Peter Capaldi on Cricklewood Greats, The Thick of It and Malcolm Tucker

We are in Peter Capaldi’s spacious, if spartan, dressing room in the vast, empty, 1930s Hornsey Town Hall in north London. The actor’s days are spent filming (he’s working on the second series of The Hour, in which he is the new head of news) and his nights are on stage (as Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers); a punishing schedule from which he emerges looking exhausted, hardly surprisingly – chalky white, with a nose-dripping cold, and exceedingly thin.

He is dressed in a 50s costume of drab grey suit with braces and black-rimmed spectacles – so similar to his own pair that he later struggles to remember which are his. When I sit on one of two sofas, he asks if I would mind swapping because he needs to protect his back while he eats his BBC canteen lunch, a suitably retro plateful of roast pork and two veg.

It is his only mildly unchivalrous act (the springs on the sofa I sit on are shot and I sink to the ground); the rest of the time, he couldn’t be more charming and less like the Bafta-winning role for which he is most famous, foul-mouthed Labour spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.

Cricklewood Greats

What Capaldi would clearly like is to have a post-lunch kip on the bed in the corner of his room with its girly, pastel-patterned duvet (which, positively Sherlock-like, I divine correctly as belonging to his teenage daughter, Cissy.) But, alas, he has something to promote, and since he wrote it, directed it, presented it and even designed the art work that appears in it, he’s just going to have to be a trouper and get on with it.

Cricklewood Greats is a send-up of those reverential documentaries where the presenters talk in hushed tones about the legendary long-dead stars of now-defunct film studios.

It starts with the silent movies and a familiar, bowler-hatted comical chap called the Little Drunk, through the 1930s comedies of Florrie Fontaine with such mega-hits as Florrie Drives a Lorry, the horror B-movies featuring Dr Worm, thence Dr Jekyll and Matron Hyde (“He always brought class to films that didn’t always deserve it”) leading to the finale of Terry Gilliam’s Professor Hypochondria’s Magical Odyssey, whose literally explosive direction finally did for the studios.

So is this his revenge for countless hours of television irritation? “Actually I love these sort of documentaries, which you might turn on late on a Saturday night – like, say, The Alma Cogan Story,” Capaldi says. “But they are ripe for spoofing, because the presenters are always so serious and anxious to make themselves look like rather attractive and interesting people.”

What appealed to him about the project was not the presenting role, but the idea that he could make “these tiny little films, y’know. [In 1995, he won an Oscar for directing a 20-minute short film, Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.] And I thought how fun it would be to do one with fictional characters. Those programmes always tend to be about very successful characters and I like the idea of slightly unsuccessful people who showbusiness jettisoned at a certain point.”

Upbringing

Capaldi was brought up in a poor but respectable Glaswegian tenement, as the actor describes it, in Springburn, with his sister, his late father Gerry, son of an Italian shepherd from a little village near Monte Cassino, and mother Nancy, of Irish parentage.

Nancy and Gerry ran a café on the ground floor of the tenement they lived in. Also in the block was Peter’s paternal grandmother, his maternal grandmother lived opposite, his uncles and aunts and their children in the building behind them.

“It was the tail end of that very traditional, extended family and I loved it. My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn’t a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing – it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people – when you came home from school and your mum wasn’t in, there were lots of people you could go to.

“It was quite poor. Where my grandmother lived, the only toilet was a communal one on the landing, but it was spotless.”

Artistic child

His uncle Peter, after whom the actor was named, and his father were both talented painters and encouraged young Peter to draw, “which I did well, from when I was a child, so there was always the belief and encouragement that I would do something artistic.”

His desire to act was based on a few random plays he had taken part in at school but “we were not a literary family, we didn’t go to the theatre, we never listened to Shakespeare… I just fancied the idea of acting. It seemed like a fun life.”

He applied to a number of drama schools in London but when he failed to get in, enrolled instead at Glasgow School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Peter Howson, who went on to be the official war artist in Bosnia.

Lucky break

Capaldi was in a band called the Dreamboys who used to support the slightly more memorable Altered Images, with fellow Glaswegian, Clare I Could Be Happy Grogan. She had starred in the charming Gregory’s Girl by Bill Forsyth, the director who was to change Capaldi’s path – in one of the many flukey twists and turns that mark the actor’s life.

The director was a friend of Capaldi’s costume-designer landlady, and on meeting the lodger in his pal’s kitchen one night, was so struck by “the drama” of the 23-year-old’s face that he cast him as a young oil-company employee opposite Burt Lancaster in Local Hero, released in early 1983.

When I say that in my mind’s eye I can still see that callow young man (there was something unusually striking about his face, as well as his acting) but that it fades in and out of Tucker’s snarl, all these years later, Capaldi laughs: “Well, I’m lucky enough to have hung around for that amount of time. I’ve been lucky enough to hang on!”

After the excitement of his lucky break… nothing. “It was a different time. Now kids go to drama school and then leave straightaway to go to Los Angeles and meet piles of agents. But I wasn’t a trained actor. I had no idea what you did. So I just went back to Glasgow and spent all my fee on curries and lagers and taking my friends out.”

The road to Hollywood

Eventually, he arrived in London where he was helped by fellow Scots actor Denis Lawson, who he knew from Local Hero. There was a good part playing the manservant to John Malkovich’s Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, but not much else stands out.

In 1993, he wrote and starred in a low-budget Scottish road movie, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder, that won the audience award at the London Film Festival. Then came his Hollywood moment with Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life; the idea arising, fortuitously, when Capaldi’s wife, Elaine Collins, an actress turned producer, muddled up the existential writer with the American director, Frank Capra.

On the back of this success, doors were opened in Hollywood, flesh was pressed, deals were struck and then unstruck. The mighty Miramax gave the go-ahead on a screenplay, Moon Man, that Capaldi had worked on for a year, flew him out to Manhattan to toast his success, but en route – mysteriously and humiliatingly – the green light had turned to red.

The Thick of It

The family home in London’s Crouch End was paid for, however, by the fat fees from the company and was duly dubbed Villa Miramax. In 2001, Strictly Sinatra, a film Capaldi wrote and directed starring Ian Hart, was a flop, followed by years of Poirot-this and Foyle’s War-that, before Armando Iannucci, another Scots-Italian who had been brought up in the same street as Capaldi – as the two of them later discovered – had the good sense to see that Peter would make a brilliant Malcolm Tucker.

This offer came in the nick of time, as Capaldi was seriously contemplating another career. “Although it wouldn’t have really been what I wanted to do, I had started sending out story-boards that I’d drawn to various directors because I’d thought, ‘I’ve got to get a job. I’ve got to get some other work.’”

His misadventures in Hollywood were what inspired his creation of Tucker rather than, as is widely thought, Tony Blair’s former director of communications Alastair Campell.

“The only people that I had witnessed personally behaving in the way that Malcolm does were American agents or producers. You could see people at ICM in Los Angeles – malevolent forces in Armani suits – barking the foulest and most terrifying of obscenities down the phone at people.

“The producers, too. Harvey Weinstein and the team at Miramax were long celebrated for Malcolm-like behaviour, so in fact they were the people I thought about. That was the model I took, rather than Alastair Campbell, as I didn’t know him. Alastair might be a bit disappointed to know this!”

Playing Malcolm Tucker

The Thick of It returns later this year, for a fourth season. I wonder whether Capaldi actually likes his character? Does he find him satisfying or liberating to play?

“I like Malcolm very much. He’s got a heart of gold [Really?] and he’s only trying to do his job; it’s not his fault that he’s confronted by an army of idiots. It’s quite exciting to play him, because he tends to always be on the offensive and he gets given wonderful lines, lots and lots of them. As any actor will tell you, that’s an attractive position to be in.

“His verve, his vigour is a great tonic. Also I think he’s quite complicated, he’s not just a swearing man. He lives in a real world full of tough people making tough decisions. At his best he cuts through that world with a certain spring in his step and humour; get in his way, though, and he’ll cut you open with his face.”

I wonder how much he finds himself, after seven years – off and on – of playing the man, maybe sharing some of Malcolm’s characteristics a little bit at home? “Unfortunately, if you spend hours being scornful, there’s a residue left when you ask ‘Where is the TV remote control?’ or ‘What do you mean, I have to mow the lawn?’”

Do your family and friends ever tease you about Malcolm-like tendencies? “It’s most commonly said that I’m very nice and not like Malcolm at all. But some of my friends feel that he does lurk inside me. They think they had seen him long before he appeared on the television and he’s still there and not to be disturbed.”

Politics

Capaldi has been described as coming from an “Old Labour” background, but when I ask him about his parents’ politics, he laughs: “They’re so not political… that’s why I’m laughing.”

He talks movingly about how in the big, tough industrial cities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle, “there is a great embracing of creativity and a great pride in it. The Billy Elliot thing is quite rare… Actually, I think people are thrilled to see young people with their gifts… unless they’re dumb.

“I lived through a golden period where society felt that it was good to help people who didn’t have a great deal of money fulfil their potential. It’s sad, considering where we are now. I wouldn’t be here if it were not for the grant system that paid for me to go to art school – because my parents couldn’t have afforded it.”

Art

He still tries to draw every day, inspired by John Byrne, the 70-something artist, playwright and father of Tilda Swinton’s children, who once told him, à propos of his own daily regimen: “If you can do this, why wouldn’t you?”

He talks, very tenderly, about “the succour” of looking at great paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, the drawings of Holbein through to the Turner-shortlisted George Shaw, who paints the Coventry estate he grew up in.

Ambition

Sometimes, he wishes that he had made it in Hollywood: “I’m not on the radar there… but the only reason I’d want to be is because occasionally you see something magnificent, and you just think, ‘Oh, I would love to be part of that!’”

Like what? “Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. It’s not just epic, it’s the craft of film-making taken to an extremely high level. The costumes are fabulous, the sets are fabulous, the script is fabulous… the acting is extraordinary. And we never do anything like that, you know.

“So you think, ‘There is a wonderful thing’ and, yes, of course, I would love to be part of it but you have to set out to do that and move away from your family or move them with you.

“I guess you’d earn an enormous amount of money, and I’ve never had to make that decision. But also, I’m too…” a very long, thoughtful pause, and then a big laugh, “Well, I suppose I like my life exactly the way it is.”

Radio Times