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Christopher Eccleston: Roles
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Relatively unemployed as an actor for some years after his graduation, Eccleston took a variety of odd jobs at a supermarket, on building sites, and as an artist's model. His luck began to change in 1991, when he was chosen to play the protagonist of Let Him Have It. He won acclaim for his haunting portrayal of Derek Bentley, whose real-life murder of a policeman and subsequent hanging for the crime was the subject of dispute in the British legal system, as Bentley had the mental age of a nine-year-old. Eccleston's handling of the role paved the way for more work, and he was soon starring opposite Robbie Coltrane in Cracker, a popular British television series. He stayed with the show from 1993 until 1994, when he was cast in Shallow Grave, the stylish thriller from Danny Boyle, John Hodge, and Andrew MacDonald, the team who would later make Trainspotting. The film, which starred Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, and Kerry Fox as three flatmates with a corpse on their hands, proved a success, and Eccleston won praise for his portrayal of an unhinged accountant.
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Eccleston ... discovered that playing the role of Claude, the invisible character in the first season of the cult show, enabled him to see how different making a television show is in the United States. "I think what interested me was, having made British television for, what, nearly 20 years now, I wanted to experience American television. The process is different. Scripts are less tied down than the UK."
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More television work followed in the form of Hillsborough (1996), and that same year, Eccleston won the title role in Michael Winterbottom's Jude. Co-starring with Kate Winslet, he garnered widespread praise for his interpretation of Thomas Hardy's tragic hero, and he began to attract the attention of American audiences. This attention was heightened two years later when he was cast as the dastardly Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth; both his chilling performance and the film itself received wide acclaim. The same year, Eccleston starred alongside Renée Zellweger as an Orthodox Jew in A Price Above Rubies. The film was a relative disappointment, but it did allow the actor to break away from the character types that he usually played. In 1999, Eccleston could be seen in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ and in Heart, a black comedy in which he starred as a man so consumed with jealousy over his wife -- whom he believes to be having an affair -- that he gives himself a heart attack.
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Eccleston is ... known in the U.K. for his performance in The Second Coming (playing the "son of God") and a recurring role on Cracker. He has also appeared in dozens of movies, stage, and television productions, including Elizabeth and Gone In 60 Seconds. He has been nominated for and won several awards for his television work, and was nominated for a Golden Satellite Award for his role in the film Jude.
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Eccleston said he was unaware of the source novels for the movie before he took on the role, but after getting the part, he picked up a book and found it enjoyable. Eccleston went on to elaborate on how the movie will be different than the original source material.
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The producers of Heroes offered Christopher Eccleston two different roles, Sylar and Claude. Christopher declined the role of Sylar because he thought it was a cliché for European actors to play villains in American culture.
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