Alex Lawther is a man of extremes. Or, to be way more accurate, he is an actor who has been juggling extremely different projects of late. Is it possible to image two more different shows than FX’s Alien: Earth - the mega-budget sci-fi horror intent on obliterating your nerves - and the BBC’s Leonard and Hungry Paul, the gentle comedy about a couple of two board-gaming nerds which brings new levels of cosiness to cosy viewing.
Such is the pleasure of being a working actor.
“Sometimes you want a roast chicken,” Lawther ventures, “Well I don’t because I’m a vegetarian, but sometimes you want a roast chicken and sometimes you want a couple of boiled eggs with soldiers. It’s like being in a relationship with each project because you start to think this is the only way of doing things, like this is how two people get along. If you had the impression that the only way of making a TV show was with a crew of 500 people as it was with Alien, it would skew my understanding of the work I do. It flips your perception when you realise you can also make it work with far fewer means, and it still be meaningful.”
Leonard and Hungry Paul is based on a much-loved book by Ronan Hession and the show winningly brings the quirky heart-warming ‘be yourself’ story to the screen.. It features Lawther as Leonard - a ghost writer of children’s encyclopedias - and his pal Hungry Paul (Laurie Kynaston), a post office worker, whose suburban lives are changed by death, marriage and the appearance of an actual girl in the form of Shelley (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell).
“It's an examination of these two quite unextraordinary lives and a celebration of their gentleness and quietness. Then into Leonard’s life comes Shelley, who encourages him to expand his small universe just a little. The one he’s in, is built around an avoidance of conflict.
The show has the ambition to be without any serious drama but in a way feels closer to the subtler vibrations of life, as opposed to something more high octane, like Alien.”
While Alien: Earth took six months to shoot on location in Thailand, Leonard and Hungry Paul took six weeks in Dublin. It was something of a homecoming for Lawther, who grew up in Hampshire but has an Irish family. He says this brought pressure, “That was my cross to bear. There's just a long line of British actors doing bad Irish accents.” The intimate, close-to-home nature of the experience was helped by the fact Lawther and Kynaston were already friends, making the shoot into an intimate affair with pints of Guinness on a Friday night: “A lot of the legwork was already done in drawing the relationship, and friendship is at the core of the show.”
Lawther’s moustache is also at the core of the show, something he is still sporting, though he reveals they paint it darker for the show; “All the prosthetics on Alien and then a painted moustache for this one.”
The contrasts of the worlds tickles Lawther. He was clearly relieved by the change of pace the BBC show offered him after being on the type of show where the PR responsibilities are almost as important as the work itself. When really, the work is everything to Lawther, who is also a writer and director of short films - his second one, Rhoda, starring Juliet Stevenson and Emma D’Arcy, is currently on the festival circuit. Speaking to him, it’s obvious he has that magic actorly combination of intelligence and intuition. This is him on Leonard:
“There was a lightness that was required for Leonard, there had to be levity, because he could be dour or downtrodden by life. I found really useful throughout the shoot was to think that the things that I found funny in the story, Leonard could also find quite funny too. I realised there were times when I could even corpse. There's bits in the show where I'm corpsing, but they've kept it in, because I think Leonard also has in a sense of the absurd, and that's how he gets through life. It kept me quite buoyant throughout the shoot, like when he gets the Bag for Life with his mum's ashes in, he thinks, ‘Oh God, mum would find that really funny.’
It’s sort of a six-parter about someone dealing or not with the loss of their mum, and what they do in reflection of that grief. And I suppose when you lose someone, it's also their sense of humor that you become keyed into. It was always about trying to find the lightness, which for things like Alien doesn't ring true, right? There's nothing light about being spewed on by a Xenomorph.”
While Leonard and Hungry Paul is all about this kind of character building and small moments, the show does have more than a smattering of stardust in the form of Julia Roberts, who provides the voiceover. An unlikely ally you might think, but a testament to the quality of it, and its source material.
“She'd read the book, and I believe she'd written a note to the writer of the book, Ronan Hession, to say she loved it. He kept that in the back of his mind, and then later, when it became a TV show, he mentioned it to the producers. They reached out to Julia Roberts, thinking that they wouldn't even get a reply and she wrote back almost instantly, saying that she'd love to do it.
I think the book comes with quite a cult following, and Julia Roberts is part of that cult. She’s great at it though, because she’s warm but also wry and quite knowing.”
Indeed that ironic humour is deliciously handled in the show, never unkind but preventing the show drifting into mawkishness. And Lawther is plain excellent as Leonard, a guy with problems but with a vulnerability there, a gentle soul. It’s the kind of sense you get with all of Lawther’s characters, from James in End of the F**ing World to Hermit in Alien: Earth. No matter who messed up things are getting, Lawther’s usually the likeable heart who’s feeling it, and we feel through him.
He started when he was young, bagging his first stage role at 16 after discovering he loved doing improv at a school club. The play moved to London, he went with it, and he’s been a working actor ever since. Easy. Well, easy if you’re good. Black Mirror came his way, then End of the F***ing world, which is the kind of cult classic to have legs, now a firm favourite on Netflix. As with Leonard and Hungry Paul, it was small but perfectly formed in its eccentric mini world building.
“There's something in the spirit of those two shows that they share of us having no big anticipation behind the making of it. Whereas like something with Alien, to be honest, like you know you're gonna be doing Comic Con and premieres. We didn't have a premiere for the End of the F***ing World or for Leonard and Hungry Paul. There's something quite sort of British or British-Irish about it, the lacklustre-ness, which I like. There's no ceremony behind it.”
But there’s no avoiding it, Alien: Earth has been a very big deal this year and almost despite of its hugeness, it is an excellent show, surprisingly so given how often Alien franchise films have disappointed fans. This one delivered though. And Lawther was entirely committed to it, too much so on ocassion.
“Hermit, the character I play, is a medic but he would have had military training. So we did all that gamut. The challenge for me was trying to translate all that into something descriptive for the character. So a gun wasn’t just a prop I was holding, it was a way of telling a story. I also did some medical training. And this scene fortunately got cut from Alien, but there was a scene where Hermit sutures up someone’s hand that gets cut. I’d practised with a nurse and we’d gone over all the steps, having to clean your hands and open the syringe and suture and then wrap up. All of that takes about ten minutes.
So we were on set and Noah [Hawley, the showrunner] says action, and I start doing it, and it just goes on and on and on. Noah’s like, ‘is there any way you could do it faster?’ I tried doing it faster and it was getting chaotic. And he said, ‘OK, just forget all that stuff, just bandage up her hand because this sequence has to take place in three seconds over this bit of dialogue.’”
Despite such big production pressures, Lawther is keen for more.
“The producer said when we were in New York for Comic Con that within a month we should know whether there'll be a season two or not. I think the studio have been happy with how the show has been received, so we should know pretty soon.
But I'm also gunning for a second season of Leonard and Hungry Paul!”
Leonard and Hungry Paul is on BBC iPlayer now. Alien: Earth is on Disney+.
