Best known for playing the King of the Jews, Robert Powell is now set to play the King of England. Powell shot to international stardom in the 1970s when he portrayed Christ in Franco Zeffirelli’s internationally acclaimed television series Jesus Of Nazareth. Next month he’ll be opening the Birmingham Rep’s autumn season, taking on the role of our very own Prince of Wales in the award-winning play, King Charles III. 

What’s On caught up with Robert to ask about this latest theatrical endeavour, the challenge of playing the Son of God - and what it’s like to make a cult TV comedy series with the one and only Jasper Carrott!   

Does playing a famous person who's still alive - as you’re doing here, Robert - bring with it a particular set of challenges for an actor?
I suppose it faintly does but I don’t think I’ve played someone who’s still alive before. I’m not allowed to do an impersonation of Prince Charles - which is unfortunate, as I do a rather good one. As an actor, I’ll be playing Charles entirely subjectively, leaving it for the audience to make up their own minds.

Have you ever met Prince Charles?
We’re not friends but we’ve certainly met each other many times. We’re members of the same club. He doesn’t pitch up to that very often, probably every couple of years, but we’re aware of each other and I like him enormously. I’m an ambassador of the Prince’s Trust, so I also have other connections.

Does knowing Charles, and the thought that you’re likely to come across each other in social circles, make a difference to how you portray him on stage?
I joke that the next time I see him he might not be quite so affable, but I see the world through my eyes and I assume that other people have a similar way of looking at things. The play is quite brilliant and is in blank verse. It has a Shakespearean element which brings a tremendous gravitas to it without being too colloquial. Without sounding pompous, the blank verse element of it brings a degree of weight to the play. The audience are probably not that aware of it - just as you’re probably not aware if you’ve never read Shakespeare that it’s written as verse.

Do you know if Charles has seen the play?
I don’t think he has. If it were me, I wouldn’t be offended by it; I’d be flattered. I think it shows him in a very good light - but, again, I’m talking subjectively because I’m about to play him. What people will judge him by are the elements that they already know. It’s very much about his relationship with his children, and wanting to make his mark having waited all his life for this moment. He doesn’t want to waste it and so picks something you’d never expect him to pick to make his mark.
The play’s about the battle against everybody else as Charles tries to keep his integrity, because he’s very conscious of his own conscience. He’s a very conscience-driven man, and all the better for that. I’m completely biased because I think he’s utterly delightful.

Do you foresee King Charles III appealing to a mixed-age audience?
Very much so. Even though Charles is the pivotal character, the sons are equally interesting and exciting characters, as is Kate. I think the youngsters who come to see it will be thrilled, and there are certain elements that will be so recognisable to them in terms of their relationships with their parents.

You always seem to be in work and it goes without saying you’re a talented actor. But what’s been the secret of your long-term and ongoing success?
I work very hard. I really do. I put in a huge amount of effort when I’m working. I don’t know whether that makes a huge amount of difference, but all I can say is that I’ve been doing this for fifty-plus years...
When we were doing Holby City, we started filming at eight in the morning and finished at seven, with an hour for lunch. We filmed in Elstree and I used to be able to get home by about quarter to eight, at which time I’d pour a large glass of wine and then spend the next hour going through the script for the following day. Most of an actor’s life is dealing in the currency of banality. The secret of being successful is to become the alchemist and turn dross - which, to be honest with you, most stuff is. Okay, occasionally you’ll get a Shaw, a Shakespeare, a Stoppard or an Alan Bennett, and it’s thrilling, but most of the time you’re dealing with banality, particularly in television. There are two ways of dealing with it. You can just say it, or you can bring something to it that arrests people. Something that’s different. In other words, you give it a life which is beyond the actual word itself. That’s what I spend my time doing - finding the layers. I know it sounds awfully pompous in principle, but you asked me why I’ve been reasonably successful. I’m not saying that other actors don’t work hard too - they do - but the ones who think they can get away with taking it easy get found out very quickly.

Most people will first and foremost associate you with the role of Christ, which you famously played in 1977 in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus Of Nazareth. How did your role in such a high-profile international television series come about?
I knew they were casting but didn’t give it a second thought, simply because I’d been to see Franco for two films in the late ’60s/early ’70s. I didn’t get to read on either occasion. I just walked in and sat in front of his desk, talked for a couple of minutes and Franco said, ‘Thank you, thank you’ and that was it.
So when I got the call from Franco’s representatives saying he wanted to see me for Jesus Of Nazareth, I turned him down. I actually said no because at that time I was on stage playing a lead role in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I said to my agent, ‘I’m not going to go and humiliate myself. If he wants to see me, tell him to come to the theatre, or go to the cinema if he wants to find out whether I can act’. This is the arrogance that success can bring you and I own up to that. It’s why one wants to be successful. Not for the money and not for the fame thing but purely and simply because it does give you the right to get better parts.
A message came through asking if I’d screen test for it. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that. At least that gives me a chance to show him what I can do’. So I pitched up to a screen test where they put a blonde wig and beard on me. I remember phoning my agent from a phone box down the very same corridor at Elstree Studios where, years and years later, I used to walk when doing Holby. I rang my agent and said, ‘I think we can forget that, it was disastrous’. About two weeks later they phoned again and said that Franco wanted to come over from Rome to meet me and test me himself. Halfway through that test I knew he was going to ask me to do it. Then, when they did ask me, I decided not to say yes for about a week. There was no revenge involved. I just didn’t want to do it, but it was one of those things where you know in your heart of hearts that, having been asked, you have to say yes.

Did you ruffle any religious feathers?
To be honest, we didn’t. While we were shooting it, which was a nine-month process, we had a Rabbi on set all of the time. We also had a representative from the Catholic Church in Rome and a representative from General Motors, who were the sponsor. So we were very, very careful not to ruffle feathers.
We actually threw away the first two weeks’ filming. Franco and I watched the rushes and I said it didn’t work. Our ambition was to show the humanity - the human side, if you like - of the divine Christ. Unfortunately, though, all that happened was that he became too human and you lost the other part of him. So we decided between us that I wouldn’t do anything. I would leave it all up to the audience. I would offer up a blank canvas. I would offer up the look, the voice, the eyes, the presence, but I wouldn’t perform it. That resulted in five hundred thousand people saying, ‘That’s my Christ’. I’d allowed them to see their Christ in me. I’d love to turn around and say it was deliberate but it wasn’t. I couldn’t find any other way of doing it at the time, but the net result was little short of remarkable - well, from the letters I received anyway.

Moving forward in time, the 1990s saw you team up with one the Midlands’ finest comedians, Jasper Carrott. How did you find that experience?
It was purely accidental. Jasper was a friend and he was doing Canned Carrott at the time. His writers, who were very, very clever, had written these four-minute-long sketches to go into his show about these two idiotic policeman. They were wondering who they could get to play the other one and Jasper suggested me. They just laughed and said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, he won’t do it!’. Jasper phoned me and asked if I’d be interested.
If he’d asked me to play a straight man to his comic man then he would’ve got very short shrift - there was no way I was going to do that - but he sent me the script and I laughed out loud because both of the characters were very funny, in different ways. I asked him which one he wanted me to play and he said I could do either, so I opted for Briggs. During the course of the five television series we did, the programme evolved into a cult show that was so silly and which kids loved.

It must have been great fun to film...
It was very difficult to film. Say the working day was a nine-hour shoot, they had to factor in an extra hour a day where there would be no filming done because everyone would be laughing. We once had to cover the camera operator with a sheet because we could see his shoulders moving as he laughed. And we ruined so many takes from snorting.

Will you be meeting up with Jasper while you’re in the Midlands?
Definitely. He’s got a birthday party the day before I start teching in Birmingham, so I’ll have to behave myself.

Your career spans TV, film and stage. Which do you favour?
Television. I love it. It’s a fabulous medium. Twenty years ago I was banging on about young actors’ desire to do movies. Television is so much better. You get a bigger audience and a longer time to tell a story. I now read trade papers which say that television is the new movies and I’m really quite proud to have spotted it. I’ve been banging on about this for years.

So TV wins over stage, then?
The only reason that stage loses is that it’s unbelievably hard work.

Was acting always on your radar?
It was what I did as a kid and something I did as a teenager. Being on stage always made me happy. To me, it was more real than reality. I was a shy person as a boy, very shy, and I didn’t know who I was. When I went on stage I threw off all of that and became somebody else.

If this wonderful career hadn’t panned out, what do you think you’d be doing now?
God only knows. If Hugh Hunt, who was the head of drama at Manchester University, hadn’t come to see me in a play I was doing for the university’s stage society, I would probably have been a lawyer of some kind. But he did come to see it. He came around to the little stage door and said, ‘Why are you bothering with law, why don’t you come and read drama with me?’ To me, this was the most wonderful thing I’d ever heard. I went home and told my parents. They were shocked but very supportive.
I then resigned from the law faculty and applied to switch courses to drama. A month later I got a letter back from the board saying I hadn’t qualified - ironically because I didn’t have English Literature at either O Level or A Level. I hadn’t taken it. I’d chosen Latin, Greek and Ancient History. They said they would hold the place for a year. I immediately found the English Lit set book, picked up a copy of The History Of Mr Polly by HG Wells and had a look at it, once. I then walked into the drama department at Manchester, collared a bloke who was a drama lecturer and said, ‘Have you got any ideas of what I can do for you?’ 
You talk about serendipity, you talk about going through life and you talk about luck. There is luck, but I think you make your own. I had gone in and asked the right bloke. Some people wouldn’t even have gone in. They would’ve sat on their arses for a year or got a job on the local council, but I didn’t want to do that. So I talked to this lecturer and he said he had contacts at three theatres, Leatherhead, Colchester and Stoke. I wrote letters, went to see all of them, and got offered a job at Stoke-on-Trent’s theatre in the round. It turned out that the man I had spoken to was Stephen Joseph, who’d invented theatre in the round and formed the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough with my great and very close friend, Alan Ayckbourn. I had just picked, out of nowhere, the right man to ask and ended up in the totally right theatre. They offered me a job for six weeks - three weeks rehearsal and three weeks playing a spear carrier in King Lear. The director there then offered me a place in the acting company and as an Assistant Stage Manager as well. Theatre in the round is the perfect place to be because it’s essential. It has one five-letter word, which is truth, and if you’re not true then it doesn’t work. If you try to cheat, you’re just so exposed. 

Looking back on your extensive and varied career, what would you say is your best highlight?
That’s very, very difficult. I won the Best Actor award at Venice Film Festival thirty odd years ago. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. The competition was tremendous.
The Thirty Nine Steps will always be, for me, one of the happiest times of my life. My son had just been born and I was doing this film where I was just having so much fun. It didn’t cost very much money and I wasn’t paid very much but it was so enjoyable. I’ve had so many people, including Dominic West, who’ve come up and said it’s one of their favourite films. I was so thrilled because I didn’t know Dominic. I do now because he’s become my new best friend. Those things are so meaningful.

Have you ever turned down a role and then later regretted it?
I famously turned down Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which went on to be a huge, huge hit in the West End. I did turn down something in America, although I’m unsure if it was ever made. In the late ’70s, /early ’80s, they asked me if I’d do a television series in California of The Man Who Fell To Earth. That seemed thrilling, so we talked terms and the deal was that I’d have to sign for five years. I said to my agent that there was no way I could sign for five years. I was in the prime of my life and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be able to move around and do other things. I didn’t want to be tied to something.

Did you ever consider upping sticks and moving over to the States?
Yes, just after Jesus Of Nazareth. The reason that we shot The Thirty Nine Steps when we did, in mid-winter in Scotland, was because I had to get out of the country before April because Babs and I were moving to LA. But we didn’t. Something came up which meant it was preferable to stay here. Babs and I went to LA a few years ago and we spent quite a lot of time driving around. I turned to Babs and said, “Thank God we didn’t move here’. She said, ‘I’m so glad you said that, I thought it was just me’.
I don’t mind visiting, but I find the place utterly oppressive. I don’t know what it is - maybe it’s the topography - but I don’t like Los Angeles.
I’m terribly English and I love the country I live in. I love all the things about it. I love pubs and I’m very fond of cricket. If I look at my address book, there’s only a relatively few contacts who’re actors. There are many great sportsmen because I got involved via various charities with cricket, football and golf. I’ve made great friends in the sporting world. I’m still addicted to all kinds of sport, though not to play. 
The other reason I didn’t go to the States in the early ’80s was because, at that time, no other British actors - apart from Michael Caine, Sean Connery and possibly Roger Moore - were really making a career in Hollywood. The actors who were there were playing villains or gays. They were playing the parts that the American actors didn’t want to play. Obviously, thirty, forty years later, things have changed radically. Now the British actors are doing frightfully well. This certainly wasn’t the case when I was a young actor. Nowadays nearly all of them are either Irish or Scottish, which is interesting.
Franco Zeffirelli reckoned if he had his choice he would always use British actors. He loves their work ethic.

Finally, what advice would you give to somebody who’s starting out in the profession?
Always do more than people expect. Never do enough, always do more and go the extra mile. Always learn your lines. I do see it a lot in television, where the younger actors think they can learn them just before we shoot, in make-up or whatever. Always know your lines because it is utterly insulting to other actors when you forget them. Always do more than people expect. There’s so much young talent around and I think it’s utterly thrilling. I’m the vice president of arts educational school. I go to see their end-of-term shows and they take my breath away. 
On Holby we had such a high turnover of talent. Spotting it was great fun because I was never wrong. Russell Tovey is a perfect example. I spotted his talent when working with him on an early episode around 2004/05. Look where he is now. He’s become a very fine actor.