SIMON MACCORKINDALE

Merely transforming into a wide variety of animals from a black leopard to a high flying hawk should pose no problem to British star Simon MacCorkindale, who stars as Jonathan Chase in the 20th Century-Fox Television series, “Manimal.”

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Simon MacCorkindale tends to play undemonstrative English gentlemen and while women have been known to find him sexy, ‘animal’ is not the word one would think of to describe him. He’s civilised (even though he now lives in Los Angeles – or, at least, as he says, ‘that’s where all my belongings are – my home is wherever I am!) So there is something piquant about his playing a professor who, to fight crime, transforms himself into a protean variety of animal shapes. He had thought that he would be able to devote a lot of time to his own projects; writing and directing are his first loves. ‘I thought I would be an animal a lot of the time and wouldn’t need to be there.’ Instead he found himself working a 16-hour-day six days a week, spending hours being made up for the transformation scenes, while the human part of the role got larger and larger. ‘I was never off the set. I was hoist by my own petard!’ All actors should learn from this – being an animal is even worse than working with one.