The actor tells Lorraine Kelly about his disastrous time in the jungle, the Chariots of Fire audition he nearly walked away from and why he has no plans to retire.
Nigel Havers has had a long and successful career on stage and screen, but one of his more memorable experiences involved lying awake at night in the Australian jungle contemplating murder.
Not actual murder, thankfully. But during his time on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, the 74-year-old actor says he became so irritated by fellow campmate Lembit Öpik that he was “working up ways” to kill him.
Speaking to Lorraine Kelly on Saga’s Experience is Everything podcast, Havers admits he made a “terrible error” agreeing to appear on the show in 2010, particularly as he had never even watched it before.
“It turned out that it was a stupid thing to do. But the other thing was I wanted to kill someone in the camp.”
He found former politician Öpik “incredibly irritating”, and with nowhere to escape to, his frustration began to take over.
“I got to the stage when I would have killed him. I would sleep at night working up ways to kill him,” he says.
It was the cameras, rather than a sudden outbreak of good sense, that finally persuaded him to leave.
“And then I thought I’d end up in court on a murder charge, and I couldn’t really say, ‘Look, it wasn’t me,’ because there are 38 cameras on you, so I had to get the hell out of there.”
The jungle wasn’t the first time Havers had found himself on the verge of making a spectacularly bad decision.
Long before I’m A Celebrity, there was the audition for Chariots of Fire, the 1981 film that went on to become one of the biggest movies of its era.
Havers wanted to play Harold Abrahams, the role eventually taken by Ben Cross, but when he was asked to read for Lord Andrew Lindsay instead, he wasn’t impressed. Rather than giving the audition a go, he refused and walked out “in a sort of grump”.
A week later, he received a phone call from producer David Puttnam.
“He rang and said, ‘Have you grown up yet?’ I said, ‘I have. Thank you very much.’”
Havers says he had no idea the film would become such a hit. Looking back, it was the friendships that developed during filming that mattered most to him.
“Making friendships like that was really the most important thing about the film to me.”
In his seventies, Havers is showing no signs of giving up on acting. As he puts it: “Actors don’t retire. They get retired.”
He is still touring his one-man show around the UK and says that being told he was getting too old to do it simply made him decide he had better get on with it.
“Someone said, ‘You are getting too old to do that soon.’ So I went, ‘Oh my God, I’d better do it now.’”
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