James Nesbitt

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2008

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is James Nesbitt. He is one of our most popular and successful actors and his long list of credits includes Cold Feet, Bloody Sunday, Jekyll and Murphy's Law. In this warm and illuminating interview he recalls his childhood in County Antrim where he grew up in a close-knit, rural community. He was the only boy and the youngest of four children and, when he was told he was 'spoilt', says he always understood that it meant the same as 'loved'.

His father was the headmaster of the local primary school and there was an expectation that his children would follow him to become teachers. But James was a keen actor and says it is only now, in his 40s, that he can look back clearly and see he always felt an affinity to being on the stage. The first role he was cast in was as the Artful Dodger in Oliver. It's a character, he jokes, that has stayed with him through many of the roles he has taken on since.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Come Fly With Me by Frank Sinatra Book: Collected writings by James Lawton Luxury: A bottle of chilled Sancerre for every night.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week this week is the actor James Nesbit from the twinkly-eyed
0:31.8	every man charmer of cold feet to the flinty
0:34.3	cynical cop in Murphy's law he is a performer with an enviously broad range and
0:39.6	huge audience appeal he has according to one of our most eminent directors, that
0:45.2	magical thing which connects him with the public humanity. Jimmy Nesbitt, it was
0:50.4	the director Paul Greengrass that said that about you the humanity bit.
0:54.1	You worked with him must be six or seven years ago now on possibly one of your most demanding
0:59.1	roles so far it was the lead in Bloody Sunday.
1:02.3	It was you know and I think it was a defining moment for
1:06.1	me in many ways I had achieved I suppose through an enormous amount of luck a fair amount of
1:11.5	success with things at cold feet and I'd been working
1:13.6	consistently but I'd never really tackled anything about where I came from especially
1:17.7	something so important something was such a watershed in the recent history of
1:22.4	where I come from. And Paul approached me. He had for a long time been fascinated by Bloody Sunday about how he felt it was, something the Irish couldn't forget and the English didn't
1:34.3	want to remember. And I think rather cleverly he put at the centre of it, Ivan Cooper, who was
1:40.6	himself a Protestant like myself, but there he was leading a
1:43.6	nanny nationalist protest and just to remind people bloody Sunday was about
1:47.2	the civil rights march through the streets of London dairy from
1:51.1	derries bog side and and 13 Catholic civil rights
1:54.8	protesters, unarmed protesters were shot dead in the streets one later died.
	...

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