A Tennantcy To Act

For the longest time my little ol' blog's been known as @consanguinitatum because that was the persona I used when I established the account for a different purpose. But my purpose now is all about my Substack at A Tennancy To Act and publishing my 10+ years or research about the weird and obscure (and not-so obscure) facets of David Tennant's work and career. So today I (finally!) changed my URL to match that and stop all the confusion of having to remember a word that's got nothing at all to do with what I write about. I'm now at: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/atennantcytoact

It's about time!

ok so david tennant almost played the chief blue meanie in a scrapped disney yellow submarine remake and I need everyone to know this

Here's some context: in 2009 Disney and Robert Zemeckis were making a full 3D motion-capture Yellow Submarine remake. David was in talks fto play the Chief Blue Meanie — the theatrical, scenery-chewing leader of the villains.

The production got FAR. There was concept art, character rigging, and a whole pipeline built at a studio Disney ran specifically for this kind of work. But then Disney shut that studio down after some unrelated box office flops and the whole thing died by 2012.

David only ever talked about it once — on a talk show in 2010.

And while we never got that 3D Tennant-voiced Blue Meanie villain, some of the recovered mocap test footage + concept art has surfaced online over the years. It's wild to look at all of it, knowing how close we maybe got to seeing David - a bona fide Beatles fan - in a Beatles movie.

I've got another fun little David Tennant research project on the horizon...one we know next to nothing about. But if you've followed me for a while, you know these are the sorts of productions I enjoy digging into the most.

In the coming weeks, I'll be chatting with the director of a 1997 performance featuring part of Act II, Scene IV from Measure for Measure, in which David played Angelo. It's one of the more obscure corners of his career, and one that's especially interesting given that David has said more than once over the years that he'd love to play Angelo in a full production of the play. So far, though, he hasn't had the chance.

Some of you may already know the performance since a clip of the scene has circulated for years. It originates from Conjuring Shakespeare, a six-part BBC2/Open University documentary series about making Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences.

If you haven't seen the clip, here it is:

I'm hoping my conversation with its director will help me piece together a little more of the story behind the production and how it came to be.

...you cannot believe how ridiculously happy it made me to see that!

The Criterion Collection just shared David Tennant's Closet Picks video, and one of the films he chose was Twelve Angry Men!

If you've been following me for a while now, you'll know that choice didn't surprise me in the slightest. David has called it his favorite film more than once over the years, after all.

But did you know that during drama school, David played Juror #8—the role made famous by Henry Fonda—in three separate productions of the stage play in 1990-91?

Early last year I spent months digging into those productions, piecing together their history through newspaper archives, theatre programmes, and interviews I did with David's former castmates and teachers. The whole process was really fun for me, and I ended up publishing a three-part series for A Tennantcy To Act about David's involvement in the play.

So if David's pick got you wondering about Twelve Angry Men, and his history with it, go check out my series below. I'll link the first part here, and links to the other two parts are at the end of the first.

I’m dusting off another one from my archive today! This time I'm heading to late-1980s Paisley to talk about the St. Mark’s Players, an amateur drama group based at St. Mark’s Oldhall. David's father Sandy was the minister there, and teenage David couldn't help but get involved!

I'm not sure just how many productions David did with the group, but I do know he did at least three: a farcical murder mystery called Wanted–One Body!, an Easter courthouse drama called The Vigil, and a play by Neil Simon about a cursed village where everyone is hilariously stupid called Fools.

Check it out!