Heading in the Wright direction

From Lamda to Los Angeles and back again, local man Jack Sandle wanted to be an actor for as long as he could remember. And when the casting director of Emmerdale called, he found himself Wright up there with the stars, as Zoe Ash reports T'S a definite case of deja vu. I'm heading towards Dix-Neuf to meet Jack Sandle, a boy I used to work with in the same caf' years ago. Back then the group we worked with called itself the dream team and we all had high hopes. But Jack was always going to be an actor.

That was no surprise. He was a natural showman, even when he wasn't trying. I did get a bit of a shock, though, when I turned on the TV last week and he was answering to the name, Brett Wright, on Emmerdale.

'That looks like Jack,' I thought, staring at the screen.

'That is Jack.'

I hadn't seen him for years. But by huge coincidence, that very week he was back in Guernsey visiting his parents, Rita and Martin, at their King's Mills home. It was a great excuse to catch up at the old haunt.

Jack greeted me with the same bounding enthusiasm he's always displayed. I was clutching reviews of plays in which he's appeared and as soon as I put them down on the table he picked one up. It was for Adam Bede, a play in which he took the lead role earlier this year at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond.

'I was good in that,' he said, smiling. 'Do you know this is the first three weeks I've had off in the last year-and-a-half?'

A pupil of Vale Private School, Beechwood and Millfield followed by sixth-form college at Hurtwood House in Surrey, acting was all he ever wanted to do: nothing else even got a look-in. Years ago we used to hang out in Caf' Noir, eating chips and drinking coffee. He'd turn up three hours before everyone else and sit in the corner reading Oscar Wilde plays.

But it's a tough game.

At 19 he gained a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Then he was thrown out.

'I was just too young. I went back two years later when I was 21, when I'd calmed down a bit. I just needed to get myself settled and focused to do it.'

He spent a short time in Los Angeles in the years between and he knew a producer who was working there who provided a foot in the door.

'You've got to be good enough to start with,' he explained. 'Then it's about who you know. After that it's about perseverance. You get respect for being a British actor out there.'

That respect stems from the kind of training offered by places like Lamda. Of the 2,000 hopefuls who each year apply for a place, only 30 get in.

Older and a bit wiser, he returned to England and had to audition to the same people who had thrown him out two years before. He was, he said, the only person who has ever been taken back.

'There was never a problem with my acting,' he explained, 'more a problem with my calmness.'Work breeds work,' his agent told him ' and that's how he got the Emmerdale role. The casting director was brought by his agent to see him appearing in Hay Fever at the York Theatre Royal.

But appearing in the popular soap didn't mean travelling to the Yorkshire Dales. All his scenes were filmed in the ITV studios in Leeds.

Morale among the actors was high: 'They'd just overtaken EastEnders in the ratings for the first time and had a massive party. They were still in the glow of that when I got there.'

So what was it like being around such familiar screen characters?

Playing local entrepreneur Brett Wright, he became a pawn in a game of deception between four leading characters. He was clearly a hit with the ladies on screen, but what were they like when the cameras were switched off?

But it's not all laughs. 'You have to know your lines and hit your marks. They are shooting on a tight schedule with six episodes a week. If you've got a major storyline in a plot you can be in make-up at 7.30 in the morning and not leave until seven in the evening.'

As our second round of coffees arrived, Jack sat back looking down the Arcade.

'I love the pace of life over here, it's so different from London,' he said. Home really is Guernsey for city-based Jack but he knows that work commitments mean he can never realistically live and work here. 'I like to come back here to recharge.'

The Emmerdale role isn't the first time Jack has hit our TV screens. He was in early episodes of the BBC sit-com, My Hero, and, more recently, Wire in Blood with Robson Green and Cold Feet star Hermione Norris. The pressure is on with this kind of job because it's shot on film: if you make a mistake, it costs. And it's no good pleading that you're the new boy, because you just won't get hired again.Green was great to work with, Jack said. 'He went out of his way to be professional and friendly.

'We would have one-to-one rehearsals, me and Robson, just with the director,' he explained. 'If he was happy, then about 25 crew members would come in and rig up the lighting and we'd do the whole scene again. Skill is improvisation with limitations. You don't want to screw it up. If you do it well, you get more work.'

Not long out of college and having appeared at Bristol's Old Vic Theatre in Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen in one of the lead roles, he received a call from his fellow kinsman. He was playing in Macbeth and the leading man had broken his leg. Could Jack do it?

'I had 12 days to learn and perform it,' he said. 'It was a daunting task but gave me a lot of confidence and I stayed and played it for a month. That's what takes the bottle. Doing the fringe shows at the beginning.'

Support from his family has been vital. 'You need them to believe in you, even when no one else does. You have to stay optimistic. I've been very lucky in that I've always known what I wanted to do.'

That's not enough, though, if you haven't got the X factor that directors and producers are seeking.

'If you're no good, you don't survive: it's that cut-throat. In the first couple of years out of college, you lose about 10% of your fellow actors,' Jack explained. Many turn to teaching when they can't cut the mustard in the tough world of acting. 'It's a hard life.'

So, having worked in front of a live audience and done TV work, which would he choose: his name up in lights or rolling in the credits?

The theatre wins every time.

'Adam Bede was good,' he said. 'You knew you'd really moved people.' Jack leaned back, running his hands through his hair, and his face lit up as he recalled the feeling of walking off the stage after taking a final bow, knowing that he'd done a good job.

'Done something worthwhile,' he reflected. 'When people go to the theatre, they want to go on the emotional journey with you.'

There is, however, a catch.

'My heart is in the theatre really, but you can't survive on theatre wages.' The logistics of theatre work often prove too much. If you are living in London and working short-term elsewhere in the UK, you find yourself paying two rents.

'You're living two lives really.

'The ideal life is to work in television to earn enough to get through theatre. You learn on the job very quickly in theatre because you can't reshoot.

'Someone told me once,' he said, leaning in, 'that if I was really unhappy with a scene, I should swear, because then they'd have to cut it.

'That's what's so different about the television work. It's all shot out of sequence: it's just not the same. The first day I was filming with Robson, I was looking at him thinking, 'he's not doing anything'. But each little movement can mean so much more on the television because your eye can fill the whole screen.

'On the stage, you not only work off the other actor but off the audience as well.'

With the influx of Americans now trying their luck in the West End, does he fancy a stint on Broadway?

'I'd love to,' he said. 'Maybe Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or a Chekhov play. I'd love to do a Chekhov.'

The lack of regular work and income can scare many people off but it doesn't faze Jack. He's never done anything else, so why would it? He's glad to be having a break and not many actors can say that.

'I'm starting to think about what's next but I have some auditions coming up so I'm not worried.

'Maybe I'll have to retire back here,' said Jack, his love of Guernsey always there in the background. Jokingly, he told me that he'd been eyeing up Castle Cornet as a potential Elsinore for a re-make of Hamlet ' although knowing him, I wouldn't rule out anything.

Retiring seems literally like a lifetime away but you should allow yourself to have faith in this local boy. This is just the tip of the iceberg: he's going all the way to Broadway and beyond.