For five seasons Sean Pertwee’s Alfred Pennyworth has been looking after young Bruce Wayne in Gotham, but as the Caped Crusader prepares to finally spread his wings in the final season’s dozen episodes, we find out how he came to being Batman’s butler.

Sean is at the Sci-Fi Ball in Southampton where he’s preparing to meet a room of adoring fans, though I suspect it’s not just for his work on Gotham. In addition to memorable turns in Dog Soldiers and Event Horizon I tell him that in my house he’s just as well-known for his voiceovers on MasterChef: The Professionals and surfing with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ewan McGregor in 1995’s Blue Juice. He caught up with Sci-Fi Bulletin’s young ward Master Nick Joy to share some memories:

 

Blue Juice is one of those films where I think we enjoyed making it more than people enjoyed watching it! Cornwall has since become really hip and happening – at the time, people didn’t really realise that there was that surfing culture there. Everyone employed on the movie were soul surfers, none of them were competitive surfers. I learned to surf, got the bug, and nearly didn’t come home. I nearly went Apocalypse Now… started travelling and surfing!

Onto things Gotham, I wonder how your role of Alfred was originally sold to you. He’s not your obvious action hero – or at least he wasn’t before this show.

Yeah, as a kid if someone asked if you wanted to play Alfred you’d say ‘Thanks a lot!’ I was in the States doing [Sherlock Holmes show] Elementary, playing Lestrade, and I got given this script during pilot season – it was lines for this guy who wanders in to a boozer in the East End of London, where he’s going to crack the larynx of this geezer. I wondered what the hell this was – two pages of script like something out of Gary Oldman’s The Firm. So I did it, and literally the next day, on the set of Elementary, they asked me to get down to LA to discuss it further.

You still didn’t know what it was?

It didn’t have a name, and at first I saw Bruno Heller loping past, and then Danny (Judge Dredd) Cannon, who I’d a done a film with – Goal! – many years before. He was another one of those that was leading the British film charge back in the day. He was doing The Young Americans while I was doing Shopping with Paul [W.S.] Anderson and Jude Law; It was two camps at the time. So I knew Danny and asked him what he was doing there. ‘We’re here to see you, you mug!’ he laughed. ‘It’s our show – Gotham.’ I repeated the title – ‘Gotham? Like Batman? So who am I playing?’ They told me Alfred Pennyworth. ‘Of course I am. [Laughs] That makes perfect sense!’

And that was the first time you made the Batman connection?

They gave me the full script and I had 40 minutes to read it – I had to hand in my phone – and that’s when the sphincter really started to pop. This was really good. It was amazing. It was a take on how the city moulds people into becoming the characters they later become.

The jump-off point for Alfred is just after the assassination [of the Waynes] where he is a butler, and has made a Bushido oath to look after this young boy – he blames himself for the deaths – but he has no parenting skills. For a liturgy of fans their bible is the Dark Knight’s 76 years of adventures, so for us to step in at this time and be very definite about our take on it, to make him fallible, and not to make him a wise old sage – wow. To make him dangerous and as dark as Bruce was from an actor’s perspective one of the most exciting things I’d ever read. He really is the only man other than Constantine in the DC Universe that’s an Englishman. To be there was an extraordinary experience.

How much influence did you have in how you played the role?

The director, when I first started, wanted me to be very East End. The studio said they wanted that, but in actual fact they wanted it turned down a bit because they wanted Downton Abbey. He was a butler, and everybody loves a genuine English voice in the States! Because Danny and Bruno let me, and I have a propensity to wonder off script piste, I improvised a lot and started adding things.

You suddenly had a bigger profile on Twitter.

It became a sort of thing on Twitter. Robin Lord Taylor (Penguin), Cory Michael Smith (Riddler) and I started live tweeting and what we found hilarious is that people really didn’t understand what I was talking about! They just went with it.

When I went to David Mazouz, who plays young Master Bruce, ‘You stupid muppet, you plank, wind your neck in, you’re having a Turkish’, and asked him if he knew what I’d just said, he replied. ‘No’, and without even breaking character [he’d add] ‘But Bruce would.’ And that was the idea.

Londoners, or people from Great Britain, they use their language as a weapon. You don’t have that in America. It’s much more in your face. Some of my most favourite scenes were with Chris Chalk (Lucius Fox) where I’d say things like ‘I’m going to tuck you up like a kipper’ and Twitter exploded with people trending with ‘What’s a kipper?’ That was the real thrill about playing the role – being allowed to stamp a bit of Pertwee on it.

Has it been gratifying for you seeing young actors live David and Camren Bicondova (Selina Kyle) growing up over the five years and developing as actors?

It’s been absolutely amazing. I have a son called Alfred – which is kind of weird – who’s just a little bit younger than David, so it was a very easy pool in many respects to draw from emotionally, because I missed my boy a great deal. They got on really well, which was so sweet, watching them both grow into these men, and both be really nice people.

David had just got into an Ivy League college while he was still filming, and there was I complaining that I didn’t have time to learn these lines, and he’s doing that, getting into college and learning to drive all at the same time. He’s a friend for life – I’m seeing him in a couple of weeks. He’s a very fine, well-adjusted human.

So you’re fully wrapped on the show?

Yes, though I haven’t seen it yet. The funny thing is that I came straight over after finishing. They’re up to episode 6 or 7 I think, and I only saw the first one [of this final season]. The actors, the crew, everybody… there was this real sense of love. I’ve worked in the business for a very long time and I’ve only ever experienced anything that tapped on that once before. We were blessed in more ways than one.

Over 70-plus years we’ve got a good handle on Alfred. Did it help that he had a well-developed character?

We knew where he was going to end up, but we couldn’t see the trials and tribulations along the way. As a father you can completely understand that everyone goes through a ‘dick’ phase, and in the last season Bruce went through ‘Billionaire Brat’ phase, and he was horrendous. I wished we’d dwelt on that longer – the fact that Alfred leaves him – really painful moments.

That’s what I loved about the show – although it was slightly camp and arched, that it did all stem from natural emotions. None of the characters just woke up one day and decided to be evil. Robin Lord Taylor’s performance as Oswald showed him to be a mothered, gentle boy that was disturbed, beaten, bullied and abused all his life. Don’t push someone like that too far or they’ll crack and you create a Penguin. The same with Edward Nygma – all he wanted to do was be people’s friend – but he was ignored and the city created a monster.

How are you filling the Gotham-shaped hole in your life?

I was a little over-exuberant when I first got back in turning things down. I kind of wish I hadn’t now, but my wife’s very pleased because I’m home. I got home on Freddy’s birthday on 17th December and there’s a film that I’m desperate to do – I’m really hanging on for it – I just hope we get to do it this year. We were supposed to make it last year – it’s called Kruger – directed by another actor, Craig Conway, and by the same team behind Dog Soldiers. It’s only a four/five-hander, set on the Kruger game reserve. It’s just a belter – we’ve had the script for six or seven years, and we’re all desperate to make it. Other than that, we’re all up for a whole heap of stuff at the moment.

 

And while Sean won’t be in the title role, with Epix’s new show Pennyworth in production, it would appear that we haven’t quite had our fill of Alfred yet.

 

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