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panelshowsource · 2 days

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https://www.thetimes.com/article/david-mitchell-interview-upstart-crow-marriage-to-victoria-coren-and-fatherhood-5g73ccfzn

please, if you can do this you are absolutely incredible

sure anon, you just go to archive.is and plug in the link 😉

full article below the cut

When the Peep Show actor and panel-show regular David Mitchell was a boy – clever, introspective and a doted-upon only child for eight years – he had his “special costume trunk”. There was a lime-green and brown jumper for Star Trek, a black mac for Doctor Who and an 18th-century king. One day, when he was strutting around in the mac with his trousers stuffed into his socks, a plastic sword by his side and a piece of string tied round his waist, some older boys knocked on the front door and said they’d kicked their ball into the Mitchells’ garden. As they trooped through to find it, Mitchell hid behind a tree in shame, “oppressed”, he remembers, “by the feeling of being a weirdo. I was just a small boy and not quite as normal as I’d have liked.”

Cut to today. Mitchell, 44, is in the street in Waterloo in London wearing brown linen trunk hose, a leather codpiece, knee-high brown leather boots, a white linen shirt with Shakespearean collar, a brown leather doublet and belt and pouch. His already very high and clever forehead (Oxford private schoolboy, Cambridge history student, Footlights actor and writer) has been lifted a few inches higher still with the help of a bald cap and prosthetic forehead – “Although David has a brainy forehead, it’s not as brainy as Shakespeare’s,” says the woman in charge of his costume – and then a wig over the top. Ahem. We all know it’s rude to stare, but passers-by are clearly thinking, “WTF? I’ve just seen a bloke dressed as Shakespeare astride a Santander bike.” In his 2012 memoir, Back Story, Mitchell writes, “Is it normal to feel you’re not normal but want to be normal? I think it probably is.”

I had been hoping to sit down and talk to Mitchell while he was dressed as Shakespeare, whom he resembles convincingly in the upcoming third series of Upstart Crow, a clever and funny BBC Two sitcom about the Bard’s family life, written by Ben Elton with precisely Mitchell in mind as Shakespeare, albeit a younger David Mitchell. “But they couldn’t find a younger me,” he says, “so they had to put up with me instead.”

But Mitchell is in mufti, a pair of crumpled chino-type trousers, brown shoes and a nondescript navy T-shirt with a collar. His hair is pretty much as it was when he was the young boy hiding behind the tree, a standard issue kid’s bowl cut combed into a parting. Although he still loves a bit of fancy dress, codpieces and doublets and the like (the bald cap can get a bit tight and uncomfortable after a long day filming, he concedes), clothes continue to cause him agony. For years, his mum bought them for him (through the Cambridge years and later still), but now it is a role that has befallen his poker-playing wife of six years, Victoria Coren Mitchell, herself a comedy panellist and writer. “I’m very happy to put them on,” he says of what she buys for him. “To be fair, she’s never tried anything …” he trails off, but I think he means “modern or cool”.

“It’s just a slightly tidier version of the sort of thing I was wearing before. She knows the one thing I want my clothing to be is unremarkable.” And then there is the unchanged haircut. Coren Mitchell must know which battles to pick. “Not because I like it, or hate it, but because to change it at any point would have provoked comment … That would have made me cringe,” he writes about keeping the cut. The beard has stayed, but he has admitted he would have razored it off if faced with protest.

For years, Mitchell’s identity, to the public at least, but also to himself during the dark days of ready meals and no girlfriends in his Kilburn flat (“contented squalor” is how he puts it ), has been inextricably linked with the fantastically well-drawn, tragic character of Mark Corrigan (written for him), whom he played in Peep Show. He starred alongside his comedy partner Robert Webb, who got the part of Jeremy, the much cooler and more sexually successful flatmate. They had been writers/performers since meeting at Cambridge, but Peep Show made them, bringing them to an audience beyond student comedy fans. The essence of Corrigan’s believability was the fact that the show’s main writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, based many bits of Corrigan on Mitchell himself: the nerdiness, the hopelessness in love, the pudding haircut, the clothes bought by his mother. But, Mitchell says, “The big difference between me and him – perhaps I am kidding myself – is that I’ve always been a fundamentally happier person, because he doesn’t know what he wants. For me, despite everything, for years not knowing if I was ever going to have a significant relationship, blah blah, the one thing I did know was that comedy was my crutch. Professionally at least, I’ve always had that source of hope and contentment.”

The deep irony of Mitchell’s life was that as his career, a dicey profession in any case, began to rocket, he was at his most emotionally desperate. After meeting Victoria Coren briefly at a drinks party (which she can’t remember) in 2007, he met her again at a film premiere. He writes in his autobiography Back Story, “I changed then. Everything that happened to me after that moment, even incidental things, are in a different context, a new world where different things matter.”

They dated briefly and he fell hopelessly in love with her. But timing was not on his side. Coren had lost her father and began seeing somebody else. She let Mitchell go honourably and kindly, what he calls “a reluctant brush-off”, but it broke his heart. He was sure there would never be anybody like her again. This inner melancholy fed into the character of Corrigan. In this respect, man and character were identical. He admits now that he told nobody about how dreadful he felt. “I didn’t talk about the state of my life to my friends,” he says. Journalists were always trying to fish around for comparisons with Corrigan. In 2009, when Mitchell was mourning the loss of Coren, on Desert Island Discs Kirsty Young talked about Robert Webb becoming a father. She asked Mitchell if he wanted that for himself. Mitchell said rather glumly, “I think I do.” There followed a white lie when he said, “I don’t think I have an ideal woman.” The fact was, he did.

Mitchell was not blind to the fact that he and Webb had had the most blessed career path, sprinkled with Baftas and endless opportunity: writing, acting and, for Mitchell, the panel shows The Unbelievable Truth and Would I Lie to You?. And so he felt his “wishes”, his luck, had been used up on his career. And then in 2010, Coren, like Princess Charming, came back into his life and suggested they try again. Reader, he married her two years later.

As Mitchell sits before me, he is beaming. “I’m trying not to look smug,” he says. “I feel very lucky. If I had thought that [asking her to marry me] would not have seemed mad earlier, I would definitely have done it. I am just incredibly proud that someone like Victoria wants to be with me. She has these amazing qualities, but fundamentally, we clicked. I fell in love with her. Being with her, it’s made me fundamentally more secure. A high percentage of the lurking terrors I felt for years, the things that I felt I’d failed to face up to as a proper human being, have gone.

“I do feel that there is someone in my life who I can say anything to. For years, I never talked about the things that worried me and now there is someone whom I trust, which creates a completely different context in which I can exist.”

Being loved, and loving, has taken away Mitchell’s profound sense of self-doubt. “I think I realise now that people judging me adversely, in superficial ways, doesn’t matter. Now I don’t mind looking a bit daft, like taking the bins out in my pyjamas. I don’t mind seeming like a bit of a twat any more. I don’t worry about projecting an image. There was a certain brittleness [before], and being worried about being laughed at in a way I was not in control of. I don’t really care much about that now.”

Do you take the bins out in your pyjamas?

“It has been known. I only wear my pyjamas all day if I have decided I’m ill. But I do think when I’m perfectly well I have always moved on to day clothes at some point.”

For diehard Peep Show fans reading this happy-ever-after fairy story and lamenting the replacement of their unhappy hero with a well-balanced, emotionally healthy middle-aged man who understands it’s good to get out of pyjamas before lunch, fear not. Mitchell confesses that having worried for years about not finding happiness, he now frets that somebody will take it away from him. Honestly! There’s no pleasing some.

“I’m a worrier,” he says. “I worry that something is going to go wrong. A horrific accident or an illness or, on a less serious level, a career mishap. I think that is probably how I avoid feeling guilty for being so lucky, that I worry that something is going to go wrong.

“I truly thought that because my career had worked out, maybe I didn’t get to have everything. And now I’m very happily married and I have a lovely daughter. I feel, ‘Hang on. Surely I’m luckier than I deserve?’ But that’s a definition of luck, isn’t it?”

Mitchell beams again. Their child is three and called Barbara. “She’s amazing. Extremely talkative and she likes imagining things, telling stories and being characters and explaining to me who she is in one of her stories.” Just think of the Coren Mitchell dressing-up box in their northwest London home. All those BBC codpieces and doublets knocking around for a second generation of bright dresser-uppers.

In the old days, Mitchell used daytime TV to procrastinate while writing. Now, it’s playing with Barbara and watching Peppa Peg and Hey Duggee. “A few minutes of feverish [work] activity followed by 45 minutes of time slipping through my fingers, some of that with Barbara.”

The announcement of Mitchell’s marriage brought astonishment beyond his close circle, for the fact that he and Coren seemed such an unlikely couple. But Mitchell says that he is similar to his wife (although he plays bridge, not poker). Both find the kind of socialising that comes with showbiz excruciating. They would by far prefer to stay at home with a DVD and supper on their knees. “I find places that are rife with acquaintances very stressful. I am not sure on what level to greet them. Do I hug them? Am I shaking hands? I sort of feel whatever I do will be wrong.

“Now, though, it’s nice going to a party [with Victoria] because you think, ‘We’re here; we’re in this room. It is a very high-stress moment, so let’s talk to each other for three minutes, catch our breath and then go, ‘OK, now we can go over there.’ Sometimes we separate or sometimes we just move together, depending on how confidence levels are going. At least eight times out of ten, I’d rather be watching a DVD and having some food in front of the telly. If you are happy at home, you’ve much less motivation to find the social confidence. You think. ‘Why are we even here? What’s the earliest point we can reasonably go?’ ”

In a year’s time, Mitchell will be thrust into the world of the school gate, a positive lion’s den of half acquaintances, small talk and necessary pleasantries with relative strangers, set against the backdrop of a bad day, or any anxiety going on about your child. “That genuinely hadn’t occurred to me,” he says, “but, yes, you are right. I remember that from being a child myself.” As he says, at least at parties there is alcohol to help everybody, other than “the minority of shark-like sociopaths who are very happy moving through the water while everyone else is sort of terrified”.

Mitchell’s relationship with Robert Webb is still strong, although their careers are more independent these days. “We’re closer friends now that we don’t work together so much. For several years it was incredibly intensive.”

Webb does not star in Upstart Crow, which, incidentally boasts Kenneth Branagh and Lily Cole in its final Christmas special. In the autumn, Mitchell is set to star in a film with Steve Coogan, yet to be officially confirmed, but he is back with Webb in the new year for the filming of another series of Back, the acclaimed TV series that reflects the old dynamic of their comedy partnership. Mitchell plays Stephen, a bitter son displaced by the return of his parents’ long-lost foster son, Andrew (Webb), and is eaten up by jealousy and inadequacy as Andrew seems to threaten his plans to take over the family business.

In his private life, Webb has been a good ten years ahead of Mitchell. Mitchell confesses that when Barbara was born, he took months off work. “Looking back, one of Rob’s children was born in the middle of a Peep Show shoot and he had an afternoon off and then a weekend, and then he was back filming on the Monday. I think I felt a sense of. ‘Oh, that must be quite difficult,’ but when I look back now, I go, ‘What? How did that work?’ I think I let him go through [becoming a father] without really reflecting on it. At the time, I was probably half-thinking, ‘What? He’s having a baby now, and we’ve got to get this shot.’ Only now have I allowed myself to realise, ‘Oh right. That was a massive moment [for him].’”

There are some jokes Mitchell has made in the past, particularly about children, that he would never write now. And he won’t read anything that makes him worry about the world Barbara will grow up in. “Victoria finds the dramatisation of a certain sort of horrific thing totally ceasing to be on any level of entertainment.” They did watch Broadchurch together, starring Mitchell’s close and long-term Cambridge friend Olivia Colman, but series one, about the murder of a child, was before Barbara’s birth.

Mitchell’s life has spun 180 degrees. Where once he was a relative loner – an only child for eight years – his private life is filled with people: nieces, nephews, brother and sister in-law, parents in-law. “I do enjoy it, but I also don’t know what your relationship with a cousin or an uncle or niece is supposed to be, so I’m learning that.

“I think in middle age, I am getting a sense of what a life is. I get the sense there is an arc, and if I see as many years again as I’ve seen already, I’m lucky. The life I had in Kilburn didn’t carry on for ever. I was ultimately unhappy and then something happened. I met Victoria. My life is totally different. I see that you can have periods of feeling completely unchanging and then a change will happen and can happen so many times, and then you die.”

Perhaps this is a maudlin element of Corrigan still lurking beneath? Loving Barbara as well as Victoria, Mitchell says, “I worry terribly that the world is terrifying in so many ways … There’s electricity and sharp corners and all of that, but also I want a world for Barbara to be secure and happy and prosperous in.”

If Mitchell once asked himself if it was normal to want to feel normal, well, aged 44, he might finally have got there.

#a #david mitchell

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undead-potatoes · 7 months

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Finally got to that Act 2 Durge camp scene if you refuse to kill Isobel last night, and while I've seen that scene like a billion times other places, going through it with both Astarion and Shadowheart as Aurora gave me some thoughts whirring in my head

Aurora's mental state for most of the game is in the gutter. Like the level of self-loathing she carries with her at all times is honestly a bit much, leading her to be very self sacrificing and borderline suicidal. She's kept it together thus far, even finding some renewed hope and purpose after discovering her connection to Lathander at the monastery, but when she's forced to almost kill a loved one in camp she just falls apart completely.

When she's finally back to her self again, all she has left in her is tears. She's just so tired. Between the sleepless nights, the chronic headaches and pains, the constant battles both within and without her cup is already full, and now it's spilling over.

She genuinely contemplates just leaving, putting as much distance between herself and the others as she can before turning, maybe taking down some shadowy abominations with her as she goes. And if push came to shove, a dagger to the heart always does the trick.

She's kept her Urge mostly secret until now, afraid of what the others would think, and is very pleasantly surprised to discover she's met with compassion of all things. The others are wary of her, sure, but none of them seem to blame her for her affliction, and seem mostly preoccupied with how to avoid any possible incidents in the future.

And then there's Astarion, who almost got killed by her uncontrollable bloodlust, and Shadowheart, who could just as easily have become the victim had the dice of fate rolled slightly differently. The way both of them are so supportive of her, seemingly unfazed by the moral aspects of the Urge. How Astarion is being a little cheeky about the whole thing, joking about it in all the right ways to ease the tension, while Shadowheart's more earnest and serious approach still makes her feel seen and taken seriously.

To be met with such understanding and love when she has none for herself is so important to her I think, to have something more to live for than just a sense of duty and spite. Someone to keep the candle of hope lit, even when the Urge tries to snuff it out.

#Sunny Plays BG3 #OC: Aurora Dawnbringer #god this got WAY longer than I intended lmao #so normal about her just CHEWS ON MY OWN LEG #and there's a bunch of stuff in between here I didn't mention #like how she sits down and really explains to everyone wtf is going on in (almost) full detail now that the cat is out of the bag #or how everyone got no sleep that night bc Aurora's screaming kept everyone up for hours and quite frankly shook them a bit #they can't really afford to lose time but they're all (extra) tired and Aurora is knocked out cold afterwards and can't go anywhere #so they mostly just hang out in camp or do smaller things in the surrounding areas bc that's all everyone has the capacity for that day #everyone is just sorta having a really weird 24 hours lmao

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