How do I describe Tim Key? To a certain subset of UK comedy nerds, he’s a man who needs no introduction. To those who need one, I could say he’s a poet, known for his wry, observational free verse. Or an actor, who’s popped up winningly in some of the best British comedies in recent memory (Peep Show; Inside No 9; the Alan Partridgeverse), and the odd blockbuster (Mickey 17). Or maybe a writer – having co-written (and starred in) the new feature film The Ballad of Wallis Island. “I quite like the fact there’s a lot of things,” Key muses. “When you think back to when you’re 16 years old, they all look like things you aren’t supposed to do as a job.”
The 48-year-old poet-cum-actor-cum-screenwriter – what Americans might call a “multi-hyphenate” – is lounging on a sofa in a private room of a central London hotel. He’s wearing a vivid pink sweater and a baseball cap with the letters “LA” stitched on. Key has, in fact, spent a reasonable amount of time in Los Angeles over the past couple of years, having flown out to star in The Paper, the newsroom-set remake of the US sitcom The Office; the experience is documented in a new book of poems, LA BABY!. “I really like America,” he says, “but it’s not plain sailing. I miss stuff about England – fish and chips, genuinely. A local pub. Rain. Lime bikes. Football.”
The Ballad of Wallis Island is, much like Key himself, about as British as it gets. In The Independent’s four-star review, Clarisse Loughrey describes it as “Stephen King’s Misery with a mug of tea and a lemon scone on the side”. Key himself plays the would-be Kathy Bates – an obsessed folkie called Charles who lures his favourite singer (played by Tom Basden) to his remote island home. Rather than a sledgehammer to the ankles, Basden’s character, Herb McGwyer, instead gets a suitcase filled with half a million pounds in cash – in exchange for a private beachside gig. The spanner in the works? The arrival of McGwyer’s ex-singing partner and ex-lover, played by Carey Mulligan.
Key and Basden’s working relationship goes back decades; Wallis Island started life as a short film in 2007, directed by James Griffiths, who would later return for the film. “It was very self-contained, like a little fable,” Key says, “but there was something nagging between all three of us… Maybe every year or two, we’d think about how that could be a feature.” The missing ingredient, it seems, was Mulligan – and the bittersweet remnants of a bygone romance that gives the film its emotional impetus.
“When I’m writing stuff for fun, it’s usually poems, which last for maybe 45 seconds and then just sort of disappear,” says Key, folding his arms above his head and reclining. “This is obviously a much bigger undertaking. We feel proud that we managed to start and finish it, and then film it.” Strangely, perhaps, he seems almost ambivalent about folk music itself. “The music side of this film,” he says, all “comes through [Basden]” – who wrote a soundtrack of surprisingly credible folk songs for the movie. “I just let him get on with it. It was crazy exactly how hard it was, because I think that the film sort of lives and dies on the music. To invent a musician in a film who is believable and plays music you can imagine someone becoming obsessed with? It’s kind of a magic trick, I think.”
Acting alongside Basden was, he says, a “complete joy” – and, for what it’s worth, Key turns in a strong, endearing performance. There’s a particular quality to most of the characters Key plays on screen, a sort of flustered, awkward patter that veers just clear of David Brentian pomposity. By now, he’s rather good at it. “But there’s some stuff about acting that’s quite miserable,” he says. “Auditioning isn’t very pleasant – and can be quite demoralising. There are a lot of jobs where once you get your job, that’s just your job. In our job, you’re constantly trying to get another job.” An assistant walks in and hands him a mug of something brown and rich-looking. “Mocha,” says Key, contentedly.
He must be doing something right, auditions-wise. Key got his start on TV back in 2002, with an appearance in the reality series Britain’s Worst Driver. Before then, the Cambridge-born performer had lived for a stint in Kyiv, been a member of Cambridge University’s sketch comedy troupe Footlights, and formed his own group, Cowards, with Basden, Him & Her’s writer Stefan Golaszewski, and actor-writer Lloyd Woolf. He didn’t so much break through as enjoy a sort of gradual reputational ascent, becoming a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe with his poetry shows.
It was Steve Coogan (“a very generous performer, who’s been very generous to me in general”) who propelled Key further into the public consciousness when he snared him for the two-season comedy series Mid Morning Matters as Alan Partridge’s DJ wingman, “Sidekick” Simon. Set entirely within a radio booth, Mid Morning Matters was pound-for-pound the funniest Alan Partridge has ever been, and Key’s character – part straight-man, part foil, a normalising force and irritant at once – was a big part of that.
“I think I was living in quite a lot of fear,” says Key. “Fear of letting [Coogan] down, and letting the whole project down, or in some way screwing it up. Because it’s a very specific job. You’re not there on an even keel – that isn’t what the assignment is. You’ve not signed up to be a double act. You’ve signed up to make sure that Alan Partridge operates efficiently, that he has the best chance of being the best possible Alan Partridge in this new incarnation.” Key later reprised the role for multiple other Partridge projects.
You’ve watched ‘Peep Show’ for 15 years, and then you’re suddenly in the flat. I don’t care who you are: it’s all so familiar and so intimidating
If Partridge was a high-pressure assignment, then Peep Show, he says, was “even more petrifying, really”. Key joined the modern-classic sitcom in its final season in 2015, playing an insufferable colleague and roommate who is, in his first episode, memorably sealed in a sleeping bag and waterboarded with lager. “It’s just all too much,” recalls Key. “I mean, bear in mind, I wasn’t young when I did it. I’ve been acting for years, but even so – you’ve watched Peep Show for 15 years, and then you’re suddenly in the flat. I don’t care who you are: it’s all so familiar and so intimidating.”
In the decade since Peep Show finished, Key’s credits have been varied; perhaps most fascinating was his bizarre comic role in this year’s Mickey 17, the sci-fi clone-fest directed by Oscar-winning Parasite filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. (Key spent much of the film dressed in a pigeon outfit.) “[Bong] was a lovely, avuncular figure,” says Key. He’s got a great vibe where you just look at him and think, ‘This guy really loves making this movie.’ Considering how big that movie was, the scale of it, he doesn’t emit any stress or anxiety, just holds the whole thing together in a very light, kind of blissful way.”
I wouldn’t exactly describe Key himself as blissful, but there seems to be little of the anxious stiffness he’s so skilled at transmitting onscreen. I’d go so far as to say he seems sanguine. I find it oddly telling that he’s a committed football fan – despite not supporting a team. “It’s kind of crazy: I don’t think I know anyone quite as neutral as me watching football,” he says. “It just really, you know, calms me. When I was a kid, I used to support Liverpool fanatically… then I realised that I’d never been to Liverpool.”
LA BABY!, out on 4 July, paints a picture of Key as a sort of amiable fish out of water, not so much grumbling as taking in his American sojourn with a very British bemusement. The book is packed with “arbitrary” references to celebrities, films, strands of culture: one poem imagines an encounter with the ghost of Stan Laurel. “When you’re little, you just think Laurel and Hardy are funny people on your TV in black and white,” Key smiles. “When you go back to it, you realise they are stone-cold geniuses. Charlie Chaplin especially… I seem to remember him not being my favourite when I was a kid – not as funny as Laurel and Hardy, a bit creepy. But then you watch him as an adult and go, ‘That guy is insane.’ He’s a genius.”
The Paper is unmentioned by name in LA BABY!, but the promise of a big, American TV breakthrough looms over it. “With this stuff, you just have to hope that the people doing the casting know what they want and are happy with stuff,” he says. “I don’t have an enormous amount of range, and am quite idiosyncratic in that show – I don’t do an American accent. But I felt very free, and very appreciated.”
Feature films and buzzy new sitcoms: it’s all a lot to take on for someone who still seems like a poet at heart. “I do find it funny to be able to make a living from writing poetry,” says Key, finishing the dregs of his mocha. “I think subconsciously I’m attracted to poetry because it’s kind of quite an odd situation. It’s not easy. I don’t find anything that easy. But poetry is certainly the least stressful. It’s just sort of writing any old thing.”
‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ is in cinemas now. ‘LA BABY!’ is published in the UK by ‘Utter’ & Press on 4 July
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