playing Crowley, and the relationship between your character and Michael Sheen’s character, Aziraphale?
TENNANT: Well, it’s a bit of a double act. They are yin and yang, really. I enjoyed playing almost every scene with Michael Sheen. He’s someone I’ve known for years. We never really acted together, but I knew him and I knew his work, and I knew that it was gonna be fun, and indeed it was. He’s great to bounce off. He’s never not engaged, in any moment of a scene, and it makes you better to have someone to play with who’s that present and skillful. Crowley is a great character. He’s a demon, and they’re averting the apocalypse. We get to see them throughout all of human history. There were so many things that were just gonna be fun to get involved with. Just to be a part of this story that people love so much and that means so much to people – this novel has such a following – it can be intimidating because you don’t want to break it, disappoint people, or let people down, but it felt like the team was robust enough to make it something worth doing.
How did you find Neil Gaiman, as a showrunner?
TENNANT: Oh, fantastic! He was very present and very involved, but also hugely creative. He’s lived with this novel for so many years. It was such a formative experience for him, as a writer, writing with Terry Pratchett. And with Terry Pratchett no longer being with us, Neil has become the caretaker for the memory of Terry. I think he would acknowledge that, himself. So, he’d be entirely forgiven for being rather proprietorial about the whole thing and about wanting things done in a very prescriptive way. And whilst he had a very clear, very strong, and very persuasive view of the material, which was fantastic to have access to, he was also interested in what people brought to it. He was genuinely interested in the collaborative art of making it from a novel into something else. He actually couldn’t have been better, from that point of view, just having his skills available to us, all the time, and to have a conversation about these characters and about the show, as it developed. The whole thing was a wonderful experience.
David was just interviewed for the Glasgow Film Festival, and he answered a few questions about Good Omens…
Good Omens, a big budget production to be screened on Amazon Prime, is a different story altogether. When the first teaser images of Tennant and co-star Michael Sheen in costume were released last year, there was a feeling abroad that this was about as close to a Celtic acting dream team as you could get – Tennant, a former Doctor Who and star of Broadchurch and Harry Potter, alongside chameleon-like Welshman Sheen, who has played everyone from Brian Clough to Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams. But although both men knew each other well, they had only acted together once before: 15 years ago, on Stephen Fry’s Evelyn Waugh adaptation Bright Young Things. And even then they never actually shared screen time.
“Although we spent quite a lot of time on set and in prep and socialising a little bit, we didn’t have a single scene together. So I’ve known Michael all that time and never really had a chance to properly act with him until now. So when Good Omens came up, and I knew Michael was involved, that did feel like I could finally tick a box I’d been hoping to tick since I first met him.”
And how was the box-ticking experience?
“It’s always a gamble working with someone, even someone like Michael who I knew relatively well,” Tennant admits. “But at the same time it can be hugely exciting to discover a new working relationship and that’s mercifully been the case with Good Omens. Just about every scene I have it’s Michael and I staring at each other and that could have been a grim experience over the six months of the shoot if he hadn’t been such a joy to be around.”
In fact, Tennant is feeling “rather excited” about Good Omens. He, Sheen and the rest of the crew recently viewed a “sizzle reel”, a rough trailer put together by the show’s Portree-born director Douglas Mackinnon. And he liked what he saw.
“It’s quite hard tonally to get a grip on what Good Omens is, because it’s this very unique world that comes from Terry and Neil’s novel and from the scripts, which Neil has adapted pretty faithfully from that novel,” he says. “I think it’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever been in before and possibly anything many people have seen before. It’s like a sort of fairy tale with a kind of very real world setting. It’s a farce and it’s also deeply serious, It’s all things at once and not quite any one of them. If the rest of the show turns out like this early trailer that we’ve all seen I think it’s going to be quite special.”
Beyond the show itself, the involvement of Amazon also makes Good Omens feel a little out of the ordinary. For a start there’s the amount of cash available to the show – “We’ve clearly got a bigger budget than any BBC show I’ve ever worked on before,” says Tennant – and then there’s the palpable sense of ambition and expectation coursing through the production.
“That whole Amazon-Netflix model seems to be the future and there’s a sense that you’re working with a company that people are watching very keenly at the moment to see what’s going to happen next. From an acting point of view you just turn up and you do your job like you do on anything else. That’s the same on Good Omens as it was on a low budget British film like You, Me And Him. The nuts and bolts of it are the same every day. But it’s when you take a step back you see the ambition of something like Good Omens and the resources that we’ve got to play with. It’s very exciting to be able to be part of that.”
elsinore-and-inverness asked: Is Dog really going to be CGI? *imustnotreadthedailymail imustnotreadthedailymail*
Huh? No, that’s hilarious. Ollie, who plays Dog, played his last scene last week. He is very not CGI.
He’s gorgeous, and incredibly sweet. Hang on, let me go and read the article.
(Goes and reads.) (Counts five untrue statements before the article starts. I like the bit where David goes off to his trailer for an hour. I think we probably lost five minutes while the medic checked his leg, and he never left the set.)
On the CGI thing, as soon as we realised that in the scene David was doing, Ollie was getting overexcited, and he thought he was meant to do what he’d been trained to do the last time he was on that location, we knew we couldn’t do the scene again with Ollie in it in later takes. So we put down green markers to show where where Ollie was, after that, and we’ll drop in Ollie from other takes if we need them.
