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petercapaldi-press · 4 months ago

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Reposted from @dawnlestaffs [Original post here.]

INTERVIEW

May 30, 2009

[transcript under the cut]

Out of the Loop

He went from pop star to pop has-been, Local Hero to zero, Oscar winner to TV-show extra… But it took the role of a foul-mouthed spin doctor in the BBC’s hit political satire The Thick Of It to transform Peter Capaldi’s fortunes

As the frerocious spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the biting BBC political sitcom The Thick Of It, Oscar-winning actor Peter Capaldi has demonstrated a talent for swearing that would make Alf Garnett blush. In person, Capaldi, whose talents have found a wider audience following the success of the recent big-screen spin-off In The Loop, barely cusses at all. The air only really turns blue as he warms up to a rant about the world of politicians.

‘Politics is a whorehouse,’ he says. ‘It’s a brutal world where there’s no place for the thin-skinned. I’m not saying that all politicians are awful. I don’t know any of them well enough to say whether they’re awful or not. But almost every day you find out something about them that’s appalling. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised any longer. But it’s still a shock to find out about Damian McBride sending emails filled with very unpleasant allegations about members of the Conservative Party. Like everyone else, I’m tired of all this. It’s a terrible way to behave, a completely disgraceful way to conduct any kind of business.

‘It shouldn’t be encouraged. There’s nothing smart about it whatsoever, but it’s part of the mechanism by which things are achieved in politics. Whatever anyone pretends, it’s not just McBride behaving appallingly and it’s not just Labour. It’s going on all over the place. The idea that David Cameron and George Osborne are going to come in and clean all this up is, frankly, laughable.

‘Forget it. Because it’s going on already. You can’t blame anyone for being cynical about politicians. I wish someone like Obama would come along and say, “Believe in me.” We’re in dire need of someone with a sense of honour, because I don’t see any honour out there. Personally, I have as little to do with politicians as possible. The ones I’ve met I’ve found very boring. They’re extremely egotistical, incredibly self-important. If I can help it, I try to stay as far away from them as possible.’

As he admits, this has become increasingly difficult since he introduced Malcolm Tucker to the world in 2005, when The Thick Of It first hit our screens. Directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci, the show followed a team of government ministers quaking under the rule of Tucker, a spin doctor with an Oxbridge degree in foul-mouthed intimidation. To ensure Tucker’s lines are as sharp and obscene as can be, a special swearing consultant is kept on the payroll. ‘He’s a mysterious chap called Ian who possesses a genius for creating grotesque insults,’ says Capaldi.

The show was hailed as both a brave new chapter in political satire and the funniest thing on TV since The Office. By the time it had been extended to two hour-long specials, Tucker was being wildely discussed as belonging to the pantheon of classic British comedy creations, alongside Del boy, Alan Partridge and David Brent.

Everyone involved with The Thick Of It has maintained that Tucker is a composite of several government spin doctors. Even so, Capaldi’s character is frequently compared to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications director, who is famous for his Tucker-esque short fuse and use of industrial-strength language.

Campbell himself seems to have few qualms about being associated with a character so profoundly monstrous that he’s at his most courteous when telling a special adviser, ‘If you don’t go and get me some cheese, I’m gonna rip your head off and give you a spinedectomy.’

While acknowledging Tucker is ‘a devious, lying, bullying, truth-twisting, warmongering psychopath,’ Campbell has also conceded that he is ‘to an extent, based on me’.

Given that Capaldi might sooner settle for a ‘spinedectomy’ than endure the company of politicians, imagine his delight when he attended a Channel 4 political awards ceremony last year and found himself sharing a table with Alastair Campbell.

‘It was a very strange evening,’ says Capaldi. ‘I had no plans to sit next to him and the first I knew about it was when I arrived. It was extremely rude of Channel 4 to have set it up that way. Equally, it would have been rude of me to have walked away from the situation. I never wanted to meet Campbell, because I knew he’d be very charming.

‘It was very entertaining to watch him in action. He provided a running commentary on the night’s proceedings which had its Tucker moments. Certainly lots of swearing. It was a riotous sort of night. Having attended comedy awards, which involve drunken losers getting more and more horribly drunk, I thought I’d seen the worst kind of bear pits. Nothing compares to being in a room full of politicians screaming abuse at each other all night. It’s hilarious but also a bit terrifying.

But Capaldi has come closer to the centre of power than that. While making The Thick Of It, he spend a day filming at 10 Downing Street. There, to his grim bemusement, real-life Malcolm Tuckers queued up to have their photo taken with him.

‘Number 10 could not have been more welcoming,’ he says. ‘They threw open the doors to us and gave us the grand tour. We ended up sitting in the Cabinet Room, thinking how bizarre the whole experience was. They all seemed very happy to have us around. The real-life Tuckers weren’t nearly as colourful as ours, but obviously they were all on their best behaviour.

‘It might seem odd that the find the show so funny. Maybe the spin doctors all see themselves as victims in some way. They work under tremendous pressure. Unlike most other office workers, the fruits of their day’s work have far-reaching consequences for all of us.

‘There are no health-and-safety regulations for what they do. Nothing is laid down in terms of how they should treat people. There are no restraints. Essentially they’re gatekeepers, the tough guys who ensure that politicians are protected from the media. Their position in the chain of command is not defined, but it’s understood that their task is difficult and vital. As such, they enjoy enormous liberty in the corridors of power. They’re free to dish out random b*****kings nd make them as savage as they like. If anyone feels that they’ve overstepped the mark, they can’t go to a tribunal and claim they’ve been abused.’

But not all politicians have seen the funny side of the satire. Conservative MP Michael Portillo has dismissed In The Loop as ‘exhumed satire, hopelessly dated, deeply boring’.

‘Portillo’s reaction was extraordinarily angry,’ says Capaldi. ‘It should have reminded us how much we all hate the man. He’s been through an interesting cycle. We all used to hate him and, to the fierce delight of a generation, he lost his seat in 1997. Then he became a lovable TV personality. Now we can hate him all over again.’

The film has a stellar cast, including Steve Coogan, Gina McKee and Tom Hollander. But none is more impressive than James Gandolfini in his first film since his eight-year run as Tony Soprano came to an end. For a hardened Sopranos fan, working with Gandolfini was the thrill of a lifetime.

‘Waiting for him to arrive, the anticipation was electric,’ says Capaldi. ‘Then he walks through the door and his charisma fills the room. I kept thinking that this is what it must have been like to spend time with Sinatra: everywhere he goes he’s recognised and everyone wants a photo or an autograph. He’s incredibly gracious with everyone he meets.

‘We finished filming in New York and an end-of-shoot party had been arranged at this fabulous steakhouse in Brooklyn. It’s very hard to get a table there and there’d been a miscalculation. The actors had been put with the producers, but make-up and wardrobe had been put in a separate room.

The maître d’ was very resistant to the idea of putting us all together, explaining that the table we needed was occupied and it would be bad form to ask those people to move. When James arrived I explained the problem to him, but even he couldn’t persuade the maître d’. But James became aware that the people at the table were looking at him in complete awe. So he walked over to the table and, of course, they were happy to do anything he asked, so long as they could have their photo taken with him. The way he dealt with it was so cool. He’s a real class act.’

Capaldi is no stranger to working with screen royalty, beginning with Burt Lancaster, with whom he starred in 1983’s Local Hero. ‘The thing I remember most about Lancaster is that he was a great swearer. It was my first film and I was a gauche 24-year-old. Meeting him for the first time I was nervous and doe-eyed. I asked him how his hotel was and he barked, “The hotel’s fine, but the woman who runs it is a ****.” At the end of the filming he turned to me said, ‘You have a good instinct for acting, but I can’t understand a f***ing word you say.”’

Before his acting career took off, Capaldi had a brief stab at rock stardom, singing in a Glasgow punk band with future US chat-show supremo Craig Ferguson on drums.

‘Originally we were called the B******s from Hell, but we figured that a name like that would prevent us from becoming as big as the Beatles. So we changed it to the Dreamboys, possibly the worst band name of all time. It made us sound like a bunch of oiled-up musclemen who stripped off at hen parties. We did manage to put out one single, though, which was called Bela Lugosi’s Birthday. The definite highlight for the Dreamboys was playing third on the bill at the Camden Palace to three rows of skinheads who kept threatening to kill us.’

He came close to missing his shot at an acting career. Having failed to win a place at drama school, he enrolled at Glasgow Art School, where he studied graphic illustration. One evening he came home drunk to find his landlady, a costume designer, chatting with director Bill Forsyth, then riding high on the success of 1981’s Gregory’s Girl. Forsyth decided there and then that Capaldi would be perfect for the role of Danny in Local Hero.

This lucky break would prove to be the first of Capaldi’s false dawns. He moved to London, confident that plum roles awaited him. Instead he spent much of the next decade working in repertory theatre and landing bling-and-you-miss-them parts in shows as diverse as Rab C Nesbitt and Poirot. Then, in 1995, he won an Oscar for directing his short film, Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Suddenly it seemed that Capaldi had arrived yet again.

‘The feeling of success was very short-lived,’ he says. ‘Collecting an Oscar in front of my heroes, people like Steve Martin and Robert De Niro, was unreal, like being on an acid trip or something. For the next couple of weeks, I was invited to every big Hollywood party. But it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I’d find myself at some swanky do being introduced to Al Pacino and finding I had nothing to say to him beyond, “I really admire your work.”’

Returning to London, he kept plugging away at writing scripts. When Miramax expressed interest in a piece he’d written called Moon Man, Capaldi once again thought his ship had come in.

‘I flew out from Heathrow having being assured that this was a goer. Unbeknown to me, the project was cancelled while I was up in the air. I landed in New York and took a cab to the company’s Tribeca HQ, imagining the popping of champagne corks and the handing over of a very large cheque. I gave the cab driver a massive tip and marched into the building. Within 30 seconds I’d learned that it was all off. So I got back into the cab. The driver felt so sorry for me that he handed me back the tip. Then I returned to London to direct dog-food commercials.’

For the next ten years he worked mainly as a journeyman actor, putting in solid but uncelebrated performances in TV shows such as Foyle’s War and Judge John Deed. By 2004, he chances of Capaldi landing a career-defining acting role seemed to have finally eluded him. Then Armando Iannucci happened to see him play a hot-tempered professor in an episode of Peep Show and invited him to audition for the part of Malcolm Tucker.

The Thick Of It was officially an ensemble piece, but the main star of the first series was Chris Langham, whose role of bumbling minister Hugh Abbot completely revitalised a fading career and won him two Baftas.

Then, in November 2005, Langham was arrested as part of an investigation into internet pornography. He was subsequently found guilty of possessing child pornography and sentenced to ten months in prison. Though his character has not officially been written out of the series, the actor did not appear in either of the two specials.

Capaldi is the most charming and accommodating of interviewees until the subject of Chris Langham is brought up. Asked to confirm whether the Langham case is the reason for the BBC not showing repeats of The Thick Of It, he says firmly, ‘You’d have to ask them; I don’t know.’

Iannucci is on record as saying that he’d love to have Langham back on the show but he realizes that it would be an impossibility. When asked whether he shares this view, Capaldi’s mood visibly darkens and he fixes me with the flintiest of stares, saying, ‘I’d rather not discuss that.’

The moment passes and he brightens up when discussing how the role of Tucker has transformed his career. After years in the wilderness, he is currently one of the most in-demand actors around. He’s recently starred in Skins, The Devil’s Whore, Torchwood and Doctor Who. So high is his stock at present that, after a tortuous ten years, he’s just received the green light for his pet project The Great Pretender, about the making of a movie about Bonnie Prince Charlie, starring his friend Ewan McGregor.

Our time is almost up. Capaldi is off to begin filming a new series of The Thick Of It and hints that this could be the beginning of the end for Malcolm Tucker. ‘I think this could be the last series with the present cast in it. Labour aren’t likely to be in power much longer. The show needs to reflect the times. So I imagine we’ll soon be gone. Of course I’ll miss it. Most of all I’ll miss getting into the character of Tucker. It’s always such a challenge for me. I’m incredibly mild-mannered and he’s the opposite. I’ve only lost my temper big time on three occasions. I’ve got a long fuse, but when I do go off on one it’s nuclear.

‘It takes weeks to get into character. Before filming I can be found ranting and raving, swearing like a demon in my kitchen, while my wife and daughter cower in the living room. I hope the neighbours realise I’m being Tucker and not simply losing my mind. When Tucker’s gone, I won’t have that outlet. Hopefully the writers have a colourful exit planned for him. A heart attack, maybe, or perhaps they could finally silence him by bringing him down with a nasty stroke. That would be nice.’

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