Ahead of Stitches’ release, we caught up with Noble to talk about acting, stand-up comedy, and his geeky interests… Well I have acted before, I’ve done stuff on stage when I was a kid and that; I have actually acted quite a lot, but it’s all been when I was younger. When I was a member of a youth theatre I did a couple of Shakespeares, and that was f***ing terrifying, quite intimidating. Does this take you far from your comfort zone, then? What’s so brilliant, and I thought it would be the downside of film, is that all of a sudden you’ve got much more scope – there’s no audience, so you make the decision… Your audience is basically the director; you’re doing it, and you give the director and editor options and choices, and they decide. Obviously you give them the moments, different moments, but they choose those moments and how they put them together. I can see why some actors get very frustrated and want to direct; obviously as a stand-up I have that freedom all the time. But to hand that over to somebody else and say “Right, here are the moments – it’s up to you”, it’s actually quite liberating! Obviously you’ve got to trust the director and editor, but luckily even though we hadn’t worked together before, I could tell just from my conversations with Conor [McMahon, director] that he got it. He knows exactly what he wants, but within that he’s happy to hear new ideas and suggestions. Of course, the problem with films is always that you can do something and what it ends up being in the edit is never what you had planned… And even as a director, I think Woody Allen was saying that his films were only ever 30 per cent of what he had in his head… That said, I’m happy with what’s come out in this case – certainly people seem to like it. Is there a dream role that you’d love to play? One that would make you go, for example, “Cancel my tour, I’m off to be in Doctor Who!”? I think anyone would cancel anything to be [The Doctor]! The weird thing about Doctor Who is, I think there isn’t a human being on the planet who would say no to Doctor Who. But the only downside of that is you’d have to live in Cardiff! [Laughs] I’ve got nothing against Cardiff, but… You could commute! It could be the next James Bond! Or indeed, you could be the new James Bond… Well there you go! I’ll play Doctor Who, James Bond and Worzel Gummidge! No, I think it’s safe to say I’ll never be Bond. Well, motorbikes is my thing. I was with my accountant the other day, and he was going through my credit card statements, and he pointed out to me that the only things I purchase are motorbike stuff and movie things! And with that, our time was up. Ross Noble, thank you very much. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
