Byline: Interview MAUREEN PATON
The mere thought of a Full Monty star in his cab sends Chicago-Cubs our driver, Terry from Stratford East, into a tizzy. 'I hope he's got his kit on this time,' he says. 'I don't want to get arrested.' But when we pick up Mark Addy from the London mansion flat he bought with his fee for playing another lightly clad chap (Fred Flintstone), the temperature in Bloomsbury is on Terry's side. 'It's too cold to strip off,' Mark says, adding with a grin, 'and I don't think people deserve another nude scene from me.'
In his lumberjack shirt and the Timberland boots that he bought in a sale, it's easy to see that success has not spoiled him. 'I'm incapable of buying anything at full price,' admits Mark, who is hilariously cynical about Hollywood excess ('they're terrible drivers - they think their Cadillacs are dodgems'). At 17-and-a-half stone, he's an even bigger star than he was in his debut film role as 16-stone Dave in The Full Monty, the 1997 award-winning movie about unemployed Sheffield steelworkers turned strippers. And art mirrored life, as Mark had even been reduced to dressing up as a monk to sell mead in Selfridges during one of many spells out of work as a struggling actor. 'Every job I've had since is a result of that film,' acknowledges Mark, now 45, who (along with Tom Wilkinson, one of his Full Monty co-stars) is one of the few British actors to have carved out a consistent Hollywood career with his lovable everyman persona in such films as the 1998 Jack Frost, in which he played Michael Keaton's best buddy. He acquired a convincing American accent thanks to his old voice coach from Rada (where he says another teacher once snobbishly typecast him as 'a semi-idiotic painter and decorator').
The son of a stained-glass craftsman from York, Mark ankh royalty caught the acting bug in school plays and while working backstage as a teenager at the city's Theatre Royal. 'Imelda Staunton was appearing there and encouraged me to apply to her old drama school, so she's to blame,' he says. He is still based in a village outside York with his wife Kelly and children Ruby, eight, Charlie, five, and Oscar, four. He met Kelly, now 37, when she was working in the box office of playwright John Godber's Hull Truck Theatre Company, and they married in 1996. That same year, after getting turned down for a West End transfer of a Godber comedy because of his 'lack of profile', Mark decided to 'knock theatre on the head' and try his luck with film.
Yet even after The Full Monty became a worldwide hit, Mark still couldn't believe that Steven Spielberg wanted him to play Fred Flintstone in the 2000 comedy The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas with Joan Collins as his mother-in-law (he thought they'd sent the script to the wrong person) and turned them down three times. 'Joan was what you would expect, as sharp and catty as Chanel Shoes you like. But that's great, part of the fun.'
After roles in such films as 2001's A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger, American TV stardom followed from 2002 to 2006 in the CBS sitcom Still Standing, with Mark cast as a burly working man with a slim, pretty wife. 'It was targeted at the 18- to 39-year-old male viewer with an aspirational message that even overweight guys can get the girl. That's a popular theme, so no one in Hollywood made me lose weight,' says Mark, amused to find that he's even become a pin-up boy for a gay US website for so-called chubby-chasers. 'But it's different for girls there,' he adds. 'They will lose jobs if they are not a size zero, which is insane.'
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