Hi
Colum, when I was researching on the internet I found nothing other than brief
photos of you as David Tennant’s double, was it a personal decision to keep
your private life private?
Colum: Alright some personal info. My
birthday is the 18 of January. I was born and raised in Blarney, County Cork,
Ireland, one of five children. One of my brothers is a professional musician in
Ireland, he plays the guitar. My first instrument was the drums, then piano,
then guitar and singing. I moved to the Canary Islands aged 18 and that was the
start of my life as a full time musician.
How
did you get the role of body double for David Tennant and was it just for
Doctor Who or have you doubled for him in other roles prior or since?
Colum: Well, I had done some extra work for
a company called Phoenix, who do extras for a lot of the TV stuff recorded
around the west and south west of the UK. I had already been a weevil in
Torchwood (big masks, night shoots) and one day I got a call asking could I
come to the Who set the next day. David Tennant had to travel up to Scotland
for urgent family issues and they needed someone of a similar build and hair
colour to double in a scene that they were in the middle of filming. The next
morning I was saving Kylie Minogue from evil robot angels on board the Titanic
flying through space. That was the start of it. The production team saw that it
worked quite well and I got called in for various other scenes and episodes
while he was the Doctor. I also doubled for him in a programme called The Minor
Character which was written by Will Self. It was filmed from Tennant’s POV with
a voice over narrative so the only shots which featured him were when he was
looking in a mirror.
One
of my favourite moments in the Stolen Earth 2 parter was the scene in the
TARDIS with the full crew, what was it like on set that day with the full Who
cast, can you recall any funny moments on set, and who was the funniest out of
them all?
Colum: That was a fun scene to do, as the
whole cast were having a blast all being together. John Barrowman was certainly
the loudest and was funny, but the two who were most entertaining were
Catherine Tate and David Tennant. They were constantly cracking each other up
and had a great chemistry.
When
did you get your big break in show business?
Colum: That’s an interesting question. I
don’t really consider that I have had a big break. I have been doing music for
quite a while now, and have enjoyed moderate success, being able to make a
living from it. The double work for Doctor Who was a real treat, but it was an anomaly,
something very random and totally unplanned, and something I have never
attempted to replicate. The other extra work I did was as a way to fund my
first solo album, and I haven’t done any since.
I
had always thought you had only appeared in that one episode from Journey’s End
as the half human half Time Lord role, but you’ve appeared in many others involving
David as the Doctor, can you tell us which other episodes they were – although
it may be hard for us to locate without a series of freeze frame shots!
Colum: Haha! Finding exact identifiable
screen shots is difficult, I have tried. The episodes I was involved in as
David’s double are Voyage of the Damned, The Sontaran Stratagem, The Planet of
the Ood, Partners in Crime, and Journey’s End. In the last series I appeared as
a Roman soldier in The Pandorica Opens. The ones I did most work in was The Voyage
of the Damned and Journey’s End. I appeared in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
in the Sarah Jane Series, also as David’s Doctor double.
You
were also in Torchwood; can you tell us what your role was in this show and what
episodes you appeared in?
Colum: Yes, in Torchwood I was a Weevil in a
couple of episodes, but I never kept track of which ones. There were a lot of
different people used and the Weevils appeared in a lot of episodes, and with
the masks on it were hard to tell us apart. I was also doing a lot of touring
around then so I really didn’t keep track of it.
Will
you be involved in the 12th Doctor Season at all?
Colum: I have no plans to be, but hasn’t
stopped it from happening before!
You’re
also a talented musician; can you tell us more about this? Are you a solo
singer/songwriter, do you have a band, have you any published songs, can we
hear them online anywhere?
Colum: I started playing music
professionally when I was 18, and haven’t stopped since. In my 20’s I played
with a duo New Druids and we travelled a lot gigging wherever we went, and
getting involved in many varied musical projects along the way. Around the time
of the double work, I released my first solo album “GO” and have since done
another one “HOTEL”, which is available online to download from iTunes.
Most of my time over the
last year however has been taken up with the novel.
Where
do you find your best inspiration to write your music/songs?
Colum: Songs are wonderful things to write.
I have written a song while out walking, in the space of twenty minutes or less,
just from a melody in my head and the rhythm of my feet, and I have also
struggled for months trying to find the right combination of words and rhythms
to unlock the melody I knew was hiding just under my psyche.
Songs and stories are
very different for me and come from different places, although people are often
surprised to hear this. Maybe other artists who do both don’t find it that way,
but for me, a song can be both more oblique and more intimately personal at the
same time. You have the magic of melody to carry the listener through. You can
have a line in a song with only two words in it, but the melody and words
combined can break your heart or mend your soul every time you listen to it.
Writing stories is a more practical, less ethereal way of expressing yourself.
In order for the two words to deliver that effect, you need to have structured
everything leading up to that point exactly right, and it takes more care and
precision.
Inspiration comes from
everywhere, simply from an awareness of the internal processing of your
external environment, but putting that into a coherent expression is tricky. I
access songs best when I switch my mind off, but create stories by very
consciously applying myself. Songs can take flight almost instantly, a melody
will rise and you will rise to follow it, stories are a more mechanical,
methodical means of flight. The goal is to make it seem effortless and
spontaneous.
Who
was your inspiration as you were growing up?
Colum: Inspiration came from anyone who I
saw, read or heard that through art told me about myself and the strange
paradoxical world I found myself in without actually explaining anything. Art
can give insight without explanation, it can bypass the critical cognitive part
of you and touch something deeper. That is what has always inspired me.
You’ve
written a psychological novel called The Fly Guy that is out March 2015, can
you tell us anything about the novel at all?
Colum: It’s a story about a writer who
creates a detective character. The detective can’t solve a case, the case of
The Fly Guy, and the more the writer writes the less secure his own reality
becomes. It’s a creepy thriller which looks at how we create and whether we can
control what we create, while following the interconnected stories of a drug
dealer, a bodyguard, an investigator, and a writer. How much of ourselves do we
create and how much can we never destroy? It grew out of a weird short story I
wrote about a man meeting someone who knows more about him than he knows about
himself.
The website is www.sansonreganbooks.com and there are a few things on there
that are worth investigating. We have made it very interactive, but it does
require some thought and investigation from the person browsing it.
The Fly Guy will be out
early next year, but in the meantime I will be blogging on the site, and there
will be short stories available to those who pre-order. There is a lot going
on, it’s all very exciting right now.
So
actor, singer/songwriter and author, what’s next on the horizon for Colum?
Colum: Well, The Fly Guy is taking up all
the time right now, that and gigging around Cardiff, but I have plans for the
next novel, and have been putting together parts of that. There is a cool album
waiting to be recorded too, a real earthy rootsy world music record with the
lyrical content taken from slave poems and letters from around the globe. When am
I going to get a chance to do that, I’m not sure but when it happens it’ll be a
lot of fun.
Thank you Colum for a
wonderful interview.
Headshots courtesy of
Colum Sanson-Regan and Alison Smith.
©BBC Doctor Who 1963
©BBC Torchwood 2006
