David Tennant in the RSC’s Hamlet in 2008.He is one of the biggest stars of stage and screen, from the Royal Shakespeare Company tosuffers from nerves – and chocolate is one of his secrets to calming them, he has revealed.
The actor allowed himself exactly three squares of chocolate in every interval of one of his shows, finding “comfort in the routine”. “Being on stage is a bit like jumping out of a plane. I try and nail down the things I can control,” he said.Laurence Olivier , who suffered years of debilitating anguish. Tennant spoke of trying to control his anxieties and not “allow your brain to start winding you up”, which is when “you allow those little anxieties in”.
He added: “When you’re opening a show, it’s just the sort of terror of ‘is this conceivable that I can remember a sequence of words in front of other humans?’ There’s just the horror of the terror that it just might not be actually possible. “And, as that recedes, a couple of weeks, a few weeks into the run, then your brain or my brain will almost try and replace one anxiety with a fabricated anxiety. I don’t know why it feels the need to do that, and I wish it didn’t.”