The Shaun Dooley Trilogy
I came across this fun story and tracked down a series of videos to support it several weeks ago. I've had this ready to post since then, but put it in storage for the time being. For reasons that should be come clear, I realized this was a good time to post it.
A year-and-a-half ago, I posted several videos about Jodie Whittaker, the first actress to play the role of ‘Dr. Who’ (and who previously had been in the series Broadchurch), performing for the Children in Need charity album. This was a project in England where well-known celebrities who are not professional-level singles recorded favorite songs to raise money. She is a truly major fan-girl of the group Coldplay, and when nervously recording a Coldplay song, two members of the group surprised her. The videos are all great fun (not just of the actual event, but several others, putting it in full perfective), and you can watch them here.
I came across another similar and great fun occurrence for the same Children in Need album. This time, it was for actor Shaun Dooley – who, as it happens, was the star of that same series, Broadchurch. He, too, is not anything close to a professional singer – in fact, before performing his song, he said he was so nervous that he had to do it with his eyes closed so that he could imagine he was singing the tender Taylor Swift number, “Never Grow Up,” to his children, as he always did, rather than see everyone standing around watching him. But unknown to him, Taylor Swift had been contacted and shows up at the recording studio to surprise him. (She later tells Dooley that she’s a big fan of Broadchurch.) And oh, my, yes, he is very surprised. Fun, too, is that Oscar-winner Olivia Colman is there, having been involved in setting up the surprise, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is there in the control booth, as well. We don’t see it here, but in subsequent interviews I checked out, Dooley mentions that Taylor Swift stayed around for an hour afterwards, including taking selfies with his kids.
To put added perspective on all this, here is Dooley on a chat show after the event talking about how it all came about. (He notes that his wife was involved as a conduit of sorts, though leaves out in this conversation that she had kept it a secret for about a month.) Nice, too, for all those who don’t know his work on Broadchurch, the interview begins with a little bit on his career and some clips from the show.
And finally, here’s how his recording of “Never Grow Up” turned out.
Comments