Pip Torrens: Ready to role
Anwar Brett meets Pip Torrens, one of the busiest men in British showbusiness
Above: Pip Torrens, who lives in Dulwich, appears on screens small and large
He’s one of those actors who is instantly recognisable, if a little harder to name, but Dulwich resident Pip Torrens is the sort of character player who always adds value to a production.
His list of films includes Tomorrow Never Dies, Rogue Trader and Pride and Prejudice, while on television he has scores of credits in high profile productions like Longitude, Shackleton (his personal favourite), Silent Witness and Doctor Who.
"People sometimes say, ‘I saw you in that thing the other day,’ and I’d completely forgotten that I did it," he says good naturedly. "As often as not you’re on a job for only a couple of days. So if it’s screened more than a year later you can’t automatically place it."
The two-part Doctor Who adventure Family of Blood saw him play the stiff upper lipped headmaster of the pre-First World War school where the Doctor is hiding incognito.
"I’ve had kids treat me with extraordinary deference because of that," he smiles. "I also had a cough and a spit in a James Bond film years and years ago in a sequence that was filmed first and dropped in at the end of the film. I’m just on a ship giving orders while James Bond was doing the business somewhere else.
"The number of small boys who’ve come up to me and asked if I was in the James Bond film they saw. I want to say ‘not really,’ because we filmed that bit before they started principal photography. I remember the cinematographer was sitting there with his big cigar between takes.
My heart sank when he said, ‘So are you guys coming on to Venezuela?’ And we said no, that was it. We were done and dusted in Portsmouth."
Torrens has fulfilled a childhood ambition by pursuing a career as an actor. Straight out of Cambridge, where he had read English and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, he studied at drama school for a year. After that he was cast as understudy Daniel Day-Lewis in Another Country. And 26 years on he’s still at it and enjoying it as much as ever.
He has become one of those ubiquitous performers who delivers a great deal, often with very little screen time in which to do it. Unprecious and unstarry, he lives the life of the working actor, which is somewhat removed from the diva behaviour and bloated entourages of some higher profile peers.
"My criterion for a part is: will it get me the next job," he says. "Telly fulfils that nine times out of ten, because everyone watches telly. Film is a luxury – I don’t know of anyone who turns down a film, which is why even the worst Brit-com movies that get made often have quite illustrious supporting casts.
"I’m this sort of Oxbridge product, so I started off playing nice best friends, and then I went into professional parts – solicitors and GPs. Then I started going bald, which is very good because you start getting slightly sinister roles.
"And in the last couple of years all I’ve done is play pinstriped bastards behind desks, and the occasional noble headmaster. You have to be realistic about this, you’re not going to be asked to play hugely against type, everybody’s typecast, because that’s what casting is to an extent."
Such self deprecation is utterly disarming; Torrens clearly takes his work seriously but it is a job that helps to pay the mortgage and support the family he plainly adores. Wife Chantal is a non-practicing barrister, while daughters Lanikai and Elysia and son Raffi offer some welcome distraction from the inevitable unpredictability of an actors’ working life. Whatever they understand of Dad’s work there are, Torrens reveals, perks they can all share.
"They’ve done quite well in terms of trips," he smiles. "We had an amazing year the year before last where we had 10 days in Capetown followed by 10 days in Tunisia. I said to them that they’d covered the whole of Africa in the Easter holidays. I think that’s a wonderful thing if you can just take them with you.
"I would do that wherever I went, and I know other actors who do the same thing. If you’re on location you will spend so much time not doing anything. Unless you’ve got an incredibly demanding part it just seems stupid not to take them with you because you’re going to miss them like hell."
Currently to be seen in a series of black and white First Direct ads running on television and in print, Torrens admits he went in to meet for these aware that the agency was looking to cast a ‘Mr Grumpy’. When he got there the part had gone and only the Mr Happy role was left. "So I went in and did a manic, determinedly upbeat thing," he says with a shrug, "and that seemed to work."
He tackles a more conventional dramatic role in the handsome television movie Miss Austen Regrets opposite Olivia Williams and Hugh Bonneville, and has most recently been before the cameras on Wire In The Blood and the movie adaptation of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue.
Audiences may look at Pip Torrens and instantly think of stern authority figures that have dominated the recent crop of roles he has played. Casting directors might, less forgivably, be guilty of the same thing.
It’s probably not too surprising that he cites the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall as his acting heroes, all being character actors who graduated to star status at a time when that journey was more accepted. When he describes Robocop as one of the greatest films ever made he seems even more removed from the pinstriped bad guys he plays from time to time. Clearly there is more to the man than the job he does, more to the actor than he has so far been given the chance to prove.