Daily Mail (UK)
October 29 2005
by Bill Penrose
Main Photograph: Pete Rosenbaum
John Barrowman was 37 when he got his own spaceship to play with last year, when he was cast as the 51st century time-agent Captain Jack Harkness in the BBC's revival of DOCTOR WHO. Last week he learned that he'll be remaining in the driving seat for a while because his character is to have his own spin-off TV series. For Scots-born Barrowman, it is a dream come true.
After all, what boy - of any age - wouldn't want to fly a spaceship? As Barrowman says, 'Growing up, everybody wanted a toy of the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars - and I ended up getting my own ship, which was cool.' The fact that it was in DOCTOR WHO that he was flying his ship made it even cooler.
'I'm a huge DOCTOR WHO fan,' explains Barrowman, who is currently appearing opposite Rob Lowe in the military courtroom drama A FEW GOOD MEN in London's West End. 'I grew up watching it. The first episode I remember had the Autons [monsters who took the form of plastic dummies]. My mother had to hide me in her coat in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, because I wouldn't go past the shop dummies. I thought they were going to come alive and step out of the window and shoot me.
'We moved to the U.S. when I was nine and one TV channel played DOCTOR WHO episodes as a marathon every Sunday night. I'd stay up late and watch them. I never thought I'd be a part of it one day. So, when the opportunity came up, I was ecstatic. The day I went in for the audition, I was put on tape and the tape was given to all the execs at the BBC. Apparently it was the quickest decision they'd ever made because, within 15 to 20 minutes, they'd said, "That's Captain Jack."
The way Barrowman tells that story proves those BBC execs were right. Captain Jack is an ebullient, super-confident, ridiculously handsome showman. And so is John Barrowman. He has a habit of recounting the complimentary things people have said about him, littered with disclaimers like, 'Of course, I'm not saying that. It's just what I was told later'.
For example, in 1989, when Barrowman was a 22-year-old drama student in San Diego, California, he came back to the UK to visit relatives in Scotland and study Shakespeare. While in Glasgow, he discovered that open auditions were being held for a production of the Cole Porter musical ANYTHING GOES, starrring Elaine Paige. By chance, Barrowman performed in an amateur production of the show, so he went along, as he put it, 'To see if I could do what I was being trained to do. I did it and - I'm saying now what I was told later - one of the producers said, "My mouth just dropped. I couldn't believe that in Glasgow a young man would just walk in who could sing, act and dance."
'I went down to London a couple of days later and met Elaine, and apparently when I walked on stage she said, "Oh, he's pretty. Let's see if he can sing." They said, "But he's very young, Elaine," and she replied, "We just can't let him go."
This is Olympica-standard swanking. But who wouldn't be pleased with themselves if they had Barrowman's clean-cut jawline, his singing voice (he has also starred in SUNSET BOULEVARD and CHICAGO), and his all-American sportiness?
'I'm a guy,' Barrowman says. 'I like guy things.' So he was on the swimming team, the diving team and the athletics team at high school. 'I was the guy who, if I was in a relay race, would go last because I could make up the time and win it for the team.'
Barrowman loves to tell a good story. Here, for example, is his description of his film debut, aged 20. 'I was in THE UNTOUCHABLES. Well, my bottom was. I'd just signed with a modelling agency in Chicago and they asked if I'd do a day's work as an extra in Chicago, where it was being filmed. Sean Connery, Kevin Costner...all the stars were there. The film crew and the people in the principle roles treated the rest of us like dirt. I remember Sean Connery ordering us, "Don't look at me!" I was a huge fan of his. But that day I became his biggest un-fan.
'I actually walked off during the lunch break. Everyone had been screaming at the extras, and I'd had enough. So I said to the first assistant director, "I'm going home." She said, "You can't go home." I said, "Watch me, Bye-bye!"
'Needless to say, I never got asked to be an extra again. But my behind did make it to the screen in one of the few scenes I did in THE UNTOUCHABLES - it's a shot in the police academy. My mother recognised it right away!'
This, then, was the man who turned up at the TV studio in Cardiff in December 2004 to play Captain Jack Harkness, five months into the shooting of Doctor Who. Barrowman's first day's work involved a romantic scene with Billie Piper, who played Rose, the Doctor's assistant. Naturally, he says, Billie was thrilled to see him. 'Billie told me later that when I arrived it was like a breath of fresh air on the set,' Barrowman confides. 'She said, "You made it fun again."'
If the fun had gone missing from DOCTOR WHO that might have been because its star, Christopher Eccleston, had already secretly decided to quit. 'None of us knew Chris wanted to leave. We had no clue. I later found out that, by the time I got there, he had already decided not to do another series and the BBC were trying to deal with that. I don't know if Billie knew. She never showed it if she did.
'You have to respect someone's decision. If they wanna go, they wanna go - you can't stop them. But when we were filming every day, we had no idea that Chris wasn't enjoying it. Whatever problems he was having, though, when he came on set he was fine, and he did his job.' Billie was breaking up with her husband Chris Evans at the time, but Barrowman says it wasn't an issue on set.
Captain Jack is the first bisexual DOCTOR WHO character, which makes John Barrowman's casting even more appropriate. Last year he publicly revealed what had long been an opne show business secret: he is gay. That did not, however prevent his early career from being littered with rumors of supposed affairs with his leading ladies.
'First it was Elaine Paige, then Stephanie Powers, then Angie Dickinson and then Cher,' he says. 'I told everyone they weren't my girlfriends, but no one wanted to hear that. Angie Dickinson was quoted as saying we had great sex on a motorcycle. I mean, no! Wro-ong! C'mon, I live with another guy, I'm surrounded by diva women; I work i musical theatre and I have two cocker spaniels, who are well-groomed. Wake up and smell the coffee!'
Still, Barrowman did have a date with Cher. 'She had seen me in SUNSET BOULEVARD the night before and tracked me down because she wanted to take me out to dinner. Afterwards, I walked her to her car and she asked me for a goodnight kiss. It was just a peck on the cheek, but the photographers caught it as I leaned foward, so it looked as if we were going in for a full-on snog.'
'The next day it was all over the papers. I was her new boytoy. Cher rangup and said, "Barrowman you're one of the luckiest queens around." I said, "Yeah, thanks a lot."'