Martin Kemp's Steve Owen: EastEnders' Best-Dressed Character


By Larry Jaffee



Want to know what a good bloke Martin Kemp is? The actor known to EastEnders fans as dashing Steve Owen actually took a phone call from me during an early round 2006 World Cup match between England and Trinidad Tobago.

The dumb Yank (me) forgot that the Brits take their football so seriously. Martin, who remembered me from the last time we spoke via a transatlantic phone call 18 months ago, gently explained after a minute of small talk that he needed to get back to the game on the telly (the score was nil-nil at the time), and I should call him back at the same time the next day.

“It doesn’t matter how we win, at least we win,” Martin tells me the next day, as we trade notes on how lucky the England team had been so far in the competition. “That’s the best it can be.” The North London native, 44, is an avid Arsenal supporter in the English Football League.

I explained to him that the impetus for my call was how The Krays, the 1990 gangster film in which he co-starred with his brother Gary as the title characters, was selected as the first film to kick off “Pulp Month” (June 2006) on the U.S. cable network, the Independent Film Channel (IFC). (The second was Pulp Fiction.)

“That's fantastic,” comments Kemp, who was glad to hear that his work is showing in the U.S., and that for the time being Steve Owen is alive and well in the U.S.

“They remastered [The Krays] for a new DVD. Myself, my brother and Peter Medak did a commentary. It was the first time I saw in a good 10 years. I think it’s one of those movies that’s got better with age in a way. Lots of the actors in that movie have passed away. It’s one of those films that's holding its own the older it gets. I think the styling of The Krays has been copied several times in recent gangster films. The styling of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs I think was based on The Krays.”

Kemp’s first brush with entertainment stardom came earlier as bassist in the 1980s band Spandau Ballet, which were huge in their native U.K. and Europe, and even scored a Top 10 U.S. hit in “True.” Gary Kemp was the lead singer and principal songwriter.

“The band was Gary’s deal,” Martin explains. Kemp looks back fondly on his Spandau Ballet days. “Gary was the leading force in it, but I was in there playing at the top of the game for 12 years. In England we had a fantastically long run. Most pop groups, Spandau Ballet was I suppose, only get four or five years at the most. Spandau was kind of my brother’s thing I suppose. Me going into acting, and The Krays, EastEnders and all the stuff I’ve done since, is nice because it’s my own thing. Gary and I spent seven or eight years in drama school when were kids. Acting wasn’t new to us. When I started drama school at nine years old, I had already totaled 20 TV shows when I was a kid. So going back into acting in The Krays when the band finished I was going back to something I felt at home with any way.”

Following his Krays success, Martin ended up trying to make it in the mid-1990s in Hollywood, where he learned he had two, life-threatening but ultimately benign, brain tumours. He counts his lucky stars, and recently visited the Hospital of St. Cross in Rugby, England, into open their MRI scanner.

He said at the hospital: “One of these machines saved my life so I was delighted to be asked here today. I know the help these machines can give people.”

Kemp doesn’t regret the time he spent in Hollywood trying to make it as an actor there.

“I didn't find it frustrating. It was a really big learning curve. Going over and living in LA wasn’t a hardship. I have to say I loved living there. It’s beautiful. I did quite well in a way. I was constantly working, maybe not in the films that I wanted to do at the top level. But it was always in those kind of ‘B’ independent movies. But I was always working, which was really nice. When I look back it now, it was a fantastic experience, and an experience that I still use today.”

While The Krays is a film cult classic and Spandau Ballet has made its mark in the annals of pop music, it’s Kemp’s portrayal of EastEnders’ Steve Owen that gave him a continuing television career, and landed him such honours as Best Actor at the British Soap Awards in both 2001 and 2002 and Most Popular Actor at the 2000 National Television Awards.

I mention to him that Mal Young, the BBC’s former head of drama, once told me that he decided to bring in Kemp based on his stellar work in The Krays.

“I don’t know whose idea it was to cast me in EastEnders. Several people have said it over the years. Matthew Robinson, who was also an executive producer, always said it was his idea. I don't mind it. I had great fun working on EastEnders.”

Kemp shed some light on the wardrobe decisions made for the cast. “When I first took on the role of Steve Owen, they put him straight away in regular jeans and black leather jackets that they always put their characters in. It took me about six months to talk them into getting Steve into suits, ties, shirts. I wanted to smart him up a little bit. They wanted him to buy his clothes in Walford Market like everybody else. But in the end, I think the Steve Owen character was taking 90 percent of the wardrobe budget. Everybody else was left with hand-me-downs.”

I asked him if he caught the Extras episode last year in which Ricky Gervais’ female sidekick has trouble distinguishing between Ross Kemp (Grant Mitchell) and Martin Kemp and The Mitchell Brothers. He did, and thought it was funny. Despite sharing a surname, they’re not related.

“I think we (Martin and Ross) had about a year that we worked together. By the time I joined he was going to leave.” Was it ever confusing to have two ‘Kemps,’ around the set, such as having their inter-office mail mixed up? He responded jokingly, “Noooooo.”

Besides EastEnders, Kemp in recent years has worked regularly on British television for rival channel ITV, for which he starred in several series, including Serious and Organised and Family, as well as six or seven one-off dramas.

“ITV is really good at that. It’s kind of the equivalent of NBC ‘Movie of the Week.’ I did lots of those. I did one (Can’t Buy Me Love) with Michelle Collins (Cindy Beale), which was lot of fun. It was really nice working with Michelle because I've known her for years. But I never worked with her on EastEnders because our paths never crossed. There was none of that kind of first-day nerves. Usually you meet each other [for the first time] and get on with it straight away. We had a kind of hidden rapport without knowing it. She’s a good girl.”

I suggest to Martin that he and Michelle are among the exceptions of EastEnders acting alumni who have been successfully able to go onto other roles, and not get stereotyped forever as their Walford characters.

“Soaps are funny that way. The danger there is if you’re straight out of drama school and EastEnders is the first thing you ever do then I think you're in trouble because it’s very hard to do something after EastEnders. But I think if you already have a CV and a back catalog of work, and then go into EastEnders, people will know you for something else, I think it’s quite an easy step to get out of it.”

Kemp is about to start production on an independent British movie, a horror thriller called House on Straw Hill with Jane March, who was in a movie with. Bruce Willis. “I start work on that in three weeks’ time.”

Asked whether he might give Hollywood another try, he says “If I'm invited then I would. I’m a bit too old now to say, ‘Let’s go over there and give it a shot’ like a lot of young actors do. I don’t think I'm up for banging on a few doors. I think if I was invited to go over there to work I think I’d jump at it.”

I mention that the actress behind Steve Owen’s better half (Melanie), Tamzin Outhwaite last year had a brush with Hollywood, co-starring with Wesley Snipes albeit in a movie straight to DVD. “I think if you’ve got a movie that opens the door for you then that’s fantastic.

Kemp is at a loss to come up with a funny anecdote about life on the EastEnders set.

“EastEnders is one of those shows that’s constantly fast and full on, that there isn’t time. As soon as you laugh in EastEnders and start enjoying yourselves, you can’t, which I found kind of frustrating, because you have to shoot another scene. They shoot so many pages. I remember we once shot 30 pages of script in one day, which is unheard of. You just don't have time to enjoy yourself really. I wrote that book (True, his 2000 autobiography) the hardest thing I could think of was coming up with any anecdotes out of EastEnders because there just isn’t time to have anecdotes.”

While EastEnders might have spent more money on his wardrobe than other cast members, they also broke the bank on his exit. For fear of revealing a “spoiler,” I won’t describe the particulars, but let’s just say that Steve Owen didn’t left Albert Square in a taxi driven by Charlie Slater.

“It was quite brave of them really because you build up a show like that for somebody’s exit then obviously the show has to come down the other side. That’s how things work. I was quite pleased that they wanted to get rid of me in a big way.”

Kemp also reveals that it was his idea to leave EastEnders. “I said, ‘It’s up to you whether or not you kill me off or keep me on.’ It didn’t really make any difference to me. It wasn't in my agenda that I’d go back to the show. They often shoot themselves in the foot [by killing off popular characters]. I have to say if it was my show I don’t think I’d kill off the big characters.”




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