The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗
“You’ll never walk again.” This was when I was eight or nine and recovering from viral encephalitis.
I’ve heard it all: too fat, too short, no talent. Those are the things that cut me deep when I was younger, but now they drive me.
"You can't see your children for two weeks." (When I was going through my divorce.)
“Unfortunately, Michael, I don’t think you’re ever going to work in the acting profession until you’re about 40, and then it’ll only be in minor character roles.” Drama teacher at Guildford School of Acting.
In the 1950s I went to the Chelsea Arts Club’s New Year’s Eve ball at the Royal Albert Hall dressed as a Christmas pudding, with swimming trunks under my costume and holly in my hair.
Picking up RAF pilots’ parachute packs and gear they dropped off in a pile.
My work. What shape will it take?
Trying to exercise authority over one.
I hope I’ll find my mother and father in heaven. Only my father would probably say, “You can’t come and live here, boy!”
In 2001, when my eldest son died.
Paapa Essiedu, Richard Coles, Robert Carlyle, Leona Lewis, Ciarán Hinds, Kelly Hoppen
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