Post by Jen on Jun 6, 2010 14:39:05 GMT -5
**IAN PLAYS JOE IN CONVICTION (2004) - BBC Website**
It was a case of school friends reunited on the set of Conviction for actor Ian Puleston-Davies.
It was the first time that drama school colleagues Puleston-Davies and Reece Dinsdale had worked together, which made filming all the more enjoyable for the actor from North Wales.
"It's the happiest job I've done yet - it was brilliant and will stay with all of us forever.
I got reacquainted with Reece after many years - we were at drama school together and it was brilliant to see him again.
"This job really was the highlight of my career to date."
Puleston-Davies plays Joe, an old school detective in the CID, investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Angela.
However, Joe lets his emotions get the better of him and gets involved in the murder of their prime suspect.
Puleston-Davies has made a career out of playing bad guys but he believes that although Joe is a murderer, he is not essentially a bad person.
"I have played quite a few paedophiles," jokes Puleston-Davies.
"In fact for a while I cornered the market for paedophiles and heroin addicts. I used to think I was filed under P for Puleston-Davies but I wasn't, it was P for playing Paedophiles!
I do get pulled in for all the bad guy parts.
"Joe's an old-fashioned policeman - think Bodie and Doyle. Think The Professionals. Think the old hard-nuts.
"Joe thinks of yesteryear and wishes that the force had the clout it once had. But essentially he's not a bad man.
"There's no evil, no badness in the guy, he's just become distracted and his motives and sense of moral justice have become warped.
"He just loses it - he's got this temper and unfortunately Jason Buliegh gets in the way."
Joe has a lot of guilt, which is plaguing him from a previous murder case and spills over into the investigations into the 'Little Angela' murder.
Explains Puleston-Davies: "He's carrying huge guilt from a previous case that went horribly wrong. He took complete responsibility for that, and it hasn't gone away and so it's eating away inside his conscience.
"Whether it has turned him into the vigilante, that people say he's become, I don't know but it has dogged him over the years.
"He's got confused with what is right and what is wrong and this vigilante attitude is purely because he's a loving family man. He feels that Buliegh is a threat to Joe, his family and everyone like them.
"There are great contradictions in his character which is so interesting to play. Although Joe has done this terrible thing, he still cares about his wife and daughter and he cares about Chrissie and his colleagues.
"I'm not saying he'd stop a bullet for any of them, but I think that there is some sort of affection there."
This exploration into how a murder affects not only those connected with the victim but also the perpetrator is something that makes Conviction stand out from the average crime drama.
The police officers are not portrayed as the whiter-than-white paragons of virtue normally associated with other shows in this genre. Joe and Chrissie are real humans with real emotions and fallibilities.
"People see the police as good people," explains Puleston-Davies.
"We see them as almost unnaturally moral and that's why people are so shocked when they read headlines like 'Copper murders wife' or 'Constable of 30 years on the beat found with a prostitute'.
"We forget they are just like you and me. We build up this veneer of an old fashioned cop so that when they get found out it's more shocking than a pop star, or a man down your local pub."
When Chrissie starts to freak out about what they have done, it's left to Joe to take command of the situation.
In an almost clinical fashion, he dictates exactly how they deal with the minutiae and continually emphasises to Chrissie how they will not be found out if they just keep their cool.
"Chrissie becomes the 'what if' guy," explains Puleston-Davies. "He's always questioning - 'What if this happens? What do we do?'
"He starts to lose it because he is very aware of their situation and its consequences - he's looking ahead to what could or will happen.
"Joe just thinks of the here and now - 'This is what we do: we get rid of the clothes, we burn the evidence'.
"On the one hand Joe's reaction makes him look level-headed but he's not.
"The fact is that he cannot bear to face the circumstances of what the future will hold and that's why I suspect he actually holds it together for so long.
"But Joe is like a tomato that is being pumped up until it explodes - he is so level-headed in such narrow margins. He has this Jekyll and Hyde side to him.
"It is the complete dark turmoil, which is spinning around in his head that will eventually be his undoing."
Puleston-Davies is also a writer, having co-written the ITV1 drama Dirty Filthy Love, a semi-autobiographical story about a man with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which transmits in late September 2004.
And Puleston-Davies had nothing but admiration for Bill Gallagher's Conviction script and Red Production Company's dedication to producing original drama.
"Maybe being a writer makes me a little more obsessed about the work," says Puleston-Davies, "but what it does give me is even more respect for the writers when they get it right because I know what the process is like.
"If Red hadn't made Conviction, I don't believe the six of us that were cast would have been playing the leads. Any other production company would have been, 'Ian who?' I've lost jobs before now because I'm not a big name.
"We were all joking in the first week of filming and choosing an alternative high profile cast - we were sure that it would have included Ross Kemp, Martin Kemp and Paul Nicholls!
"But Red are one of the few production houses who first and foremost want to tell a good story and then find the actors who are good storytellers."
******************************************************
**IAN PLAYS JOE IN CONVICTION (2004) - Interview in The Stage**
Starring in gritty detective drama Conviction and toting guns in a new Guy Ritchie film, Ian Puleston-Davies is no stranger to crime roles. But, as the passionate Welshman explains to Rob Driscoll, crossing the floor into scriptwriting has been fuelled by more personal subjects, including his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and rural community roots.
Writing television dramas and acting in them are clearly two very distinct disciplines, but Ian Puleston-Davies is that rare breed who combines both talents with a more than a modicum of success. His last script to air on screen was the acclaimed ITV1 comedy drama Dirty Filthy Love, based on his own history of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which starred fellow Welshman Michael Sheen in the role of a man torn apart by his own physical paranoias. And he’s currently completing the final drafts of Farmer Brothers, another one-off drama, set in the North Wales mining community, which the BBC will start filming next year.
In the meantime, Puleston-Davies returns this week to performing in front of the cameras as the most dysfunctional detective you’ll have seen in a long while, in BBC3’s much-anticipated new drama series Conviction. He’s the first to admit that the prospect of yet another British cop show initially filled him with a sense of ennui. Then he realised that there was no hint of traditional find the killer, case-orientated stories in the very adult scripts by Bill Gallagher of Clocking Off and Out of the Blue fame, but instead a bold and thought-provoking perspective on life in the modern day police force. More than that, it was a welcome change from playing the bad guy - even if his character Joe does end up killing somebody in the first episode.
“I’ve tended to corner the market in playing paedophiles and heroin addicts,” says Puleston-Davies, who was born in Flint, Clwyd. “I’ve always been on the wrong side of the law, so I guess playing a boy in blue was part of the attraction.
“But Joe, my character in Conviction, is far from formulaic. He’s an old-school CID officer who’s seen far too many episodes of The Sweeney. He’s of the ‘bang ‘em up and ask questions later’ discipline, and he clashes directly with the new age, thinking man’s copper in the show, played by Reece Dinsdale. But while there’s no evil or badness in Joe, he does become distracted, goes off the rails, and does something really terrible. He just loses it, he has this temper and unfortunately the prime suspect in a murder case gets in the way.”
Conviction probably offers 46-year-old Puleston-Davies his most high-profile television role to date, yet it could have all ended up so differently. He grew up in a big farming community, and like all of his cousins was expected to become a farmer.
“I did all the traditional pursuits of young farmers, like stock judging, but I knew in my heart I was never cut out for it,” he recalls. “I had a wonderful escape by joining the local school drama club, and found that was my destiny.”
At the well-respected Clwyd Youth Theatre - which also witnessed some early board-treading by Rhys Ifans and Mark Lewis Jones - Puleston-Davies furthered his love of all things stage.
“Fortunately my parents were kind enough to let me leave my wellingtons at the back door and disappear to London,” he laughs.
He’s been there ever since, writing and acting over the years. He trained at the Guildhall School of Drama, “a lot of ex-Clwyd Youth Theatre members went there, like Rhys Ifans,” he says. Today, home for Puleston-Davies is Belsize Park, north London, where he lives with his partner of two years, Sue, duty manager of Hampstead’s Everyman Cinema. But his Welsh roots are never far behind.
“I go back home a lot - just the other day I went to an event held by the Flintshire Ploughing Society, of which my dad is chairman,” he says proudly. “It was actually a hedge-cutting match, and I felt I should lend some support. The plight of small farmers, especially in his native North Wales, is a topic about which Puleston-Davies can get quite passionate, hence his new screenplay, Farmer Brothers, which he’s been writing for several years.
“I’ve always wanted to write something with the backdrop of the plight of farming in Wales, as I don’t think small farmers get the same sympathy that miners had in the eighties, and it’s something I really wanted to redress.”
The resultant drama won’t be a preachy sermon, however, more a comedy drama that intriguingly mixes farming with flamenco. Humour, he insists, is vital as a method of point-making, hence the vital comedic tone of Dirty Filthy Love, co-written by Jeff Pope, which addressed the very serious topic of OCD, something from which Puleston-Davies has suffered for most of his life.
“I am indebted to my old mate Michael Sheen’s performance, because so many of my friends said he rang so true,” he says. “We also had a fantastic response from sufferers themselves, and that to me is the icing on the cake.”
Pulseton-Davies himself still suffers from OCD, and although he is a lot better these day, he doesn’t believe there will ever be a cure.
“The word is control,” he says. “The story you saw in Dirty Filthy Love is based on me eight years ago, and I’ve come through the worst, through therapy and medication. I’ve still a long way to go, but my determination is not to go to my grave carrying my wet wipes!”
Meanwhile, the dual working life of Ian Puleston-Davies means he is now back in front of the cameras, filming no less than Guy Ritchie’s new movie, Revolver, in London and the Isle of Man.
“Former Flying Picket Brian Hibbard and I play a couple of Irish gangsters,” he reveals. “Guy’s going back to what he does best, a good knockabout gangster flick, and the cast is amazing, including Jason Statham and Ray Liotta. Only last week we filmed a massive shoot-out in true Guy Ritchie tradition. All I’m waiting for now is to meet Madonna.”
It was a case of school friends reunited on the set of Conviction for actor Ian Puleston-Davies.
It was the first time that drama school colleagues Puleston-Davies and Reece Dinsdale had worked together, which made filming all the more enjoyable for the actor from North Wales.
"It's the happiest job I've done yet - it was brilliant and will stay with all of us forever.
I got reacquainted with Reece after many years - we were at drama school together and it was brilliant to see him again.
"This job really was the highlight of my career to date."
Puleston-Davies plays Joe, an old school detective in the CID, investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Angela.
However, Joe lets his emotions get the better of him and gets involved in the murder of their prime suspect.
Puleston-Davies has made a career out of playing bad guys but he believes that although Joe is a murderer, he is not essentially a bad person.
"I have played quite a few paedophiles," jokes Puleston-Davies.
"In fact for a while I cornered the market for paedophiles and heroin addicts. I used to think I was filed under P for Puleston-Davies but I wasn't, it was P for playing Paedophiles!
I do get pulled in for all the bad guy parts.
"Joe's an old-fashioned policeman - think Bodie and Doyle. Think The Professionals. Think the old hard-nuts.
"Joe thinks of yesteryear and wishes that the force had the clout it once had. But essentially he's not a bad man.
"There's no evil, no badness in the guy, he's just become distracted and his motives and sense of moral justice have become warped.
"He just loses it - he's got this temper and unfortunately Jason Buliegh gets in the way."
Joe has a lot of guilt, which is plaguing him from a previous murder case and spills over into the investigations into the 'Little Angela' murder.
Explains Puleston-Davies: "He's carrying huge guilt from a previous case that went horribly wrong. He took complete responsibility for that, and it hasn't gone away and so it's eating away inside his conscience.
"Whether it has turned him into the vigilante, that people say he's become, I don't know but it has dogged him over the years.
"He's got confused with what is right and what is wrong and this vigilante attitude is purely because he's a loving family man. He feels that Buliegh is a threat to Joe, his family and everyone like them.
"There are great contradictions in his character which is so interesting to play. Although Joe has done this terrible thing, he still cares about his wife and daughter and he cares about Chrissie and his colleagues.
"I'm not saying he'd stop a bullet for any of them, but I think that there is some sort of affection there."
This exploration into how a murder affects not only those connected with the victim but also the perpetrator is something that makes Conviction stand out from the average crime drama.
The police officers are not portrayed as the whiter-than-white paragons of virtue normally associated with other shows in this genre. Joe and Chrissie are real humans with real emotions and fallibilities.
"People see the police as good people," explains Puleston-Davies.
"We see them as almost unnaturally moral and that's why people are so shocked when they read headlines like 'Copper murders wife' or 'Constable of 30 years on the beat found with a prostitute'.
"We forget they are just like you and me. We build up this veneer of an old fashioned cop so that when they get found out it's more shocking than a pop star, or a man down your local pub."
When Chrissie starts to freak out about what they have done, it's left to Joe to take command of the situation.
In an almost clinical fashion, he dictates exactly how they deal with the minutiae and continually emphasises to Chrissie how they will not be found out if they just keep their cool.
"Chrissie becomes the 'what if' guy," explains Puleston-Davies. "He's always questioning - 'What if this happens? What do we do?'
"He starts to lose it because he is very aware of their situation and its consequences - he's looking ahead to what could or will happen.
"Joe just thinks of the here and now - 'This is what we do: we get rid of the clothes, we burn the evidence'.
"On the one hand Joe's reaction makes him look level-headed but he's not.
"The fact is that he cannot bear to face the circumstances of what the future will hold and that's why I suspect he actually holds it together for so long.
"But Joe is like a tomato that is being pumped up until it explodes - he is so level-headed in such narrow margins. He has this Jekyll and Hyde side to him.
"It is the complete dark turmoil, which is spinning around in his head that will eventually be his undoing."
Puleston-Davies is also a writer, having co-written the ITV1 drama Dirty Filthy Love, a semi-autobiographical story about a man with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which transmits in late September 2004.
And Puleston-Davies had nothing but admiration for Bill Gallagher's Conviction script and Red Production Company's dedication to producing original drama.
"Maybe being a writer makes me a little more obsessed about the work," says Puleston-Davies, "but what it does give me is even more respect for the writers when they get it right because I know what the process is like.
"If Red hadn't made Conviction, I don't believe the six of us that were cast would have been playing the leads. Any other production company would have been, 'Ian who?' I've lost jobs before now because I'm not a big name.
"We were all joking in the first week of filming and choosing an alternative high profile cast - we were sure that it would have included Ross Kemp, Martin Kemp and Paul Nicholls!
"But Red are one of the few production houses who first and foremost want to tell a good story and then find the actors who are good storytellers."
******************************************************
**IAN PLAYS JOE IN CONVICTION (2004) - Interview in The Stage**
Starring in gritty detective drama Conviction and toting guns in a new Guy Ritchie film, Ian Puleston-Davies is no stranger to crime roles. But, as the passionate Welshman explains to Rob Driscoll, crossing the floor into scriptwriting has been fuelled by more personal subjects, including his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and rural community roots.
Writing television dramas and acting in them are clearly two very distinct disciplines, but Ian Puleston-Davies is that rare breed who combines both talents with a more than a modicum of success. His last script to air on screen was the acclaimed ITV1 comedy drama Dirty Filthy Love, based on his own history of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which starred fellow Welshman Michael Sheen in the role of a man torn apart by his own physical paranoias. And he’s currently completing the final drafts of Farmer Brothers, another one-off drama, set in the North Wales mining community, which the BBC will start filming next year.
In the meantime, Puleston-Davies returns this week to performing in front of the cameras as the most dysfunctional detective you’ll have seen in a long while, in BBC3’s much-anticipated new drama series Conviction. He’s the first to admit that the prospect of yet another British cop show initially filled him with a sense of ennui. Then he realised that there was no hint of traditional find the killer, case-orientated stories in the very adult scripts by Bill Gallagher of Clocking Off and Out of the Blue fame, but instead a bold and thought-provoking perspective on life in the modern day police force. More than that, it was a welcome change from playing the bad guy - even if his character Joe does end up killing somebody in the first episode.
“I’ve tended to corner the market in playing paedophiles and heroin addicts,” says Puleston-Davies, who was born in Flint, Clwyd. “I’ve always been on the wrong side of the law, so I guess playing a boy in blue was part of the attraction.
“But Joe, my character in Conviction, is far from formulaic. He’s an old-school CID officer who’s seen far too many episodes of The Sweeney. He’s of the ‘bang ‘em up and ask questions later’ discipline, and he clashes directly with the new age, thinking man’s copper in the show, played by Reece Dinsdale. But while there’s no evil or badness in Joe, he does become distracted, goes off the rails, and does something really terrible. He just loses it, he has this temper and unfortunately the prime suspect in a murder case gets in the way.”
Conviction probably offers 46-year-old Puleston-Davies his most high-profile television role to date, yet it could have all ended up so differently. He grew up in a big farming community, and like all of his cousins was expected to become a farmer.
“I did all the traditional pursuits of young farmers, like stock judging, but I knew in my heart I was never cut out for it,” he recalls. “I had a wonderful escape by joining the local school drama club, and found that was my destiny.”
At the well-respected Clwyd Youth Theatre - which also witnessed some early board-treading by Rhys Ifans and Mark Lewis Jones - Puleston-Davies furthered his love of all things stage.
“Fortunately my parents were kind enough to let me leave my wellingtons at the back door and disappear to London,” he laughs.
He’s been there ever since, writing and acting over the years. He trained at the Guildhall School of Drama, “a lot of ex-Clwyd Youth Theatre members went there, like Rhys Ifans,” he says. Today, home for Puleston-Davies is Belsize Park, north London, where he lives with his partner of two years, Sue, duty manager of Hampstead’s Everyman Cinema. But his Welsh roots are never far behind.
“I go back home a lot - just the other day I went to an event held by the Flintshire Ploughing Society, of which my dad is chairman,” he says proudly. “It was actually a hedge-cutting match, and I felt I should lend some support. The plight of small farmers, especially in his native North Wales, is a topic about which Puleston-Davies can get quite passionate, hence his new screenplay, Farmer Brothers, which he’s been writing for several years.
“I’ve always wanted to write something with the backdrop of the plight of farming in Wales, as I don’t think small farmers get the same sympathy that miners had in the eighties, and it’s something I really wanted to redress.”
The resultant drama won’t be a preachy sermon, however, more a comedy drama that intriguingly mixes farming with flamenco. Humour, he insists, is vital as a method of point-making, hence the vital comedic tone of Dirty Filthy Love, co-written by Jeff Pope, which addressed the very serious topic of OCD, something from which Puleston-Davies has suffered for most of his life.
“I am indebted to my old mate Michael Sheen’s performance, because so many of my friends said he rang so true,” he says. “We also had a fantastic response from sufferers themselves, and that to me is the icing on the cake.”
Pulseton-Davies himself still suffers from OCD, and although he is a lot better these day, he doesn’t believe there will ever be a cure.
“The word is control,” he says. “The story you saw in Dirty Filthy Love is based on me eight years ago, and I’ve come through the worst, through therapy and medication. I’ve still a long way to go, but my determination is not to go to my grave carrying my wet wipes!”
Meanwhile, the dual working life of Ian Puleston-Davies means he is now back in front of the cameras, filming no less than Guy Ritchie’s new movie, Revolver, in London and the Isle of Man.
“Former Flying Picket Brian Hibbard and I play a couple of Irish gangsters,” he reveals. “Guy’s going back to what he does best, a good knockabout gangster flick, and the cast is amazing, including Jason Statham and Ray Liotta. Only last week we filmed a massive shoot-out in true Guy Ritchie tradition. All I’m waiting for now is to meet Madonna.”
