The Bruce Bits - The 1990's

Daily Mirror 1990

by Patricia Smyllie

Superhero Bruce finds his Eden

He's a superfit hunk who every week flexes his muscles on TV while chasing through the streets of Hong Kong. You'd never guess that heart-throb Bruce Payne, the cool cop Nick Eden of Yellow Thread Street (ITV, 9.15 tonight) was once destined to spend his life in a wheel chair. When he was 16 he fought a long battle after a delicate operation to cure spina bifida - and avoided that wheel chair. Now the girls have fallen for blond Bruce in a big way as he chases those Hong Kong villains. He's even being hailed as the next Don Johnson.

Rave

Bruce, 29, from South London, is a fitness fanatic who likes to do his own stunts. The man who received rave reviews for the spivvy racist in Absolute Beginners has even transformed one of the bedrooms of his flat into a mini-gym Bruce won awards at RADA for comedy, acting and physical presence and you certainly can feel that presence when he fixes you with one of his deep, penetrating looks. "Going to Hong Kong to do this series was an experience in a lifetime. I hope they make a second series because I'm longing to go back there." Bruce is very proud that he outran fellow actor Mark McGann who plays Brady. "I'm accident-prone though," he admitted. "I always seem to come unstuck. "Once the noise of constant gunfire was so loud I shoved some peanuts into my ears... "One got stuck and I had to have it removed in hospital. It caused quite a laugh."

Daily Mail 1990

A wild child in Eden

by Sophia Watson

Being a Hollywood heart-throb is the kind of future most would jump at. Bruce Payne says he's not good-looking enough. He has a point: saved from the edge of ugliness by a magnificent Marlon Brando nose, his jaw is lantern, his blue-grey eyes puffy and too narrow for his long face and his longish hair is carefully sculpted around his already receding hairline. And yet he is being hailed as Britain's answer to Don Johnson, a dubios honour, I would think. He has, as they say, a presence: a certain tough-guy charm which marries well with his character Eden in ITV's Saturday night series Yellowthread Street, a British Miami Vice set in depressingly seedy Hongkong. So who is this new macho hero, this accomplished 29-year-old actor who could slot easily into any slick American cop show? The answers are surprising, spanning an extraordinary adolescence of law-breaking and adventures with gipsies, to an immobile spell in hospital for five months.

at 15, he spent five months in hospital with a form of spina bifida. "I was in the casualty ward for the whole time, alongside guys with legs and arms missing. I used to lie in that hospital bed and cry my heart out, thinking about all the wrecked lives round me. I was scared out of my life, scared what was going to happen to me. "My spine was fused. Some nights after the operation, when I couldn't move, I would lie awake thinking about what would happen if there was a fire. There is never a day goes by when I don't tell myself how lucky I am." Yellowthread Street, uneven and slightly ludicrous, is unlikely to form the pinnacle of his career. "But I'm not disappointed in the experience, it was a good time for growth. "The producers did themselves no favours, though, in choosing the opening episode. There were three white Caucausians chasing three ostensibly yellow people. Not very 1990's is it?"