What the Devil did next: Interview with Graeme Hawley

Mon 01 Oct 2012

Whilst Marlowe’s hapless Doctor Faustus may have seen a sticky and unfortunate end for his dangerous dealings with Lucifer, actor Graeme Hawley seems to have got off pretty lightly with his brush with the devil. For the former Coronation Street star thankfully bears no traces of the devilish alter-ego that has stalked him throughout this summer as he nightly performed the arduous tasks of damning mankind and battling with God, transformed into the ultimate baddy, Satan, for the York Mystery Plays 2012.

Performing to a total of 31,000 audience members, Graeme appears nothing like his evil counterpart in describing his time with York Mystery Plays as a “heart-warming, life-affirming experience”, repeatedly emphasising the real enjoyment he felt from working with that “amazing” 500-strong community cast.

A world away from the secluded little TV towns of Emmerdale and Weatherfield where he really made his name, Graeme confesses that the Mysteries was an exciting new experience for him: “While I’d done a lot of theatre before Coronation Street and am very at home on stage, to be on that big of a stage was quite a different thing. But it became quite an easy thing bizarrely and very empowering, particularly in the moments when you got the opportunity to take to that stage and really bellow out to 1,500 people. You know, most actors are kind of power hungry in one sense or another anyway so it was quite nice to have that power”.

And with such power of course comes a devilish reputation, something Graeme is no stranger to, having played one of soaps’ most talked-about villains, John Stape, who unwittingly smothered, kidnapped and clobbered his way through the cast of Corrie for four years. “It’s a bit weird now” Graeme confesses. “I’ve spent the last five years walking down the street with everybody shouting John Stape at me and now I’m in York and everybody shouts the devil at me instead.” Yet with his satanic summer now well and truly over and no chance of John Stape returning from the dead (or at least “only if there’s a Corrie spin-off set in hell or something”as he assures me), Graeme seems to have severed his Faustian pact with evil typecasting and is now excited about taking on a new public image.

For Graeme is now gearing up for a brand new role back in York, as he takes on the part of a pioneering surgeon in The Guinea Pig Club written by internationally acclaimed author, Susan Watkins. Based on a true story, The Guinea Pig Club follows WWII cosmetic surgeon, Archibald McIndoe, who abandons his career of nipping and tucking the starlets to find new challenging surgeries to reconstruct the shattered faces of his experimental guinea pigs: Britain’s savagely burnt fighter pilots.

Determined to look beyond the damaged faces of these heroes and save the men within, this is a story that seems very timely, coming on the back of a Paralympic summer of altering attitudes to cosmetic appearance. “It’s a very optimistic play really” Graeme explains. “It starts in a dark place but it’s a story of people’s faith that human beings can see beyond facial beauty. One of the lines my character Archibald says in the play is that ‘every human being on the planet is more than a sodding face and a pair of hands’ and that’s what he passionately believes. As long as we function, as long as your mouth works well enough to hold food and drink and your nose works well enough so that you can breathe, that’s all that’s important. Everything beyond that is just cosmetic which is interesting for somebody who’s made his living out of cosmetics to say.”

Having delved into the surgeon’s life and met with Dr Sandy Saunders, one of McIndoe’s real patients, Graeme is already starting to feel divided over the multiple aspects to McIndoe’s character, demonstrating that he isn't as opposite to Graeme’s previous roles as it might initially seem. “Archibald is an incredibly intelligent man. And with that kind of thing comes an arrogance about him- now, I’m used to playing arrogant people, that’s nothing new, the devil was fairly arrogant. And there’s also a confidence about McIndoe which you need to be a surgeon full stop but, you know, this guy was performing surgery that nobody had ever attempted before and trying to change the health system really. And he was really brave to stick his head above the parapet.

“But he’s a very complex man, because at times he’s not particularly nice in the play. We’ve had a therapist talking to us who knows the play very well and her comment about Archibald was that he has the empathy of a brick. So he’s not some lovely cuddly young guy but is quite a force of nature really. So there are elements of other characters that I’ve played in there.”

Whether Graeme will fall back into his evil character ways after this role, he isn't certain, but he is determined to try a bit of everything in his career from television to film to theatre to DJ-ing. “I get bored quite easily” Graeme confesses. “Because the more things I can do, the more interesting life is really. And if my life’s interesting then I’m able to take that back home as well. And that makes you a better person to be around your family and children as you can introduce them to more different things in life because ultimately that’s the most important thing. Because however much I love this job it ultimately all comes back to what I can do for my family.”

And with that statement, coupled with an overwhelming enthusiasm for everything he speaks of, the word "amazing" abounding in his every response to my questions, I think we can be pretty sure that Graeme Hawley's dabble with the devil thankfully left on him no lasting influence.

Read the interview on The Yorker website.