He's Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood on the telly, but John Barrowman is more at home singing his heart out in musicals
KEY POINTS:
In a Cardiff recording studio the size of a shoebox, John Barrowman is standing with a pair of headphones clamped to his ears, his eyes tight shut. His entire face appears to be in pain, but he is in fact closer to rapture.
Three hours into a long day's recording for his album Another Side, he is fully immersed in Elton John's Your Song, a personal favourite that he has nevertheless chosen to interpret in a manner more redolent of Ewan McGregor's version in the 2001 film Moulin Rouge. The reason he is doing the song this way is because Barrowman is to musicals what, well, what Elton is to tantrums. Consequently, he is over-enunciating every syllable and kicking any subtlety into touch.
"I will not bastardise my musicality for anything," he says in a sort-of explanation a quarter of an hour later during a break.
We are in the studio's lobby area with a bottle of water each, and Barrowman, dressed down in cotton and denim, his blue eyes burning beneath chestnut-coloured hair, makes for voluble company. Even when talking one-on-one, his voice cannot help but boom with the theatricality of one used to reaching people all the way up in the gods. He makes unswerving eye contact, too, his lids seemingly untroubled by a requirement to blink. "I can sing the high notes and the low, and so I do just that always," he says. "Of course, Ewan rather shouted his way out of the song. I, on the other hand, sing it proud."
Cardiff has become the performer's base of late. He's here filming the second series of the hugely popular Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood and the long days of filming often stretch into nights and most weekends. Torchwood, much like Doctor Who, represents the acceptable face of geekdom, a TV show in which sci-fi is served up as so much knowing nonsense that, mercifully, grabs every chance it gets to ramp up the attendant irony.
This is thanks not only to Barrowman's performance, but also to its creator, Russell T Davies, a man who rarely removes tongue from cheek. Torchwood has already inspired a legion of fans, many of whom take it all terribly seriously and set up websites in its honour.
This very slavish devotion is fast turning Barrowman into the kind of fan-boy icon who sci-fi conventions will welcome for ever.
Whenever he has a spare moment, he chooses not to relax but instead to come here to the studio to put the finishing touches to his first album.
His voice has been on record before, mostly soundtracks to the Broadway and West End musicals he has appeared in, but Another Side is the first to carry his name above the title. It's an inevitable, and highly calculated, cash-in on his soaring popularity, and features cover versions of some of his favourite songs: Bryan Adams' Heaven, Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time and Chicago's If You Leave Me Now.
Hardly an exercise in credibility-building, but Barrowman never craved credibility in the first place.
"Look, this is not about me setting myself up as a pop star here," he says, "but simply for those people who have seen me on television and are maybe keen to discover another side of me, that's all."
"I'm very driven. If my career had gone the way I'd planned it back when I was a teenager, then I would be a movie star sitting in my beach house in Malibu right now, not in Cardiff, but I'd be a fool to be ungrateful for what has happened to me because my life is fabulous and I really am living out all my dreams.
"I'm doing TV, theatre, albums. If Hollywood never does quite come calling, I'll still die happy, don't you worry about that."
And if Hollywood does call?
"Oh, I'd be there like a shot."
Barrowman was born in Glasgow in 1967, but the family moved to Illinois eight years later.
One of his earliest memories is of accompanying his mother to the record shop where she worked, and standing on the counter to sing all the top 10 hits to the customers: "I always did love an audience."
After graduating from high school, he attended a university for performing arts and, in the late 1980s returned to Britain where the angle of his cheekbones, coupled with an innate ability to sing and dance and entertain, landed him the first in a succession of West End roles.
He appeared in the United States TV sitcom Central Park West, about upwardly mobile Manhattanites, but that soon bombed. He very nearly got cast as Will in Will & Grace, but was thought not quite camp enough.
However, he managed to impress Sam Mendes enough for the venerable theatre director to cast him in The Fix in 1998, in what was a very different role for him.
"I played a coke-sniffing, heroin-obsessed, sex-addicted politician," he says. "It was extreme stuff, and there was a scene where I had to inject drugs directly into my crotch. People would pass out in the audience, I swear they really did." He received an Olivier nomination for the role, ensuring that he would never be so neatly typecast again. "Sometimes people still refer to me as a `gay actor', though, and I hate that because it immediately hems you in.
"Also, it's just wrong. I am not a `gay actor', I'm an actor who happens to be gay, and for me I think it's important to show another side to the gay world. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing leather chaps and having your arse hanging out, but we are not all camp. I'm a guy, and I like guy things."
It's a shame, I tell him, that his enthusiasm doesn't come bottled. He'd make a fortune selling it. Then again, perhaps it's a good thing. Britain would implode if everyone were quite so buoyant as he. He laughs riotously, and everything but his chestnut hair quakes.
So there we have it: John Barrowman, a man, a veritable lifeforce, so happy with his lot, overjoyed to be the lead in Torchwood, and proud of his album of cheesily impassioned ballads. His producer emerges from the studio now, and taps his watch. The performer stands to leave, says nice things in parting, and bounds off down the corridor, whistling loudly. It is, of course, a happy tune.
LOWDOWN
Who: John Barrowman, stage-musical singer turned bisexual space hero from the future, saving Britain from illegal aliens in Dr Who spin-off Torchwood.
Where & when: Torchwood, Wednesdays, 10.30pm TV2
-INDEPENDENT
