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by mia hadjigeorgiou
British actor and Coronation Street legend Phillip Sean Middlemiss, aged 61, discusses his path to success, his career highs and lows, and the current projects he has in the works after a lengthy legal battle proving his innocence in an international corruption scandal…
Though many may know him as the cheeky and mischievous bookmaker Des Barnes, the man behind the character, Phil Middlemiss, is definitely far more interesting.
Originally from Hartlepool in the North East, Phil grew up in a mining community, and despite initial dreams of becoming a professional footballer, he began to fall in love with acting and drama in his teenage years.
He said: “I was always headed for a creative field… I think my dad wanted me to be an architect but I was like ‘oooh 7 years at uni? That’s not for me really’, I just didn’t want that… you know I did arts and stuff, and I used to sneak off and go to the cinema from school, which sounds like a cliché now, but that’s what I used to do and take the punishment later”.
From there, his passion for both theatre and film began to develop, and by 16, Phil had joined the National Youth Theatre.
When asked if his parents were supportive of his dreams, Phil couldn’t thank them enough, starting by praising his mother as “the greatest mother ever”, before humouring me with an anecdote about his father’s reaction: “When I said to my dad, I wanted to be an actor, he asked ‘are you gay?’, and I said ‘no, would it matter?’ and he said ‘well no’, and he was fully behind me just like my mum”.
After finishing his schooling, Phil then started auditioning for various drama schools with the help of his English teacher, and following offers from both RADA and LAMDA, accepted LAMDA’s invitation.
However, the path to success was far from linear or straightforward for Phil once he got to London, initially sharing a one-bedroom apartment with another young man from Hartlepool who had been accepted into a London art college.
There, the two had to “wash up in the bath and all sorts”, and Phil began working as a night-time security guard before moving on to work in a sunbed parlour, all to make ends meet. He added: “London is a hard place to make ends meet. It was tough then, it’s even tougher now”.
After graduating from LAMDA and winning the school’s ‘best actor’ award- “which was amazing”- Phil then began to embark on a number of different acting projects in both television and theatre, until he secured the prominent role of Des Barnes on Coronation Street.
During his almost 10-year stint on the show, Phil had a great time playing Des, and when discussing his time ‘walking the cobbles’, he was highly complimentary about both the writers and his character.
He said: “The writing was always good and there were many funny moments, I’ve got millions of stories. Great stories. Great times. I think I really enjoyed playing Des because the writers at the time would pick up traits in you [as an actor] and put them in. So, when you play a character like I did for nearly 10 years, then you can put layer upon layer upon layer”. All good things do eventually run their course though; having appeared in around 700
episodes of Coronation Street as a fan-favourite, Phil eventually decided it was time for him to move on.
His character’s death was watched live by an astounding 19.6 million viewers, including his hotel’s room-service waitress that night, who, thinking that she had seen a ghost, dropped the whole tray of food when Phil opened his door.
Coronation Street enabled Phil not only to advance himself as an actor, but also embark on a number of things he would never have otherwise done, “from judging Miss Hawaiian Tropic in the States- which was very interesting- to playing football in Wembley, all for charity.”
Charity work is something Phil is keen to engage with as someone fortunate enough to be in the public eye, and in recent years, he has embarked on a joint charity project with former England football player Bryan Robson, raising money to mend broken medical scanners for children living with serious illness.
The two put on race nights every weekend, eventually raising over £1.5 million for new scanners, and according to Phil, “that’s more of an achievement than getting all the TV awards or whatever”.
With that being said, though he thoroughly enjoyed being on Coronation Street and accepting the opportunities the show brought, Phil admitted that his favourite project to work on had to be the show Where the Heart Is.
“I worked there for 8 years, and it was the best job I’ve ever had. Where the Heart Is was just sensational, the craic and the people. The people we used to get in there, we had mega stars that would come in for 1 episode with a guest appearance and oh it was brilliant”, he said.
His least favourite project was an earlier one, which he joked has since practically been scrubbed from the internet due to its embarrassing nature…
Phil played a guest character in an episode of Casualty, who comes to woo his Tom Jones-obsessed wife by belting a Jones-ballad in the hospital waiting room. He joked, “They said they’d got me a wig, like a Tom Jones tight curl thing and patent black leather trousers and at first, I went ‘f*** that’, but like most actors I just did it”.
Since then, Phil has come a long way, but an unfortunate and unfair mix-up in an international corruption scandal has undone a lot of his hard work, and left him starting all over again.
Several years ago, Phil ventured out to Ghana in an attempt to make a film called The Reluctant Orator, however the project fell through at the last minute.
In response, Phil thought to make the best out of a less-than-ideal situation, and became “embroiled” with the company Airbus, who, unbeknownst to Phil and colleagues, were involved in the bribery of government officials.
Airbus were eventually ordered to pay €3.6 billion for their corruption- the largest ever aviation fine- and Phil was unjustly tagged as guilty by association, which led to serious fraud officers coming after him, extensive costs in legal representation, and even Interpol putting a red notice on him and his wife (who had never even been to Ghana).
Phil then became slightly emotional when mentioning how, historically, the only people who have had red notices put on them have been serious global criminals known for committing extreme crimes, including the likes of Osama bin Laden and other major terrorists.
Eventually, the truth prevailed, and all the charges were rightly dropped. However, as a result of the whole ordeal, Phil and his family have lost a lot of the life he has worked so hard to build, and he now says that “it’s time for a bit of retribution. You can’t get away with ruining someone’s life, as we’ve seen with The Post Office”.
Currently, Phil is rebuilding his career step-by-step, and his production company has a number of promising projects in the works, including a children’s animation about renewables, and a tv show based on the true story of the witches up in Paisley, Scotland.
He is very excited about both, but especially enthusiastic about working with Mackinnon & Saunders on the former, having seen first-hand the incredible work they’ve produced for projects like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
Finally, when asked for advice he’d give to anyone trying to break into the industry, Phil took a minute to think, before saying, “It’s a completely different world and I would say embrace everything, don’t fixate on the end goal… always have a projection of where you want to get to but don’t focus too much on it because acting is organic. Leave all that s*** and baggage and inhibitions behind, and just throw yourself into it”.
