HEROES & INSPIRATIONS
CAMERON CHAPMAN
WHAT MAKES A GHOST HUNTER TICK? THE MAN INSIDE LOCKWOOD’S SHARP SUIT SHARES HIS FAVES
Words by Darren Scott /// Portrait by Pip
Benedict Cumberbatch: gateway to theatre.
GETTY, NETFLIX
CAMERON CHAPMAN would have dazzled in another field entirely had life gone another way. Or indeed, on another field, as his childhood aspirations were to excel in sport.
“I guess I just didn’t have the sort of talent you need,” he shrugs. “I loved sport. I used to swim 24 hours a week, play tennis and football quite seriously. But I was just, unfortunately, never good enough. If you ask any of my friends, they’ll tell you he really wishes he was a footballer.”
Well, it turned out alright for another lead actor in a genre show, one Mr Matt Smith…
“The producers of Lockwood & Co worked with him on Last Night In Soho. I remember talking to Nira Park, our executive producer, about how I wish I’d been a footballer, and she told me about Matt Smith. I think he was probably far better than me,” he laughs.
“I almost had a feeling everyone else had a head start,” he says of turning to acting seriously when he was 16. “That just excited me that that was a challenge. It gave me a real ambition and hunger for something, which I think maybe I was losing with sport fading out. I had a bit of extra drive to go and achieve something in this field.”
Landing the titular character in the Netflix adaptation of Lockwood & Co as your first gig is pretty big on the achievement list. But what of the people who inspired his journey to Portland Row?
ACTORS
My first idol with acting was… I saw Hamlet at the Barbican when I was about 15 and it was Benedict Cumberbatch, who I obviously knew: ‘Oh, he’s a great actor, he’s someone you look up to as an actor.’ But the physicality and the dedication and precision that he worked with for what must have been about three and a half hours, with really heightened text… I was just blown away by it.
I didn’t know theatre could do that to someone. I wasn’t someone that was taken to a lot of theatre as a young person. I’ve always enjoyed it, but I’d never gone out of my way to watch it, and I thought it was stunning. Whilst I maybe didn’t understand what they were talking about, I just thought that’s such an achievement to dedicate yourself with such honesty and commitment. And it looked like a challenge. It was around that age that I stopped doing sport seriously. I turned this into thinking, “I’m not going to make it in sport, why don’t I give this a go?”