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At The Captain's Table Captain Hollister was killed off in Red Dwarf's first episode - but that didn't stop him making a comeback in season VIII. Mr Flibble stops for coffee with the man who threw the Dwarfers into the brig - Mac McDonald... |
Andrew Ellard
How did you get started as an actor and a performer?
I had a paper-round and I used to deliver to this lady that ran a Japanese artifact shop and who was in charge of the local amateur society. This was when I was like 13, in New York. And then she needed a 14 year old kid to play a character in this amateur thing that she was doing - so I did it. I'd always been Class Clown up until then anyway, so I was very happy with the idea of people looking at me and laughing at anything I said.
And so I did it and it went down gang-busters, and I think really I just decided then that I was either going to be an actor or a priest, one of the two. Then when I turned 14 and my testicles dropped and I discovered women, that settled that question for me. (Laughs)
I went to university in America and majored in drama. I did that for 3 years, and in my last year they had a vacancy for the local Bozo the Clown. They had like 50 different television clowns at any given time in America. And one went missing in action around the time that I was 19. The producers of the show knew me because they knew the drama department of the university. They said, "We think that you'd make a great clown, why don't you come down and audition?" So I went down with really long hair, moustache and goatee, put the white make up on over all that, and I got the job. So I had my own TV show for about a year when I was 19. And I learnt a lot. Basically don't work with kids! (Laughs)
After that I did a lot of street theatre out in California. The Triple A Acting Company used to do theatre in bars and coffee galleries at one o'clock in the morning, and we'd basically do B movie piss-takes. We'd do a cross between science-fiction and a beach party movie called The Triple Dick Monster from Out of the Sky. It was about this spacecraft that crashed at this beach party, and we had a great 8ft tall, green monster with three rubber phalluses, he assaulted everybody at the beach party. So we used to do that, and then I came to this country in '74.
