‘Riding the scooter along the clifftop at Beachy Head, I got too close and fell off’
I wasn’t well when I went for the auditions at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. I’d been in
South Africa filming Zulu Dawn and got some sort of disease. I looked washed out. When the director Franc Roddam saw how sick I was, he told me to go home, but I was asked back for a screen test. When I heard that Johnny Rotten was no longer being considered for the lead role, I thought: “Well, this is it.”