The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 November 2023 source ↗
A flight from Paraguay to South Africa that went badly wrong. The plane nearly fell out of the sky and the oxygen masks dropped. People were screaming but the pilot saved the day, and then apparently never flew again.
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
Anna dared me to jump off a cliff in Menorca on holiday a couple of years ago. I did. I fell 30m through the air, hit the water at an odd angle and shattered my coccyx.
Where do I begin? There have been a lot.
Called me the N-word.
I would really love to know my parents as an adult. I lost my dad when I was 14 and my mum when I was 20.
In order to raise money to pay for myself to go to the National Youth Theatre, I performed a medley of my drama school speeches and some songs for my entire school. Considering I can’t sing, this was terrible. I did U Remind Me by Usher and Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. They paid £2 each – basically, to laugh at me.
I was a happy kid. I had quite a small life: I grew up in Walthamstow and didn’t really leave east London. I didn’t go to the South Bank for the first time until I was 18 years old.
A really bad habit of eating sweets before I go to sleep.
After losing my mum still managing to finish drama school, because that was really difficult. I lost her in the first year.
Rita Wilson, Stephen Graham, Nicola Walker, Isabelle Huppert, Gemma Whelan, Andy Serkis
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