Interview Timothy Spall  

By William Leith  
 

The first impression Timothy Spall gives is of a man who is not at all careful or guarded. He seems to be saying what comes into his head, as if you were not going to write it down and publish it afterwards. He jumps from one subject to another, from farting to Hitler, in a flash. He calls this "blethering on". He is a man with a talent for bar talk, a grasp of high-flown nonsense. Unlike many actors, he is not protective of his image; I don't think he knows what his image is.  

You get the sense that he knows what a good actor he is, and also that he doesn't know how others see him, a fact he probably finds rather painful. (People will come up to him and say the names of his characters; he says he likes it much better when they say, "Timothy Spall".) But this confusion exists because he's so good; he's a consummate character actor. In the public's mind, he disappears into the parts he plays. Until his recent illness (he was diagnosed with leukaemia in the summer of 1996, had a bone-marrow transplant, and is now recovered), the tabloids had never quite known what to make of him; they didn't have much to grasp on to. (Good acting is not quite a tabloid category.)  

There were jokes about the lurid waistcoats Spall likes to wear and more jokes about the sad characters he plays. Of all his characters, Spall says he is most like Kevin Costello, from the comedy Outside Edge ("He appears to be slightly oikish, but is actually very well read and is a cordon- bleu cook").  

Spall is great at playing stupid people, or narrow-minded people. What he does is to make you sympathise with people who are charmless. He does not embody the viewer's hopes and dreams. On screen, his face conveys ideas and emotions imprecisely, sometimes sluggishly; he reveals the fact that a character is truly pathetic only gradually, and with deadly realism. Good comedy, as he has said, makes you cry at the same time.  

We meet in a restaurant; Spall is standing at the bar. He drinks a third of a pint of beer, fast, and orders another round; suddenly, he's talking like mad and making me laugh, although we have known each other for less than a minute. He gives an overwhelming sense of wanting to be nice to you, which is immediately recognisable from his earnest bricklayer, Barry, in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, his weak-minded chef, Aubrey, in Life is Sweet, his infertile village cricketer, Kevin, and Maurice, his conciliatory wedding photographer in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. He loves working with Leigh, the way Leigh collaborates with actors in the creating of character. He's filming with Leigh at the moment but is "contractually obliged" not to reveal the plot.  

Spall talks about the Leigh character, Maurice. "He bottles up," he says, "and then it all comes out. It's sort of like farting in a relationship. You start to go out with a girl. But when is the right moment to start farting? You can hold on to it too long." He nails down the dilemma; he discusses the philosophy of it. There might, for instance, be a point of no return, beyond which it becomes psychologically impossible to fart in front of a particular person. Laughing, I take a second sip from my drink. I say: "Well, it's nice to meet you."  

Spall once said of himself: "I know I work quite hard at making people like me." Actually, he doesn't seem to be working at all. Like many of his characters, he is earnest and puppyish; unlike them, he is not boring. He is a whirlwind of interesting words and thoughts. He swears a lot. He uses words such as "braggart" and "hubris". He talks about himself with regular nods at self-deprecation. We move to a table at the back of the restaurant.  

He chooses wine with a studied layman's relish. "I know what I like when I see it," he says, "but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it." He talks about "quaffing" and "imbibing". He had a reputation as a drinker, but says he has slowed down a great deal since the leukaemia. Officially, he will not talk about his illness. "That's another story," he says. "One day I will. It's very interesting, but I'm not ready to talk about it. I presume it's interesting. But it's not for public consumption."  

Actually, he cannot help but be changed. He has, for instance, stopped being a hypochondriac since his illness. He says: "I've been through too much to worry about me going."  

He is happy to talk about acting. He says: "I suppose just trying to get it to feel like it's not acting is very important to me." He very much wants to give the impression of not being precious. He ponders, and says: 'Sometimes I think, in a split second, 'Yes, I really know how to do this, and I can see it being done, and I can see all the fall-out of it being a success.' And then, in the process of doing it, it's just an exercise in major arse-twitching."  

"What?"  

"Because you're nervous. You think you know how you might do it in the blinking of an eye, but then you... I never quite know, really, how it is done. I suppose it's a mixture of hubris and panic... or, it's where hubris chases panic around the bed post."  

He thinks hard about the characters he plays, grafting little bits on to them until he's satisfied. He has recently played Gordon, an intolerant, narrow-minded, small-time executive in the television version of the Tim Firth play, Neville's Island. Like many of Spall's characters, Gordon is something of an anorak. It is a tribute to Spall's acting that, by the end, as Gordon reveals the even stupider man that we can hardly believe is inside him, we begin to have sympathy for him.  

"If you're going to play an arsehole," Spall says, "you owe it to that character to find out about them. To me, you can meet a shit and you can spend a lot of time with them. People will say, 'I can't stand that guy!" And he is an arsehole. But you might just look over to him, joining in the vilification, and you might just catch a tiny little blink of insecurity, of vulnerability, in that arsehole. And all of a sudden, you think: 'Oh, my God!'"  

He can, he tells me, muster up a tiny bit of sympathy for Hitler, from a moment in a clip of newsreel when he jauntily ruffles the hair of a boy soldier in the ranks. But then he thinks: "Is it right that I should be feeling sorry for Hitler? Even the worst fucker usually has a little moment of sensitivity." He looks at people, and finds his imagination running away with him; sometimes he cries in supermarkets, just imagining someone's inner life. "Imagination," he says, "is a beast that has to be put in a cage."  

Still, when creating characters he is plagued by terrible moments of under-confidence; he describes the feeling as: "Is this house I'm building going to fall down, and is it a pile of shit?"  

There is a minor tradition of showbusiness in Spall's family; his mother sang in pubs, and once won a talent contest at Butlin's. His maternal grandfather was an occasional music-hall comedian. Spall grew up in a terraced house in Battersea. (Later, they were rehoused in a tower block. "Slum clearance," he says. "Made me laugh. It was quite nice, actually. I remember my mum saying, 'Why are people always going on about tower blocks and people being 'orrible in them? We're all right'.")  

Spall's father was a scaffolder, and later a postal worker; his mother ran a hairdressing business. Spall has three brothers, none of whom turned out to be actors. He was, in a way, the sensitive, arty one. The young Timothy left school with one O-level (art).  

He had played Lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz (a classic Spall part, we can see now). Spall "got laughs". Later, he worked at a fairground and joined the army cadets with a notion of being a tank driver. He applied to join the army, but was told he was too fat.  

So he pursued the acting. Had he always been a thespian sort? "I suppose," he says, "I was capable of showing off a bit, but no more than other kids." But there had been signs. At the age of seven, he "frightened the life out of my parents" by asking for a doll. At the same time, he saw Olivier's Richard III on television, and, "something happened in me. It freaked me out. It was so vibrant. It was almost sexual in a strange way." As a teenager, he joined the National Youth Theatre; then he got into RADA, where he won the Bancroft Gold Medal. His first part in the West End, at the age of 21, was as an inmate of a mental hospital in David Edgar's Mary Barnes.  

Spall has been described as an "oik"; he once said: "I say I'm an oik, but that's a joke." It's something he tries to avoid, and also something he cultivates. "I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other clichés that come with it," he has said. Before going to RADA, he tells me, he "was going through a period of deciding that I had to edify myself". He read Lord of the Rings, "and Gormenghast straight afterwards. Then I thought I'd read Dostoevsky and go and see foreign films." He particularly remembers Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul. "Do you remember that movie? Oh, it's the mad gay German..."  

"Fassbinder?"  

"Fassbinder!"  

Spall's rendition of the film's plot is: "A real naff downtown pub, group of German charwomen, group of rather lairy, ingenuous Moroccans, he's about 30, she's about 70, they meet, they dance in this pub, like in the East End, and they fall in love."  

The menu appears; Spall orders a chop. He is chubby. He wears a light zip-up jacket and a black T-shirt with white hoops; toddler clothes. The actor Patrick Stewart arrives with two women and sits at the next table. Stewart notices Spall and gets up to shake his hand. "It's been a long time," he says in his measured way.  

Spall says: "Tim Spall." 
"I'm pleased to see you. How are you doing?" 
"Very well." 
"Good. Congratulations." 
Stewart sits down again. Spall says: 'Well, it's very sweet of him." 
"He must have seen Secrets and Lies on TV the other day." 
"Yeah, probably a bit of that, and probably a bit of 'Well done for surviving'."  

He has said: "I was always insecure about the way I looked" and "I always thought I was very odd - a bit of a swamp creature". He was shy with girls. At school, a girl called Nicola fancied him, but he couldn't bring himself to kiss her. "She got really annoyed at one point... she was angry because I hadn't made any moves."  

He developed a taste in eccentric clothes: customised flares and painted platform boots. He wasn't trying to be cool. He once said: "I'm not always fat, but when I'm thin, people don't seem to notice. I'm seen as a fat person no matter what shape I'm in."   

He met his wife, Shane, after she watched him on stage in the RSC's The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1981; they married six months later and have three children, Pascale, Rafe, and Mercedes, known as Sadie. He gave the children unusual names, but "conventional middle names". Rafe was named after Spall's character in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Pascale went through a phase of "wanting to be called Janet".  

They live in a large house in south-east London. The children, says Spall, are, "Marvellous. They're a bit like me - well-behaved in public, and a bit naughty at home."  

More self-deprecation. But why? He will often criticise himself, not as an actor, but in all sorts of other ways. He sometimes says that, as a father he can be over-disciplinarian; he has referred to himself in newspapers as a "git". He says he used to "spend all day trying to be a nice guy and then go home and be a bastard". He says: "I probably am quite a nice bloke, but I don't want anybody to think that it's a kind of compensation for anything. Because I do believe, even though I go out of my way to be quite friendly - I just don't want anybody to think that I don't have my bad moments, or that I'm not unreasonable, or that I don't shout and scream when I'm at home.  

"If I feel that I've gone down the path of nice-blokeship, I quite like to remind myself, and others, that I actually can be a bit of an arsehole."  

After playing the lonely, earnest Barry in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, something strange happened to him; for a few months, he couldn't get any work. This left him badly in debt for a while (he was forced to consider selling his house and moving to Skegness). "I still don't know what it was," he says. Sometimes he tries to puzzle it out: "I have all sorts of half-baked notions. Was it over-exposure? Did people assume I was a Brummie? I thought, 'What have I done?'"  

The truth is, he had done it too well; he had constructed a character who had had no luck with girls, who had not passed many exams, who was destined to be seen as a fat person, even though he wasn't particularly fat. In terms of playing small-time creeps with hearts of gold he had, temporarily, priced himself out of the market. Perhaps people thought that was him. Even now, when strangers come up to Spall in the street, the thing they are most likely to say is "Barry". ("Another thing they say," says Spall, "is, 'Where are the others?' They assume we're some kind of travelling circus.")  

He has a last glass of wine. He talks, voluminously, about hangovers. Tomorrow, he is due on the Mike Leigh set, which he will enjoy wholeheartedly. "If it's going well, and even if it's not, you know, it's a really interesting working environment. Because you usually have a lot of fun."  

Outside the restaurant, he shakes my hand and belts off along the crowded pavement, through people, some of whom might be mumbling "Barry", and possibly, after his performance in Neville's Island, "Gordon". Or even "Timothy Spall". 
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