As well as being a talented actor, Nathaniel has also served as an executive producer on the acclaimed series <\/span>The Beast Must Die<\/span><\/i>, and shares his love of poetry through his Instagram account by doing regular readings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Most recently, Nathaniel will be performing in <\/span>Ragdoll<\/span><\/i>, Katherine Moar\u2019s new play, at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Drawn into this project by gripping dialogue, the challenge of playing a character that\u2019s very different from himself, and the joy of being the first to play the role of \u2018Robert\u2019, Nathaniel has nothing but praise for the experience of working with both Katherine and the play\u2019s director, Josh Seymour.<\/span><\/p>\n With the show now having begun its limited run, we caught up with Nathaniel to discuss his extraordinary acting journey. From struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia and playing \u2018Inspector Lynley\u2019, to his latest artistic endeavour at Wilton\u2019s Music Hall and how he became involved in <\/span>Ragdoll<\/span><\/i>, here\u2019s what he shared:<\/span><\/p>\n I love that question because nothing made me want to become an actor. I wasn’t going to do anything else. I realised when I was nine. Up to that point, I’d wanted to be a train driver, an astronaut, Fred Astaire, a cowboy, Tarzan \u2013 anything I’d seen on telly. I wanted to be all those things and lived through every moment of every programme or film that I watched. I remember watching [Laurence] Olivier when I was five, and I was just thinking, \u201cI want to be Henry V. I want to be everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I was nine, I took a train by myself from London to Cambridge to see my sister in her first term at Cambridge playing Lady Macbeth. And when she came on, I just went, “I see, I can be a 12th century Scottish king or a doctor like my mum without six years of practise. I can just do three weeks of rehearsal. This is fantastic. I could just be an actor.” So it became a realisation rather than a choice.<\/span><\/p>\n I’ve wanted to do other things along the way. I wanted to, at one point, emulate my mum and be a doctor, but I’m dyslexic, and that doesn’t help with exams. I had a brother who’s now a film director \u2013 Ollie [Oliver Parker], who could do crosswords in Latin when he was 11, another brother who did his A-levels at 16, and a sister who I think has got four different MAs from around the world. I was not an intellectual or an academic like they were.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For a long time, I thought myself a bit dim. But when I was 42, I discovered I was dyslexic, and that made a lot of sense. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that dyslexia makes it harder sometimes to learn lines, but I know a lot of people in the arts that are dyslexic. It’s not a novelty anymore, and neither is my ADHD. Everybody’s on the train now. But I adore it. I think none of the characters I’ve ever played have been dyslexic, which I think helps me learn my lines. I don’t know. I must be fooling myself on that one, but it’s true. And I played a lot of lecturers and professors recently over the last five or six years. And so they’re as smart as anything. And I guess I realised at 42 that, yeah, I’m not that dim, I just don’t see words in the same way that others do.<\/span><\/p>\n I remember my dad putting me to bed one night and saying, “Do you see the swirls on that wallpaper? What does that look like to you?” And I went, “Oh, well that’s a cloud and that’s an elephant.” And that’s when he said, “Yeah, that’s called using your imagination.” And I’ll never forget that. So I think without that, I would’ve been sunk.<\/span><\/p>\n I didn’t want to go to drama school. I wanted to go to university. I was at a school called Leighton Park just outside Reading \u2013 a Quaker school. It was a boarding school, and I’d slip out after my prep and go and join a local amateur dramatics theatre company. I don’t think the school knew, but I was in plays in Reading while I was at school. I found myself then thinking, \u2018Okay, I can just go straight into it. I’ll just go straight into it.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There was an actress I’d met who was fantastic, I thought. She went to Hull University, so I thought, \u2018That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to Hull\u2019. So, on my UCCA forms I put on my five top universities to go for: Hull at the top, then Bristol, Manchester, Oxford and Cambridge. Funnily enough, none of the others replied, but Hull did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I’d just done a play, <\/span>Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance<\/span><\/i>, and I played \u2018Musgrave\u2019. I went into my chat and this professor showed me the theatre and they were doing <\/span>Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance<\/span><\/i>. I started quoting it and he was obviously really impressed because by the time we got back to his office, he said, “So, what would you like us to offer you?” And I went, “A couple of Cs and a D will do me, thank you very much.” But I didn’t get anywhere near it, so I didn’t get into university and I thought, \u2018What am I going to do?\u2019 I retook A-levels. And then I thought, \u2018Well, I suppose I better go to drama school and learn\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I was at the National Youth Theatre. I had a great time there. People like Douglas Hodge, Sally Dexter, Colin Firth and I became really good mates at that place. It was really fun. It was a whole new experience. And people like Colin were getting into Drama Centre and a lot of people were going to various drama schools, so I thought I better try.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I got into LAMDA and, honestly, it wasn’t my favourite place in the world. I found it quite cliquey and difficult. The actors who’ve come out of it, when I meet them again or see them, I just have nothing but admiration for them. How they stuck at it as well, I don’t know. We had really good actors, but it felt difficult for me. I was never part of a group.<\/span><\/p>\n I was very lucky. In those days, you needed an Equity card. Somebody was inevitably offered that, and different jobs and agents came to them. I’d happened to play a really good part \u2013 \u2018Captain Brazen\u2019 in <\/span>Trumpets and Drums<\/span><\/i>, which is Brecht’s version of <\/span>The Recruiting Officer<\/span><\/i>. I had such fun playing him and I was luckily offered lots of different things and lots of different agents, and I felt quite secure for the first time. I’m still picking up things sometimes that I learned and going, “Oh yeah, I remember then they had that class. I did this, didn’t I?\u201d Still now, 40 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n Initially, you’d think it was a radio play for me because I am meant to be late 70s and an LA lawyer originally from Boston, but he’s lost that. I’ve just done [<\/span>The Twelve Dates \u2018Til Christmas<\/span><\/i>] for Hallmark, where I had the amazing Mary McDonnell as my ex-wife and Jane Seymour as my girlfriend, and I got a phone call that said, “Here, sending a play. Have a look. See what you think.” Over the last few years, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve done a lot of theatre over the last few years \u2013 had an absolute ball. I mean, I’m astounded how poorly paid this business is, but the parts are great.<\/span><\/p>\n I’ve done some new plays and I’ve worked with some fantastic writers over the last few years. Hilary Mantel when I was doing the <\/span>Wolf Hall<\/span><\/i> series, and Tom Stoppard. So I’m quite used to working with writers at the moment, and I thought, \u2018Okay, let’s see what this one’s like\u2019. Katherine Moar, she wrote a play called <\/span>Farm Hall<\/span><\/i>, which was on at the Jermyn Street Theatre when I was at Southwark playing the same story by a play written by somebody else. So it was quite interesting. I thought, \u2018I’ll read this and see what I think\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n And like those other really good playwrights, I found myself reading the part out loud as I was reading the script, which is an indication for me of proper talent, and I’m identifying with it straight away. [\u2018Robert\u2019 is] very different from me and I think this is going to be a fun challenge. This is going to be something different. And the joy, of course, of playing in a new play is that you are forging the road. Nobody else has done that one and nobody else has played this character.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I played \u2018Henry VIII\u2019 in the <\/span>Wolf Hall<\/span><\/i> series, lots of people have played Henry VIII, but nobody played that one. A lot of people have done <\/span>A Man for All Seasons<\/span><\/i> or Shakespeare’s <\/span>Henry V<\/span><\/i>, but no one had played Hilary Mantel’s version of Cromwell’s version of Henry VIII. And no one has played Katherine Moar’s version of Robert before, who is loosely based on a real character. And I just thought, this is going to be so exciting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The dialogue zips through, it’s fantastically clever, really inventive stuff, challenging. People often use the word rollercoaster, but it’s cleverer than just going up and down. It’s going round and inverting itself and going back again. And we’ve got Katherine in the room. So I read it and I thought, \u2018Okay, this is going to be interesting\u2019. So I had a long chat with Josh [Seymour, the director]. I went to see Josh in a cafe in town and we talked about it, and I came away thinking, \u2018Yeah, this is really getting more interesting by the second\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n You know, when someone’s offering you a part, inevitably they flatter you a little bit, and I’m a sucker for that, frankly. Flattery will get you everywhere in my book. So I spoke to Katherine, and actually, she didn’t really flatter me that much. It was more about what she saw Robert to be and how different he was from the other. There’s two characters in the play, Robert and Holly, and they’re in 2017, at the beginning of the Me Too movement. Then there’s two other actors in the play who are playing the same people but young, back in 1978. It’s very clever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Image credit: Alex Brenner \/ Nathaniel Parker as ‘Robert’ and Abigail Cruttenden as ‘Holly’ in ‘Ragdoll’<\/em><\/p>\n She then started comparing me to the younger one, saying, “He’s got to have changed like this and he needs to have developed, and what we’re seeing now is this.” And that’s really great. It’s a very exciting thing to do. So you’re partly basing it on a real person, which is always a fun challenge, but also having the imagination to take it beyond that and do your own interpretation of somebody.<\/span><\/p>\n The writer isn’t always right just because the word sounds the same \u2013 writer and right. They can be challenged, and Katherine is very accepting of that challenge. She’s almost always right, it has to be said, but there’s a really important talent, not just as a writer, but as a director and as an actor, too. It’s not often used enough as a producer, but I think it’s a really good talent for that too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I remember being told this by my brother twice in my life, once when I was about to play \u2018Macbeth\u2019 for the National Youth Theatre, and the other time I was about to direct. And he said the same thing: “Just listen to what the person has to say.\u201d If someone comes up to you, if you’re an actor, listen to what the other character says. And if it’s good writing, you’ll know how to respond. And if you’re directing or on the other side of the thing, then listen to whatever he says because if you interrupt somebody, then they haven’t finished telling you their idea, and their idea might be the thing that unlocks everything. So, let them have their idea, and if you don’t use it, fine \u2013 they won’t resent you because they’ve been heard.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It’s a really good tactic. I’ve been on film sets with Ollie many times and I’ve seen him do that, and the sets have always been wonderful sets. People have really enjoyed the process because he listens. Katherine does that, as does Josh. They really do listen and they let me say what I have to say. And sure enough, they often don’t use it. It’s really great to have been heard, and look, I’m enjoying the process.<\/span><\/p>\n I did a play at Southwark a few years ago, which I didn’t have much to say in. I hadn’t done any theatre for a while. From there, I thought, \u2018I really need more words\u2019. And then I did <\/span>Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll<\/span><\/i> with Tom Stoppard, which was full of words. It’s the moment you identify with somebody and somebody thinks you identify with them, so you give them a shot and go, “Okay, let’s see if I do.” And there are some things which I don’t identify with. I often see actors go, “Why were you asked? Why did you choose to do this?” And more often than not, the question is answered by, “I was offered it. I had nothing else to do. They’re paying me, I’m doing it.”<\/span><\/p>\n I have been very lucky recently, and I have read some plays and a lot of them have been fantastic, but the ones that really, really gripped me are the ones I’m able to do. There’s a lot of experience there now. I’ve been around the block a couple times, but the greatest thing is you do some of this and you’re learning again. I just love that sensation.<\/span><\/p>\n I did a Hallmark series earlier this year for Christmas \u2013 <\/span>The Twelve Dates \u2018Til Christmas<\/span><\/i>. I’d never done anything like that. Working with Jane Seymour, Mary McDonnell and Mae Whitman, who was playing the lead. That was an experience. I’ve done TV shows before, I’ve done series before, but it was completely new to me to do that, and every day was a joy.<\/span><\/p>\n I started doing it because poetry has always been a huge part of my life, without sounding pretentious. My dad was, I think, at one point, chair of the William Blake society. It was integral to his life, William Blake, and I remember him teaching me and Ollie about Blake and getting us to learn poems as kids. Like I said, I was dyslexic. He used to have to pay me. So I was paid a sixpence to learn \u2018Tiger Tiger, burning bright\u2019. I found the financial incentive really worked for me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\nIn this interview, you\u2019ll find:<\/h3>\n
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\nHi, Nathaniel! What made you first want to become an actor?<\/h3>\n
How did you get started as an actor?<\/h3>\n
How did you first get involved in \u2018Ragdoll\u2019?<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/spotlightuk\/image\/fetch\/w_{width},c_limit\/https:\/\/www.spotlight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Nathaniel-Parker-Robert-and-Abigail-Cruttenden-Holly-credit-Alex-Brenner-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHow do you choose which projects and roles to take on?<\/h3>\n
You’ve recently been reading poetry on your Instagram account. What made you decide to do this?<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\n