The Britpack by Louise Brealey, published in SKY magazine May 1996
James Frain
"I got to do my first love scene this week. It's about time - I've been doing this for nearly three years.
I've killed people, I've raped someone, but I've never had so much as a screen kiss," complains 27-year-old actor James Frain, of his just-completed episode of the cult American series Tales From The Crypt. "The scene was with a corpse, sadly. I resurrect my slaughtered girlfriend and we have a tryst..."
Although he sports a Northern Irish accent in this month's Nothing Personal, a bloody and controversial story of loyalist freedom-fighters in 70's Belfast, Frain actually hails from England's own Bishop's Stortford, or "Home Counties hell" as he prefers to describe it. "If anyone says 'Let's go there for the weekend,' just say no," he tells me helpfully. "There is nothing there. It's just a place that you leave, otherwise you have a f***ing nightmare life."
Acting provided the one-way ticket out of no-hope-ville that he was hankering for. His break was a part in Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands, playing an "angry young student" alongside Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. "It was a perfect role for me at the time," he jokes. Since then, you may have spotted him disguised as a "very odd, quiet, f***ed-up English aristocrat," in last year's television drama series, The Buccanneers, or Ted Danson's dweeby scientist side-kick in Loch Ness.
Next up he materializes as a Russian professor[actually, a prince] alongside Alan Rickman's divine mad monk Rasputin. And shortly after our conversation he's jetting off to America to do a low-budget independent film about a group of lads who get together every couple of months, talk about women, get drunk and tell stories. "But I don't know how I'm going to do it - I'm knackered. They're going to have to give me loads of drugs and some crutches and I'll just wing it."