The question
What is the worst job you have ever had?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Acting, when you don’t want to do it or you disagree with everything, is almost like having sex with someone you don’t like. I had one experience like that on stage, in a terrible version of The Cherry Orchard. I put on a wig, dark-coloured contacts and just hoped no one would recognise me.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 26 September 2020 source ↗
Cleaning toilets in a hotel in Croydon when I was 16. A guest once gave me a half-eaten bag of pistachios as a tip, so there were perks.
When I was younger, I appeared in the Halifax adverts that featured a cake or a bridge made of hundreds of people. You stood there for three days and were not even really seen.
Life modelling for a woman who made me recite Shakespeare as I posed. I had a hangover, and it was all a bit much.
A movie called The Return that was about cows from outer space.
Warm and bubbly.
When I had a bicycle accident when I was 24. I was on a bridge going down; the bicycle broke and I smashed to the ground, face first. I broke my jaw and my teeth, and had to have plastic surgery. It all took half a year and then, funnily enough, I got my first big job – a TV series – with what I thought of then as this big, ugly scar.
I spend most money on my garden.
My vain side would like to be remembered as someone who did good for others in some way. But I would be happy if my children remembered me.
Now. During the period of Covid, I have had the opportunity to rethink and I’ve got a new gift of cherishing now.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Allam, Kiefer Sutherland, John Waters, Charlotte Church, Martin Kemp
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