Grooming by Joe Mills of Joe and Co using Kevin Murphy and Dermalogica Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer
As I walk into a chintzy upstairs bar at the Garrick Theatre in London, Rob Brydon spots me and breaks off from the photography session. “The journalist strode into the room,” he announces mock-heroically to the assembled onlookers, “like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.”
“Thank you,” I reply. “Actually I had my hair cut yesterday…”
“Hmmm,” he winces. “It was less the face, more the jacket you’re wearing.” Then in a theatrical whisper, rolling the words around his mouth like a lottery-ball dispenser, Brydon admonishes himself: “That’s a great start. Insult the interviewer.”
The photographer asks Brydon to stand, so he can take a close-up of his face. He’s on a roll now. “His eyes,” Brydon commentates, looking into the lens, “like deep brown pools of shit. Swim in them and get hepatitis B.”
Brydon sustains that bounce and bonhomie for the duration of the next hour that we spend together. An anecdote for everything, there are no traces of the self-doubt and lugubrious streak, outwardly at least, that we expect from our comedians. In fact, Brydon is full of positivity. His career, he says, could scarcely be going better. He is currently appearing in The Painkiller, Francis Veber’s farce, part of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s year-long takeover of the Garrick, alongside Ken himself. The overwhelmingly gushy reviews, boiled down, have been: “Branagh is really funny and Brydon’s an exceptional stage actor. Who knew?”
Brydon is also about to star in his biggest Hollywood role to date, as a dwarf in The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the prequel to the Grimm-inspired fantasy-adventure Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth. He saw the film the day before we meet and is delighted with how it’s turned out. In the next few months Brydon will film a new run of Would I Lie To You?, the 10th series of the evergreen BBC1 panel show he hosts. Later in the year he’ll shoot a third instalment of the beloved mockumentary travelogue The Trip, alongside Steve Coogan, this time in Spain. “Life’s good!” he says more than once.
Not that he is a straightforward interviewee; Brydon can be a slippery fish when he wants to be. In The Trip he plays a version of himself that is recognisably Rob Brydon, but also not (he doesn’t constantly do impressions, have drunken fumbles with PAs or always read the bill in Henry Kelly’s voice). And there’s an element of that today. The feeling of observing a performance is most obvious, understandably, when the conversation turns to personal matters. Brydon has an impressive five children, from two marriages, and he is clearly protective of his and their privacy.
“I’ve never yet talked about my children in an interview and not regretted it afterwards,” he says with a shudder. “It seems like a horrible intrusion, yeeurgghh! So all I’ll say is that they’ve got very little time for me and they see me for the fraud I am. No, I just feel icky talking about them because they are kids, they are at school and all their friends are avid Observer Magazine readers. The last thing I want is: ‘Your dad said…’”
I look down at my notes. “You can leave as long a pause as you like, but I won’t answer it, haha!” he continues, evidently delighted. “The journalist’s pause… Been working for years.”
So, once you accept that Brydon has no interest in participating in an armchair analysis of how Rob Brydon became Rob Brydon – and would inevitably be charmingly obstructive of attempts to do so – you can exhale and get on with having a hugely enjoyable, knock-about time.
Success came relatively late to Brydon and it is this, he thinks, that has informed his attitude to work ever since. He was born in south Wales 50 years ago; his father was a car salesman, his mother a teacher. A career in acting might have seemed an outlandish fantasy for a boy from Port Talbot, but his father grew up down the road from Anthony Hopkins so it always felt like a legitimate and realisable ambition. He was rejected by Rada, accepted by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, but left early when he was offered a job, aged 20, on Radio Wales.
And that, for the next 15 years, was as good as it got. He started to hoard rejection letters. The jobs he did book occasionally verged on humiliating. Sometimes now Brydon hears snarky comments about voiceovers he’s recorded or commercials he’s filmed. Certainly it’s hard to think of another performer who could simultaneously appear in the West End alongside Kenneth Branagh, in a blockbuster film with Charlize Theron and on a slightly naff advert for P&O Cruises. Brydon laughs when this comes up.
“Prior to Marion and Geoff and Human Remains in 2000, which were my first hits, I’d been playing crappy parts in sitcoms that could have been played by anybody,” he says. “At one point we had to sell furniture from our house because we were so short of money. I was defaulting on the mortgage. So when people say: ‘Why did you do this? Why did you do that?’ You know, well, good luck to you! I used to be a radio presenter, which paid bugger all and then I was let go from that station. Then I was a TV presenter on Sky and I was let go from that programme and I’d just taken out a mortgage. So now this is a lot of gravy.”
There’s an obvious sting in the response. “I’ve been accused of selling out for doing adverts. From what? What do you think I am? I’m the little bloke from Wales who tries to make you laugh. Judge me on the work. Judge me on whatever you want. You can judge me on my commercials, but also judge me on Human Remains and The Trip and Gavin and Stacey and this play. There’s a whole body of work.”
No question, Brydon has thought this through. His defence amounts to: if Al Pacino can hawk coffee, he can plug Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
“To me it’s all part of being an entertainer – a word that is often used in a derisory fashion and I don’t see it that way,” he says. “I think it is quite a noble thing to want to do: to entertain people.”
He goes on: “Perhaps if you do fewer things, you get a bit more respect. If you specialise, people like that. John Lee Hooker never released a rap album. He played blues guitar, that’s what he did. But if you turn your hand to lot of different things – which I could certainly be accused of, it would be hard to mount a robust defence against that – it’s different. But what was it that Anthony Hopkins said? There’s a great prayer he uses: “‘Fuck ’em!’”
Marion and Geoff, Brydon’s poignant and inspired breakthrough, introduced us to the naïve, cuckolded taxi driver Keith Barret, sitting in his cab, talking to the camera, revealing more than he realises. This role has, in some senses, come to define Brydon. In The Painkiller, for example, he plays a failed photographer for the Swindon Advertiser, who decides to kill himself because his wife has left him for her psychiatrist. Branagh, meanwhile, is a suave assassin staying in the hotel room next door.
Wouldn’t it be satisfying to play the hitman sometimes? “Yes it would, yes, it would, yes, it would,” Brydon replies. “But there are a handful of actors who get the opportunity to play such a range. It’s funny, because I played what you might call a villainous role in a BBC drama about Napoleon and it was very well received. But it didn’t lead to anything. I got excited about that: ‘Ooh, I’m going to have… I can do those things…’ I played Kenneth Tynan [in the 2005 TV film In Praise of Hardcore] for the BBC, again well-received.”
There’s a tiny sigh, “But what can you do? You can only choose what is offered to you.”
A few years ago, around the time when everyone from Ben Stiller to Robert Downey Jr was saying that The Trip was their new favourite show, Brydon thought he should give Hollywood a shot. The experience didn’t agree with him. He stayed at the Mondrian, Sunset Boulevard’s pristine, minimalist hotel, and its white walls and sparse furniture made him feel as though he was in an asylum. He missed his family, and listened to too much Neil Diamond. “A lot of these actors are spending six months in Winnipeg. What does that do to your marriage and your relationship to your children?”
For Brydon, it’s matter of drawing a distinction between success in work and personal contentment. Around the time he was breaking through on TV, he was also getting divorced, splitting from his first wife Martina.
“To a degree, even with the modest success of Marion and Geoff and Human Remains, it kind of a evaporated a little bit then,” he says. “It’s about what makes you happy. And I think when you’re younger it’s the work. When I didn’t have the success, I felt the work defined me, because there was a lack of it.”
A fixed point for each year now is a one-month holiday every summer with his second wife, Claire, and all his children. I ask if they go to the same place each year. “I’m not telling you,” Brydon splutters. “You’ll bloody turn up!” He’s not exactly joking. “I’d have thought, if you’ve got children – unless you loathe them – you want to be with them, don’t you? Otherwise, why have you got them?”
He doesn’t entirely contest the accusation that he could be more ambitious. He was the co-writer of Marion and Geoff and Human Remains, but he finds his time more and more squeezed these days. We discuss James Corden, his co-star on Gavin and Stacey, and his unstoppable rise in the US. “James was always on a rocket,” says Brydon. “When I talk about James and his drive and his focus, I don’t have that. I have it in a micro-sense, perhaps. In a moment.”
For now, work like The Trip suits Brydon better. Before each series Michael Winterbottom, the director, plots an arc for the characters and sends Brydon and Coogan a list of books and films that could be useful along the way. Almost without fail, they never get round to looking at them. “For the new one in Spain, I want to read Don Quixote,” says Brydon, “but I know now that I won’t.”
Will Coogan? “He is more likely to than me, but ultimately he won’t. But he’ll get closer to the bookshelf than I will, put it like that. In The Trip to Italy, there’s a scene where we’re walking up the street talking about Roman Holiday and I’m going, ‘Yes, yes…’ I hadn’t watched it. It’s acting, isn’t it?”
And then sometimes things just fall into your lap. With The Huntsman, he didn’t have to audition: “The irony is that I’ve auditioned for far less substantial roles and not got them.” The part was well written and the rest of the cast – the other dwarves include Nick Frost and Sheridan Smith – were great. Best of all, it was shooting just round the corner from his home in Teddington, south-west London. It may look like a magical, jagged-mountain kingdom, but the action was shot in places like Virginia Water, Windsor Great Park and Frensham Ponds, with the scenery jacked up by CGI.
“I’m all for smelling the roses,” says Brydon, as we wrap up. “I had this conversation yesterday after I’d seen The Huntsman, because I was thinking, ‘Ooh, you never know what this might lead to…’ And then I said out loud, ‘Things are great as they are!’ Life’s pretty good as it is.”
He laughs. “I’m a very deep person. I hope that’s come across.”
The Huntsman: Winter’s War is out on 4 April; The Painkiller is at the Garrick Theatre, London, until 30 April
