Interview
JA SO N W A TK I N S Gustav Temple meets the actor whose wide range of roles has included forensic pathologists, serial killer biographers, editors of national newspapers and nearly the landlord of a house full of louche chaps
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thing. The Mike Leigh thing came along and I’d always enjoyed improvising at drama school. The thing about Mike is that he draws on real people for his characters, then puts them on the screen and fits them into the story. I’ve always enjoyed observing
ou may not recall this, but way back in the early 2000s you auditioned for a part in a sitcom we were developing with French & Saunders. You were to play the louche landlord of a boarding house full of caddish reprobates. Needless to say you’d have got the part, had it been commissioned, but after that we saw you pop up frequently on television screens in other programmes. Well, then The Chap must have been responsible for the launch of my career in television!
“David Niven was part of Hollywood and knew all the film stars of the time. He was our access to it. He takes you to the exotic, to somewhere different. He had a rather wonderful moustache, didn’t he? You’d imagine he was always immaculately dressed”
Your first film break, aged 22, was in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes. Did you see this as an auspicious start to a glittering career in showbusiness? That was really early on. I’d done lots of small scale touring, fringe theatre above pubs and that sort of
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