The question
As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I wanted to be a footballer and then a squash player – I was in with a chance because I was very good. But I fell out of love with that by 14 or 15 and joined a youth theatre.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 January 2019 source ↗
An actor. Then I grew out of that and became one by default. Or sort of one: “Not really an actor”, said Michael Billington.
First a horse rancher, then a dancer.
An actress. I started when I was 13 at theatre school. My first assembly, Tom and I were sat next to each other.
An ambulance driver.
When I am in Italy with the family, not thinking about work.
I say it a lot to my kids when I’ve lost my temper, and I’ll save up a big one for when they are 18.
The Wimpy in Kingston when I was 16. I’d recently become vegetarian, and there weren’t many veggie burgers in 1988.
Thinking about all the worst possible things: losing people, dying, how am I going to die? All that sort of stuff. I stay awake thinking about furniture and shoes as well. It’s not all death.
It’s hard to beat David Attenborough. Everything he does is quality. I like people who make me proud to be British.
I love clothes and accoutrements, so it would be either a suit or a watch. I love Mark Powell in Soho, and Paul Smith.
Brendan Gleeson, Riz Ahmed, Jessica Raine, Liev Schreiber, Rose McGowan, Robert Bathurst
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