Interview: A trying time for Samantha

Gaining a stone and a half for her new role came easily to Samantha Janus. Learning to play rugby was more difficult.

"I can't tell you how nervy I was when I stepped on to that pitch," she says. "Thirteen guys and me. I was so intimidated.

"But there was no way I was going to let them think of me as a girlie."

Besides, she says, with a squad of professional scrum-halves watching, "it was no time to come over all actressy".

Miss Janus, star of the laddish TV sitcom Game On, is now appearing in the equally masculine but infinitely more northern film comedy, Up 'n' Under.

Her character is a Castleford gym-owner who's agreed to whip a team of slobs - among them Men Behaving Badly's Neil Morrissey - into match fitness.

Her first job, though, was to train herself.

"When I first met the director, John Godber, I'd been appearing in Grease," she says, "and the dancing kept me slender.

"For the film I had to put on about 20 pounds - which, of course, I found quite easy. The hard part was losing it again afterwards.

"I had to do it in a month, too, so I went on a course of aerobics and jogging, and trained myself to eat less."

Much has been made, especially by the film company's publicity department, of the shower scene in which Janus appears naked.

"I have no problem with that sort of thing," she says, "unless a scene is there purely for titillation - and that's certainly not the case here. And I find it just as hard to do as revealing emotions."

The sequence in question sees Morrissey ogling Janus in the shower - but leaving, so to speak, with his tail between his legs.

"If you look at that scene, the whole point is about a woman being totally unfazed by this man's perception of her," says Janus. "He's trying to intimidate her and she puts him down within a second. It's an important moment.

"All the same, I do have reservations about it being used to promote the film."

Janus and Morrissey's rugby sequences - much of the film's action takes place on the pitch - was filmed over several weeks in Cardiff (they couldn't find enough suitable locations in Yorkshire).

"We had to be caked in mud for every shot," says Janus. "And I saw the props people collecting it from a spot where people had been walking their dogs."

For Morrissey, playing rugby was only slightly less of an ordeal than for his co-star. "It was a crash course for all of us," he says, the cigarette in his hand offering a clue as to his normal fitness regime.

"We kept getting dragged on to a rugby pitch at six in the morning when all we were expecting was a script reading.

"And I'm rubbish at rugby - always have been. At school I was the last person to be chosen and I'm no better now than I was then.

"So if the film makes it look as if I can play, I'm delighted."

Anyone who believes the world of film-making to be glamorous would, says Morrissey, soon have been brought down to earth - literally - on the set of Up 'n' Under.

"Uncomfortable is the word which springs to mind. We were plastered with mud, then we had to wait for it to dry in the freezing wind before being sprayed down with ice cold water. Not nice."

They had to do their own stunts, too. "There's one sequence in which I get tackled by two large men," says Janus. "The stunt co-ordinator went through it with me very slowly, but because I was so excited I went and did completely the opposite and I hurt my back.

"After that experience, I have no ambition to be an action heroine."

Janus was, she admits, never the first on to the games field. "At school I hated all games. I was always being sent off for not having the right shoes or the right T-shirt. I got miffed by the whole thing and I'd end up sulking in the hall."

Morrissey, too, spent his school days on the subs' bench. "I had size nine feet when I was nine. I was like the Yeti. And a gangly one at that."

For both of them, then, the attraction of Up 'n' Under was not the rugby but the presence of John Godber.

Britain's most performed living playwright, originally from South Elmsall and now based in Hull, had spent five years raising the finance to turn his hit play into a film; now he was making his directorial debut.

"It was a very exciting prospect," says Morrissey. "We wanted to be a part of it."

Godber brought a typically northern approach to direction, his actors agree. "There's no mystery to directing," says Janus. "On a couple of occasions the Director of Photography asked him questions and he said, 'Screw that, I'm the director not the cameraman. You do the lighting, I'll do the pointing'."

If Up 'n' Under is a success, Godber's backers are already lining up other films for him. "He's so prolific," says Morrissey. "There's probably four or five screenplays leaping out of his word processor as we speak."

There is, however, a long shadow cast over his debut film by the runaway success of The Full Monty. Though their stories are not connected, they are both broad northern comedies - and audiences will doubtless expect one to be as funny as the other.

"If people want to go and see our film on the basis that The Full Monty was funny, that's fine," says Morrissey. "But that shouldn't be the criteria.

"If a film is good, people will go and see it. Simple."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.