The role of the narrator in the Rocky Horror Show is usually cast in one of two ways, it either an actor playing the part, or a celebrity – who is more than likely reading the lines from the book they are carrying.

- Advertisement -

For Nicholas Hammond who is undertaking the role in the production that’s on at the Crown Theatre, he says he can only approach it as an actor. Creating an idea of a character and building upon that.

Being the narrator is just the latest in a line of very memorable roles that the actor has played over the decades, although audiences may not have always connected together all the different parts he’s played over a very long career.

His earliest outing was in the 1963 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies where he played the character of Robert. With William Golding’s book included on the reading lists of high school English courses for decades, it’s a film a generation of students watched, until a newer version was made in 1990.

‘I did that when I was 10, and I’d always just liked the idea of working in the theatre. My mother was an actress, and all of her friends were actors, and they just seemed like they were really fun people. So even as a child, it just always attracted me as a fun way to spend your life.

“I’d say it still is! I have as much fun backstage at Rocky Horror as I did backstage when I was doing The Complaisant Lover on Broadway when I was 11 years old. It hasn’t diminished at all. I still love it.” Hammond said.

As far as first stage jobs go, Hammond’s Broadway debut was pretty impressive. He acted in the Graham Greene play alongside Michael Redgrave and Googie Withers.

While Hammond’s mother Eileen was an actress, he says his parents never pushed him into acting, rather they just went along with is desire to explore the profession.

“They were willing to go along with it when they saw I was really keen to give it a go. But I think they probably thought I would outgrow it, that I would do a couple of things as a child, and then get serious and go to university and get a real job.”

In 1964 Hammond was cast as Friedrich von Trapp in The Sound of Music, its a role that catapulted him from child actor to child star, and he’s never looked back. The actor says he can see a lot of similarities between projects like Lord of the Flies, The Sound of Music and The Rocky Horror Show. 

“They are three shows that just never die. They just keep going and going and going, with new generations of audiences that keep watching.

“When you think that Rocky started 50 years ago, they thought it was going to run a week and be over. Sixty-two people in the audience at the first performance, and here it is, 50 years later, and there are productions all around the world.

“It’s the same thing with The Sound of Music. We didn’t know when we made the movie, we thought it’s a fun movie, but nobody knew it was going to be this global phenomenon, and it continues to this day. You don’t ever know.

“If anybody could figure out the formula for that, of course they’d put it in the bottle and be enormously successful, but you can’t, there is no formula. It’s just something strikes the public’s fancy generation after generation, and some things don’t. I just feel very lucky that in my career I’ve been in a few of them.” Hammond said.

Hammond says he’s thinks Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon in Hollywood, which he recently appeared in, is another project that will have longevity with audiences.

Appearing on stage in The Rocky Horror Show he says, is unlike any other production.

“It’s a very strange experience for me, because I’ve never done a show where the audience knows the lines better than I do. I mean, you’ve really got to get it right, because they’ll know if you get one word wrong, or there’ll be several 100 people out there at any given moment, who memorised that script, and they’re ready.

Audience participation in the show has increased over the decades and die-hard fans know exactly when they can throw a line into the proceedings.

“They’re anticipating. They know when they want to yell something out, and they’re ready for it, they’re waiting, you say the line, and back out it comes. It’s a very different experience of being in a conventional play. It’s more like being in a kind of wild but quite wonderful party.” Hammond said, describing the on-stage experience as “controlled chaos”.

What other memorable roles has Hammond played over the years? He portrayed Dennis Connors in the Australian mini-series The Cup which dramatised Australia’s win of the America’s Cup, and long before Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield or Tom Holland were around – Hammond was Peter Parker and Spiderman.

In the 70s and 80s he appeared in some of the most iconic television shows including The Waltons, Hawaii Five-O, The Love Boat, Magnum P.I. Murder She Wrote and Dallas. But it’s his appearance on the ever popular The Brady Bunch that is most remembered.

Hammond appears in one of the show’s most famous episodes, the one where Marcia gets hit one the nose with a football. Hammond played the boy she was supposed to be going on a date with.

Once again, it’s a role he never imagined we’d been talking about decades later.

“At the time you do them, you think, ‘Oh, it’s a really fun job’. And then 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later, 50 years later, people say ‘Oh my God, you were the original Peter Parker.’ ‘Oh, my God, you were Friedrich von Trapp.’ ‘You were one of the choir boys in Lord of the Flies!'”

“You don’t wake up in the morning and think those things yourself. But then you get reminded of it when people stopped you in an airport or somewhere, and then they would have tell you their story about how much they enjoyed it.” Hammond said, describing it as the gift that keeps on giving.

The Rocky Horror Show is at Crown Theatre until 26h August. 

Graeme Watson 

You can support our work by subscribing to our Patreon
or contributing to our GoFundMe campaign.