John Barrowman: he'll do anything
John Barrowman: he'll do anything
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008
A star of musicals and talent shows; an omnisexual time traveller in 'Torchwood'; a crooner with designs on us all. There seems little - apart from swearing on family shows - that the shamelessly talented John Barrowman can't do.
Words Sam Delaney.
Portrait Laura Hynd
[John Barrowman. Portrait Laura Hynd -- John Barrowman: 'He might explode out of his skin with excitement at any moment']
The West End legend Ruthie Henshall ambled around in front of her microphone, irritably looking at her watch. Jason Donovan slouched in his chair, looking at the door. Even the exuberant young cast members of Hairspray had started to yawn and pick at their fingernails. The BBC orchestra waited. The conductor frowned. The producer muttered something grumpy about giving it another five minutes.
The cast had assembled at the Mermaid theatre to rehearse for Andrew Lloyd Webber's 60th birthday celebrations, which took place in Hyde Park in September. And they were waiting for John Barrowman - the man who hosted the event, as well as performing a couple of numbers himself. He was late, very late. If he was not there soon he would have to go on stage on the big night with no rehearsal whatsoever.
All of a sudden, the door opened and there, finally, stood Barrowman. Eyes turned and I wondered what sort of reaction he was going to get. Almost all of these people were former colleagues from his lengthy career as one of the West End's most prominent leading men. But in recent years Barrowman has found wider stardom on television. His role as Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and its spin-off show, Torchwood, has made him a household name. So, did he now think he could keep the likes of Ruthie Henshall waiting?
Clearly Barrowman's West End colleagues didn't mind. As he stepped into the light and flashed his preposterously showbiz smile, he was greeted with immediate warmth (and even a few whoops from the Hairspray contingent). The atmosphere had certainly brightened now he was here.
Disappointingly, there'd be no hair-pulling today. Barrowman sashayed onto the stage, kissed Henshall apologetically on the cheek, mouthed 'sorry' to the producer and nodded to the conductor. Before we knew it, the pair were delivering a rendition of The Perfect Year from Sunset Boulevard as if they'd been practising the duet for weeks. During an instrumental interlude, they performed an impromptu waltz. It was captivating.
Barrowman was jaunting around the room, glad-handing friends and barking in his strange Illinois-meets-Glasgow hybrid of an accent. Jason Donovan greeted him with a warm 'Hi J.B.' and the pair embraced. He bantered flirtatiously with Jodie Prenger, winner of the BBC's musical talent show I'd Do Anything (Barrowman was a judge). One young member of the Hairspray cast got locked in a rough and tumble headlock. He seemed to like it.
Barrowman's dialogue was relentlessly playful and a little saucy. He appeared to be in perpetual motion: his blue eyes beamed like lasers and his smile was constantly widening. Watching him buzz about the place, you began to worry that he might explode out of his skin with excitement at any moment. It wouldn't be so bad - he was probably filled with glitter.
'I have always been hyper,' he explains to me 24 hours later. We are in his agent's central London offices, a considerably less glitzy and flamboyant scene. He is still exuding a level of energy that verges on the demented. 'We blame my mum because she used to put rosehip syrup in my milk when I was a baby. Eventually my parents had to take me to the doctor because I would never sleep.'
He is here to talk about his new album, 'Music Music Music' ('I've become known for saying things three times!' he says proudly. 'Like when I'm judging on the talent shows, I'll often say, "Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic!").' Featuring cover versions of Bette Midler, Andy Williams and Elaine Paige staples, as well as an original song by Gary Barlow (the single What About Us?), it could be the perfect Christmas gift for sentimental mothers across Britain.
But Barrowman thinks its appeal will stretch farther than that. 'When I was recording my first album the record company said: "We want you to do an album that shoots the 25- to 40-year-old women, right?" I said: "Please don't put me in that pigeonhole because you'll realise that my audience is much bigger than that."'
He's not short on self-confidence. 'For this album, I asked them to come on one of my tours and realise how diverse the people in the crowd were: I've got 18-year-old girls to 40-year-old women. Mums and dads bring their five- to eight-year-old kids. I've got teenage boys, gay men, gay couples - it's a completely diverse demographic.'
He may sound like a marketing executive delivering a sales pitch about himself, but the fact is, he's right. Barrowman is a unique figure in modern entertainment. His career in musicals has encompassed West End and Broadway productions of Phantom of the Opera, Grease, Hair, Sunset Boulevard, Miss Saigon, Beauty and the Beast, Anything Goes and Chicago.
As Captain Jack Harkness, he plays a buccaneering omnisexual time-traveller who kisses men on teatime television. He can be seen wooing mainstream audiences as a judge on prime-time Saturday night talent shows (I'd Do Anything, How Do you Solve a Problem like Maria?) while simultaneously revealing a far edgier side in the later reaches of the television schedule.
He is a modern gay icon who manages to stay down with the kids while simultaneously being your granny's favourite television personality. 'He is unique as a gay man on television in that he's overtly sexual,' says Russell T. Davies, the man who created Captain Jack Harkness and cast Barrowman in the role. 'But he's also an expert at modulating his own personality for different audiences while remaining essentially himself. That's a hard thing to do. He has a gift for it.'
Barrowman explains it more bluntly: 'I'll put it in a nutshell for you,' he says. 'I'm not going to get up and say "f--- off" in front of a family audience.'
Beyond that, he puts few limitations on his on-screen behaviour. So many television personalities seem to be playing a carefully defined role, projecting a two-dimensional side of themselves that they consider appropriate to their audience. Barrowman is looser. He does not play a camp stereotype.
Corny innuendos aren't really his thing - if he does veer into lewd dialogue it tends to be rather more frank than that. 'I don't really like the idea that people think of all gay men as the same,' he says. 'I hope that people look at me and see that not all of us are mincing about!' There's certainly nothing mincing about Barrowman. He is an imposing physical presence - what the Americans would call 'corn-fed'. He looks as much like a Gridiron quarterback as a fancy-pants dancer: as he thunders around in front of you, you're conscious of the fact that he could just as easily pick you up and chuck you across the room as twirl you into an impromptu salsa.
At high school in Illinois, he was a star of track, field and stage. 'The jocks would see me with my friends from the musical productions and call us the "choir fags",' he recalls. 'But I wouldn't take s--- from anyone. They knew I'd get them back in training the next day.'
He says the large number of gay men on mainstream British television is something that couldn't happen in America, the country in which he grew up. But do all the camp stereotypes on our screen disappoint him? 'No, they don't because any programme that is taking the step to portray [homosexuality] in a positive way, even if it is a bit of a stereotype, is a good thing. It's a step.' Is he on a mission to change perceptions? 'It's not a mission but there is a sense of responsibility that you are representing a community, and I want to represent it well.'
This was part of the motivation behind his high-profile marriage in a civil ceremony in 2006 to his long-term partner, Scott Gill, an architect. The couple now divide their time between their house in west London and a beachfront property just outside Cardiff, close to where Doctor Who and Torchwood are filmed. They have dogs and there is a rugby field next door. 'That lets us both do a bit of window shopping,' he grins.
One day, when life is less busy, they hope to adopt a child together. 'We have a lot to offer a child,' he says. 'A great house in Wales that's surrounded by great schools. We're not talking about a baby. We talked about adopting a nine- or 10-year-old because there are a lot of kids that age who really need to be adopted and really want to be loved by a family but haven't found one yet.'
Barrowman spent his first eight years in Glasgow. His older sister was academic (she is now a professor of English literature and journalism and co-authored his autobiography) and his brother was an accomplished footballer who had trials for Glasgow Rangers. He once took Barrowman to the local park to play in a match. 'I didn't like it, Mum,' he said on his return. 'It got me all dirty.'
His father worked for the Caterpillar heavy machinery company just outside Glasgow. In the early 1970s he was offered a chance to transfer to Illinois and took the whole family with him. They settled in the town of Aurora, and Barrowman claims to have been unfazed by the upheaval.
'We'd already done a whole year of travelling around the States a few years before,' he says. 'We took a year out of school and my parents taught us themselves as they drove us around the country.'
Sounds a bit hippyish. 'Hardly! We were like middle-class hippies wearing Ralph Lauren and driving around in a Lincoln Continental!' He paints a picture of a secure, middle-class American upbringing in a family that was very close, fairly liberal and bursting with bonhomie. Which probably explains all the gushing self-confidence and relentless glee that consumes him in adulthood. It certainly made coming out as gay a relatively painless experience. 'My parents became more militant about it than I did. They used to be at parties where their conservative mates were saying that gay men and women should be put on an island and blown up, and all that kind of s---. One night my mum got up and said, "I can't stand this any more. Do you realise that you are talking about my youngest son?" So they lost friends, they quit friendships with people because of the homophobic attitudes and I'm really proud of my parents for that.'
He studied drama and music at San Diego University, then pursued work on both sides of the Atlantic. He returned to Britain and quickly found work in musical theatre. In the early 1990s he appeared as presenter on the Saturday morning children's television show Live and Kicking. Things were going well for him: he then returned to America to pursue further screen roles. He was cast in two prime-time soaps (Central Park West and Titans), only to see both of them flop. 'After two failures like that, no one in LA wants to touch you,' he says. 'I had bleak times when I just couldn't see where the next job would come from. I ended up creating my own one-man cabaret show and taking it on the road just for something to do.'
He displays a natural Glaswegian industriousness not often associated with the acting trade. 'My parents gave me a work ethic that remains very strong,' he says. 'I never sat on my arse moaning about getting turned down at auditions. I just kept working. Even now, I will consider every request my agent puts before me. I don't rule anything out because I need to work and earn money like everyone else. But my key criteria for any job is that I have to have fun doing it, even if it's a commercial.'
By his mid-thirties, it seemed as if mainstream television success was unlikely to happen. Thankfully, he had by that time cultivated a flourishing stage career, having won an Olivier Award in 1998 for his role in a West End production of The Fix. 'If you'd told me 10 years ago that I'd be doing those kinds of roles in theatre for the rest of my career, I would have been perfectly content,' he says. 'Then Doctor Who came calling...'
Russell T. Davies had written the character of Captain Jack Harkness as an old-fashioned Hollywood hero. 'I knew of John and wanted him right from the start,' he says. 'There aren't too many actors in Britain who have those dashing Hollywood looks. We only called him in for the audition to check he hadn't aged too badly. It turned out that he still looked 21, the bastard!' He was originally set to appear in just five episodes of Doctor Who's first comeback series in 2005. But the character made such an immediate impact with audiences that he became a regular on the show.
Davies was pleased with Barrowman's impact, both on and off camera. 'Shooting Doctor Who is a hard slog,' he says. 'Having John on set kept everyone enlivened during the long night shoots. It's impossible to ever have a normal meeting with the man. I live near to him in Cardiff and even if I bump into him while I'm out getting a paper there's a big song and dance, an anecdote, some gossip. He is like that the entire time.'
Barrowman's impact was such that he soon had his very own series, the post-watershed 'Doctor Who for grown-ups', Torchwood. For Barrowman, previously pigeonholed as the wholesome boy next door, it was the perfect showcase for his edgier persona. He quickly transcended the role of actor and became what can only be called a 'personality'. There is a clamour for him to appear on television shows as presenter or guest, and he could still take his pick of West End musical roles if he had the time. In 2006, the television industry magazine Broadcast named him as one of the three hottest properties in the industry. A senior executive in BBC Entertainment tells me that there is 'a massive appetite to see more of John Barrowman on the network'. Several vehicles for his presenting skills are said to be in development.
Despite his protestations that he was perfectly happy doing musicals, Barrowman is unable to hide the sheer sense of excitement at his wider, and somewhat belated, success. At one point, he sits upright in his chair and begins to deliver an unprompted rundown of his recent work commitments. 'I'm doing Torchwood! We're doing the album and the promotional campaign! Earlier in the year I was in Canada doing How do you Solve a Problem like Maria! They gave me one week off and I flew to LA to finish the album! I presented the Baftas for the E! channel in America! And I'm about to do an ad for Morrison's!'
I'm momentarily dumbstruck by the weight of information. Can one man, even a man with this amount of energy, a man who claims to drink only one coffee per day and still buzzes through life like a toddler who's eaten a whole bag of Haribos for breakfast, sustain such a diverse career? I ask him to make a choice: actor, singer, presenter, dancer, talent show judge, advertiser of mid-price supermarket chains: what is John Barrowman?
'No!' he shouts. 'I won't let you do that to me!'
* 'Music Music Music' is released on 24 November