Steve Coogan
Ah-ha, poor Yorick! British Comic Steve Coogan has never been able to shake off his most successful character, Alan Partridge. Now he’s making a fresh start in the states, taking a starring role in Hamlet 2. Will lawrence meets him
Having the last laugh
Like many an actor, Steve Coogan dreams of the day when he’ll secure a truly blinding role. And he came very close to this on Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian, in which he reprises his character of Octavius, a toy Roman centurion. But he came a little too close for the wrong reasons.
“Honestly, on that film, I really thought I might go blind,” he tells me when we meet. “During filming one day, I was running along – I play a toy soldier – scampering past these giant blades of plastic grass. But, being really old, I got out of breath, so I stopped. And as I bent over to catch my breath, one of these big plastic blades of grass went right in my eye.”
He pauses for a moment, the colour draining from his face as he recalls the injury. “It was horrific. It pushed my eyelid over the top of my eyeball and down over the other side. I bruised my ruddy eyeball – actually I nearly blinded myself. I stopped and put my hand over my eye – I thought I’d have blood gushing out – I couldn’t see or anything. My head went numb.
I had a real black eye for the whole of the rest of the film. They had to cover it up with make-up every day!”
That was an instance of truly suffering for his art. The 43-year-old Alan Partridge star might be a household name in the UK, but he’s desperate to break the US. He has enjoyed some movie success – he put in a memorable supporting turn in Ben Stiller’s big-budget hit Tropic Thunder, and works alongside the likes of Owen Wilson and Robin Williams in Night at the Museum 2, released this month. Later this year he takes the lead for the first time, in high school comedy Hamlet 2.
“Night at the Museum is a different beast from Hamlet 2, because I am not carrying the film and I didn’t run to get it,” says Coogan. “Ben Stiller and the director talked to me when I did the first one and I agreed to do some stuff with Owen Wilson. He and I improvise aplenty and we have a little bit of a thing going on, which people remember after the first film. I just loved doing the sequel and there was a lot of opportunity for our little nuances which just lift it beyond the generic.”
The big difference, however, is the effect on Coogan’s Hollywood career – Hamlet 2 has the potential to make or break it. “It sold for a lot of money after the Sundance film festival, and while it was not the big commercial success in the US that they thought it might be, critically it was brilliant.”
Coogan’s character, Dana, is a drama teacher who comes with probably the worst idea for a sequel ever. But for all his fallibility, he manages to inspire a class of previously uninterested students. Importantly, the film and its characters are American.
“The film really put me on the map over in the US,” smiles Coogan. ‘A lot of people went to see it on the East and West coasts. It worked very well for me.”
COOGAN FINDS THE STATES APPEALING BECAUSE AUDIENCES OVER THERE DON’T GREET HIM WITH PRECONCEIVED NOTIONS. ‘When I think of America, it’s not really the money, as, fortunately, I don’t have to make choices based on that. I have the luxury to make decisions based on creativity. With America, I like the lifestyle over there. I find it less stressful and you are less under the spotlight there.”
This would, of course, be an aspect of his struggle with less edifying publicity. When Coogan’s career sky-rocketed after his first Alan Partridge vehicle, Knowing Me, Knowing You, came out back in the early 1990s, he quickly became something of a tabloid star, leading to salacious tales in the red-tops, one of the most recent featuring American rock temptress Courtney Love and narcotic abuse. He and his wife Caroline Hickman divorced in 2005 and he has a teenage daughter, Clare, from another relationship. (He has recently granted her a credit card and wonders, rather belatedly, whether he should have imposed firmer controls on her spending.)
However, Coogan says the wild days are over.“That palaver is behind me. All I want to do is to not stand still, to just keep moving around.”
He seems true to his word. Throughout our hour-long conversation he proves fidgety – rising once or twice, in mid-flow, to tinker with the hotel suite’s thermostat.
In spite of these interruptions, he proves thoroughly engaging.
He is no riot – comic actors rarely are – but the curmudgeonly reputation seems more than a little miscast. He is serious about his work, but talks with good grace and good humour.
“Comedy is exhausting. Comedy is all about technique and doing something that has an emotional element to it, which has a genuine sentiment to it. Normally, you are impenetrable. You are the funny guy. You can’t be knocked down. But if you are being totally vulnerable and exposing yourself in an emotional way as an actor, which is not the normal preserve of comics, then it goes against every gut instinct you have.”
THERE IS IN COOGAN A SENSE OF STILL NEEDING TO PROVE HIMSELF. “Basically, I want to keep doing stuff that is demanding, something that has some scariness, the risk of falling over,” he says. “I don’t mind risking, messing up, if I can do something that is interesting and different and challenging and just valid for my own sense of self-respect.
“In America they are much more open to me as an actor and as someone who can be creative doing other things; there they simply look at the body of work. I certainly won’t neglect my own country and the reason I did Sunshine, the drama series on BBC One, was that I read the script and thought it was very good. I thought it would be difficult and there was a question of will I be able to do this but that gets me excited. I like to make life a little bit difficult for myself.”
The biggest shadow over Coogan’s career in Britain is still Alan Partridge. Of all his small screen creations – the most recent comic entry being the hit-or-miss roadie character Saxondale – Partridge remains the most infamous, and arguably, the closest to his creator’s natural persona. For all the adulation that the character has inspired, however, does Coogan ever feel as though his iconic buffoon has proved a hindrance?
“Only if that’s all I’d been doing,” he counters, “but before I did my recent live comedy tour, I’d not done any of those famous characters for about eight years. That was the last time I did Partridge, but yes, probably in this country, it has stopped me from doing other things. I create and am involved in other projects but it may have an effect on people in the business, their attitude to what you do, and, of course, there is the public.”
Coogan is greeted by the Alan Partridge catchphrase, “Ah-ha”, about twice a week now, which, he says, is “fine”. He smiles again. “For me, though, there is a slight disconnect. People in the street ask me to do it and I shout ‘Ah-ha’, but it doesn’t mean anything, it’s kind of like this abstract concept. But what’s really weird is when people say that I sound like Alan Partridge, and I go, ‘Well, actually, he sounds like me because I came first!’
“Because people see you doing funny stuff, they think everything you say will be very funny. So, often, whenever you say something, people laugh, as if that’s what you want them to do.
Generally, people are very nice when they come up to you. The worst thing, I think, would be to a soap star, where you don’t have enough money to give yourself a really private life, but everybody knows you! And people will think you’re just like the character. I love Alan though, and going back to him in my stage show was like revisiting an old friend for me.”
It makes sense. After all, Alan Partridge is one of Coogan’s finest creations, a truly great character, one of the best. He is, perhaps, blindingly good? “Watch how you use that word,” he smiles, “watch how you use it!”
Night at the Museum 2 is out now; Hamlet 2 opens later this year.
