Rob Brydon has taken a trip. This one is a family holiday to southwest France with his wife, Claire, and their sons, Tom, 15, and George, 12. Yesterday they visited Carcassonne castle and toured local markets. Now Brydon is on a sofa in shirt and shorts, his usually closely structured quiff swaying loose. “This is me in holiday mode,” he says, sweeping his hair aside with a diva-like flourish.
So who, I wonder, does he verbally spar or trade impressions with, as he does with Steve Coogan in their acclaimed foodie travelogue, The Trip? “I am the butt of my 15-year-old boy’s jokes in this house,” he says. “However, over lunch yesterday I did say to everyone: ‘Do you realize you are eating with the star of the world’s biggest-grossing movie?’ ”
He means of course Barbie, the blockbuster film in which he appears as Sugar Daddy Ken, sharing the screen with the comedian Tom Stourton, the son of the fruity-voiced Radio 4 presenter Ed Stourton. On the day we speak it has just passed $1 billion at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film made by a woman as sole director. Brydon was cast because Margot Robbie, its star and co-producer, is a fan of another Brydon hit, Gavin & Stacey, in which he appeared as the bumbling Uncle Bryn.
“You never know who’s watching, do you? Margot loved Gavin & Stacey and a few years ago a friend of hers asked me to record a video message for her as Bryn,” he explains. “To be honest I’d forgotten all about it, and then I get the call for Barbie, and the response to it has been extraordinary.”
The 58-year-old Welshman is the self-confessed “Keith Richards of niceness”, so he doesn’t really do anger or annoyance, but he has definitely been irked by certain bits of the Barbie experience. “I recorded two scenes in one day but they used only one, which itself was edited. All in all it was shorter than one might have hoped for,” he says carefully of his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance. “On the other hand there was a lot of British talent [several actors from Sex Education and Derry Girls and Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor in Dr Who, were also cast], some of whom were on set for nine months, and their appearances didn’t make the same impact as my one day of work.”
“You never know who’s watching, do you?”
What of the cynics who didn’t understand why he had been cast at all? “I won’t say it annoyed me because that will end up being the headline but … it does slightly sting that some people are saying, ‘What’s he doing in such a big Hollywood movie?’” he says. “I am resigned to the fact that it’s the price I pay for not taking the big acting roles in America and doing quiz shows [Brydon has been the host of the BBC’s Would I Lie to You? for 14 years] and voice-overs here instead.
“I consider myself an actor who likes being based in the UK and who does a range of non-actor things, because they pay the bills and they are fun.” One of which being his hit podcast Brydon & — recently acquired by the Amazon-owned Wondery from Spotify — in which he interviews acting and comedy chums like Ben Elton, Harry Hill and Dame Harriet Walter.
“Some people snipe and say, ‘That Welshman gets everywhere, like a rash,’ and others, like a dad on the touchline at my son’s football recently, have never heard of me. I am not without ego. I like being marginally ‘heard of’.”
“I consider myself an actor who likes being based in the UK and who does a range of non-actor things, because they pay the bills and they are fun.”
The fact is, Brydon’s work has made him a favorite among the Hollywood elite. The last time I met him he had just been in Los Angeles getting backslapped by the likes of George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr, Owen Wilson and Justin Timberlake, all fans of The Trip. “I am not here to blow my own trumpet, but there is a lesson for young actors — do your best in every role. Greta Gerwig [the director of Barbie] told me she was a fan of Human Remains [the BBC black comedy series Brydon co-wrote and appeared in with Julia Davis in 2000], which amazed me.”
Famously Brydon passed on numerous big US offers because he wanted to remain based in London with his young family. His school friend Catherine Zeta-Jones (they attended Dumbarton House School in Swansea together, and Brydon once admitted to stealing her lunch money) has succeeded in Hollywood and, latterly, his Gavin & Stacey co-star James Corden became a huge transatlantic hit after hosting The Late Late Show in America.
“I am not prepared to make the sacrifices to make films or TV in Hollywood or Atlanta or Vancouver, wherever the tax breaks for filming are these days, because believe me there are sacrifices,” he explains. “There has to be something inside you that needs that level of success and fame. I don’t have it.”
He and his wife went to visit Corden in LA a few summers ago. Afterward Brydon expressed distaste at the venality and competition in Tinseltown. “No, words are important,” he corrects me. “Distaste sounds like I’m above all that. It’s more personal relief at not being exposed to that level of competition. You’re in a restaurant and the waiter pulls out a script. You’re in a drug store and the guy selling you aspirin wants to sing you a song. The hunger for success is off the charts. Don’t get me wrong — once I did have that hunger myself, but it was for success in this country. This is where I wanted to prove myself.”
Famously Rob Brydon passed on numerous big US offers because he wanted to remain based in London with his young family.
Brydon has done so. As well as his TV and voice-over work and touring his show A Night of Songs & Laughter (it returns to the UK in the spring), he’s soon to appear in the Amazon series My Lady Jane, a reimagining of the life of Lady Jane Grey, who was imprisoned nine days after being proclaimed queen, and executed in 1554. Brydon also promises another series of The Trip, eventually. “Maybe in ten years — but will Steve’s health hold out that long? And anyway my philosophy is always to leave them wanting more. People always say, ‘Make The Trip longer’, or ‘Do a Gavin & Stacey film’. I say no, let people yearn — not getting enough is good for them.”
As for the podcast, many of the guests are friends, so it’s pretty cozy stuff, because Brydon doesn’t like confrontation. “I won’t ask anything that makes my guest uncomfortable,” he winces. “I think the best podcasts like The News Agents or The Rest Is Politics are like listening to friends.”
Inevitably the episode with Coogan is slightly different. Just as in The Trip they bicker and spar. Coogan admits that Brydon is a talented character actor before taking him to task for “drifting into light entertainment”.
Brydon had been struggling to establish himself for years when he met Coogan in the bar of the Holiday Inn in Reading in the late 1990s. He had already co-written the mockumentary Marion and Geoff, but Coogan helped get it on-screen with the BBC.
“I was 35 and so frustrated at not getting anywhere and I absolutely worshipped Steve,” Brydon recalls. “If you would have told me, in that bar, that we’d work together as a duo I would have said, ‘Not a chance in hell that’s ever ever gonna happen.’ I say to young actors now, ‘Keep going. Don’t just talk about it, show people what you’ve got that’s special.’”
Marion and Geoff was about a taxi driver going through a divorce. In Human Remains Brydon played seven different men going through various divorces. And the year they were broadcast, in 2000, he got divorced from his first wife, Martina Fitchie (they have three grown-up children: Katie, Amy and Harry). The first time I met Brydon he called the split “agony” and mentioned a recurring dream: waking up in a cold sweat saying to himself: “I must protect the bridge.”
How is the bridge? “God, yes, I remember that! It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to work out the bridge represents the stability of my family. I don’t have that one any more — thankfully the bridge is secure. And that’s because I made a conscious decision and I have stuck to it: family first. There isn’t really any film or TV project that could jeopardize that.”
Family informs everything Brydon does. When he’s at home he works out with a personal trainer three times a week because he wants to stay fit for his children. “I don’t pretend to be the perfect dad but I want to be able to keep up. I use the TRX System [a suspension regime in which you use straps to work against your own bodyweight], resistance bands, free weights and then do various mat exercises. If you want a body like mine, that’s the price.”
Yesterday he took his sons to see a football match, Roma against Toulouse. José Mourinho is now the manager of Roma and Brydon’s kids reminded him of yet another slightly dissatisfying brush with the A list — when the self-styled Special One was in charge at Tottenham Hotspur.
“José Mourinho has enjoyed some of my work and he once sent me a letter which said, ‘Any time you want to come to a match or a training session just let me know.’ But by the time I answered he’d been fired,” Brydon relates. “That was hard to live down with my boys, but of course there’s a lesson for us all there: how long are we ever special? Never forget – fame is a fickle mistress but family is forever.”
Michael Odell is an interviewer and features writer
