Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the release of the new holiday movie Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint, starring John Bradley, Celia Imrie and Richard E. Grant, fan-favorite actor Bradley (best known as Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones) shared some of the things he loves most in life. — N.D.
Playing the Drums
I've been playing the drums for about 25 years now. I don't play every day, I'm not particularly good and I've never wanted to do it as a career. I've also never really wanted to be in a band – I just wanted to do it purely for myself, for my own enjoyment, and not put any pressure on it. There's just something about drumming, about the physicality of it, about the way you feel a sense of rhythm coursing through your body. And there's a reason why drums are found in the most remote places and the most remote cultures. Every single culture in the world finds drums, and that just goes to show that it's amplifying something that's very deep inside us – that hunger for rhythm and that instinct to make noise. There's something really primal to it. I love just playing for a long time, for nobody else's benefit, and being in a flow state. You can't predict whether you're going to have a good drum session or a bad one. Sometimes you can't hit a thing, and sometimes everything you hit just sounds perfect and you're not overthinking it. It's just your body doing the talking.
My dad was always a big rock fan and he had the 1991 AC/DC concert film, Live at Donington. Their drummer at the time was a guy called Chris Slade, who just looked like he was having the best time. A lot of rock drummers snarl their way through a set and look like they want to kill someone when they're playing, but Chris Slade had this big beaming smile on his face when he was playing. He looked like there was nowhere else on the planet he'd rather be than on that stage playing those drums. So I just fell in love with drumming from watching him, because I'd never seen anybody look like they're having a better time than him. We lived in a tiny welfare house, but my dad got me a drum kit and I learned on that. I no longer play every single day, but when I do and it goes well, there's nothing to touch it, really.
With my acting, I’ll look at a script and unpick the character and there's not a word or a stage direction that I don't analyze for a deeper meaning. I love that. But when I’m drumming, it's all about instinct and requires no thought at all – it's just your body and your inner metronome talking. It's so instinctive. As an overthinker, playing the drums allows me to take a bit of a break from all of that.
The Beatles
Maybe the Beatles is not the most original choice, but what they achieved over the course of their very short career becomes more and more magical with every year that goes by. And you can learn so much from them.
If you're a creative person and you're struggling to find inspiration, you should watch Get Back, because it's a masterclass in how the creative mind works. I think people will ultimately talk about Paul McCartney the same way we talk about Shakespeare. There aren't very many people who have that kind of creativity just flowing through them. And there aren't many people who, over the course of the past 60 years, have contributed to the sum of human happiness in quite the same way. If you listen now to a lot of music from the ’60s, ’70s or even ’80s, it sounds like old music, but if you listen to the Beatles, especially the early stuff, they still sound like young people, and there's an energy to them that can't be replicated. It's infectious. And if you look at pictures of them from back then, it just makes you smile.
The Beatles were just magic, and the way that they evolved as a band over the course of their career is also remarkable. I was thinking about artistic evolution recently, because I was talking to somebody who had just started watching Season 1 of Game of Thrones. I was happy they were watching it, but I was also thinking, Oh God, I was 21 and that was the first thing I ever did … I'm not ashamed at all of my performance in it, but I just know that it's probably the worst performance I'm ever going to give, simply because I was so new to acting. You gain a certain experience from every job you do, so even though I'll always be judged by Game of Thrones, because it's probably the biggest thing I'll ever do, I would love to go back and redo the early seasons, just because it doesn't represent who I am now. And I think that's a healthy thing. You should always look back on the work you did, even two years ago, and be slightly embarrassed about it. Otherwise you're not progressing properly.
Home
In my work, I'm very lucky to get to travel and see places that I never in a million years would have seen otherwise. I can enjoy them while I'm there, but home isn't about a place. It represents something else.
I still live in Manchester, the same city where I was born, and I've got no great desire to live anywhere else, really, because there are very few constants in life. It feels like things are in flux all the time, and there's just something consistent and comforting about living in a place that you know so well, and the place knows you as well. I still talk to people who I have known since I was four years old, and I can't pretend at all with those people – which is important when I work in an industry where a lot of it is about pretense and presenting a different side of yourself! It’s really healthy to get back to who you are as a person, your very core, around people who can tell if you've changed and who won't let you change, because they love you for the person that you always were.
There's something about that that's so refreshing. And I really wouldn't want to be without it. Things can go wrong in life and in a career, but as long as you've got a home to go to where you're accepted for your very beating heart, you can tolerate anything in the wider world. My mum and dad, bless them, can't do their shopping online, because they don't use the internet and they wouldn't know how to. So no matter what, I stay connected with them in important ways. I've been on sets in making movies with Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry, and I've been in my trailer hoping that they don't call me to set because I've got to get my parents’ online order in before a certain time. Otherwise my mum's going to go mad, my dad's going to ask what I'm doing, and I'm going to feel like I've let them down!
That might sound like a bit of a burden, but it really isn't. It's something that, while I'm doing it, everything else goes away and I'm just their son, and I'm just helping them out in the best way that I can. I've never wanted to sever those connections with home. And moments like that – doing something really simple for somebody else who's done so much for me – never get in the way.
