Maximum exposure

HARDLY a day passes without someone saying to Mark Addy, "I don't recognise you with your clothes on". Such cheeky comments are a legacy of a role that exposed him, literally, to an international audience. Ten years have elapsed since he played chubby Dave in The Full Monty but the recognition lingers on.

Playing Dave in the story of redundant steelworkers who stripped to earn cash led York-born and based Addy into Hollywood movies and a starring role in a US sit-com.

But the past is hard to live down when you made your mark in a film that so caught the public imagination - and huge images of you naked were plastered over billboards across the country.

The actor, who got a taste for acting while working backstage at York Theatre Royal as a teenager, harbours no grudge at still being associated with the role. He's even revisited the film for the even more revealing two-disc special edition DVD.

Now Addy is back and looking for work. After four seasons starring in the American comedy series, Still Standing - as yet unseen over here - he's returned home to York, where he lives with his wife and three children.

"I'm surprised people can still remember The Full Monty," he says. "It was the first film I did and it's probably going to be one of the best parts I'm going to get to play. So it has a very special place in my heart.

"I would say every job I've ever done since then has been a result of it. If you do a little movie that happens to do incredibly well, especially in the States, you're basically auditioning for Hollywood in one go."

He was rewarded with roles in US movies like Jack Frost, The Time Machine and playing cartoon legend Fred Flintstone in The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas on the big screen. With Steven Spielberg as executive producer, it was a role he felt he couldn't turn down.

Still Standing has just finished a four-year run on US television. He and Jamie Getz played a Chicago couple, who were high school sweethearts and children of the Seventies, trying to raise their three children more coolly than their parents did them.

He had to commit himself to a long-term contract without knowing if the pilot episode would be picked up by the networks. For the past four years he's been working on the TV show seven months of the year in the US.

He rejected moving there for good. His wife, Kelly, whom he met while he was appearing as an actor and she was working in the box office at Hull Truck theatre, didn't want to settle abroad.

"She doesn't like it over there," explains Addy. "She wanted to be at home. As soon as I'd done there, I could get on the next plane and fly back to earth. I was kept busy and was putting in a lot of work, so I felt I deserved the time off when not filming the series.

"As long as my wife and I have been together, I've always had to go away although this has been the longest period. We had a five-month break in the summer but that's the time I wanted to be back home with the kids."

His family has grown since he started doing Still Standing with five-year-old Ruby being joined by Charlie, three, and Oscar, one.

He was filming 22 episodes of the sit-com each year. "You're basically doing a half-hour play every week. You have a writing team of 15 or 16 writers and the script changes according to what's working, and then you perform it for an audience at the end of the week," he says.

"They've got the system down just right. They know how to make these things trundle along. It would have been the perfect job if I didn't have to do the accent."

He had no desire to stay on the other side of the Atlantic any longer than necessary. "Los Angeles is not a place I'm particularly fond of. But it has been very good to me," he says. "I appreciate the work, but it's not a place I want to spend more time than I have to. It's very weird. No-one tells you the truth there, you don't really know what the truth is."

Returning to The Full Monty after a decade proved an odd experience as he and director Peter Cattaneo recorded a commentary for the DVD.

The special edition also includes documentaries about the making of the picture and the British film industry, deleted scenes, and an option to select your favourite tune from the film and go straight to that scene.

He hadn't watched the film for some time. "I saw it when it was first out, we went to screenings but stuff you're in you don't want to be watching the whole time," he says.

He moved back to York from London around the time that The Full Monty was released. It was in his home city that he had his first paid job as an acting assistant stage manager at York Theatre Royal. He quit his A-level studies when offered a full-time post.

"I honestly don't mind what I do next," he says. "If I read a script that I really respond to, I'll do it. I haven't done theatre for about seven years. It might be nice to do that before it gets too scary."

He'd love to work again at the York theatre if the right part comes along, just as he's open to making movies both big and small. "I've done big budget and low budget stuff, and they're equally complicated in terms of getting them made," he says.

"It's nice to be in a position to help those small projects get made. I've done a couple in the midst of all those escapades on the other side of the pond."

Now he's catching up on all the things he missed while in the US - "Chinese takeaways, fish and chips, decent beer, watching sports that I understand and aren't broken up into two-minute segments on the TV".

Since returning, he's recorded a BBC Radio 4 play written by Hull Truck director John Godber. Currently he's unemployed. "I'm back and looking for work, although I'm not exactly in the dole queue," he says - recalling the famous scene in The Full Monty where the aspiring strippers practise their routine while queuing up for their benefits.

* The Full Monty two-disc DVD is available to buy from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, £15.99.