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Peter Wingfield:
Hi, and welcome to the Methos collection. I'm Peter Wingfield. I play Methos in Highlander, the TV series, and also in the most recent Highlander movie, Endgame.
~THE YOUNG WINGFIELD~
Let me tell you a bit about me. I was born in Cardiff, capital city of Wales. Kind of an industrial city built on the mining industry. I was actually born in Glossop Terrace Maternity Hospital, which is in a suburb of Cardiff called Splott, a little-known fact there.
I lived in Cardiff till I was eighteen, went to university. I went to school there. I learned Welsh in school, did two years of learning Welsh. And I now can't remember a single thing, apart from all the bad words. And the drinking toast, "Twll din pob Sais," which will always endear you to a Welshman if you find one in a pub.
Translation: Twll din pob Sais - Asshole to every Englishman (Screw the English)
~To be or not to be...~
I guess my first interest in acting came while I was at school. My school used to do a play every Easter, and everybody used to get involved. The whole of the first and second year were a part of that. And that was my first real contact with it. But the first proper role I ever did was in a play called "Ondine" by Jean Giraudoux, in which I played an illusionist. And my-- The first entrance that my character made, I was just wearing a pair of tights, bare chested, and I had a big cape and a magician's hat. And I walked onto the stage on my hands. And my assistant was, for no reason I can really fathom, dressed as a dog. And he carried my hat in his teeth, and then when I got down he passed me my hat. That was my first proper acting role. And I followed that enormous success by playing Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" the following year. And I think that was really what spoiled me forever. I think really after that, deep down inside, there was no going back. It was an actor that I wanted to be.
~SCHOOL DAZE~
I went to university in Oxford, and I studied medicine... Which seems very strange now, looking back, but at the time it was the obvious thing. I was interested in science, and I was always good at passing exams. I never really concentrated on the work, but... Two weeks after I'd done a paper, I couldn't remember a thing, but on the actual day, for the three hours that I had to be answering questions, I was pretty good at that stuff. And you sort of get pushed -- if you're good at passing exams and you're good at the sciences, you get pushed towards medicine. And there was some-- My dad was a doctor, so it was in the family.
So I ended up Brasenose College, Oxford, reading physiological science and then onto St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London to do clinical studies. And that was a terrible mistake, because at Oxford, it's not like being at a hospital where everyone around you is a doctor or a nurse or somebody medically related. It's a regular university where there are people doing classics and English and Egyptian studies, and I just didn't really do any medicine. I did a lot of plays and had a really very good time. But I was not the greatest potential doctor. And I snuck through my exams barely, with frankly very little knowledge of most of the curriculum.
And I moved on to my practical training, the clinical years at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, which again was a terrible mistake, because there was one other guy there while I was there, who was really interested in theatre and the arts. And if I'd been there on my own, I'd probably have just done medicine, but he was really interested in directing and I was really interested in acting. So I did a lot of plays there as well and gradually less and less medicine. About four weeks before my finals, I thought to myself, 'I really don't want to be a doctor who acts. I want to be an actor.' So I left.
~ON BEING INFLUENCED~
My major influences, I think in the early days -- the days when I was in medical school in university but doing lots and lots of plays and watching movies -- I think the movie that really was influential in my life was a movie called Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner film. And there was something about the time that that hit me and the subject matter of the movie, which really touched something deep in me and made me feel "now, if I want to be an actor, then that's what I should do." That being in medical school, qualifying as a doctor, and then using that as something to fall back on and acting if I could, that was really never going to work for me. I had to commit, I had to burn all my bridges.
~THE BIRTH OF CHARLIE PENKNIFE~
So I left medical school, and for a little while I was blissfully unemployed, and then for a long while after that I was very painfully unemployed. And in the midst of this I'd been offered a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London to do an acting course, but I didn't have any money coming in and they wouldn't give me a grant because I'd already done five years of medicine, which is not unreasonable.
So I used to do kids' parties at the weekends. I'd do five days in drama school, and then Saturdays and Sundays, I became Charlie Penknife, the jungle explorer. I used to wear a big pair of khaki pants and a massive pair of steel toe-cap boots and a pith helmet -- [camera cuts between takes] and a pith helmet -- pith helmet. And I used to do all sorts of ludicrous things. I used to do the standard kind of kid's games -- pass the parcel, musical statues. I used to do little adventure stories. Sometimes I'd just lie on the floor and let them kick me. I'd do anything to make the time pass. Tried puppet shows once but made the big mistake of having the puppet theatre in the middle of the room, so as soon as I went behind it, all the kids went straight out through the door.
I used to wake up in a cold sweat on Saturday mornings thinking of the party that I was going to have to do that day. Kids are a very tough audience. They're really not afraid of telling you that they're not having a good time and that you're really boring and you suck.
~DRAMA SCHOOL DUES~
Finally did manage to get a scholarship to Guildhall School and did my three years' dues there. A very strange system, where I really don't think I learned anything about acting at Guildhall. And I found drama school really tough because they expected me to be there all day, every day, and I wasn't used to that. I had to do things like, we had a gymnastics class where they would teach us to do forward rolls. And I'd actually done a lot of gymnastics in school, and I was national trampoline champion in Wales under fifteens. So I could do forward rolls. I really didn't see that the class had anything to offer me. So I didn't used to go to classes like that and I nearly got thrown out of drama school for, um, not really having the team spirit.
The whole process was about the final evening in the third year where all the agents and directors -- casting directors -- came and watched you do a couple of speeches as a showcase, and I got an agent out of that and started work pretty much immediately.
~AN ACTOR FOR HIRE~
When I left drama school, the first job I ever did was playing a taxi driver in a movie called Antonia and Jane. I had eight words. They were the words "It's a moot point" and "Okay, gov, you're on." And I got the job because the person they'd cast actually couldn't drive and didn't tell them until the day before they were filming, when he phoned up the director and said "Listen, I can't drive and it's not just that I haven't got a license, it's that I really, really can't drive." So they came to the nearest drama school and said, "Has anyone got an equity card and fancy doing a little job?" It was my first work.
The first proper job I had was a TV series called Medics where I played a medical student who failed to take his final exams. Although there was a slight difference there, in that he had an affair with a patient and got into a bit of trouble and had to leave town. Followed that immediately with playing Lieutenant Pasco in Soldier Soldier and actually overlapped those two jobs with a mini-series called The Men's Room. So my first, I don't know, six, seven months as an actor were pretty easy. Life seemed good. And then that finished and I was unemployed for a very long time.
Acting's a funny business that way. You have periods of intense activity followed by periods of absolutely nothing going on. And you never know when one is going to flip into the other, and you never know when you start a job, how it's going to affect your life.
~BECOMING IMMORTAL~
The first connection I had with Highlander was a phone call from my agent saying that there was an audition if I was interested. It was a TV series spin-off from a movie. The character, he didn't really know much about, but it was four days filming in Paris, was I interested. Four days in Paris? You're going to pay me? Yeah, all right.
I went and picked up the scenes for the audition tape. I had no idea what they were talking about. There was some stuff about this guy had been on stage with Caesar and he'd also been on stage with the Rolling Stones. And then he was fighting some guy called MacLeod under a bridge in Paris and asking him to chop his head off, saying it was going to be for the best in some kind of a way. It seemed like a pretty strange precept for a TV series to me. Is 'precept' a word?
~Methos
MEETS THE HIGHLANDER~
As background to the character, I had this information that he was something like five thousand years old, he couldn't remember exactly how old he was. But that he, when we first met him, was sitting on the floor, eating a pizza, drinking a can of beer, listening to a walkman. It made no sense to me at all. Learned the words, put it on tape, sent it off, forgot about it.
I then got a call a few days later saying, could I retape the scenes, but slightly change the performance? Just emphasise a little of this, a little of that. Make it subtly different. And as I recall, that was, I think that was on a Tuesday evening that I taped that, and they then put it on a plane, sent it to Paris for the Wednesday. And the job was to begin on the Thursday.
And I got the job and I went out and started filming and I thought many times, if they hadn't liked the retaping of it, what were they going to do? Because, really, time was against them to find somebody else to do it.
I went out to Paris, filmed the scene. The first scene I ever did was that one under the bridge. Loads of smoke machines. This guy called Adrian Paul came up to me. He was wearing what appeared to be a sleeping bag with a zip up both sides. It's freezing cold. France gets unbelievably cold. And he came out and shook my hand, told me who he was. He seemed pretty serious, pretty intense, seemed like he had a lot on his mind. And he discussed a few things about the character and about the scene and then we went at it.
I had no idea what I was doing, most of that scene, but it was kind of fun, you know, a bit of sword stuff, some pretty dramatic lighting. And I did another day or so filming and then I went home, came back one more trip, did a day's filming, went home. End of that episode, I never expected to hear from anyone again. And that's where it all began.
~THE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR~
If you're playing the oldest guy around, the easy thing to do, the obvious thing, is to have some old guy with a white beard and, you know, sort of Santa Claus. But the rules of this world were that you stayed the same age you were when you were killed. So you go way back in history, life expectancy gets less and less and less. The chances were that if he was that old, he would have died in his twenties or thirties. And he'd stay that age.
And the other fundamentally smart thing was that he was a pacifist, he avoided fighting whenever he could. And again, if you think it through, you know, these guys that are fighting all the time, the biggest, toughest, meanest fighter, somewhere along the line of a thousand years is going to have a bad day [snaps his fingers] and it's gone. If you're really smart, you avoid fighting whenever you can, and you blend in so that no one knows you are the oldest guy in the world. People are out hunting you, you've got a price on your head, you need to look as inconspicuous as possible.
And I thought that was clever on their part, because it gave him some depth and some smarts without playing anything. Because there's really nothing you can do to play "five thousand years old". You've just got to hope that people believe it.
I had no idea how the business worked in North America, which is superimposed on all of this. In my country, when you do a TV series, you make six or seven episodes. That's a year's work. If the show does well, it comes back the next year and maybe does another six or seven. Here, you're talking about seasons that are twenty-two episodes and characters that will appear in one, disappear for years at a time, and then come back again.
I knew there was the possibility that they'd bring the character back at the end of the season and chop his head off. But month or two later, I got a call saying, would I like to do that, indeed, do the final episodes of that season. They sent me the scripts and I read them, and at the end of them, I wasn't dead. My character was still very much alive. I actually had some pretty funny lines in the episodes too.
From talking to a few other people on the show, discovered that that's the most important thing you do when you get a script. You go to the back page and you see if your head's still attached.
So we shot those. I went back to England. Probably about March by this time, 1995. And again, I forgot about it. Didn't think I'd ever see or hear anything from these people again. And then late in August, I got a phone call saying would I like to go out to Vancouver, Canada. Shoot two more episodes. I'd never been to Canada, so I thought, yeah, right? It's a job. They sent me the scripts. I had some really very good lines. An episode called "Chivalry", followed by an episode called "Timeless".
And my thinking about the character was that the best I could really do was to suggest that there was a lot going on below the surface. I never actually reveal anything whatsoever.
~METHOS IS THE MAN
Everybody Loves~
Why is Methos such a favourite? Why is he so interesting? I get bored really easily, and the big problem with TV shows is that you're playing basically the same story, week in, week out. The first episode is great. You're creating a character. It's all new. You have all the meaty stuff. The rest of the time, you're playing variations on the same stuff. And it's stultifying, and I get bored and I'm not much fun to be around when I'm bored.
The thing about Methos is he was a different guy every time I met him. And that was not just superimposed on top. That was why he was the guy he was. It's why he'd survived all this time. It was because he was always blending in. He was always merging and was that kind of protean, ethereal, 'difficult to grab hold of' fluid quality. And it meant that some weeks I was playing comedy, some weeks I was playing really kind of deep, heavy stuff. I mean, to be able to say about a character, casually in passing, "Oh yeah, he was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse." And for people not to say, "Come on, you're kidding me." That shows a great strength in the writing of that character. Anything was possible with him.
And it created this beautiful thing where things that I was doing, because I was in a particular mood on a particular day, the writers would pick up, and they would feed it back in a different spin on a new story. And I would take that and wrap it around a different way and spin it back slightly differently again. And there was a tremendous creative sense of dialogue between me filming mainly in Paris, and the writers and producers way off back in LA. And it made him such fun to play.
~THE 5000 YEAR OLD CHAMELEON~
Every time I met him, he was a different guy, he was a different challenge. With some of the episodes, they're very, very dark. And I think of the "Comes A Horseman / Revelation 6:8" story and also "Methuselah's Gift". And some of them were very light comedy. They were almost fast. I mean, the "Indiscretions" episode, where there's a bit of a backstory, and then it's just Methos and Joe in a road movie. It's hard to know where the comedy, where the story lines, where the character came from, whether it was me, whether it was from the writers, because it became so intertwined.
It's interesting to me. There is an anthology book called "An Evening at Joe's", which is collection of stories written by people associated with the Highlander world. They could have been actors on the show or the props master, a fight director, worked in the office. Anyone to do with the series was able to write. And of this book -- it's two hundred and eighty pages -- there's one story that's nothing to do with Highlander at all. It's about sixty pages. And of the remaining pages, half of them are directly about Methos. I love the pages that aren't about Methos. One seventy-page story is the story of Dracula as told by Methos to Joe. So three quarters of this book is Methos related.
Why does he have the power to create that interest? I think one of the reasons is that he reveals so little about himself. One of the other reasons for the great appeal of the character, I think, is also his great age. Five thousand years. I mean that means you can go back to our entire recorded history and you can talk about anybody that ever lived, and Methos would have been around. Every single interesting person from every culture on the planet -- you can ask Methos; he'll have an opinion, and he may have personal experience, because the further you go back in time, the fewer people there were on the planet. And that makes him an incredibly interesting dinner companion. Someone to sit down and chat with, to say 'hey, what was Cleopatra like?' 'What was Genghis Khan like?' 'What was it like being around at that time when that stuff was going on?' 'Helen of Troy, was she really that cute?' 'What was it like to be in the presence of Nefertiti? Of Jesus, Muhammad? Did you meet them? What were they like?'
And as an actor, that's an extraordinary challenge and fascinating. It demands so much of you. It demands that you go to places that no other characters demand that you go. Emotional places, research-wise, you have to go and find stuff out. And that's a gift. As an acting role, that's just a gift.
~MARKED BY HIGHLANDER~
Let me tell you a story, the last thing that was ever filmed of Highlander, the TV series. So at the end of the "Indiscretions" episode, big Quickening. I was standing on the ledge probably fifty feet above the ground in an old power station warehouse place. There were explosions rigged all around me. There were jets behind me that were going to fire flames twenty feet in the air. I'm standing on a little metal disc, and underneath that is a smoke machine so that there's going to be smoke coming up around me. Behind me is, you know, this is probably ten feet of solid land. In front of me, there's about four inches and then this forty-, fifty-foot drop. Across from me, there is a ledge on which are amassed the entire film crew, plus all the producers, the executive producers, everyone to do with Highlander, because this is the big party to end the show. We have one go at this. We're not coming back.
And once it starts, I'm doing my... oh man, I'm having the attack. I'm looking up, screaming with the intensity of the moment. And one of the fireworks goes up into the sky and comes down on my face and I feel it hit my cheek. And then I can feel it burning my flesh. And you're caught in that dilemma of "Do I just scream in pain and say, 'Cut, cut, cut, we got to go again on this'," or do you just grin and bear it? Well, guess what? I still have the scar. Marked by Highlander.
~HIGHLANDER CONVENTIONS~
Highlander fan conventions. How do you explain that to anybody? That is one of those fundamental "you had to be there" moments.
[clips from 1998 Highlander convention - exterior of the Hilton, a convention poster, empty convention room, techs building sets, registration staff, seated crowds cheering as Peter exits the "loft elevator" onto the stage, poses, and picks up a handheld microphone.]
Peter Wingfield: [into mic] Candygram.
I can't remember exactly how many people were there. I think it was probably about a thousand, fifteen hundred. I do, however, remember walking onto the stage that first time, and the screaming and cheering and people passing out because they couldn't breathe. It was a baffling and extraordinary moment. I guess it's what Roger Daltrey must have experienced over and over again when he was going on stage with The Who. It's what rock stars get all the time in these big stadium gigs. But I had absolutely no concept of it. No preparation for it. And didn't know what to do with it. And I've got to tell you, I've been to a lot of conventions now, and I still don't really know what to do with it. It's just too weird. To travel to the other side of the planet and find people have your face on a t-shirt. That's weird.
I think from the start I had a sense that Methos was inside me somewhere.
~POSTCARDS~
It seemed like such a good idea. I mean, I knew it meant twenty-some-odd hours straight driving through the rest of that day and the ensuing night, but I wanted her to see it. And I wanted to be there when she saw it. I wanted to be there when she stepped out of the van and saw it spread out before her in the first glimmering light of a dawn. The Grand Canyon. I wanted to see that look of awe in her eyes. The amazement, the sheer bloody majesty of it. I'd been there a dozen times over the years. More. It never loses its power. I suppose I wanted her to put humanity, life, into some kind of perspective. Next to this great work of nature, human problems seem small. And it even makes my thousands of years of memories seem light.
Of course, when I'd played out the trip in my head, I didn't include the rainstorm that hit us when we crossed the Rockies. Or the flat that almost had us off the road and into a ditch just outside Flagstaff. I also... I didn't include the bit where I slipped while I was trying to push the van out of the mud we'd become mired in, fell down a bank into a strategically placed bramble bush. The cuts and the bruises, they healed within minutes, but my clothes and my disposition were sadly beyond resuscitation. Alexa said it didn't matter. She tried to make a joke of it, but it did matter. This was the first day of our first -- and only -- trip. And here she was, woken out of her much-needed sleep by the cold and the wet, and by a guy who couldn't even manage a simple tire change. It just made me so mad. By the time I finally accepted that we wouldn't make it to the canyon for dawn and we should check into a hotel, I couldn't face the "Good evening, sir. How are we, sir? Had a bit of a rough trip, have we, sir?" So I left Alexa to make the arrangements. She came back with two keys, another little detail which my fantasy hadn't included. I couldn't say I blamed her. I didn't feel much like spending the night with me either. I wiped the mud out of my eyes and reached for the shower knobs, and then, summoning a dozen dead languages, I cursed fluently for a full minute without pausing for breath. Our quaint hotel, apparently designed for honeymoon couples, had forgone installing a shower in favour of a giant whirlpool tub. I stood there shivering in the cold-tiled bathroom while the tub filled.
It seemed like a geological age before it was deep enough, and I lowered myself gingerly into the steaming water, watching implacably as it instantly turned brown. I ducked my head under and tried to scrub some of the dirt out of my hair, but I only succeeded in sending more cascades of dirty water into my eyes. I sat with my eyes closed for a long moment, contemplating what a sissy I'd become over the years, and terribly accustomed to cleanliness. And then I had the sensation that I was not alone. Alexa was standing in the doorway angelically wrapped in one of those white monogrammed bath robes they have at all the best hotels.
"My room has a shower," she said by way of explanation.
"Maybe I should use it," I replied. Okay, I know it's not exactly Cary Grant, but it's hard when you look like Uriah Heep.
"Maybe you should try clean water," she said. Crouching down, she reached past me and pulled the plug out of the drain. I sat motionless as the water slowly ebbed away; she held my gaze, never once looking away, a tiny smile playing on the corner of her lips. She was enjoying this, damn her. Bless her.
When the tub was empty, she replaced the plug and turned the taps back on. She sat on the corner of the bath as it filled. "Turn around," she said. So I did as I was told, drawing my knees up towards my chest. She nudged me forward with the knee and scooped up a handful of water to splash over me, and I let myself relax as the hot water rose around me. I could feel the fingers brushing against my scalp, against the tops of my ears as she went through my hair, strand by strand.
I felt her hands drop to my shoulders and pause almost imperceptibly before moving on. She shifted position and reached past me for the soap, and when her hands returned, they were cool and slick with lather. She made her way over my shoulders and down my chest, and the last of the mud disappeared as she repeatedly cupped clean water over my body and smoothed away the remnants of soap. I could feel her breath warm against my ears as she leaned forward. She worked down my arm from shoulder to elbow to wrist. Then she lifted my hand and cleaned between each finger, and I closed my eyes, felt my breath catch at the touch of her hands against the sensitive webbing.
And then she slowly traced a circle on the inside of my wrist, and my eyes flew open as the moment was shattered into a thousand pieces.
"And I thought you were just some geeky travel writer with his college van," she said, lifting my arm out to have a better look. "I didn't figure you for the kind of guy with a checkered pass that included a tattoo."
"You have no idea," I said. What else was there to say? Where could I possibly start? I tried to look at the tattoo and see it the way she did, as a sign of a troubled youth. The inside of the wrist is jammed with nerves and veins, and it's one of the most dangerous places to be tattooed. Hence the Watcher ritual. And hence my involuntary shudder as she raised my wrist towards her mouth and I anticipated the coming kiss. But no kiss came. Instead, she blew gently on the exposed skin and then ran her tongue around the tattoo.
And I shuddered once more and turned in the bath and scooped her up in my arms and pulled her in on top of me. Her robe turned instantly to sponge and I held her and kissed her. I felt her breath go short and pulled back a fraction and looked into her eyes. And there it was. That look of wonder and awe that I'd wanted so much to see. Here in this tub in this hotel room was a work of nature, older than either of us.
Perhaps this first day wasn't ruined after all.
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