Tyneside's Beckham

The actor admits it's the first time that his father will actually watch him perform.

BEN Price is used to being asked about the Beckham connection. No wonder as the latest recruit to ITV1's soccer-and-sex saga Footballers' Wives joins the Earls Park team as Conrad Gates - who's captain of England, has a glamorous wife and dyed blond hair.

Any resemblance to a real soccer star is, of course, entirely coincidental, for legal reasons at least.

Price feels the connection with Beckham is "pretty spurious".

The actor, who grew up in Newcastle and had his first taste of drama at Live Theatre in the city, says: "I have dyed hair and that's as close as it gets."

He sees Gates as part of the trend where footballers, and men in general, are becoming more what's called metrosexual - sensitive, well-groomed and in touch with their feminine side. It's all to do with image.

"Obviously you can make a parallel with Beckham. That's possibly deliberate on the programme-makers' part," he adds.

Gates is a man with everything - wife, girlfriend and boyfriend. "He's pretty loose," says Price. "He's mad, he's wild. He's always up to something, with both men and women. He doesn't apologise for it. He's a bisexual adventurer with the body of a god and the mind of something else."

Intelligence, you gather from the first episode, isn't his strong point. He thinks with his private parts not his head. And, while much has been made of the glamorous clothes worn by the cast of Footballers' Wives, Price spends much of his time discarding his outfits.

He's first seen walking through the lobby of a hotel in Thailand wearing nothing but a small towel, which drops leaving him totally naked. "There were about 200 people there, having a good look. I think I shocked them more than I shocked myself. When the towel dropped, there was a bit of a gasp," he recalls.

The most difficult aspect of the role was the hour-and-a-half it took to get ready for filming in the morning. "I had to dye my hair three or four times a month, and get a fake tan two or three times," he says. "I was quite happy to do that. The only thing I was always wanting to do was push it as far as it would go. I didn't want to have half a look."

Footballers' Wives, as fans acknowledge, is trash with flash. For Price, Conrad Gates represented his first leading TV role following smaller parts in series including Wire In The Blood and Badger.

"I was aware of what the programme was like, but I hadn't watched it," he says. "I took the job because a, I like to work and b, I thought I could do a good job of it. It wouldn't have affected my decision whether I'd seen it or not. The character interested me.

"It's quite a hard programme to make. I know it might surprise people but getting it just right is hard. You're going through a lot of drafts of the script, and the work is quite concentrated.

"All the actors on it are pretty diligent. Everyone recognises it's such a high standard to maintain. Nothing is normal about it. There's nothing like it on TV, people either love it or hate it."

On screen, Conrad wastes no time in bedding Tanya Turner (played by Zoe Lucker). The second week of filming found Price making wild passionate love to her in a private jet. "It will look very raunchy on screen, but in reality it was boiling hot, very cramped and we had the whole crew standing around us watching. But it was fun all the same," he recalls.

Conrad's look may have demanded much work, but his skills on the pitch didn't. Newcastle supporter Price likes football, but doesn't play it. He can only remember playing twice for the cameras in nine-and-a-half hours of TV. "Football to Footballers' Wives is like oil to Dallas. That's not the point of the story," he says.

He likens playing Gates to playing Achilles in Greek tragedy, as he did on stage at Sheffield Crucible. It's a matter of adopting a different mindset. "Achilles was half-man, half-god. You have to get yourself into a mental state of having the best and of everything coming to you," he explains.

Price is talking over the 'phone from Dublin, where he's rehearsing for a revival of Brian Friel's play Dancing At Lughnasa at the Gate Theatre. He got the part immediately after completing nearly six months work filming Footballers' Wives.

He'll be on stage when the series is showing on ITV1, but is aware that he's about to become less anonymous thanks to the press and publicity the series provokes. "That's a necessary part of the job," he says. "Once the show comes out there's going to be a lot of photographs and things."

Birmingham-born, Price moved with his family to Newcastle when he was nine. His parents still live there. "Newcastle is a wonderful place and there are times I do miss it, but if you're in acting, you have to be in London," he says.

Since getting the part of Conrad, he's discovered that his dad is a big fan of the series. "He watched it and knew everything about it," says Price. "He's never seen anything I've done on television or on stage, but he was the happiest man in the world when I got this job."

He has no idea where the acting bug came from. His first stage experiences were doing drama at Newcastle's Live Theatre. He saw other people go off to drama school and decided to do the same. Later, he got the chance to act alongside Robson Green, who began his career at Live, in the Wire In The Blood series.

For the moment, Price is happy with his TV and stage double. "There can't be anything better than doing Footballers' Wives and then going to the Gate in Dublin. I'm very, very lucky," he says.

* Footballers' Wives return to ITV1 on Wednesday at 9pm

Published: 05/02/2004