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Peter Capaldi’s latest role isn’t to fuck the fuck in (or indeed fuck the fuck off) like The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker, or nail an outfit
Doctor’s Orders: Peter Capaldi’s Favourite Albums
by Jude Rogers
4 February 2026
As he prepares to embark on his first ever headline music tour, Peter Capaldi takes Jude Rogers through 13 records that have defined his life, from the parallels between Talking Heads and Doctor Who, to the time he found himself in a room with Kate Bush
WRITING / ARTICLE
Peter Capaldi’s latest role isn’t to fuck the fuck in (or indeed fuck the fuck off) like The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker, or nail an outfit inspired by David Lynch and David Bowie as he travels through time as the Twelfth Doctor. It’s to sit on a tour bus from Newcastle to Edinburgh, Cardiff to Brighton, get behind a microphone, and sing. “I’m not trying to be a pop star or anything,” he says, Zooming me from the London studio where he’s also been supervising the mix of his hit Apple TV detective series, Criminal Record, before getting into rehearsals. “Oasis don’t have to worry. It’s a very humble little tour.”
Capaldi’s arrival as a solo artist in his sixties comes with a history. At the turn of the 1980s, when he was a student at the Glasgow School Of Art, he was the frontman of the Dreamboys, not a bunch of Chippendale-lite entertainers, but a jangly gang of Glaswegian post punks. They had another nascent star in their lineup (drummer-turned-comedian Craig Ferguson, who later hosted The Late Late Show in the US), released a single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Birthday’, and toured lots, albeit with minimal success.
They even once ran away from a venue because they didn’t have enough money to pay their support act. “I’m not the kind of guy who would be trying to get one over on someone, and it was so embarrassing,” Capaldi says, a chirpy, spirited presence on the screen. “But we sort of had no choice.” The band they’d left behind, Cocteau Twins, did alright though, I say. “Yes, they did! The gods of rock & roll sorted that out.”
Capaldi went on to bag roles in enduring films like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero and Dangerous Liaisons, and even won an Oscar in 1993 for a live short film he wrote and directed starring Richard E. Grant, Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Work was bitty after that, until he turned up, in a foul mood, for an audition for a new BBC political comedy series, The Thick Of It, in 2004. Malcolm Tucker wasn’t meant to be Scottish or terrifying, but Armando Iannucci was sold.
Twenty years and a turn as the Time Lord later, Capaldi is 67, but today is an excitable fanboy, armed with notes: “I wrote down some clever things to say!” His own return to music was inspired by a friend, Robert Howard, aka Dr Robert from the Blow Monkeys, with whom he’d play guitar. “And he was always pushing me to get more involved, saying you’ve got to write a song, so I caved in and wrote a song, and it was fun.” 2021’s St Christopher and 2025’s Sweet Illusions brim with songs referencing streets and alleyways, humming street lamps and antique thrills – Capaldi’s own brand of noirish Scottish cinema in sound, in which his voice, switching between doomy sprechgesang and twisted crooner, beckons you in.
As part of a band that includes Altered Images’ guitarist Andrew Cowan and Glasvegas drummer Chris Dickey, his first tour starts in Newcastle on 24 February, and ends with his second date at London’s 100 Club since 1982. “It only took me 44 years!” Capaldi’s raring to go. “I’m doing this just for the fun of it, you know. It’s not part of building an empire. These days it’s simply for the joy of playing music, and keeping things interesting.”
1. Lou Reed
Berlin
When I was at art school, I often didn’t do the work I should have during the day, so I’d have to pull all-nighters to catch up. There was a point where I was threatened with being thrown out, so I had to buckle down, and even though I was more interested in seeing bands, I’d play albums to accompany me through the night. The one that was always on was Berlin, so I have such a sentimental attachment to it. I love Transformer too – it’s one of the best albums ever made – but in Berlin, he hasn’t become so veiled. Sometimes Lou would become a little bit inaccessible, but with this album, he’s really making it clear what he’s talking about.
It’s the sad, sad story of these drunk adult souls in Berlin, and it has a quality about it like a musical. It’s very atmospheric and emotive. And his voice… nobody else has a voice like that. It’s an instrument that immediately evokes a certain kind of vibe, able to draw you into these stories and these individual characters, with very simple but powerful lines. And this sounds awful, but it also allows you to sink into a kind of despair and misery in the story before it becomes a beacon of hope at the end, lifting you up and pulling you out. It also includes the only song I’ve ever heard that mentions Mary Queen of Scots.
2. David Bowie
David Live
So I get pegged as a big Bowie fan all the time, which drives my wife [actor/producer Elaine Collins] bananas, because she got to Bowie first. She’s still got scrapbooks in the attic from when she was at school. All these photographs of David from Jackie magazine, from the very beginning. Whereas I’d had flirtations. I wasn’t one of those people who saw ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops, but a few years after, at school, when the teachers would occasionally let kids play the records in a lesson, if you were drawing or something like that, somebody played Aladdin Sane. And of course, we, being teenagers, played ‘Time’ over and over again, because of the famous line in it referring to self-pleasuring. What? It was amazing! We couldn’t believe anybody was actually saying that.
But I never really got into Bowie until I was at art school, which would have been about 1976 or 77. The first album I really bought was Station To Station, which I thought was terrific, but I couldn’t understand what it was. It didn’t feel like glam rock, or soul, or Kraftwerk, but it was individual, epic, and strange. So then I thought, Oh, well, I love Bowie now, so I’d better find out more, so this being a time when you had to buy or borrow records to do that, I went to a record shop and saw David Live.
I thought it was a greatest hits album, which would save me a bit of money, but when I got home and listened to it, of course, I soon discovered it wasn’t that at all. I love its strung-out anxiety. It’s a live album [from the Diamond Dogs tour] full of panic, on which the versions of his songs are very, very different. His voice is hoarse, almost broken, because he’s been touring for weeks, but it still has this absolute authority. And I love the way the musicians sound… apparently there’d been a terrible argument before everybody went on stage about the deal they were being paid, so they’re very disgruntled, but there’s this epic urgency to it. And Earl Slick, who’s only 22, has only just been parachuted in to replace Mick Ronson. He’s just fearless here, given that those are big, stacked heels to fill. He attacks every single song with this wild animal.
3. Randy Newman
Trouble In Paradise
Randy Newman’s also a total one-off, isn’t he? His combination of romance and irony is really unusual. He’s a kind of romantic cynic, although I don’t really believe in the word cynic. He’s a realist. He sees the world as it is, and wishes it were better, but also recognises when it’s sad. Plus, his ability to spike and satirise is second to none.
‘I Love LA’ is a great song, but my favourite song, I think, is ‘My Life Is Good’, where the character, I think, is some extremely arrogant LA-based producer or a musician or someone who makes makey, whose life is protected by money from reality, and from any responsibility to care about other people. There’s a great bit when the teachers at the private school call him in because the kid’s been misbehaving, and to prove to her how wonderful he is and how his child couldn’t be involved in anything untoward, he goes into a spiel about who he was out with last night. Do you know where I was last night? You know who I met? I was hanging around with Mr Bruce Springsteen! And then he says, Bruce said to me… and the music then turns into a sort of dream sequence, where Bruce says, ‘Randy, how would you like to be the Boss for tonight?’ It’s bonkers, but it’s brilliant.
Randy Newman comes from a family of film composers, a heritage he mixes with ragtime and rock and roll, and to play all those styles and introduce a kind of ironic slant on modern life is astonishing. It’s also very difficult to be funny. I know that sounds like a silly thing to say, but to actually, genuinely be a serious musician who can also be humorous and really pull that off is tough. No one’s that funny. Apart from The Barron Knights, obviously.
4. Kate Bush
Hounds Of Love
I was once in a room with Kate Bush, you know. I know! I was too frightened to say anything. It was at an exhibition of the wonderful painter John Byrne’s work. I’m not the kind of person to have regrets in my life, but I wish I’d said hello to her.
I knew ‘Wuthering Heights’ early on, but her music was generally a bit Marmite to people. But when this album came out, I just loved it – there was so much invention in it, sound-wise, and it was really at the cutting edge of what you could do technically. I couldn’t understand how she was writing songs like ‘Hello Earth’, with the astronaut guy and all the bleeps, and ‘Waking The Witch’, with all those hellos, and how she was somehow able to make them out of collaging sounds, and using samples of voices. The editing of those voices and the compression of them – sometimes saying something very literal, sometimes something very theatrical – I didn’t know how she achieved that. And in tracks like ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, she can delve into the subconscious and touch it very deeply. She seems to find her way in there and allow this stuff to rise up. There’s nothing bogus about that album at all. She had the drive to use this real cutting-edge, new technology and new techniques to take us to this deeper place. What a thing.
5. Television
Marquee Moon
I went to see Television [in 1977] at the late lamented Glasgow Apollo, which is gone now, which was a huge venue, when the support band was Blondie, although we didn’t know who they were. In those days, the lines of communication were a little thinner than they are now. In contrast to the Kate Bush album, this one is built from guitars, bass, drums and a bit of keyboards, but from that dry set of stuff they still created a whole other world, a mysterious world. And I still don’t know what they’re talking about – what the marquee moon was, what they’re doing going to a graveyard in a Cadillac at midnight, and so on – but all these stories are suggested by a guitar that’s not doing stuff that I thought guitars did. They’re far from the guitars of Earl Slick or Mick Ronson. They’re very dry, almost jazz-like, with these pure melodic lines that pull you into it. Just think of the title track, which is so odd, starting with two guitars calling to each other, in a fairly abstract sense. And then Tom Verlaine starts to sing over them, but these lines continue, and another line is added, and another, which pulls us into this mechanism for thrusting the song forward; it grows in momentum. Then it reaches this almost Mike Oldfield bit where it goes – BLING! BLING! BLING! BLING! – then it collapses, and it goes back to the start. Yeah, so it’s fabulous and strange, and very compelling.
6. Frank Sinatra
A Man Alone
I've never bought a Frank Sinatra album, but my parents had lots of them. This one was in our house, but I don’t think they ever played it apart from the song that goes, “there was a girl in Denver before the summer storm / Oh, her eyes were tender…” [Love’s Been Good To Me]. Frank had met this poet called Rod McKuen, who was popular in America in the late 60s and early 70s, writing maudlin poems and lyrics for songs. A lot of this album is Sinatra reading poems, and it reminds you that people forget how good an actor Frank Sinatra was.
Sinatra is playing this kind of salesman, or Don Draper kind of guy who seems to wander around America being lonely. I look at this now, at 67, and I feel a little uncomfortable about him wandering around America, having left a lot of people and wreckage behind him, and us being invited to feel sorry for him, which sort of pulls off, because his voice is incredible and the arrangements are very cinematic. A Man Alone is this very lush, sad soundtrack, a strange Disney ride you might have wanted to go on in the late 1960s. And his voice, of course, is just incredible, with perfect diction, and there are these little fireworks he deploys. One of the little poems, ‘Night’, which is about the loneliness and fear that can come to you in the middle of the night, is a really strange thing to be having on a Frank Sinatra album. I can only imagine that my father bought it by accident, expecting something else.
7. Talking Heads
Remain In Light
I’m struck by the fact that so many of these albums I’ve chosen are dominated by an individual character. It’s like Sinatra, the man alone, the rat packer, the wisecracker, Bowie, Kate Bush. I think that’s what music is about a lot of the time – it’s not just about the tonal, melodic sounds, but the story of the character who’s getting into your head, and a story not necessarily told in a narrative form. And I say this knowing that David Byrne hasn’t constructed all this music with Talking Heads. His is not the only hand at play – the whole band was very, very musical and involved in all of this. But Byrne’s character, his voice, his persona, his look, crystallise the whole thing, especially when he gets to ‘Once In A Lifetime’. He’s not just in a buttoned-up shirt, looking a bit sweaty. Now he’s dressed as a minister, and he’s got all of the moves, and people can start to do them, which draws them into this very unusual song.
One of my favourite tracks is the last one, ‘The Overload’, which talks about the digital world. It’s basically about something going wrong with a powerful computer, I think – or at least I think that’s what’s wrong. It could also be about a human being, I suppose. But there’s this sense of darkness and the closing down of something that will unleash a kind of malevolent force. It’s very Doctor Who, actually.
8. Goldfrapp
Supernature
I nearly picked The Seventh Tree, which is beautiful, with a very laid-back, sort of brassy, guitar-led Beatles-like pop at points. But Supernatural is my favourite by them. It’s full-on Bolan-esque. To start with ‘Ooh La La’, a total glam stomp – I’m a sucker for a glam stomp. The first three tracks are like total hymns to a past genre, and I think that’s very difficult to do without taking the piss. Goldfrapp are able to touch the sort of vitality and innocence of that music. At the same time, these songs are never pastiches of glam – they don’t sound sampled or anything like that, but absolutely up to date. And Alison Goldfrapp’s voice is so incredible. It’s so beautiful and rich. She’s just great.
9. Pulp
This Is Hardcore
Jarvis Cocker is amazing. I also know This Is Hardcore was a troubled album and took a long, long time to make. They were maybe doing a little bit of soul-searching at this point about what their identity was, because there’s no ‘let’s all get together in the year 2000’ here. There are songs looking forward in different, softer ways, like on ‘Help The Aged’. Only Jarvis Cocker could write a song about pensioners. I love his take on the world.
The title track itself is fabulous, so epic, and I love the malevolence in it. I think what makes a great album is being able to go from the light to the dark, with its music having a power that alerts us to the onset of a rather dark force that may be within all of us and should not be ignored. [Looks at notes and laughs.] That sounds quite good, actually. I could be a polytechnic professor! But I love the way Jarvis has that fabulous ability to appear very colloquial and chatty while at the same time following these dark, epic themes. And the whole band have to be congratulated for building the mood behind him.
10. Robert Donat reads his favourite poetry
Robert Donat was a British film star in the 30s. He’s in Hitchcock’s British version of The 39 Steps and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. And he’s a very grand sort of old stage actor, when people like him rather spoke like this. I bought this album for a job I was doing, for comic reasons, but I was interested in older accents and older ways of speaking. He belongs to a theatrical tradition that’s probably closer to what was going on at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, and his accent is very posh, but also rather warm, which is nice, like nothing we have today.
One of the things that interests me, given that recording only goes back 150 years, is how did people speak before that? You know, say 200, 250 years ago? Donat did half a dozen or so of these albums – on my copy, he reads Keats’ ‘Bright Star’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Way Through The Woods’, and I ended up finding his readings very, very comforting. He was also an interesting character, a film star at a time when there weren’t very many British film stars, a little out of time, but with a liveliness to him on camera that felt new. When I play this, I really feel as if I am plugging into the past.
11. Sister Rosetta Tharpe
The Best Of
I’m sure everybody else has seen that little clip of Sister Rosetta from the Granada show in the 60s [The Blues And Gospel Train, broadcast in May 1964, from Wilbraham Road station in Whalley Range]. It’s a wet afternoon on that platform when Sister Rosetta turns up in her churchy gear, and then she brings out a Gibson SG! My first guitar was a Gibson SG, which I’d seen in a shop window, and it was the love of my life.
They were the only guitars I knew that were good, so I’d put down a deposit and it cost £500, which was a huge amount of money back then. I worked in a pub all through the summer break to save up for that guitar, bought it – it was beautiful – and loved it so much, but then it disappeared. Years later, my wife, having heard me talk about how much I’d loved this guitar, found a replica for my 60th birthday, as close as possible to a vintage guitar of the same age. Mine’s the same colour as Sister Rosetta’s, all cream, but no, her guitar playing isn’t like mine. Her’s is extraordinary.
If she’d been a man, she would have been placed much, much higher up the ranks in terms of what she was doing. My best of has the song ‘I Heard My Mother Call My Name In Prayer’ on it, which is so sad, and so full of that gospel respect for mothers. Clearly, something terrible had happened in the subject’s life, but the mother had remained steadfast, kneeling down in her cottage on the hill to pray to the Lord. It’s so beautiful. Also, there’s a brilliant, quite graphic, song called ‘Were You There When They Crucified Our Lord’? Can you tell I’m a Catholic?
12. Ennio Morricone
The Mission OST
This is one of the greatest soundtracks, and obviously, given what I do, I’m a big fan of soundtracks. I met Morricone once before one of his concerts, and got a selfie with him because I was so excited. He didn’t speak English, or at least they said he didn’t. One minute – that’d be a good way to get through the night, wouldn’t it, to just pretend you can’t speak, so you can’t talk to people!
The Mission is the sort of film that doesn’t get made anymore, about the Jesuits going to Latin America, to the jungles. Robert De Niro plays a character who’s murdered someone, and the only way his soul or his psyche can survive is to pay a penance, which the priests work out for him, which wouldn’t be an exciting subject for producers today. But it’s excellent, and I love ‘Jacob’s Theme’ in the film, which Jeremy Irons, the actor, ‘plays’ on the recorder. The melody is lifted into the score, and then it rises. And because it’s about Jesuits in Latin America, the soundtrack combines European Catholic choral music with Latin American rhythms and singing. It’s like wild music, but it has a holy, sacred element to it. It’s just an incredible combination.
13. Sex Pistols
Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
This was inevitable, really, wasn’t it? I mean, I was there when it came out, and I just thought it was incredible. The whole brouhaha about the Sex Pistols in the newspapers took over the whole culture before we’d even heard a note, so it was hard to grasp their musical identity, other than the fact that everyone said that they were terrible, they couldn’t play, all that stuff. Finally, Virgin signed them, and they brought this out, and it’s just stunning.
When those chords of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ begin, it tears you into the whole song. And John Lydon’s voice was so absolutely unique at that time, and so unignorable. I’d heard about the songs, and there were versions of them knocking around, but when you heard these fully formed, complete things that went from A to Z and had this blistering kind of power to them, it really made you feel you could achieve something like that, too. The idea that you could make such powerful music so simply was so exciting, especially after there’d been such a dominance of musical sophistication with Yes and Genesis and the supergroups, which all demanded a kind of musical bravado and technical skill that was way beyond the limit of any of us. The fact that this was available to us, and driven by a kind of youthful anger, was so exciting. It still is!
The Scottish actor and musician revisits the now gentrified streets of London’s Soho, recalling the sites that marked his youth hustling for
INTERVIEW
Peter Capaldi: ‘I wouldn’t mind some of my ashes being spread here one day’
The Scottish actor and musician revisits the now gentrified streets of London’s Soho, recalling the sites that marked his youth hustling for jobs, first in studios, then on stage
Portrait by Tom Pilston for The Observer
Friday 16 January 2026
Sometimes the right sort of backdrop, one familiar from the past, is hard to find again. The landscape has altered and you struggle to find your bearings. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for. When Peter Capaldi set off through London’s Soho last spring to shoot a cover image for his album Sweet Illusions he searched for somewhere suitably gritty.
“I couldn’t find the sort of scuzzy place I wanted. In the end the photographer, Ray Burmiston, who I’d worked with a lot on Doctor Who, took me sitting in a bus shelter outside the old Saint Martin’s School of Art building.
“It worked, because during one of the longueurs in my career, when things weren’t going too well, I went along to a fantastic term of life drawing classes there.”
The album, released last year, consolidated Capaldi’s return to music – a return sparked by meeting guitarist Robert Howard (Dr Robert from the 1980s band the Blow Monkeys) – and heralded a live tour that will now take him across Britain. Howard encouraged the actor to make music again, and produced his latest album and 2021’s St Christopher.
Music was at the heart of the formative years Capaldi spent in London, keen to hit the big time with his first band, the Dreamboys. Back then, in the early 1980s, the young singer and frontman roamed the shady streets bordered by Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street and Leicester Square, thirsty for a break. “I wouldn’t mind some of my ashes being spread here one day,” he says, as we retrace his youthful steps, “and perhaps some in Crouch End, where I lived a long time, and in Glasgow. And maybe Venice.”
The Scottish actor is best known for playing those twin totems of British pop culture: the 12th Doctor and the fiery Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It. His stint in the Tardis won him an audience of millions, while the political sitcom won him a Bafta. Although he was born and raised in Glasgow, he had two distinct runs at Soho life as a young adult, establishing an affinity with the area that starts and ends with his love of music.
“The initial wave was trying to be a pop star. I’d come down armed with cassette demos and trail around the music labels,” he says. Sometimes his fellow band members would join him, like drummer Craig Ferguson, who later became a talkshow host in the US. “We would go to a telephone box in Soho Square and phone up all the record companies. This is where all the business was then, and later I would be here on stage, or in a recording booth inside a little studio doing a voiceover.”
As the winter light dims, Capaldi, 67, turns up the collar on his dark overcoat and strides ahead through streets that have – despite cigarettes and chewing gum – otherwise rather cleaned up their act. “I have spent most of my professional life here, one way or another, but it was much grubbier back then. I watched the wonderful Neil Jordan film Mona Lisa the other day, and there are scenes in Soho in it, where Bob Hoskins goes looking for a lost girl. They shot it on location and there were fluorescent pieces of card stuck up everywhere with things like “Danielle, French model, top floor” written on them in marker pen. I feel less at home here now, because it’s all been tidied up and commercially branded.”
The films Jordan made in the late 1980s, along with John Mackenzie’s London thriller The Long Good Friday, remain favourites. “They were beautifully shot and romantic somehow. There was a sadness and melancholy to them.”
Our plan is to wind our way to the 100 Club, a fabled music venue on Oxford Street. It is where the Dreamboys long ago supported Scottish band Altered Images. It is also, rather aptly, the venue of the final date of Capaldi’s new tour. Even better, he tells me gleefully, a second night has just been added because the first sold out. Most of the landmarks on our stroll, however, will date from his second assault on the English capital – his years as a wannabe actor.
First port of call is the Angus Steakhouse near Leicester Square, where his visiting parents, Gerald and Nancy, bought him dinner when he was cast in his first play. “I was down here to make my name as a fresh-faced actor, having already failed as a fresh-faced pop star. My parents, who were not very well travelled, sweetly made the big trip from Glasgow with my sister to come and see me. I wasn’t even on in the West End.
“It was a production of Dracula, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, at the old Half Moon Theatre in the East End. I was playing Jonathan Harker. When I came off stage, Daniel, who was brilliant, said to me, ‘I know where your parents are sitting because they are the only people in the audience who aren’t looking at me.’ He was right, because they were quite taken with their son,” Capaldi says, with an affectionate smile. “Anyway, my father, rather movingly, wanted to take me for a slap-up meal later. He had looked up the steakhouse. It wasn’t a world they were used to at all.”
Unlovely Leicester Square also means a lot to Capaldi. He met and fell in love with his wife, the producer Elaine Collins, while they both worked on a show that ran at the nearby Donmar Warehouse. On their way home on Saturday nights they would pick up early editions of this newspaper in the square. Close by, on Frith Street, Bar Italia is still going strong. “That was the place! Thank god it survives. I was looking for an identity then, but even though I had Italian heritage on my dad’s side, I didn’t really know what coffee to order.”
Soho was where a cohort of young acting hopefuls were sent to auditions, he recalls. “You would go up a rickety staircase to some little room and find to your horror that all kinds of other more successful, tall, pale actors were there too.”
After keeping up with his purposeful pace on my bespoke tour, I’m glad when we suddenly stop at the Greek Street doorway of the Coach & Horses. This pub, surely a pin-drop on any map of the demimonde, is where the first of a steady flow of Capaldi fans approach. The star gamely acknowledges them and poses for selfies before we step into the crowded bar. “I was never part of ‘dark Soho’, but it was there as a background, a flavour,” he tells me, with a desire to convey his meaning that has, happily, nothing of the ferocity of Malcolm Tucker making a point. “I was quite frightened of going into such a famous pub, especially because, as a geek, I knew that Tom Baker, then the Doctor, used to come here. He was part of the whole Jeffrey Bernard/Francis Bacon set. Important for those aspiring to be louche.”
Capaldi once parodied the Soho scene in his spoof documentary The Cricklewood Greats in which he invented a club called the Hokey Cokey, “because when you were in you were in, and when you were out…” Back then, he says, he wished he could just “metamorphose” into the actor John Hurt, who seemed to him a perfect confection, with “a Keith Richards rock star thing, at the same time as a kind of Paul Scofield quality. He had all the bases covered.”
The young Capaldi clearly had an urge to push at closed doors and it seems to have fuelled his creative drive. “I only went to art school in Glasgow because I didn’t get into drama school. I was rejected, so my art teacher asked if they could have a look at me, because I’d missed the admission dates. They let me in and it was the best thing that could have happened. It was a way more delightful, constructive place to be. In fact, we looked down our noses at the drama school kids, who were rather staid.”
Later, in London, he “was kicked out of the music fraternity”, and so tried acting. But this also proved “a whole other world where I didn’t really know anybody”. He tried to “reinvent” himself in an England that was very different to home. “I mostly remember feeling my days were numbered because there were a lot of people clearly more talented and already more famous than I was. There was a stark class difference. I felt I stood no chance.”
The old wounds are evident as his eyes flash with remembered disappointments. The sense that the cards were stacked against him has left its trace, despite success and the passage of time.
“Unfortunately, it was assumed that other actors who spoke standard English could do any other accent, whereas if, like me, you were Scottish, that was all you could do.”
It was, he agrees, a matter of doggedly betting against the odds. “But when you are young you throw yourself into things just to see what happens. And it worked, because by falling into playing music, I ended up supporting Altered Images, which was fronted by Clare Grogan, who had starred in Gregory’s Girl. Bill Forsyth, who directed it, used to come along to the gigs, so that’s how I got to know him and that’s how I got a part in his film Local Hero – such a break!”
Although acting jobs were sporadic, Capaldi featured in two cinematic classics of the era, not only Local Hero but also Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons.
After a pause for a photo with a couple of women out on a birthday treat, a small group of English schoolgirls in tartan kilts draws near. One says she recently began watching David Tennant as the Doctor and has now got up to Capaldi’s episodes. He smiles. I could already have testified to his warmth when handling his public, because my younger son, a fan, once received a kind, amusing note from him in the post, complete with a little sketch of a Dalek.
As the street lights begin to twinkle, there is brief concern that we have not yet visited the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, where the actor starred in The Ladykillers just over a decade ago. One of his fondest memories is of a parcel from Italy sent to him there. “Inside it was a huge, beautiful cheese from the mayor of Picinisco, the village my grandfather came from. It was to celebrate a son of Picinisco making it to the West End stage.”
The small town in the Comino Valley is the ancestral homeland for several Scottish-Italian families, not just Capaldis like Peter and his famous second cousin once removed – Lewis, the singer.
In Wardour Street, Capaldi directs my eyes up to the Hammer House sign, an emblem of the great days of British screen vampires, cavorting under flickering chandeliers. “I love horror,” he explains. “I was a huge devotee of the Hammer films of the 1960s and 1970s. When I was doing Local Hero my screen test was at Bray Studios, near Windsor, where they were made. I immediately recognised the forest around there as Transylvania.”
Soho Square still looms large for the actor. It is steeped in the history he loves. Once a London home for the 18th-century Scottish painter Allan Ramsay and today for Paul McCartney’s business, in the 1980s it was HQ for Sony Music, where he remembers “some very unfruitful and depressing meetings”. On a corner stands the House of St Barnabas, former home of a non-profit members’ club Capaldi helped to found, on the instigation of Richard Strange, frontman of the 1970s punk band Doctors of Madness.
“We put money in because it was about helping homeless people. We wanted to give people a chance by working there. It was a welcoming and positive place that wasn’t drenched with Soho elites from the advertising and music worlds. I was really sad when it closed last year.”
We leave the square to the sound of Hare Krishna bells and pass, on our way to the 100 Club, an alley above which Capaldi auditioned for The Thick of It. “The places we’ve been to have changed my life and the 100 Club is still a great venue. My music now is just for fun though. I take it seriously in the sense of giving time to it, but don’t expect anything,” he says, with a confident shrug.
For someone with no expectations, he’s doing pretty well: last summer he joined Franz Ferdinand on stage at Glastonbury. “There is no ambition attached to it for me now though. I have musician friends who have given their life to it, to all the ups and downs, so I don’t think I’m suddenly the same. I’m not going to be some Johnny-come-lately.”
He’s no such thing; he’s just come full circle. When Capaldi stands before the 100 Club crowd again in early March, he will be reclaiming a lost prize, first glimpsed on these Soho streets.
Peter Capaldi Live is on tour nationwide from 24 February - 9 March; myticket.co.uk
From the book Inside Stories: Diaries of British Film-makers at Work, edited by Duncan Petrie, 1996.
Transcript under the cut:
The Writer
Peter Capaldi
For Scottish actor and writer Peter Capaldi, 1995 was dominated by one project, the writing of his second feature script (after Soft Top, Hard Shoulder), a career move spurred on by an unexpected Oscar triumph.
Preamble On 27 March Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life, a twenty-five-minute film I wrote and directed, and funded by the Scottish Film Fund and BBC Scotland, won an Oscar for best short film. I spent the week in Hollywood with, among others, my wife Elaine, my daughter Cicely and Ruth Kenley-Letts who produced the film. My American agent Robert Newman of ICM set up dozens of meetings with studios to try and sell Moon Man, the second draft of which I have just completed. By the end of the week we have a number of offers and finally we all decide to go with Miramax who seem really to want to make the film.
April 6-7 Fly to Glasgow, and then am driven for two and a half hours to Fort William to present a prize at the Celtic Film Festival. I talk to a number of people about the Miramax deal and the general opinion is the same: ‘Your life will be hell.’ I want to put a mark by these words in this diary.
April 8 1 am. I talk to Robert, my agent in America, who tells me Miramax have rejected his financial proposal for Moon Man and come back with a MUCH lower offer. Elaine and I get very depressed. Having been fanned into a frenzy of avarice by Hollywood, we have got very tired of our two-bedroom flat in Crouch End, which, since the arrival of our daughter, has become the incredible shrinking flat. Our delusions of grandeur have become so real that we even went into the local estate agents and asked for details of houses in the £250-—300,000 price range. I have to admit this did feel great, and it will almost be worth the humiliation of telling them to forget it.
April 12 Ruth rings. Miramax have approved our proposal. We are all delighted. Then madness sets in again. The estate agent arrives, and we welcome him enthusiastically. The house we have seen (and fallen in love with) is also with his company. He is sweating with the effort of suppressing his natural spiv qualities (in accordance with the fashion of the day), but he is obviously delighted he’s caught us on the up. He suggests we put in an offer for the house, We don’t have the money but what the hell! We’re in the movies!
April 13 Bob Weinstein, the president of Miramax, has rung and asks me to come to New York. He wants to talk to me about a book that he’s sent me, A Wrinkle in Time. It’s about a group of kids who get drawn into an alternative universe. I am not keen but suspect Bob is. Bob says he respects my views and then says, ‘And it doesn’t mean we don’t want to do Moon Man. That will happen.’ But just for a moment I feel the possibility of “switch and bait’ which is what big studios do. They talk for twenty minutes about your project (the bait), then show you the script they really want to do (the switch), which has usually already been through just about every director’s hands.
April 25 Talk to Bob as I want to tell him that I don’t want to develop A Wrinkle in Time for him. He accepts this with his usual charm. ‘Have we closed the deal yet?’ he asks. ‘I think we’re about to,’ I tell him. ‘But you haven’t signed yet. So I’ve still got to be nice to you. Once you've signed I’ll be like Moon Man! What is this shit? Get outta here!’
April 27 Cary Granite (yes, his real name) phones from Miramax. We are ‘seconds’ away from closing the deal. Bob wants me to come to New York next week to get my first note session on the script. ‘When would suit you?’ I ask. ‘Thursday,’ he says. ‘Thursday will be fine,’ I reply. Me. In New York. Show business, don’t you love it?
April 28 Type up more pages of Moon Man. The script is on my mind a lot. The whole middle act is problematic. I don’t think there’s enough inventiveness in it. And a lot of the characters are performing the same function. There’s a hunchbacked woman who tells the heroine much the same as the old man and woman do. But she’s funnier. But I don’t know if she’s right. Maybe she’s in the wrong place. The whole second half needs to be more focused. I’ve got a lot of work to do. Also, Ruth shows me the budget. The actual document that’s been prepared has a breakdown of my script with costs. My knees go to jelly. She then makes a criticism of the script. I take it, but it’s really hard. And she’s absolutely right. But if I find it hard coming from her, how am I going to feel in New York with Miramax?
May 4 New York. Put my dark suit on and wait for the car. Meeting at Miramax with Bob Weinstein, Richard Potter (director of production and development), Deborah Porter and Amy Israel. Bob opens the script. The first scene is a night exterior. He says, ‘Does this have to be outside?’ I look at him, a little stunned, and I am about to muster a weak ‘no’ when I realise that he’s joking. In the end I am very happy with their reaction. I get a lot of criticisms, but I think these are valid and I am most pleased that we all seem to see the same movie. I also pre-empted them, I think, by launching into my own pile of notes on the script, which I think was a first. The only worry I have is that they seem to want a moral dimension carried by the lead character. In short, she is for me simply a woman who has her child abducted, searches for the child, fights for it and is reunited. They, on the other hand, seem to feel that the script would be more powerful if the
woman were somehow responsible for the loss of her child, for example if she were a career woman, she could somehow neglect her child, thus allowing the forces of darkness to enter her life and make off with him. When they are reunited, she would learn that, hey, being a mother is more important than having a career. This I don’t agree with, as (a) I think it’s saying women’s place is in the home and (b) it’s too pat. I think we’re going to have problems with this.
May 25 Telephone Amanda (ICM London). She’s back from Cannes and tells me that Miramax have made an announcement in The Hollywood Reporter that they are doing Moon Man. She says she has met a lot of their people out there and that they are very serious about the project.
June 8 Getting really stuck trying to pin my lead characters down so I concentrate on one scene. It is the scene where ‘the painter’ is first shown the room he has to decorate. I spend the whole day on it and discover some interesting things about him. He can be witty in an acerbic way, and his language should be a mix of the archaic and the new. ‘Stella’ still remains a problem but I feel as if I am inching towards an understanding of her. She is imaginative and should have plenty of good one-liners. A good day. But slow.
The survey on our new house is OK. Looks like we’ll be moving. But we haven’t signed the contract with Miramax yet and that’s where the cash is coming from. One day at a time.
Get out to do a test voice-over for Sainsbury’s at 5 pm I’m going to keep doing voice-overs as they are my only source of income at the moment.
June 12 Speak to Amanda and Robert (ICM, LA) both of whom are anxious to close the deal, though not half as anxious as I am. Speak to our buyer and our lawyers who say we could exchange next week, meaning we can move in soon after. So we need the dough!
June 13 Minor breakthrough writing ‘Stella’. She’s much more interesting if I make her a little bit of a control freak. Her life is spiralling into chaos, and she’s trying to keep it in check in a million little ways. But she’s got to let go.
June 22 Miramax have been very quiet so now I fear that they don’t want to work with me at all and will not be coughing up the fee for the script, which is the shortfall on our house. This is the doomsday scenario and I am beginning to believe it’s going to happen. I just keep thinking ‘Get into the house, get into the house’; at least then we’ve got some capital. And if going to be in the shit, I might as well be in the shit for a lot.
June 23 Phone Robert, my agent in LA. ‘Have we got a deal,’ I ask. ‘Of course we have a deal. And if we haven’t we'll fuck the bastards and just sell it to someone else.’ I phone Michael, my agent in London, and ask the same question. ‘Of course we have. And if we haven’t, we do two things: we sue the bastards then we set it up somewhere else in three seconds.’ Fighting talk, but it makes me feel ill. The lawyers (for the house move) call. They can’t exchange contracts. The two other parties’ lawyers have buggered off for the afternoon. It will have to be Monday. We get frantic messages from the woman we’re buying from. She sounds like she’s just had a hit of helium. Is it all going to collapse? If it does we won't be penniless but we’ll have to start all the house shit again and I can’t bear it. My calmness is fading.
June 26 We exchange contracts on the house. Weird.
10 pm. Robert phones from LA. Miramax have signed. He’s faxing the contracts to us. I am so happy I can barely talk.
June 30 A blip with the contract. They need another document signed. We have to move fast as ICM in LA have a half-day today then are off until Wednesday for their Fourth of July celebrations. Manage it all by 8 pm.
July 6 Talk to Richard Potter at Miramax in New York who says they’d like to see something. I suggest the first fifty-five pages of the new draft. He agrees and I say I’ll send it to him Monday.
July 17 Move into the new house. Villa Miramax!
July 20 Miramax ring. Bob Weinstein and Richard Potter. They hate the script. ‘What happened?’ says Bob. ‘Too much information, don’t know what’s going on or where I am. The first script I couldn’t put down, but this one, let me tellya, I put it down, And page twenty. Tell me, please, you did not write page twenty. Tell me you were looking after your kid, or you were sick that day. Tell me you did not write page twenty. Can we still stop the cheque?’ They really hate it. But they are hugely enthusiastic, as only the Americans can be, about the bits they like. Bob tells me he wants to go to the line with this. He wants to do this picture. And that if we can make it work it'll be fantastic. I promise them I'll finish this draft by 18 August, in four weeks’ time. But I have to admit, my heart’s not in it any more.
August 3 Ellie Jason of Miramax UK takes me to lunch at L’Escargot. She is very kind and supportive of the script, then gives me her notes, which do vary from Bob and Richard’s in New York but that’s OK as I think I can find a way to make it all work. Leave feeling glum about the script as I always do, but cheered up at such support.
August 31 It’s the middle of the night. 2am. I can’t sleep. I’ve spent all day working on the script which is to be presented to Miramax tomorrow. I’ve drunk too much coffee and spent too long in front of the word processor. I can’t escape Moon Man. It keeps playing in my head — over and over again — bits that don’t work. What setting for this? What actor for that? Over and over.
The last three months have been devoted to this. I’ve gone into an office every day and written. I’ve never done that before. Inevitably August has seen the script invade more and more of my time and thoughts. The script isn’t right. I wouldn’t want to shoot this version, but it’s closer, much closer. One or two drafts should do it. But I’m happy that this phase has drawn to a close and I have fulfilled the terms of my contract.
September 18 Still no news from Miramax. Getting worried about surviving financially. Phone Michael, my London agent, to ask if he can get me a job. Acting or directing commercials.
September 19 Elle Jason from Miramax London rings me at home and says she’s been in touch with New York, who like ‘the script, but the coordinator has been both ill and away and that’s held everything up. But she confirms with me that New York remain very committed and excited about the script. I really appreciate her doing this and thank her for her kindness.
September 29 Richard Potter rings. He enthuses about the script then moves on to some soft criticisms. These are fine and what I expected, but it seems clear to me that the real criticisms will come from Bob Weinstein, as will the real decisions. But Richard is very nice and we talk a lot about the movie without really getting into notes. He arranges for him and Bob to ring me on Monday at 8.30 pm our time.
October 1 According to our contract Miramax have thirty days from the delivery of my script to make up their mind what its fate is. Otherwise the material reverts back to me. Their time is up today.
October 2 8.30pm. Richard Potter rings without Bob who sends his apologies. He should have been in LA but missed the flight due to some crisis in New York. He arranges to phone me tomorrow at 8 pm. Put briefly, Richard is asking for an extension, maybe a couple of days, maybe into next week.
October 3 8pm. I sit waiting for Bob Weinstein’s call. I wait, and I wait. About 9 pm some off-hand secretary who I’ve never spoken to rings to say Bob will be ringing tomorrow at 9 am LA time. That's it. No explanation, no apology, nothing.
October 4 I sleep until almost eleven this morning and wake up miserable. I feel completely uncertain about the film’s future.
5pm. Waiting for Bob to ring. Richard Potter rings to say he’ll be fifteen minutes late. Waiting for Bob. He rings. Bob sounds like he has just woken up. Asks if I’ll be in New York sometime as this kind of conversation would be better in person. He likes the script but ... ‘We have this kind of relationship so I'll just go straight in, I won’t pull any punches, we have another writer, George Wang, he’s just done something for us, and I think he’d be great on this, what do you think?’ I am really hurt and taken by surprise, but say, ‘Intellectually I know that may be of great use but emotionally I can’t give you an answer right now.’ Bob says fine and then gives me an hour and twenty minutes of notes, many of which contradict those given by the story department via Richard. From all of these criticisms it seems to me he is not interested in this film. At he end he says, “You told me once you’d never direct a script you didn’t feel secure with.’ (True.) ‘Would you direct this?’ I say ‘No’.
Now we have a problem. The contract allows for Miramax to make a decision about production based on this draft. It does not legislate for another draft. I tell Bob, I'd like to do another draft but I don’t have any money. He says he’ll get back to me in a couple of days with a proposal.
I try to get in touch with Robert in LA but ICM is closed. It’s Yom Kippur today, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and if there ever was a bunch of folks who had a lot of atoning to do it would be agents. I phone Robert at home apologising on his answering machine for ringing on this holy day. I didn’t have him down as a religious guy, and I’m proved right as when he finally rings, it’s from his gym. Unfortunately for him I just ask him to listen to how I’m feeling which is bad. He says he’ll talk to Michael Eisner (not that Michael Eisner [Chief Executive, Walt Disney], another one) in legal affairs tomorrow.
October 5 We have a conference-call with Robert and Michael Eisner who tell us they have already said no to Miramax’s offer which is not much money and another writer. They want to know how much they should ask for. We all sit around Ruth’s kitchen table, can’t think of a figure, laugh sickly at our daft inexperience and ineptitude and tell them to think of a number. It’s 1.30 am before the calls are finished and I can get to bed.
October 6 Miramax has accepted. I’ve asked for six weeks: 16 November to 24 November to rewrite and draw. They’ve committed enough money to it to mean they’re serious about the movie. They are being generous. I love them. They are going to make my life hell, but I love them. It’s my task now to deliver them a script that I am prepared to direct. Thereafter if they choose to bring on another (mutually acceptable) writer then that’s fine as I would have had a crack at it. I think they are being extremely generous.
October 15 Tomorrow I start work. I’ve got six weeks to pin down the film I want to make. I’m worried. I’m going to spend the first week drawing as I think the visual side of the picture has been neglected. I hope it is going to fire my imagination.
October 20 I’ve spent a week drawing images from the film, abandoning the word processor, abandoning the words. I’ve only got six weeks and the script still has lots of problems. Should I be doing this? Yes. The script, the document Miramax is judging, is a literary thing, made of words, structure, logic. It’s a map of a route we haven’t settled yet, through a landscape we think, or thought, years ago, we were interested in. But the logic is tyrannical. The words constricting. I’ve got to make the script the best that I can, but at the end of the day, I’m trying to make a film. An experience that happens in a cinema, Butterkist in one hand, Kia Ora in the other. The lights go down, the curtains part and this experience happens. You don’t read it. So the drawings are important because they are a more direct path to my imagination, and closer in some respects to nature of the final medium itself.
October 25 Have spent the last three days sitting down working on theme. Over and over again searching for the theme of the film, largely because Miramax seem to want to discuss it. I don’t. But I'll have to. So I better know what it is. Three days of digging deeper and deeper into the script so I can discuss what it’s really about. But what’s the point of articulating in words what is, I hope, a visceral response to a set of moving pictures? I don’t know. But I found it. And it was there all the time. Does the fact that I can name it help? Only time will tell.
October 26 A whole day spent actually writing. Concentrating on ‘Andy’. Trying to bring him to life. Then it becomes obvious. Although he is not the lead, he must drive. His character, his ambition, is what has put ‘Stella’ into this place. And he must continue to drive. Until he drives into the side of the garbage truck.
October 27 ‘Stella’ and ‘Andy’. How do I make them appear married? How do married people talk to each other — all the while saying the things I need them to say? And being sympathetic and interesting and funny? And then I turn a corner. I make that scene work. They fall out. It cuts out two pages of stupid dialogue elsewhere then gives me a scene of them making up. Suddenly they’re married. I’m very excited. I’ve pushed it into somewhere else. Parts of the script are reaching out to each other. For the first time I feel this could be something.
October 28 Yesterday’s excitement fades as I try to rewrite the sequence of the ‘Painter’ meeting ‘Jack’ and actually painting the mural. At the moment I’ve got to do this in about two and a half pages and it seems too cramped. Do I have too much going on in the set-up, which is now spreading, with Act One ending on page thirty-five? Can I compress?
November 23 Finish the script. On schedule. Having worked around the clock. Eyes painful from the word processor.
I’ve learnt a lot in the past six weeks. I’ve written faster. Been braver. Worked harder. And I think it’s there. I like the script now. And if someone were to say to me “Would you direct this script?” My answer would be yes. It has transformed into something else. All the work and criticism have been worth it. It’s a movie now.
November 29 To our great surprise Richard Potter from Miramax calls about the script. They only got it yesterday. He says, “Without giving anything away, we’re all smiling.’ He asks me to wait in for a call from Bob Weinstein. About half an hour later Bob calls. He seems very happy about the script. ‘This is a movie now,’ he says. ‘I am excited now as I was the first time I read it. We want to do this.’ He winds up on a very positive note about the script and congratulates me on my work, ‘Way to go.’ Richard stays on the line. He says they are all very excited. He says Bob was calling from home! I say ‘But what happens now?’ The truth is he can’t really say, so I suggest that what happens now is we wait for Bob to come to a decision. He says yes.
Contractually they must come back to us by the end of the year and tell us their intent otherwise the rights of the script revert back to us.
December 6 One year ago today I finished the first draft of Moon Man which had taken since January ‘94 to write.
December 14 BAFTA for a screening of Miramax’s new film Restoration. Harvey Weinstein is there and says to me that he loved the latest draft of Moon Man. He then says, ‘We’re going to make your movie.’
‘We’re going to make your movie’ — I don’t know if I believe that or not. I want to, but I am frightened to, as I'll be setting myself up for a very long fall if I do. But there is something very nice about seeing those words come out of Harvey Weinstein’s mouth. Even if he didn’t mean it.
December 19 Phone Robert in LA to ask about getting my money out of Miramax. He says he’s on to it. I ask him if he saw Bob Weinstein last week. He says yeah. That’s it. I’m disturbed by his tone. And after I’ve put the phone down I begin to fret over something I’m picking up. Something negative. There’s something going on and it doesn’t feel good.
Go to bed. Robert rings from LA. I tell him I felt something negative from our exchange. He says, “You wanna hear somthin’ negative? Bob wants to make your movie. He wants to bring you and Ruth out to discuss rewrites at the start of the year but you are not committed to doing anything.’
He knows they are going to make this proposal but haven’t yet. So I was correctly picking up on something going on. Miramax are going to make a proposal for me to write some more. This seems to me a delaying tactic to give them more time to come to a decision about the film. I know any work the script needs I could do on the move in pre-production. I want to make my movie. And if Miramax don’t want to, I want to know now so we can get the script out of there and into another studio. No more rewrites until we are green lit.
December 27 A fax from Richard Potter at Miramax confirming that they'll be bringing Ruth and me out early in the new year to give us a final decision re Moon Man.
December 28 Ruth, Elaine and I discuss the possibilities. We assume Miramax would like to make the picture as flying us out to say no would seem like a waste of money. Therefore there are issues they would like resolved before picking up the option which would commit them to more money. However, their time is up. I am anxious to get into production now, and if they don’t want it we have solid evidence that a number of other companies do. We decide to put a ceiling on it and give them two weeks to fly us out there and give us their decision.
Postscript (January 23, 1996) New York. A limo comes at 2.30 to take us down to Miramax. The driver, Rolf, is a real gentleman. When we get out I give him five dollars. He says, ‘I’m with you all day.’ ‘Well in case I don’t see you.’
3pm Miramax. Tribeca Building. Bob Weinstein’s office. As I walk into Bob’s tiny office he is on the phone. A cool young American film-maker would have sat down and lit up. I stand. Still on the phone he indicates I should sit. Obviously. He finishes his call. Then, ‘Hi good to see you’ etc. Uncomfortable silence. Something odd. I hear myself say, “This is weird.’ I instantly feel stupid, gauche, unable to resist the pressure to fill the silence, and so fill it with nonsense. ‘Why is it weird?’ asks Bob. Something in his voice alerts me.
Uncomfortable silence. Something is wrong. He looks at me and says, ‘OK, I'll just get straight to it. I asked my brother Harvey to look at it, he’d read it before but I asked him to apply his mind to it. And as distributors, which is what we are known as, we don’t know how to sell this. Is it a kids’ film or an adult film? There are parts in there that seem like a kids’ film but no kids ever going to see it because it’s too scary.’
I’m thinking ‘Kids’ film’? Where is all this coming from? Nobody has ever mentioned kids’ film before.
‘All the doubts I had originally about the script are still there. The problems with the material have not been resolved.’
WHACK. Where the fuck did that come from? Last time he spoke to me he said ‘This is a movie now. I’m as excited now as I was the first time I read it. We want to do this.’ But I know it’s over. Dead gone buried. He just has to say it. And he does.
‘So we don’t feel we can do this.’
The whole of last year and the next turn on this moment. It’s weightless, quiet and intimate and then it’s gone. I relax. Though I think I can feel the word ‘SCHMUCK’ appearing on my forehead. But Bob’s carrying on: ‘And at $10 million it’s a risk. It’s not like Sex, Lies and Videotape at one million or Reservoir Dogs at two. It’s a risk. But I gotta tell you, you’re one of
the family here. And we love you. We love what you do. It’s been great working with you. And I know I’m mad for passing on this and you’re gonna see me at the premiere on crutches and laugh but that’s the way it is. I know Richard Potter wants to have a word with you.’
I don’t cave in. I respect Bob’s position and I tell him so. I also tell him I think he’s wrong and that the script has been resolved and that I would have no doubts about starting shooting it tomorrow. But it’s all academic. I thank him for his support which has been generous and encouraging and if I ever write anything again I’d bring it to him. Then I’m up. He’s shaking my hand. Richard Potter has come into the office. As I leave Bob’s office I say ‘bye’ then shout ‘NEXT’.
Richard is looking for somewhere for us to talk. What’s the point? But I say I’ve got to see Ruth. I’m not looking forward to this. I step into reception. She’s come thousands of miles and she won’t even get to see him. I start to laugh. ‘They’re not doing it,’ I say. ‘You’re joking?’ she predictably replies. ‘No. They’re not going to do it.’ I can’t describe the expression on her face. She looks stunned. Cary Granite appears looking ghostly. He shakes my hand, says something then vanishes. Richard is floundering, ‘We love you, we really want to work with you’ etc. Like everyone here, he’s really saying nothing. I tell him I want to go.
When we arrive at the hotel Rolf, our driver, opens my door. I’ve got a couple of bucks and move to give him them. But he grabs my hand and shakes it. In the palm is the five dollars I gave him earlier. ‘This one’s on me,’ he says.
February 7 I take my three-year-old daughter to the supermarket. As we drive out of the car park I am stuffing a bar of chocolate into my face. I don’t usually do this. So Cicely says:
Peter Capaldi has delivered a bleak assessment on Glasgow as he calls for more action on child poverty
INTERVIEW
Peter Capaldi: There's something wrong with Glasgow
by Rebecca McCurdy
9th November 2025
Peter Capaldi reflects on Glasgow, the city he once called home.
Peter Capaldi has delivered a bleak assessment of Glasgow as he warned the next Scottish Government must recognise the urgency of child poverty.
The esteemed actor, famed for his roles in Doctor Who and The Thick of It, discusses his home city, childhood, and the challenges facing the country in a candid interview with The Herald on Sunday.
Speaking about the city today, he said: "I can't help feeling like something has gone a bit backwards."
Mr Capaldi was born in Glasgow in 1958, spending his formative years living in a tenement flat on Keppochhill Road, in Springburn.
The 67-year-old reflected on his "blissful" childhood surrounded by family in the post-war era.
"I didn't grow up in poverty," he said, adding: "My parents didn't have very much money, but they had enough."
But Mr Capaldi saw classmates at St Teresa's Primary School struggle with poverty.
"When I look at the school photographs from St Teresa's Primary School, there are clearly some kids there who were kind of in rags, almost Victorian, while most of the kids were well turned out," he said.
Those experiences have led him to campaign, predominately with charity Magic Breakfast, to ensure children do not go to school hungry.
He added: “We were close enough that I would come back from school for lunch but I was conscious of people at school who had dinner tickets.
“There was something made of the fact that there were kids getting free meals, unkindly, the way kids often are.
“I think there were a lot of poor kids there at the school. We were conscious of that but I don’t remember becoming involved in any conscious cruelty about it but I felt sorry for the kids.
“I think the stigma of it is awful. The idea that children will become anxious about their status just simply because they can’t get food is awful. It’s an added worry.”
The Oscar and Bafta award-winning actor may not have his own story of growing up poor but there is something about the fact the issue still exists today that makes Mr Capaldi visibly angry.
In Scotland, 22% of children live in relative poverty while more than 80,000 young people are considered to be in “very deep poverty”, where they lack the basic essentials like food, clothing and heating.
Mr Capaldi visited schools alongside Magic Breakfast, where the reality of poverty immediately hit him.
“I was horrified that there were so many kids that didn’t have breakfast, that were still in this day and age, facing that issue. It seems absolutely ridiculous,” he said.
“I think breakfast is one of the most important meals of the day and it’s a place where you can get your head together and prepares for the day. A lot of kids are clearly not having that.
“It’s just immoral that there are kids that are hungry anywhere but that we should have it here in our country that think so much of itself, that kids are walking about hungry, it’s scandalous.
“It’s really simple. There shouldn’t be any children who are hungry. It’s happening in your street, around the corner, all of these schools out there.
“The numbers are staggering in Scotland today.”
A particular source of issue with Mr Capaldi was that a November 2020 pledge by the SNP to fund universal free breakfasts was never realised.
A £3 million scheme was announced in the 2025-26 budget - but Magic Breakfast warns there needs to be a comprehensive plan.
Backing that call, Mr Capaldi said: "When I think back to my own childhood, I just keep thinking about that photograph of all the kids and how poor some of them were. It was a really hard time.
"But now, it's shocking from the statistics, really, to recognise how many children there are in Scotland who are going to school without being fed, without breakfast.
"I would like whoever the next Scottish Government is to recognise the urgency of this situation.
"It's not something that can be placed at the backburner because the hungry children woke up this morning hungry and is going to wake up tomorrow morning hungry unless the government does something about it."
He added: "You can’t have hungry children in a place that’s got these big football teams and rock bands and stadiums and posh restaurants and all of this stuff – a world which I happily inhabit. But you can’t, it’s shameful.
“This isn’t even about an improvement of society. It’s a gaping hole in the structure of our community that there are children who are going to school with no breakfast.
“Governments who have children go to school hungry is a betrayal of the responsibility.”
Mr Capaldi reflects fondly on his own childhood but told The Herald on Sunday that something is now missing from the city he once called home.
"Scotland has many, many wonderful things going on that I am deeply proud of but there still remains problems that exist in that tenement that I was in. They're still there today.
“These social issues have to be addressed. I understand that governing is complicated but there are just somethings that you need.”
He added: “I can’t quite put my finger on it but there is a lack of something – a gap that has opened up. Perhaps it's true of the whole of the UK.
“There has been a regression. The forward momentum has gone.
“The post-war ethos was very powerful, it drove things for 20 years to move forward from the utter destruction of the world wars but that has been forgotten and lost in a fog and in a frenzy of opinion.”
Mr Capaldi also backed The Herald's child poverty campaign, alongside more than 23 anti-poverty charities, which called on the Scottish Government to increase the Scottish Child Payment from £27.15 to £40 per week.
It also urged Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
It was the political satire that gave us omnishambles, pet asbos and the terrifying Malcolm Tucker. Two decades on, creator Armando Iannucci
INTERVIEW / ARTICLE
‘I’m from Glasgow – the swearing came naturally!’ The full uncensored history of The Thick of It
Sun 18 May, 2025
By Tim Jonze
It was the political satire that gave us omnishambles, pet asbos and the terrifying Malcolm Tucker. Two decades on, creator Armando Iannucci and stars including Peter Capaldi and Rebecca Front lift the lid on its chaotic creation
Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It. Composite: BBC/Mike Hogan
Twenty years ago this month we were plunged straight into the middle of an omnishambles. It was a moment in time when petrified politicians lurched from crisis to crisis, scrambling desperately to control the narrative as their endless gaffes derailed even the vaguest attempts to change this country for the better. But am I talking about the tail-end of the Blair years or the televisual tour-de-force that was Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It?
It could be either. It could even be right now – such was the show’s prescient genius. This was a satire that didn’t just mimic the government’s calamities but seemed somehow to foresee them. Over its seven-year run, The Thick of It came up with farcical policies that the government went on to adopt (pet asbos, anyone?), coined new words in the dictionary (the aforementioned omnishambles) and, in Malcolm Tucker, created one of the great malevolent forces of British comedy. Here’s how they did it …
Armando Iannucci, creator The idea for The Thick of It came after I’d done a 2004 documentary about Yes Minister for the BBC. I rewatched every episode and realised that all the topics it covered were still relevant: Europe, the threat of terrorism, austerity … everything! But I also noticed that the power dynamics had shifted. In the mid-Blair years it felt like it was less about the minister being thwarted by their senior civil servant and more about the ministers coming under constant pressure from No 10 and its enforcers to stick to the agenda.
Adam Tandy, producer For a while it was just called “Westminster-based Comedy”.
Iannucci I got in touch with politicos, ex-ministers, former civil servants, political journalists, insiders, outsiders. I said: “I’m not here for scandal, I want the boring stuff!” I wanted to know who gets in first, who’s last to leave, what is the relationship with civil servants, who would take a call from the Daily Mail? And the big revelation for me was how much the country was being run by 22-year-olds. Cabinet ministers were bringing in these junior spads because they thought they were so clever and bright but actually they were just confident. They’d never fixed a car or bought a house or really done anything complicated. Which is why you’d get a lot of these ideas that only sounded good on paper like “beacons of excellence” and “hospital clusters”.
Office politics … (from left) James Smith, Chris Addison, Rebecca Front, Peter Capaldi and Joanna Scanlan in The Thick of It. Photograph: BBC
Jamie Cairney, director of photography Armando’s opening gambit was: this cannot be like a traditional BBC comedy. He wanted to forget all of the Hollywood drama conventions. One of his reference points was The News from Number 10, a documentary about Alastair Campbell which was really messy because everything’s running at a million miles an hour. And another reference point was [Danish drama] Festen, the first Dogme 95 film. He even said: “I want you to try and adhere to the Dogme 95 vows of chastity” – things like “cameras must be handheld” and “you can only use natural light”. Very anti-establishment stuff!
Iannucci BBC Four had a small budget, I think less than £100k. They said: what can you do with it? The constraints of the budget actually helped. It forced me to be quite experimental.
Ian Martin, swearing consultant I was doing a satirical website with my brother Paul called martian.fm, and one of the things I wrote every week was this thing called Hansard Late. It was written in the style of the proceedings of the House of Commons, but it was also very sweary, like “I would respectfully ask the Honourable Gentleman to shove it up his cock” or whatever. I got an email saying: “Hi, I’m Armando Iannucci, your stuff makes me laugh, want to do some stuff for me?”. Obviously I thought it was a spoof!
Iannucci I wanted something that felt like you were eavesdropping on something you’re not meant to see. That’s how we came up with the title: you are really in the thick of it.
Peter Capaldi, played director of communications Malcolm Tucker It was hard to get any details about it. I asked if there was a script and they said no. That doesn’t give you very much confidence, does it? What are we supposed to do if you don’t have a script? Armando said just improvise. OK, well, I hated improvising because generally improvising means that the person with the biggest ego gets the biggest part. The only reason I hung on in there was because I really liked Armando’s previous work.
Sarah Crowe, casting director I’d worked with Armando before on Partridge and so whenever I’d see people try out for other things like theatre or commercials, I’d make a little note to say “Armando would like”. The cast came from all different places: kids’ television, theatre, standup … I’d even cast Alex Macqueen, who played Julius, in an Utterly Butterly commercial! I’d seen Peter in a sitcom; it wasn’t a very good one, but I remember thinking he was quite Mandelson-esque.
Iannucci We hadn’t written Malcolm as Scottish, we’d just written someone trying to keep his aggression in and then when he’s prodded too many times it bursts out. I actually had Peter down as a very gentle kind of soul, as he is in real life. But, as he tells it, he turned up in a bad mood that day.
Capaldi I met Armando and Adam in a little studio in Soho. I was pissed off when I went in. It was not a good period for me. I’d gone to an audition at Television Centre that morning for a little part and I knew everybody in the room. I thought, why am I going on tape with all of you people that I’ve worked with before?
Tandy When Peter came in, I think he was on the verge of giving up acting. We were running slightly behind schedule and Sarah Crowe, our casting director, actually had to pop out of the casting session to try to persuade him to stay.
Sarah Crowe: Peter kept saying “I’m terrible at improvisation. I’m going to embarrass you, I’m going to embarrass myself. I had to really cajole him to come in. But he wasn’t alone in being reluctant. I remember someone actually walked out, saying “call me back in when you bother to write a script.”
Iannucci I said to Peter I will be a cabinet minister and your job is to persuade me to go … and then at some point just stop being nice. He did it and it was frightening. I thought: “There’s Malcolm Tucker”.
Capaldi I remember very clearly the moment where I “got it”. The minister said: “Well, can I come back?” and I said, “It’s not fucking Coronation Street, you can’t come back!” I thought: Oh, that’s what it is.
Iannucci Peter channelled Harvey Weinstein and lots of quite lippy LA agents. It wasn’t meant to be Alastair Campbell. It was more about this group I’d heard about called “the enforcers”. They would fan out from No 10 and go around the ministers saying: “This is the line, this is what you can say, this is not what you can’t say.”
Joanna Scanlan, played director of communications Terri CoverleyAs I understand it, Armando invented the character of Terri after our audition. He hadn’t thought of her before so I must have talked myself into an entirely new character. Most of what I created as Terri was from when I worked at the Arts Council England. There were people there who’d move from job to job within the arts without ever understanding what it was they were trying to create.
Iannucci I saw Chris Langham do a docudrama about George Orwell and it was such a nuanced, humane, believable performance – but with this slightly hangdog feel to it. I thought he would be perfect to play the minister [Hugh Abbot].
Martin Armando sent me the first three scripts for The Thick of It and said: “Look, just sprinkle your shit everywhere.” I didn’t know what to do. The writers were Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche – massive, massive figures in the world of comedy. I just stared at the script for about half an hour thinking: “You can’t improve [Peep Show and future Succession creator] Jesse Armstrong!” Especially not if you’re some flailing wanker. The breakthrough was when I changed a line of Malcolm’s from “Don’t bother he’s fucking useless” to “He’s about as much use as a marzipan dildo”. I said: “Is that the sort of thing you’re after?” And Armando said: “Yes, very much so.”
Communication breakdown … James Smith, Joanna Scanlan and Chris Addison in series two of The Thick of It. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy
Scanlan I always got very frustrated because Terri had to have a blow-dry in the morning. And I’d be watching all these blokes [male members of the cast] descending on Armando as soon as he walked on the floor, like petitioning for their lines or ideas to go into something. I’d want to do the same but be there thinking: “I’m stuck in this fucking chair!” I felt really irritated by that.
Cairney On the first day of filming, Armando came over and said: “Move the camera more, make it more messy.” I thought I was being messy! So some of the messiness was deliberately overdoing it. It took us a few days to get there. Ben Wheeler, a brilliant DOP who was operating the other camera, turned to me and said: “Well, we’re never going to work again after this.”
Tandy I could only afford to give three and a half days to each episode. That’s not a long time to shoot half an hour. And so everything was shot in the old Guinness factory off the A40 in west London.
Scanlan The building was derelict. There was no funding. It felt guerrilla, like Armando was trying to get away with something the BBC wouldn’t necessarily have sanctioned.
Iannucci I wanted to try to lose all those traditional grammars of filming. So it was like a news crew turning up at a cabinet meeting. They’re not going to let you film it all again – it’s up to you to find the footage.
Capaldi Filming is a very traditional process – you do a master shot and then the closeups. Armando threw all that out of the window. He said: “You come on to the set, it’s lit, you can go wherever you like, we don’t rehearse, off you go!” The cameras had to follow us. They didn’t have any preparation. They wouldn’t know where anyone was going. A scene would tend to go on for ages. When they said cut, you’d be exhausted. But it was a fabulous experience. I think all of us who worked on the show never looked back from that because that way of working was so radical.
Iannucci We filmed it on the fly: handheld cameras, radio mics, no leads attached. I said to the cast: even if you leave the room we’re still recording you, we can hear what you’re saying, so you’re never off. There was nowhere to hide.
Tandy For the first series I’d heard about a device that they’d been using in the States, this five-channel sound recording device. It meant we could mic up all of the actors and record all of the conversations happening in an office at the same time. That device was probably the thing that made The Thick of It possible.
Cairney Armando would edit the sound first – the words were the most important thing for him. Then the editors would throw some pictures in and see what stuck with the audio. If you go through the episodes with a magnifying glass there’s some extremely bad continuity there. Hair will change, coffee cups will suddenly be refilled, but Armando didn’t give a shit about any of that. And nobody noticed which proved that it didn’t actually matter!
Capaldi Armando was great at finding these moments in the character’s eyes and faces that conveyed the chaos and the stress and delight of what they were going through.
Scanlan Before getting the role I had a Saturday job at an estate agency in Dulwich. My boss there told me one day that if I wanted to earn a bit of extra cash I could join these focus groups. She said: “You’re an actress, just say you are who they’re looking for! Say you’re a married housewife with three kids at Dulwich College or something.” So I went and did it and got my 50 quid. I mentioned the focus group to Armando. He was laughing and ended up turning the story into the second episode.
Martin There was this synchronous thing going on where we would float a policy and then literally the next week one or other of the parties would announce the same thing. I think how it happened was that the spads and the writers of The Thick of It were trying to work out the exact same problem: the money’s run out so what can we say that won’t cost anything but will sound good and keep us in the headlines?
Iannucci In the first series there’s that scene in the back of a car where they’re trying to come up with policies on the way to make an announcement. We were actually in the back of the car going to the next location so I said: “Why don’t we just film you trying to come up with new policies?” Three of them which made it into the final cut actually became law within a couple of years! James Smith [who played Glenn Cullen] came up with “Why doesn’t everyone have to have a plastic bag of their own?” There was pet asbos, which I think happened quite soon after. And Chris Addison [who played Olly Reader] came up with the national spare room database, which became the bedroom tax. I remember James Purnell, who was culture secretary at the time, saying to me: “I’ve been in the back of that car”.
Tandy After the first two seasons, which were only three episodes each, Armando came to me with a plan to do an extended run. We got a commission to do 10 more episodes. And then it started to go wrong.
Going down? … Chris Addison, James Smith, Joanna Scanlan, Rebecca Front and Peter Capaldi. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
In November 2005, Chris Langham was arrested in connection with paying to access indecent and abusive images of children on the internet. Six months later he was charged with 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children.
Iannucci It was difficult with Chris because he was charged but there wasn’t a trial. I decided to not make a judgment until there was a judgment. I didn’t realise the trial would take over 18 months. That’s why we did two one-hour specials where Hugh was referred to but wasn’t in it. But then he was found guilty so it became very clear.
Tandy When Chris was found guilty we had to recast. That’s when Rebecca joined us.
Rebecca Front, played social affairs secretary Nicola Murray The first time I watched The Thick of It, I thought: “Blimey, this is good.” I didn’t know they were casting or even making another series. I had a conversation with Armando and he said they were going to do another and halfway through it I thought: “Hang on, is he offering me something?”
Iannucci Nicola was the thing Malcolm hated the most, which was a minister who actually believed in something. Most of that third season was her ambitions being gradually whittled away.
Front They didn’t know that much about my character at the beginning, just that they liked the idea of it being a woman and a backbencher who had been promoted beyond anyone’s expectations. And so one of the inspirations for Nicola Murray was very much me! Armando asked if I was politically minded and I told him that I had formed our sixth-form debating society. I actually did think of going into politics because I had really strong opinions about certain things like nuclear disarmament. Nicola is basically me if I’d had my life ruined by politics.
Iannucci The show is a window into bullying culture. In several episodes Malcolm explicitly states that he is a bully. He pulls people apart. You wouldn’t be allowed to operate like that today. I’m sure it’s still highly charged and people shout at each other but I don’t think that single-minded, laser-like destruction of people’s personalities would be tolerated.
Front I’d never met Peter before. I knew him mainly as Malcolm Tucker. My first impression was of this charming, gentle man. I thought: “Oh, he’s absolutely gorgeous.” And then we did a little bit of improv and he immediately turned into Malcolm. It was terrifying. A total physical change.
Capaldi Did I feel like I was scaring people? No, they all scared me! They’d all been to Oxford and had been on telly for years. I was just a guy from bands in Glasgow who ate curries and drank lager.
Front It’s weirdly easy to distance yourself from the script. You think: “They’re not saying that about me, they’re talking about Nicola.” However, I do remember improvising in a rehearsal room and Peter saying: “What are those fucking boots, you’re not a fucking cowgirl!” and me thinking, “Those are my actual boots, I only bought them last week!”
Iannucci Did we ever overstep the line? Actors came into it knowing that they were going to be in line for lots of visual takedowns. But we would check in case they thought: “No I don’t want someone saying that about me on national television.” Chris [Addison] was described as looking like a Quentin Blake cartoon … but I think he rather liked that one.
Front It was easy to act terrified and cowed but nobody wants to see a woman being terrified by a bully. So I thought let’s see what happens if I stand up to Malcolm, and I think immediately it started to be funnier because it was no longer just Peter shouting at somebody. You want at least one Tuckering per episode, but that can’t be the whole relationship. So Nicola ends up constantly doing things that she knows will piss him off.
Capaldi All Malcolm’s doing is his job, you know? The idea that he’s monstrous … he’s horrible to people, but he’s moving the government’s agenda forward.
Mad for it … Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison in series two of The Thick of It. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy
Front I hope people can sympathise with Nicola because she really gets trampled by it. She goes in with all guns blazing, but really by the end of her first episode she’s already been chewed up and spat out.
Iannucci A lot of junior spads see Malcolm as an ideal to aim for. But if you analyse any episode it’s always: something small happens that’s bad, then Malcolm comes in, makes it worse, and then leaves blaming everyone else. So how is he good in any way? It’s like when Dominic Cummings came in. People said he’s an amazing communicator and an amazing strategist … but the Covid crisis had no strategy and terrible communication.
Martin Some of the lines you wouldn’t do now. They’re a tiny bit misogynistic and tiny bit homophobic. I was always a bit uncomfortable with that stuff.
Iannucci It’s a stupid, macho, testosterone-fuelled environment, slightly thuggish. But it’s all verbal. These people wouldn’t last 10 seconds in an actual fight. They probably don’t even go to the gym because they haven’t got time. They just drink lots of coffee from 5am and shout … it’s a stupid and frankly inefficient way of working. And then when they all leave politics they all talk about mental health and do lots of charity work in big thick jumpers!
Scanlan At the beginning, before Rebecca came in, I was the only woman. I wouldn’t say I was frightened, but they were all a foot taller than me. I was on my own with these tall men and thinking: “How do I get heard in this world?” It did get quite aggressive and braying with that masculine energy. One day it went too far. People were throwing insults around that you just wouldn’t do in an office. Armando stopped the improvisation and said: “That’s not truthful.” He was brilliant like that.
Front One of Armando’s great gifts is that he can push things a very long way and yet stay just the right side of it. It comes, I think, from him having a very strong moral compass. The joke always comes from the right direction.
Martin I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Terri. I even remember apologising to Jo at one point. She was the butt of so many jokes. She was roundly criticised by everybody right from the very first episode until the very last one she appeared in. It was always “she’s fucking useless, I hate her” and everything. And yet she was no more incompetent than the people complaining about her.
Tandy I’d seen some Ofcom research that said that people were less bothered by swearing now than they had been. So I thought, well, it’s a digital channel, we’ll probably get away with it. We actually got very few complaints about language. So I’m glad I held my nerve.
Capaldi I think because I’m from Glasgow the swearing came very naturally. Sometimes a “fucking” in the middle of a sentence can propel it forward with a new energy. But often I would swear because I couldn’t remember my lines. It would take a fucking minute or two for me to fucking remember the line that I fucking forgot. So I would be searching desperately for the line … and then it would fucking arrive!
Martin I think the BBC quite liked the mythology of me being hired as a “swearing consultant”. The idea that they’d solemnly brought in this kind of craftsman of the swear. It did rankle with everybody else a little bit because they all did excellent swears, too.
Tandy There was one occasion where there was a particular swear that was judged to be offensive and we were asked to make an edit quite late in the day. I think it might have been the word “gash”, which was replaced with the word “cave”. That’s sort of worse, isn’t it?
Martin Great swearing is all about getting the balance right. It’s no different to writing poetry, a novel or a stupid haiku. All the lines I loved were by other people. I loved “Tinker Tailor Soldier cunt” – that was a Simon Blackwell line.
Tandy Sometimes it was awful. There was one episode where we had I think well over 100 uses of just the F word. That’s not including the other swearwords. But then they said: “Do you think you could take what you do with The Thick of It and turn it into a feature film?” We thought about it for about, I don’t know, 15 seconds. And then In the Loop came together within the next 18 months, which is very quickly for a feature film.
Iannucci In the Loop made sense because The Thick of It arose after the invasion of Iraq, where everyone across the board at the time was saying: “This will be an almighty mistake,” and yet it went ahead anyway. I was intrigued as to why it is that someone can do that and get away with it and not be stopped, even though we’re in a democracy with an opposition and a kind of shared responsibility. So what’s happened that has meant No 10 can drive through anything it wants?
Scanlan I loved our trip down to Eastbourne for the party conference in series three. That was my most enjoyable day. Which is ridiculous because I’m basically just saying I like going on holiday, which is very much what Terri would say.
Front My favourite moment? I liked it when Nicola has a breakdown during the party conference. It was fun to film, actually. We established that, like me, she is prone to panic attacks … so it felt entirely honest that she would jump up and down on the cushions like that. I thought: “I know if I do this it will make Armando laugh.”
Tandy I remember when we did the inquiry episode, Armando and I basically arranged it so that only the people on the panel had the full script. They didn’t even get to meet the cast regulars, who were appearing as witnesses, beforehand.
Capaldi I love the idea of playing husks. Malcolm loved his job, he was addicted to it. But I think when it’s all over and he’s in the back of the car after leaving the police station, he’s relieved that the shit is over. His last words to the press are “It doesn’t matter” … because it doesn’t matter! The world continues stumbling to oblivion irrespective of what he thinks.
Cairney That whole final scene was emotional to shoot. We got a closeup on Peter’s face and drove around for about 15 minutes thinking this would be an amazing shot to run really long. And in true Thick of It style, Armando cut it after about five seconds: “Malcolm Tucker’s done. Let’s move on.”
State of play … Pearce Quigley and Peter Capaldi in series three of The Thick of It. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy
Tandy To begin with, politicians were quite cagey about the show. Whenever you met them they would say: “Oh I don’t watch that thing,” but they absolutely did – they were able to quote you huge chunks of it!
Iannucci Ed Miliband used the word “omnishambles” and David Cameron said the opposition were like “an episode of The Thick of It”. I thought: if politicians are now embracing this then it’s time for something else to start challenging them back.
Tandy I think it did have an effect on the Westminster bubble. I don’t know if it was a very good one, though, because I think it sort of normalised slightly loutish behaviour.
Iannucci Did it change anything? I don’t know. If it awoke people into thinking: “How can we change things?” then that would be a good thing. But 20 years on, it hasn’t exactly led to a better politics, has it?
Scanlan It was the last gasp of a time when there was still some respect for politicians. Arguably The Thick of It played a role in the de-escalation of respect for politicians.
Crowe It was a defining career moment for some people and a reinvention for others.
Capaldi After The Thick of It I realised that my voice had become more sinister. It got a bit lower, a bit stranger.
Martin I’d had a miserable 90s, chugging along doing bits and bobs as a musician and journalist. The Thick of It absolutely saved me. It couldn’t work now. There’s no shame any more, is there? I mean, in the early episodes you had characters saying: “For God’s sake, please don’t tell me you’ve lied to a committee!” The idea that someone’s career could be at stake over a lie they told to parliament has no traction now. People do it all the time. Blatantly.
Iannucci Has it stood the test of time? I’ve never gone back and watched it. I’ve had people message over the years saying we should make a Brexit one or a coronavirus one … but we never did things around specific incidents. We set it in a parallel world where some of these things sort of happened but were bound up with things that were completely made up, so that it wouldn’t date.
Peter Capaldi: People often ask if Malcolm’s going to move into podcasting. It might be good for him to do a kind of country podcast, actually, where he wanders around the countryside, meeting people he can’t fucking stand, like farmers.
Scanlan It’s a show that really appeals to 15- and 16-year-olds. They’ll say: “Are you Terri from The Thick of It?” So it’s given me a strange lifeline into youth culture.
Capaldi Three people came up to me yesterday in Soho to say it was their favourite programme. I met Brian Cox [Logan Roy in Succession] the other day and he told me with great delight that people come up to him and ask him to tell them to fuck off. I didn’t like to tell him that I’ve been doing that for 20 years now.
Speaking to Kate Battersby in Radio Times magazine, Capaldi, his wife and fellow executive producer Elaine Collins, and co-star Tom Moutchi,
INTERVIEW
Peter Capaldi on Criminal Record character: "He has scars and carries ghosts"
By Kate Battersby
Thursday, 11 January 2024
This interview originally appeared in Radio Times magazine.
As Peter Capaldi talks about his new Apple TV+ drama Criminal Record – "a stylish crime drama with a contemporary edge and a noir-ish element", to quote his own description – he makes no effort to disguise his fondness for Elaine Collins, his fellow executive producer on the eight-part series, sitting beside him.
Friendly, funny and stylish in equal measure, she is just as affectionate towards him… which is rather lovely, as they have been married since 1991 and have a 30-year-old daughter.
In 2021, he sweetly pinpointed "September 12th 1985, under a street lamp in Glasgow with Elaine" as the greatest kiss of his life. It was their very first, soon after they met as actors in a touring theatre production.
They co-starred in the 1992 romantic comedy Soft Top Hard Shoulder, and teamed up again in Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1995 Oscar-winning short film he wrote and directed. As Capaldi clutched his Academy Award he told Hollywood’s assembled royalty: “Elaine Collins was the real creative dynamo behind all this.”
Since then, she has become a powerhouse in British television, bringing Vera to ITV and Shetland to the BBC, long-running successes both.
Meanwhile, Capaldi’s own profile has risen ever higher, with his award-laden portrayal of The Thick of It’s fabulously foul-mouthed political enforcer Malcolm Tucker, and of course his three-year stint as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who. In 2022, when BAFTA Scotland gave him its Outstanding Contribution gong, he concluded his acceptance speech with a direct address to Collins.
"My darling wife Elaine," he said, "it’s your strength, kindness, wisdom and love that’s enabled me to have this career. You’ve always been there through all the ups and downs, and that you chose to share your life with me is the greatest luck of all."
And now here they are, working as executive producers together for the first time and talking to RT. "It was great," beams Capaldi. "Elaine’s the boss, obviously. She’s the person who really drove this show, pulled it all together and had the vision for it, while having to do the day-to-day business mechanics of keeping it rolling. I was just a sounding board."
Collins tuts at once, exclaiming, "You’re too modest. He was fantastic. We genuinely had a great time and it was amazing to have that support system at work and at home. Of course you bring it home – you’re living and breathing a show while you’re making it – but that was genuinely great. He’s always a support system for me. Hand on heart, we’re best friends."
Sitting listening close by, one of Criminal Record’s supporting actors, Tom Moutchi, smiles at the two of them indulgently. "Awww," he teases, "soooo cute." Capaldi and Collins crease up, as Capaldi agrees that "cute" isn’t a word usually linked with him.
"A journalist asked me the other day, 'Why do you scowl all the time?'" he recounts. "I said to him 'I’m not!' and he said 'Your face is a scowl.'"
"He’s cute to me," declares Collins firmly, although it must be said the role he plays in Criminal Record scores low on the cute-o-meter.
What the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup once described as Capaldi’s "graveyard complexion" is exactly right for Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty, who’s drawn into conflict with a younger detective sergeant (Cush Jumbo) over a murder conviction from a decade previously.
Complex and tense, Criminal Record is a long way from a cosy procedural featuring a grizzled-but-warm-hearted veteran cop. From the very start, Hegarty seems anything but benign. So having never previously played a detective, why did Capaldi want to portray this one?
"I liked the idea of a character who is veiled," he explains. "I always feel as if I’m giving too much away, so a character who deliberately hides everything was very attractive. I brought lots of me to him. He has a knocked-about, been-round-the-block quality, a certain melancholy. He’s like London, where the series is set – he’s been through his own personal Blitz. He has scars and carries ghosts."
Born in Glasgow, 65-year-old Capaldi and Collins (who is also Scottish, from Lanarkshire), now call the UK capital home. Co-star Cush Jumbo, meanwhile, is a born-and-bred Londoner. Along with writer Paul Rutman she is also an executive producer on Criminal Record.
What did the four of them want the drama to say about London, about policing and about race? "That it’s complicated – there are issues that have to be addressed," says Capaldi carefully.
Moutchi, who moved to the city aged seven from Ivory Coast, plays Errol Mathis, the man convicted of murder following the police investigation led by Hegarty, and is glad the series offers no neatly packaged solutions to the issues raised: "It serves as a magnifying glass as opposed to a cure."
Criminal Record has turned out a game changer for 30-year-old Moutchi, who was on the brink of quitting acting when he got the role. Now he has been cast in Gladiator II, director Ridley Scott’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning film of 23 years ago, much to the unalloyed pride of Capaldi and Collins. It’s an extra reward at the end of a long road that began when Collins first pitched Criminal Record to Apple TV+ "and others".
"I sent the script out on a Friday and Apple came back very interested on the Monday, so I immediately took it off the table elsewhere," she remembers. "When Apple decide they want to work with you, you have their full attention. They’re very supportive. When they have something to say, it’s usually worth listening to because they’re smart. You’re always speaking to people directly involved with the show who run the drama, not people five layers down."
That sounds as if the same may not be true of mainstream channels? Collins is all diplomacy as she replies, "I have been lucky. But we’ve all heard stories."
Capaldi nods. "In the UK there’s a tradition of having to wait a very long time to have your script read and then get a reaction to it. Streamers are moving more quickly than the BBC or ITV."
It seems the process of conceiving the show, having it commissioned and producing it has been enjoyable and smooth all round, but Capaldi appears nervous about how viewers will react to it. "I didn’t know if I could play this part, but real growth comes from being uncomfortable. I don’t know yet if it fully worked. If people like it, it will have worked, and maybe even if they don’t like it, some bits will still have worked."
His fellow executive producer looks at him with loving pride. "I think 100 per cent it worked," she says.
The post-punk Time Lord Peter Capaldi on the albums that shaped his universe: “Heard once, it stays forever”
ARTICLE / WRITING
Peter Capaldi – My Life In Music
By Sam Richards
14th May 2025
The post-punk Time Lord on the albums that shaped his universe: “Heard once, it stays forever”
FRANK SINATRA
That’s Life
REPRISE, 1966
I don’t really remember my parents ever going out to buy a record, but somehow there was a collection of battered albums under the record player. They would often have nights when drink was taken and fun was had, and this album would always go on. You’d never describe an album of Sinatra’s as lacklustre, but every song is compact, like they want to get it over with. But when he hits the groove of “That’s Life”, he’s kind of unbeatable. If “My Way” is about imposing your will upon life, “That’s Life” is a hymn to how powerless you are to deal with whatever fate throws at you, so the best thing is just to get on with it and have a laugh when you can. It’s the best shrug in popular music.
DAVID BOWIE
David Live
RCA, 1974
Like many things in life, I was quite late into David Bowie. In order to dig into his back catalogue, I bought this double album, which appeared to contain many of his hits. But of course, a lot of them are reworked and don’t really fly. I’ve subsequently discovered that they’d just had a big fight in the dressing room because the musicians didn’t know they were recording a live album. But I love all that angst. I love Earl Slick, who rips the whole thing up. But ultimately for me, it’s Bowie’s voice. There’s a kind of terror in it. The version of “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” on Ziggy… is a bit Judy Garland, but on this one you really believe he’s not going to make it to the end.
SIMPLE MINDS
Life In A Day
ZOOM, 1979
I like a lot of Glasgow bands – that first Blue Nile album was great. And I used to really like Simple Minds. I actually like their first album that <they> don’t like. You can see a theme here: I like the albums that don’t seem to be very successful. I saw them in Glasgow at that time, in a tiny little place called The Mars Bar. They weren’t doing blues, they weren’t doing Status Quo, they were doing some weird arthouse stuff, and they had a great song called “Life In A Day”. It’s the first time I’d really seen a band that excited me, and also where I thought, ‘It’s possible to do that.’ Because they’re all just guys from Glasgow, although the world they were evoking was very different.
TALKING HEADS
Fear Of Music
SIRE, 1979
This album got me through a lot of all-nighters at art school, when I wasn’t as attentive to my studies as I should have been. It’s Talking Heads exploring a lot of the stuff that will become more finessed and polished later on. It confounded my expectations of what a song could be, because the narratives are so strange, but they’re not dislocated. The band are very concerned about making sure the songs have an engaging structure and that there’s a chorus that will work for you, but the narrative is shifting all the time. The songs are inventive and funny, but they’re also a bit scary. You’re never quite sure whether or not you’d be happy if David Byrne showed up at your door.
CRAIG ARMSTRONG
It’s Nearly Tomorrow
BMG CHRYSALIS, 2014
A lot of actors use music to help them get into the zone. For instance, when I was doing Malcolm Tucker, I would have “Scary Monsters” playing, because it’s quite jagged and hard to relax to. And It’s Nearly Tomorrow is the one that did it for me in relation to the rather well-known character of Doctor Who. I was keen to try and bring some kind of melancholy to the role, I guess because I was older, and this album provided a way into that. It seems to be about time, loss, humanity, love, confusion and fate. The music is infused with this dark, relentless power, like the forces at work in the universe, so it would help me think about how to be a strange, alien Time Lord.
ENNIO MORRICONE
The Mission OST
VIRGIN, 1986
It’s often said of Ennio Morricone that you know it’s him from the first note, and that’s absolutely true of this album. The film is about the European incursion into Latin America and how the Jesuit priests would set up missionaries in the jungle to try and convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity, which all goes terribly wrong, as you might imagine. Morricone illustrates that story by combining his typically heartbreaking European, classical, choral sound with these indigenous rhythms and voices. So it’s a little bit like world music, but not quite. He’s a master composer of soundtracks, so he evokes this whole thing for us in a very beautiful way. He’s the greatest film composer – apart from Bernard Herrman – because he infuses his material with so much emotion.
WILLIE NELSON
A Song For You
HALLMARK, 1983
Willie Nelson was huge in the ’80s, but I did have a fear that getting into him meant going the full Ken Bruce, and that easy listening would take me over like the fungal virus in The Last Of Us. So I dug deeper into Willie’s back catalogue looking for purer country stuff. There was plenty, and it sounded great. But so did the standards. I finally accepted this when we found the album <A Song For You>. My partner Elaine and I played it all the time on a battered cassette as our life together unfolded. His versions of these standards have everything – they’re moving, frank, wise and for the ages, all culminating in his version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Loving Her Was Easier”, the song that we danced to at our wedding.
JAN GARBAREK & THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE
Officium
ECM, 1994
In 2004, I went to make a film in Iceland. It’s one of the strangest and most haunting places I have ever been, and I loved it. The film was low-budget so I was not put up in a hotel, but lodged in the Reykjavik basement of a fabulous bohemian couple named Sverrir and Eda. They left me a CD player and a number of CDs. This was the first one I put on. The Hilliard Ensemble is a vocal quartet devoted to early music; Jan Garbarek is a Norwegian jazz sax and clarinet player. The combined sound is haunting, medieval, yet kind of jazzy. The track “Parce Mihi Domine” plays like the theme music to some lost Icelandic noir movie. Heard once, it stays forever.
Peter Capaldi’s new album Sweet Illusions is out now on Last Night From Glasgow
A cordial conversation with the British character actor—still best known for spewing some of TV's greatest insults on 'The Thick of It'—abou
INTERVIEW
Interrogating Peter Capaldi, Who is (Actually, Disconcertingly) Very Nice
A cordial conversation with the British character actor—still best known for spewing some of TV's greatest insults on The Thick of It—about his new AppleTV+ series Criminal Record, Doctor Who, and his punk-rock past.
January 18, 2024
By Joe Gross
It is surprising to talk to Peter Capaldi and hear him refrain from yelling wildly specific, increasingly horrifying oaths at you.
It is in no way surprising that people who run into the 65-year old Scottish actor want him to do just that.
“People come and ask me to swear at them and tell 'em to fuck off,” Capaldi says via Zoom. Dressed in a black suit jacket and white shirt buttoned to the top, he smiles a smile that does not, in fact, seem full of coiled malice, but instead looks quite genuine: “Which is nice.”
Though his 40-plus year career in film and television has seen him play all sorts of folks —most of them a little odd, spectacularly coiffed and more than a little chatty—Capaldi is best known for two roles.
He played the absolutely demonic Malcolm Tucker, profanity-driven communications director and hilariously merciless political enforcer for the Prime Minister in the BBC series The Thick of It and its terrific 2009 spin-off movie, In the Loop. (Both the series and the film were created by Armando Iannucci, who went on to savage U.S. politicos with Veep; Iannucci's writing staff included Succession creator Jesse Armstrong.)
And from 2013 to 2017, Capaldi played the twelfth incarnation of the chaotic, immortal Time Lord Doctor Who, making a mark on the British sci-fi franchise which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023.
In Criminal Record, an eight-episode series whose third installment premiered this week on AppleTV+, Capaldi plays a completely different kind of fellow from the above: a sullen, angry cop, and a secret-keeping, interior one at that.
Co-produced by Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins (Vera, Shetland) and written by BAFTA nominee Paul Rutman (The Virgin Queen), Criminal Record stars Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegarty, a gaunt detective with decades of sketchy law enforcement under his belt and a whole mess of secrets he'd prefer to keep locked away.
When an anonymous domestic violence call comes into a London police station—a panicked woman accusing her partner of a murder long thought solved—it puts Hegarty up against the young and hungry detective June Lenker (Cush Jumbo of The Good Wife and The Good Fight fame), whose view of The Job is radically different from the hostile Hagerty’s. Framed by the 2011 London riots and more recent scandals that have rocked the city’s Metropolitan Police Service, Criminal Record is a blend of noir thriller and canny drama, focusing on race and crime in 21st century Britain.
Capaldi usually plays characters who speak their mind vigorously and often, whose words and actions are a direct link to the audience’s understanding of the story. In some ways, Hegarty lets you know exactly what he’s about: when interviewed by Lenker, he refers to the Black man he jailed as “a poor man’s OJ.”
On the other hand, he is also a mighty unreliable narrator, when he is compelled to share at all. “[Hegarty] hides all the time,” Capaldi says. “He hides how he feels and he hides what's happening. In screen acting, people say that when you're in front of the camera, you’ve got to do nothing. But you can't really do nothing, you have to have something going on. We cannot reveal to the audience Hegarty’s true self. We can’t wink and nudge. I'm not really used to playing that kind of character.”
With his wife producing, Capaldi got into the development process early. “She was also looking for something for Cush Jumbo at the same time,” he says, “so the material was able to be developed with [both of] us in mind. It's very unusual to be involved so early on, and also very unusual for writers, I guess, to know exactly who they're writing for.”
Capaldi is brilliant here, cold and angry and defensive in a dangerous way, especially in the scenes with Cush, which bring the intensity of two professionals—one earnest and increasingly pissed off, one cynical and skilled in manipulation—who are both trying to decide if they are enemies or allies while trying to get over on one another in different ways. It’s a tension that lasts until literally the last scene of the last episode.
“Cush and I both decided, without really discussing it, to not really rehearse,” Capaldi says, “We stuck to the lines but we didn't really know how we were going to deliver them. So we just went at each other and our responses were completely in the moment.”
Capaldi’s career is that of a journeyman character actor whose singular charisma and look has increasingly put him in leading roles in the past 20 years -- like Christopher Walken, if a part calls for a Peter Capaldi kind of guy, he’s kind of your only option. So it’s fascinating to see him cast against type in Criminal Record. A long-standing Hey, it's that guy! actor whose screen presence is stickier than most; he says he’s been recognized in America ever since his first role in Local Hero at age 23 but only found a truly wide audience with Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker. (Though like Tucker and the Doctor, Hegarty is full of rage, sublimated though it may be.)
“The Thick of It is old now, but there's a contemporaneous quality about Malcolm Tucker that makes people think he’s still around,” Capaldi says. “I meet people working in politics or whatever who feel that that show is some kind of balm for them.”
Doctor Who, on the other hand, is both a British institution and a property thought dead and buried in the 1990s, only to come roaring back to life and find a new audience starting in 2005. “That show goes on and expands and people get into it and it sort of never fades away,” Capaldi says. “I’m still Doctor Who, even though I haven't done it for a long time.”
And like many a Brit of his generation, Capaldi sang in a post-punk band, a quartet with the rather unfortunate name of the Dreamboys (Craig Ferguson was their drummer for a spell).
“Worst name in the world,” he says, “Might as well have been called the Chippendales. We thought we were Caligari-esque, Kafkaesque, strange, nightmarish. Not with that name.” (That said, any tune from their self-released EP -- “Béla Lugosi's Birthdáy” b/w “Outér Limits” and “Shàlle We Dànce” -- would fit right in on a compilation of goth-pop deep cuts.) For Capaldi, being in a band wasn't just about making music: “You would evoke a worldview, and then you could dress accordingly and it was wonderful. But the more and more effort we put in, the less and less distance we'd go.”
The DIY vibe, in turn, influenced Capaldi’s work as an actor. “I was very uncomfortable around actors for a long time because they might as well have been smoking pipes, wearing cravats and talking about Shakespeare,” he says. He never went to drama school so he had no idea how to approach a script or how to get from point A to B in a scene.
“But the cauldron of chaotic creativity that is being in a band is how I like to work,” he continues. “Like being in a band, in acting, you have to be able to say, ‘I don't know what it is, but I can feel something going on over here. I'll try something in that direction. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn't.’ I think that's all very musical.”
As he releases his ‘melancholic’ second album, the actor looks back on his youth in a struggling art-punk band – and explains how he took in
INTERVIEW / ARTICLE
‘The people of Glasgow frowned on all the spitting’: Peter Capaldi on his punk rock past
As he releases his ‘melancholic’ second album, the actor looks back on his youth in a struggling art-punk band – and explains how he took inspiration from putting the bins out
Peter Capaldi as told to Tim Jonze
Wed 9 Apr 2025
One of my first musical memories is of being given a Beatles wig. They sold them in Woolworths but it wasn’t a normal wig with individual strands of hair – it was vacuum-formed plastic and felt like wearing a crash helmet. When it was on you looked like you had Paul’s hair, but when you took it off you were left with what looked like a scar on your forehead.
The Beatles were big in my house but it was the lovable moptop Beatles, the London Palladium Beatles. Once they’d grown their hair and become hippie-ish, my family were always a bit down on them. I remember taking a shoebox and transforming it into a miniature replica of the set of Ready, Steady, Go, the television music show that was like a precursor to Top of the Pops. I cut off the front, drew little exit signs and cut out little Beatles. Looking back, that was when I started using music to create these little worlds.
I’m not a very experienced songwriter but I read that John Lennon would sometimes think: “I want to do something like Roy Orbison.” They would quite openly copy genres. So a song like Sweet Illusion, on my new album, is definitely me having a go at a 60s song.
Another influence you may hear is Frank Sinatra, who my parents also listened to. They didn’t have a big record collection. In fact they never seemed to buy records, so I’ve no idea where these ones came from, but they had a couple of Sinatra albums. After a few drinks everyone in the family would join in singing That’s Life. I didn’t realise it until later because my parents were in the ice cream business and we lived in a tenement, but my family were actually very musical. My father played piano, my uncle played guitar, another uncle played accordion and another uncle sang and did comedy bits. So when they got together at family dos they were a band, and everyone would tear into it. My uncle’s guitar was more like a piece of furniture than an instrument – it had huge strings that you needed big Italian peasant hands to play, but he battered the hell out of it and it sounded great.
Capaldi playing bass with the Bastards from Hell (later the Dream Boys) in 1978. Photograph: John Rogan/GuardianWitness
I was very lucky not to get into drama school. They said “you’re awful don’t come here” – quite rightfully at the time – so I went to art school instead. It was great. We all turned up dressed like Neil Young circa After the Gold Rush, wearing long hair and cheesecloth shirts. Then, during my first summer there, the Sex Pistols exploded and everyone came back in plastic trousers with cheaply dyed hair. Suddenly there was this ethos that you could be in a band, so I got involved with that. Mine were called the Dream Boys. Our influences were Bowie, Talking Heads and the Cramps, who were like a voodoo-swamp version of the Munsters. For some reason, that seemed like the direction to go in. Perhaps not very wisely.
This was around 1977, and back then you could take a tape to a venue and get a gig. The art school had a very staid student body that looked after entertainment. They tended to bring in hippie bands, jazz acts and George Melly. We wanted more aggressive music, so we ended up providing it ourselves. But our shows weren’t full of people spitting. There was quite a schism between London and the rest of the country – I think the people of Glasgow frowned on all the spitting and that kind of nonsense.
We always struggled with drummers. It was like Spinal Tap – some drummer or other would come and sit in for us. Then, one night at a place called the Rock Garden, I asked if anyone knew a drummer who wanted to join our band. A 17 year old in the audience asked if he could have a go and, rather grandly, we said we would audition him – as if we had any idea what we were doing. He turned out to be a brilliant drummer and he was very funny too – you’ll know him now as the comedian and US talkshow host Craig Ferguson.
Peter Capaldi’s band the Dream Boys
It all goes back to that shoebox. At the time I thought I just loved showing off but really what I loved was being able to create a whole world on stage and presenting our ideas to people. We kept at it. We tried and tried but we weren’t getting anywhere. Eventually you run out of steam because you have no money and you’re eating Pot Noodles on Christmas Day. It seemed like everybody else in Glasgow was getting signed or doing a Peel Session and we weren’t. I would get the coach down to London and go round all the record labels but nothing ever happened.
Still, all the local bands were very sweet to us and offered us support slots. We supported Altered Images a few times and their singer Clare Grogan had just done the film Gregory’s Girl. One night the director Bill Forsyth was in the audience, and after the gig he invited me to be in his film Local Hero. If someone standing backstage at a sweaty gig tells you they’re making a film in Scotland, you assume it’s going to be a 16mm, half-hour thing without a script. But it turned out to be a proper film. It felt like fate was pushing me towards acting and away from music, so I embraced that.
To be honest, I’d never been that interested in writing songs. And I was never the guy at the party who brought out the guitar. But I became friendly with Dr Robert of the Blow Monkeys and he is that guy at the party with the guitar. He’s a living jukebox, a fantastic singer and player. He would invite me to play along with him, and then he challenged me to write my own material.
Peter Capaldi in the video for Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved.
I wrote the songs for my debut album St Christopher while I was filming The Suicide Squad in 2019. I had so much downtime on set that I thought I’d spend it writing and see what happened. A lot of it was rubbish but some of it was OK. I love the Kinks and live in Muswell Hill so we booked their studio Konk to record it all. But then the pandemic hit and we couldn’t go. Instead we took the GarageBand demos and sent them off to people. Then they would come back with a great sax player on or whatever.
There are not many people who release their debut album at the age of 62, but that’s the great thing about technology: anybody can do it. When I was originally trying to be in the music business you had to be signed to Sony or RCA to release something, but now you just need a computer.
The album cover for Sweet Illusions. Photograph: Ray Burmiston
I wasn’t nervous of putting this music out. It doesn’t matter. It’s not my profession. My friends who are musicians have had extreme ups and downs and maintained their commitment to music through all of that. My cousin’s son is Lewis Capaldi and he’s a case in point of someone who has dedicated his life to music. His dad was driving him around Leith and Aberdeen – anywhere with a pub he could stand in with a guitar and sing – because he had to do it. I actually appeared in his video for Someone You Loved – which was the song of his that exploded, so I was delighted to be in it. He’s fantastic, but he’s in an entirely different league from me. My songs were originally more something I was doing for myself. I thought, OK, if I am going to have a go at making music it has to be music I want to make. I’m not going to do a Peter Capaldi Christmas album. It couldn’t be Malcolm Tucker sings Sinatra: “Have yourself a merry fucking Christmas.”
My new album Sweet Illusions is really my way of picking up where I left off 40 years ago as an art school student. It reminds me of Glasgow in 1984, when there were a lot of synths and fuzzy guitars, lots of echo and reverb, and lots of dreamers whose dreams were being crushed. The city has a noir-ish quality to it, a bit like Liverpool and Manchester do. It’s the Victorian city centres and the rain and the night and all that. Very cinematic. You can conjure up images and stories.
A lot of the songs deal with aging. Wondering where all the time has gone. Big Guy is about those people who were once full of braggadocio and swagger but are now dribbling on their jumpers. We remember them as something else now.
The single Bin Night is a lullaby. I’m a grandparent now so suddenly I have babies and lullabies in my life again. It’s wonderful, but being Scottish there’s always a melancholic streak in me that will seek out the bleak thing about it. In this case it’s the ticking clock. These fabulous children bring all this vigour and chaos into your life, but how long do you have left to spend with them? That made me think of the entropy of the universe and how awful the world is. And how just about the only moment I have any control over is putting the bins out. I don’t know if it’s the only song ever written about bin night but it’s a great subject.
Peter Capaldi’s Sweet Illusions is available now on Last Night from Glasgow records
We begin - and this may not totally surprise you - with a bit of swearing. There’s a line on your new album, I say to Peter Capaldi, that I
INTERVIEW
'This is my tribute to 1980s Glasgow,' says Peter Capaldi
March 22, 2025
By Teddy Jamieson
We begin - and this may not totally surprise you - with a bit of swearing. There’s a line on your new album, I say to Peter Capaldi, that I have to ask about. At one point you sing: “I talk a lot and know f*** all.” Now, tell me, Peter, is that you singing in character or are you talking about yourself?
Sitting in his agent’s office some 400 odd miles south of me, Peter Capaldi - formerly the expletive machine that was Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, formerly a Timelord, formerly of Glasgow but long resident in London - smiles before admitting, “Yeah, that’s true. I do. That’s me.”
But then he adds, “It’s a lot of people really. That’s quite common.”
Yes, Peter Capaldi has made a record. Another one. After 2021’s Saint Christopher he returns this month with Sweet Illusions which has - as you now know - sweary bits (though, actually, not that many) and guitars and synthesisers and songs called things like The Big Guy and Bin Night.
It’s not really what you expect 66-year-old successful actors to do. Especially 66-year-old actors who are still busy with the day job. Right now Capaldi is shooting a second series of his Apple+ police series Criminal Record and you’ll see him soon in Black Mirror.
Today, though, he’s talking to me, and, yes, he’s talking a lot. About music and acting and ageing and anything else that comes to mind.
We start with the music. Even though he has previous experience as a musician - back at the start of the 1980s he was in a band with future comedian Craig Ferguson called The Dreamboys - it was still something of a surprise when he released his first album. Clearly, it didn’t scratch the itch and now he’s back with another.
The explanation is simple enough. “I enjoyed doing the first one so much I just wanted to carry on doing it,” Capaldi explains.
“When I was a kid, if you wanted to record an album you had to be signed to a record label. I essentially do this myself. I have collaborators who I work with, but essentially if you have a computer and you’ve got GarageBand or Logic you can start to put songs together.
“I take it seriously but lightly, if you know what I mean,” he adds. “My intention is not to have a new career or be a pop star. It’s just a creative thing that is very accessible.”
It was his friend and producer Dr Robert - once of The Blow Monkeys - who first encouraged Capaldi to start writing songs. And now Capaldi can’t stop.
“I read that the only way you get a good song is by writing a hundred terrible ones. I think I’m still working my way through the hundred.”
That’s self-deprecation at work. Sweet Illusions is far from rubbish. Ask him to describe what it sounds like and he says, “It’s fairly nostalgic guitar and synth tribute to eighties Glasgow. That’s what I think it is. Because I’m really picking up where I left off,” referring to his Dreamboys days 40 years ago.
But it’s also the work of a man in his mid-sixties. It’s unlikely that the twentysomething Peter Capaldi would be writing a song called Bin Night after all.
“I’m a big fan of bin night. The night, not the song,” he quickly adds. “Because the world is chaotic, and terrible things are happening, and there’s only five minutes you get when you can exercise any control over your fate. And that’s bin night. If you get your bins together and you get them all out, you think, ‘Well, I’ve done something constructive.’”
More than that, though, Bin Night is also a love song to his grandchildren. “I became a grandfather. I wanted to do a lullaby because I have babies back in my life again.”
There is a lot of love on the album, it’s worth saying. If you have a tendency to conflate Capaldi with the parts he plays you might be surprised by quite how romantic it is. As he sings at one point, love is all that matters.
“Yeah, it’s love that matters. That’s not a new line to have in a song, but you can do it in a song and it’s easier than doing it in a film or on stage. You can fill things with your own emotions.”
It’s possibly worth remembering at this point that Capaldi has been married to his wife Elaine Collins, herself an actor and now a TV producer, since 1991. They have been through the highs and lows of a life in acting together.
That twentysomething singer in The Dreamboys, I say, does he feel very far away from you now, Peter?
“Not very far. I mean, physically, yes. Because I’m an actor I get to see how I look and I’m always horrified to see this old guy with white hair. I don’t know where he came from. I don't imagine myself as that, but the parts I get are like that. I don’t feel that old.
“The younger one is still there. The optimism is a bit more crushed. I went to the art school and at the time there was a great ethos of just having a go. It wasn’t just the art school. I guess that’s what the whole post-punk thing was, so I still carry that.
“It doesn’t matter if what you do is great, what matters is you tried.”
The son of Nancy and Gerald John, who ran an ice cream business, Capaldi’s desire to be creative can be traced back to childhood in Glasgow.
“I could always draw from when I was little. I remember my granny felt that drawing was an Italian thing. She was talking about Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, not the son of an ice cream van vendor.
“But when I was little I remember I had a shoe box and - this is how long ago it was - I cut the front off of it and made a wee studio in it. It was Ready Steady Go, a programme that was the precursor to Top of the Pops, and I drew little people; little John, Paul, George and Ringo, and a camera and all that.”
What he wanted back then, he says, was not to be an actor or a musician. It was simpler than that. “I wanted to be on the telly. I wanted to be part of that whole thing.”
What eventually happened was that he met the film director Bill Forsyth who gave him a role in his film Local Hero.(Image: unknown)
"I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him and a lot of people wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him,” he says of Forsyth. “My career is thanks to him.”
Everyone asks you about Doctor Who and The Thick of It, I say, but what I really wanted to speak to you about was Ken Russell’s incredibly camp 1988 vampire movie Lair of the White Worm which also starred Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohoe. What was it like working with Russell, the master of excess?
“It was great. We laughed so much. Hugh Grant was so funny. Such a smart, witty guy. He’s great company. Great cast all together, happy days.”
As for Russell himself, “he’d be fine in the morning and then at lunchtime he’d go into his trailer and he would emerge as the enfant terrible of the sixties. I don’t know if he had been quaffing champagne, or what had gone on at lunchtime, but he was mad then. He would push the cameraman off the camera and he would take over.
“I remember he was very serious about that film. It subsequently became well known as a comedy, but that wasn’t intentional at the time.
“It was a wee bit weird. I’d stumble onto a stage in Shepperton and there were some quite racy sequences that didn’t appear in the film being shot.”
Capaldi had his own ambitions as a director. In 1992 he wrote and starred in the romcom Soft Top, Hard Shoulder alongside Collins and a year later he wrote and directed the short Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life which won him an Oscar at the 1995 Academy Awards. At which point he was being courted by the Weinsteins and a career as a Hollywood hot shot seemed just a contract away, only for the Weinsteins to renege on the offer.
“I think it was for the best,” he says now.
“At the time it was difficult. The rug’s pulled from under your feet. But if I’d done that I wouldn’t have gone back to acting and I’ve enjoyed acting so much since then.”
Still, a year to the day after winning an Oscar, he told Kirsty Young on her Radio 4 show Young Again in 2024, he was shooting a local dog food commercial.
“We had to shoot it within the range of the M25, the ring road that goes around London, but the product was from Cornwall,” Capaldi recalls when I bring it up. “I had to find a farm and a field and a dog because we didn't have enough money to go any further than that
“And the client, who was from Cornwall, said the soil was the wrong colour. ‘This is brown, the soil in Cornwall is red.’ What am I supposed to do with that information? So I thought I don’t want to spend my life doing this, apologising for the earth.”
What followed were what we might call his Midsomer Murder years; guest parts in TV series and small parts in films.
“I think I was a bit disappointed,” he says of that time. “You start to go, ‘Oh well, I’m not going to do those great parts or whatever. I’m just going to be a bellringer in Midsomer Murders.’ And there is a delight in that, a grace and a dignity in that. And I love that in actors. They really get knocked about. They’re up and down. They’ve got mortgages to pay and look after their kids. I can see it in their eyes.”
Of course at that point he was also sharing a house with another actor.
“That was where Elaine’s production career started because there was a period there where I really wasn’t earning anything. She made some enquiries with some friends who were working in production and she got a job reading scripts and doing reports for the BBC. And they were so impressed by her they said, ‘There’s a job going.’ A script assistant or something in the drama department. ‘Would you come in and try and go for it?’ “That’s how she eventually ended up becoming a producer.
“She’s my boss just now,” Capaldi says, referring to Criminal Record. How is that?
“She’s great. The show that we’re doing now I really enjoy doing. It’s very demanding,very modern, and the subjects that it deals with are hard.
“And that all comes from her. Crime wasn’t a particular interest for her, but she’s extremely well read. People would come into the house and go, ‘Oh Peter, all these books, you must be very well read.’ I have to go, ‘They’re Elaine’s books. They’re not mine. My books are the Doctor Who annuals over there.’”
Have you written a song for her yet, Peter?
“Many songs. Many, many songs on the album.”
It was being cast as Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s scabrous political sitcom The Thick of It that heralded the second act of Capaldi’s career. Those fey, gangly, awkward young men he played in his twenties were now pushed aside as he became the fire-breathing spin doctor with a caustic line in sweary putdowns.
“That’s just what life does to you. I couldn’t have played that part until the time I played it,” he suggests. He needed to have experienced the “various kickings” life had in store for him, he says, to be able to play Tucker
“I knew by the time I came to play that part that things could go wrong. I was tougher, I was a different person. That helped ignite Malcolm.”
It is now 13 years since he said goodbye to Tucker, eight years (and two Doctors) since he handed the keys of the Tardis to Jodie Whittaker. Capaldi has now moved into the veteran-stroke-legend part of his career. Or, as he would have it, his don’t-give-a-stuff years.
That’s what’s great about being in your sixties, he says, you don’t care anymore.
“Physically, you can’t escape the fact that things can get a little bit tougher. But, as yet, that hasn’t really impacted me. I get a bit knackered, more knackered than I used to.”
He pivots to the personal. “I love having grandkids. I love … I wouldn’t call it wisdom …There’s a kind of understanding, a perspective, about what’s important and what’s not important which you don’t have when you’re younger and I welcome that very much. You don’t waste your time. You’ve only got X amount.”
He smiles again. “It’s funny, my wife …” he begins, “I’ve never been obsessed with death or the ending of life. I think she’s been obsessed with it since she was a kid.
“So, it’s only recently I’ve begun to realise, ‘Oh, right, so this doesn’t go on and on and on. There’s a point where this ends.’ And if you’re lucky it ends neatly.
“So I am conscious of that, but it just makes me want to enjoy life more, be a part of life.
“I’m very, very lucky because the shows that I’ve been involved in - obviously Doctor Who, but also The Thick of It - have a large appeal to young people. So I have a lot of young people talk to me. And also with the music, I’ve got a band who are all so much younger than me and it's great to be part of all that, to be in that world.
“And it's very stimulating rather than just locking the doors and saying, ‘I'm going to be old now.’
“Is it a struggle? I don't know. It’s a struggle sometimes because it's physically a bit tougher. But I don't find that I struggle psychologically. Other than the ticking clock.”
Towards the end of last year Capaldi returned to playing music live with a gig in Stereo in Glasgow. He’s not sure if he’ll do many more.
“I’m not trying to have another career, so I don’t really want to have a big tour. I don’t want a pile of people I have to answer to. So, we’re going to do Belladrum Festival in August and that’s great. The big band’s are on the big stage and we’re on a little stage and that’s perfect.
"And hopefully we’ll do a couple of gigs before that as well.”
Maybe you could see the current chapter in Peter Capaldi’s life as a sort of homecoming. He’s reconnecting with that young musician he once was. And he is also reconnecting with his own origin story in Glasgow.
“I’m in Glasgow much more now than I have been for years. My daughter, who was born and raised in north London, has moved to Glasgow with my grandchildren. Because although she was a north London girl her granny was in Glasgow and she’d come to Glasgow to see her granny who’s no longer with us. So she’s very familiar with the place. She loves Glasgow, she loves the scale of it, the kids love it, so we’re spending a lot more time there.”
There’s a sense of circularity in that, he admits, and a reminder of the city that made him who he is.
“I love Glasgow. The thing is you carry it with you anyway. Glasgow is part of me and I’m happy about that.”
Peter Capaldi talks a lot and, it turns out, he does know a thing or two. Whatever he might sing.
Sweet Illusions comes out on the Last Night From Glasgow label on Friday.
Credits:
With thanks to the Lord Palmerston Pub, Dartmouth Road, London.
Blue shirt and both suits by Edward Sexton, plum shirt by Paul Smith.
"The Doctor sees himself as a cosmic, timeless philosopher, an explorer, adventurer, righter of wrongs, and hopeless piece of flotsam and jetsam. I think he has to be all of those things..."
Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing. Just 100% rebel Time Lord. The Twelfth Doctor is in the building...
Interview by Benjamin Cook
[transcript under the cut]
Peter Capaldi is cool. This time last year, bow ties were cool, and fezzes, or Stetsons, possibly bunk beds. But now it’s the Doctor himself. Cool and composed, still never cruel or cowardly, and just the right amount of scary. If you’re anxious about this new, unfamiliar Doctor bursting onto our screens this month in his first, feature-length adventure, don’t be. Firstly, he’s brilliant. Secondly, you’re not alone. Because beneath his cool, unflappable exterior, 56-year old Peter is anxious too.
“I’m terrified,” he admits. “I have been since the very first day. At the first readthrough, there were so many people, the room was packed, you’re being filmed from the moment you step through the door. You think, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to do something good with the part now.’ When I got to film it, I was very frightened. I still am. It’s actually getting a bit more frightening now, because the show is coming on shortly. You’re in a bubble when you’re making it, because it’s so all-consuming. You sort of forget that it’s going out into the world, people are going to have opinions about it, and it’s going to work or it’s not. Once all that enters your head, you get scared all over again. You know? It’s a big challenge, because it’s sort of not about acting chops; it’s about whether or not the people like you, and there’s no guarantee of that. But you can’t spend every day terrified or you’d never get anything done - it’s not much use to you, if you’re on edge – so you sort of have to just not look down. You have to try to get on with that scene, with those words, coming through that door, running after that monster. Concentrate on those elements, and not on the bigger picture. The Doctor is rarely that frightened.” A pause. “I think it’s good to be frightened.” He mulls this over, before adding: “But also it’s delightful.”
It's well documented that Peter is a fan of Doctor Who. You’ll have read the letter he wrote, as a teenager, to Radio Times, lamenting the death of original Master actor Roger Delgado and applauding a recent article on how to build a Dalek. (‘Who knows, the country could be invaded by an army of school Daleks,’ wrote 15-year-old Peter. ‘Ah, but we’d be safe, as we’d have Dr Who to protect us!’) You’ll know that he collected the Doctors’ autographs, wrote fan fiction, drew fan art, and once interviewed Bernard Lodge, the designer of the show’s original title sequence, for a Doctor Who fanzine. You might even know that Peter was involved in the early days of organized fandom, and penned numerous letters to the Doctor Who production office inquiring about how the show was made. One time, producer Barry Letts wrote back, sending Peter two shooting scripts for 1972 Pertwee serial The Mutants, “a trigger to my ambition to work somehow – I didn’t know how – in TV,” Peter has said.
Which makes it all the more satisfying that forty-something years later, on a blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon in July 2014, Peter is stood on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral – the real one in London, not, as showrunner Steven Moffat teases, "an exact replica that we’ve built in Cardiff” – shooting the two-part finale of his first series as the Doctor. He still can’t quite believe it. “I’m amazed,” he tells DWM, “to find myself close to the end now. It’s all gone very quickly.”
Stood next to Peter, fellow Glaswegian Michelle Gomez is all Edwardian and chic – and probably up to no good – as the intriguingly-titled Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere. A passing London cabbie rolls down his window and yells, “It’s Doctor Who and Mary Poppins!”
Peter starts to sing. “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag…”
Off camera, five Cybermen lurk. They’re not joining in. (Cybermen can’t sing.) They were last spotted stomping around St Palu’s in the 1968 serial The Invasion, which Peter watched on its original airing. Of course he did. “It’s great to recreate it today,” he says. “Although, I think they had more Cybermen back then.”
“But we can CGI in extra ones,” points out Steven. “And will! Come on, it’s pretty impressive.” He’s right, it is. As the Cybermen march down the cathedral steps, Peter takes photos on his mobile phone. “It’s terrifying when they come straight at you,” marvels Steven. “They look quite funny on the stairs, but then - uh oh!”
For the past six months, Peter has divided his time between his home in London, and Cardiff, the spiritual home of twenty-first century Doctor Who. He saves the universe Mondays to Fridays, then returns to London at weekends to spend time with his wife and daughter. Peter and his wife have been married for 23 years. Remarkably, he has been reading DWM for even longer. “For as long as I can remember,” he says. See, he’s a proper fan. Right now, a few feet away from us, there are several hundred fellow fans, watching the filming from behind police cordons. “It’s nice for them to have something to see,” Peter says. “The best days are always those where we’re blowing up monsters in broad daylight.” He heads over to meet the fans between virtually every take – signing autographs, posing for photos. His dedication is relentless. This man cares.
What was it that first attracted Peter to Doctor Who? Growing up in the 1960s in Glasgow, BBC TV Centre must have seemed a world away…
“Well, yes, regional accents were few and far between on television,” he remembers. “That’s how shows were. That’s how drama and entertainment was presented. But it absolutely didn’t feel a world away. It’s odd now when you think about it, as most drama then was London-centric, but we didn’t think about that. It was full of monsters, and creatures, and mystery, and darkness, and fun, and magic. Anybody who enjoyed the show had a very intimate relationship with it, so it never occurred to me for a second where it was made. It didn’t feel as though we were watching different people, other than when they were supposed to be not human. People have often asked me, since I took up the role, what the attraction is, and I find almost any answer is wanting. You can break it down into constituent events or psychoanalytical nuggets, but in the end it’s a sort of myth to me; a curious mix of sci-fi, and the fairytale, and the mysterious. It’s quite a darkly magical thing, I think. I like to keep it a mystery.
Does it feel like the same show he’s working on now?
“To me it does, but I know that it isn’t. The show is clearly, on lots of levels, very different. It’s a very huge, commercial concern. It’s international in a way that it wasn’t before. That’s the show that we’re making. But at its heart it’s the same, because it’s made by people with a very deep and respectful affection for the show through all its incarnations. Also, it’s not about standing still. It’s constantly moving and looking forward. It must bring the past with it, without being slavish to it. Of course, sometimes we make a very specific reference to the past. Sometimes the past does assert itself very powerfully…”
Let me tell you about my first meeting with Peter. It’s 1 May 2014, and I’m in a Nottingham Castle vault. In Cardiff. This is perfectly normal. They’re shooting Episode 3, Mark Gatiss’ Robot of Sherwood. I first glimpse Peter standing beneath a Medieval tapestry, practicing the yo-yo. Ben Miller is here too, playing the Sheriff of Nottingham, but looking spookily like Anthony Ainley’s Master circa 1983. During a break in filming, I slink out of the castle, and onto the empty, darkened TARDIS set next door. Because I’m nosy, and I want to see what they’ve done with the place since the new Doctor arrived. He has left his mark. The console room now boasts bookshelves, a chalkboard, a small workshop… but it’s dark and I can’t really see, so I venture in a little further. It no longer feels like I’m in a Cardiff TV studio or that Robin Hood is next door, or that this isn’t actually the TARDIS. And that’s when I hear a voice. “Hello, you must be new.” It’s him! Not Peter Capaldi, but the Doctor. Looking a lot like Peter Capaldi. He’s sitting on a fold-up chair, in the shadows, where he was rehearsing his lines before DWM broke in. But he smiles warmly, and says he loves the magazine. “It relaxes me after a long day,” he explains. “I’m enjoying Doctor Who Magazine very much at the moment, and I’m glad that someone is documenting all of this stuff.”
Then the Doctor shows me around his TARDIS. “Essentially, it’s Matt [Smith]’s TARDIS, with a few additions,” he says. “You can’t see today, but it’s usually lit quite differently. Lots of orange. I think we might stick with this next year, too.” He’s talking about next year already! This man loves his job. “How could I not? It’s Doctor Who.” He talks enthusiastically of the fans he’s met since taking on the role (“They see the Doctor, not Peter Capaldi. That’s better, I think. The Doctor is much more interesting than I am”), and of how thrilled he is with this year’s crop of scripts, even those that are delivered at the eleventh hour (“I’d much prefer that than them arriving a week earlier and not being as brilliant”), and of how important it is with a show as huge as this that everyone who works on it cares as much as they do. His only regret about taking on the role, he confesses, is that he’s aware that one day he must give it up. “So I’m determined to enjoy every day as much as I can.”
Then he shows me his binder. This is the binder in which Peter keeps his scripts. It’s covered in photos from old episodes of Doctor Who. “It’s kind of like a school thing, really,” he explains. “I was looking for some stuff to decorate it. There’s a certain childlike thing… You surround yourself with images, and try to conjure a creative environment, even within the little plastic folder that I’ve bought from the stationary shop, that’s going to constantly remind you of things, put ideas in your head. I found these pictures on the internet.” There’s a photo of an out-of-costume Jon Pertwee and Liz Shaw actress Caroline John rehearsing a scene from 1970 serial Inferno (“He looks very dashing,” comments Peter, “and I like that, because I sort of don’t imagine any of the Doctors in their own clothes. It’s unusual to see him like that on the TARDIS set, and a reminder of how elegant he was in real life”); another of Pertwee and Delgado sharing a smile during the filming of 1971’s The Claws of Axos; one of a beaming Tom Baker in the mid-70s, at the height of his powers, surrounded by a sea of adoring children and curious old ladies; a photo of Baker during a visit to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, enjoying a light-hearted moment with the nurses (“It looks like it was taken in the 30s,” says Peter, “which it can’t have been but it’s a picture of great warmth”); another of William Hartnell, in full Who regalia, signing a girl’s plaster cast during a visit to a children’s ward in the 60s…
“It’s a reminder,” says Peter, “that whatever people might think about William Hartnell, this was somebody who was going out to children’s hospitals on his days off, making sick kids feel a little bit better. It reminded me of that element of the show, that connection that kids and young people make to it.” It’s clear that Peter isn’t taking the responsibilities that come with playing the Doctor lightly. The photos adorning his binder are, he says, “fun little signals of the show’s past, for me, and a connection with childhood, I guess. I realise now, as I’m saying it to you, it’s an underlining of where Doctor Who was born for me. It was my childhood.”
When I next meet Peter, he’s shooting Episode 8, Mummy on the Orient Express. It’s the second week of June. Peter, Clara actress Jenna Coleman, and guest star Frank Skinner – another diehard Doctor Who fan – are on the fully-lit TARDIS. Frank is transfixed by the orange glow of the central console. “Stunning, isn’t it?”
“It’s like Alien under there,” nods director Paul Wilmshurst.
Frank isn’t even in this scene. He just wanted to be on the TARDIS set to watch Peter. “It’s like I’m watching Doctor Who live,” grins Frank, “but from a really, really good seat.”
Peter is worried that the Doctor is too solemn in this scene. “That’s a very serious face,” he says, watching himself back on the camera monitor. “There’s tension there. The Saturday night audience, they want it to be, ‘Yeah, hooray, now whoosh, let’s go,’ but that ain’t happening.”
“The Saturday night audience is a mixture of people,” Paul reminds him. “No, I like it.”
This weekend, Peter read the scripts for his first season finale. “It’s a stormer,” he tells me, then fixes me dead in the eyes and asks: “The Caves of Androzani. Why’s it so popular?”
Um. It looks amazing… The whole serial oozes class… It’s probably Peter Davison’s finest performance as the Doctor… It’s everything you could want from a Doctor’s swansong.
Peter looks satisfied, for now. “Interesting. Thank you.” He bounds off to film a scene. (Later, on board the Orient Express, I overhear a conversation between Peter and Frank. “Sharaz Jek,” Peter is saying. “Don’t you think he’s brilliant?” “Yes!” Frank replies. “Oh, I love Sharaz Jek!” I leave them to it.) Ten minutes later, Peter is back. “Ben, how long can Time Lords live for? Also, what’s the best Colin Baker story?”
Okay. Weill. Thousands of years. And I nominate The Trial of a Time Lord, controversially. (So sue me. Or send your letters of complaint to the editorial address.) But Trial aired in 1986, I point out, at a time when the BBC wasn’t all that supportive of Doctor Who.
“That must have been hard,” says Peter, “for the people who worked on it back then. Fortunately for us, that’s no longer the case. This show couldn’t be more supported.”
A few weeks later, back in London, I ask Peter about this day, and his questions about former Doctors. “It’s two things,” he explains. “This is an extraordinary part, with an extraordinary history to it, so I’m very conscious of arriving in this historical context. But also it’s very, very personal, because your own experience of the show informs it, so I was keen to make myself more familiar with Peter and Colin, because that’s when I sort of left the show behind. I was about 17, 18 years old midway through Tom Baker, and I started to drift away a bit. I don’t mean I didn’t watch it, but… I’m not as familiar with it. I wasn’t there as religiously on Saturday afternoons as I had been previously, and in those days there were no VCRs, no DVDs. If you missed it, you missed it. I wanted to learn about my ‘lost years’. I think it’s important to know and to understand what was going on in the show back then. Actually, Doctor Who Magazine has been a great help to me with that, so thank you. The great challenge of the show and this part is to keep it personal, while being respectful to its past.”
So how do you go about making the part of the Doctor your own? Where do you even begin?
“Well,” says Peter, “you begin with yourself. You begin with those elements of yourself that you feel would be at home in that role. There’s an old actors’ adage that you don’t become the role, the role becomes you. It’s trying to find those parts of you that will fit with the Doctor, and understand those bits that don’t come so naturally to you, that you have to fabricate. I kept looking for people in real life who I thought had elements of the Doctor about them and were inspirational in some ways. I composed a list of those.” He won’t reveal who’s on the list. All he’ll say is, “I was trying to stick in ideas about people who would be Doctor-ish and if I could expound on that or deploy any of their tics… I tried to generate a microclimate of Doctor Who creativity. Also, it’s recognising what’s been written. My Doctor is written slightly differently from some of the other Doctors, and the Doctor changes quite dramatically from episode to episode. Some demand more of your comedy chops, graver or more serious episodes demand a more sombre creature. All these variations have to live in the same body, in the same face. Putting all that together is tricky.” He shrugs. “I’m saying all this, it hasn’t gone out yet. I don’t know if it’s worked. It remains to be seen whether or not I’ve been successful.”
Which bits of his Doctor are most like Peter, I ask?
This stumps him at first. He thinks hard for a good 30 seconds, before saying: “Um. Well, I suppose there’s a sort of, uh… there’s a kind of division that happens in the eighteenth century between science and art. Previously science and art had belonged in the same box. Leonardo da Vinci could be a fabulous artist and a fabulous scientist. To me, the Doctor is an artist-slash-scientist. He’s incredibly bright. I don’t think my Doctor would welcome any of those definitions. He’d think they’re quite primitive, from his point of view.”
So how does this new Doctor see himself?
“Good question. I think as a cosmic, timeless philosopher, explorer, adventurer, righter of wrongs, and hopeless piece of flotsam and jetsam. I think he has to be all of those things. I didn’t want him to be in charge as much as perhaps we’ve seen him before. He’s someone who sees great beauty in things, but that can be in stars being born in the outer reaches of the galaxy, or in litter blowing across a supermarket car park at dawn. He finds all of these things beautiful, and I think he should constantly stop and see them. He wants to pursue beautiful things, but he gets shocked into adventures. I think he just wants to range around up there, back there, in the future, looking at it all, enjoying it all, and seeing it all, but he’s constantly drawn into areas of conflict.”
I point out that Peter’s Doctor has a bit of an edge to him – he can seem quite severe at times – but Peter insists, “It’s less him being hard on people; it’s more that he doesn’t understand quite how you talk to human beings. It’s less ‘I don’t suffer fools gladly’; more ‘Oh, they’re quite complex, these human beings. They need to be comforted from time to time.’ He becomes impatient with them. Some of the previous Doctors have been more sensitive to what their companions and other human beings need from him. My Doctor needs them to get up to speed with him. He can’t really be bothered hanging around and making life lovely for them, making them welcome. It doesn’t mean they’re not welcome. A lot of this is in the writing: Steven’s concept of how far you can take the Doctor. I never think my Doctor is unpleasant; he just isn’t great at dealing with humans. He doesn’t mean to be short with them. He just doesn’t quite get it sometimes.”
You’ll know this, but Peter has appeared in Doctor Who before. In 2008, he played Caecilius opposite David Tennant’s Doctor in The Fires of Pompeii. “When I was offered it, I was so excited, I couldn’t actually read the script,” he told DWM earlier this year. “I just wanted to phone my agent and say, ‘Yes!’ But I was persuaded that the professional thing to do would be to read it first. So I did, loved it, and off I went.”
Will we get an explanation for why the new Doctor has Caecilius’ face?
“It’s addressed,” smiles Peter. “Is it Caecilius’ face? Was that man really Caecilius?”
The tease! What else can he tell us about the Doctor’s journey this series. Did Steven tell Peter everything from the start?
“He gave me a very entertaining evening,” chuckles Peter, “when he went through the entire 12 episodes, basically acting them out for me. I said to him he should get a job as a performance artist. He did them all. All the characters. He’s like a chameleon. He told me what was going to happen in the show.”
Was there anything where you thought, ‘That sounds too bonkers’?
“Well, you just go, ‘Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. That sounds…. good luck with that.’ But then it comes to fruition, when you actually see it, it’s amazing. I have great faith in Steven and this amazing crew. I’m always amazed at how they pull it off. Of course, a lot of actors love to know what’s going to happen to their characters well in advance, because they think that allows them to pace their performances. I’ve never really been convinced of that. I operate on a need-to-know basis. If something dramatic’s going to happen, I’d rather that I discovered it when it was happening, not six months beforehand. The actual scripts don’t arrive till maybe a week before the readthrough, which will be a couple of days before we start shooting, and the surprises I like are the smaller ones; the little moments, the asides, the remarks, the experiences, the things that go on in the by-streets of the episodes. Those are the things that delight me.
“What I think sometimes happens with long-running shows,” he continues, “is that you get into a groove. You learn how to do the part in a certain way, and you just keep doing it. But you’ve got to constantly niggle it, probe it, find out those little moments, push it, see how far you can take it. At the same time, the audience switches on to see a certain thing. You’d be disappointed if Tom Baker didn’t at some point produce a jelly baby, or if Jon Pertwee didn’t give a politician or a soldier a withering look. I used to find this with The Thick of It [BBC Four/Two, 2005-2012]. I’d always say ‘Do we have to have Malcolm [Tucker, the aggressive and profane spin doctor that Peter played] come in doing a great, sweary tirade?' And they’d say, ‘Well, yeah, because that’s why people switch on.’ A director the other day told me that another director had suggested, ‘Let’s have a shot of the TARDIS materialising, but let’s not see it materialise,’ and everyone had looked at him in horror. What’s the point of having a show where it happens out of shot? Part of the fun is seeing the TARDIS materialise, the Doctor and Clara step out, and – where are they this time?”
How will he be watching the series when it airs on BBC One this August to November?
“The problem for me is, I’m a Doctor Who fan,” he laughs, “so I can’t not watch Doctor Who. Even if it weren’t me, I’d be watching it. I’d miss not watching it. But yes, that’s an interesting point – I don’t know what I’ll do, to be honest. It is quite difficult to watch yourself. The episodes that I’ve seen, I find that the sticking point of them all is me. That’s what I find the most troublesome, is watching me. But there are wonderful things that happen when suddenly it all comes together, and it becomes Doctor Who, and then you have to remind yourself… you know, when I forget that it’s me, that’s when I enjoy it. One of the key things I’m finding out about it now is that it’s created by all of the efforts of the people working on it, so watching these episodes with me playing the Doctor in them, has been extremely illuminating. They’ve shown me more about who my Doctor is than me sitting in a quiet study trying to figure it all out. So it’s a kind of self-feeding thing, if we’re going in the right direction – and I hope that we are.
“The funny thing is, we’re starting to have these conversations about next year and I’m like ‘There are some amazing things coming along there!’ Steven is telling me, and I’m like, ‘Wow! Yeah!’ So we’re already ahead of the curve on all this. We’ve some great ideas coming for 2015.”
So Peter will be back next year?
“Well, I’d like to be. It’s not up to me. I’ve had a wonderful time doing the show, anybody would, but having a wonderful time is no guarantee that they’re going to keep you there. I’ve loved it, so I’d be very, very happy to carry on, but we’ll have to see. We’re doing a Christmas one. As I say, we’ve discussed 2015. But there’ s no guarantee it’s certainly me. But I hope it is.”
Last summer, when it was announced that Peter had been cast as the Doctor, there was much excitement, some trepidation, and plenty of speculation about how he’d play the part. In March this year, a couple of months into shooting, something wonderful happened: a shaky mobile-phone recording of a touching encounter between Peter and a young fan appeared on YouTube, and went viral – over 180,000 views to date – and reminded us, as if we ever doubted it, that as well as being an excellent actor, Peter was as compassionate as the Doctor himself – without doubt the right man to take on the role.
“This little girl, her parents were concerned that she loved Matt so much and she would genuinely worry that he was gone,” recalls Peter, when I ask him about the video, “and what was going to happen, and how was that going to affect her?”
In the video, we see Peter get down on one knee and gently tell five-year-old Roxann: “Matt was really nice to me, and Jenna was too. They were both very welcoming to me when I came into the TARDIS. Matt said to me to look after Doctor Who, and he gave me his watch that he wears, and he said that in his own way he was happy that it was me who was coming in. So I will do my very best to be as much fun and as friendly as he is. So they say it’s okay for me to be the Doctor. I hope you think it’ll be okay for me to be the Doctor, too.”
‘Even though Roxann wouldn’t look at them or talk, which is due to her autism,’ explained Roxann’s mum in a blog post, ‘she took everything in that was being said to her by Peter. I cannot express how overjoyed and thankful I am.’
“All I could do was to try to show her that both Matt and Jenna had approved of me, and hopefully if they did – and Matt particularly – then she would feel that it might be okay,” Peter tells DWM.
“But you just sort of busk it, really, because you don’t know what people are going to ask you, and you don’t know what people are going to bring to a meeting with you. Certainly when they’re youngsters, they’re so enthusiastic about the show, you’d have to have a very cold heart not to try to make them feel good about it.
“It’s a fairly new experience for me,” he concludes. “it’s difficult, when you’re offered the role, to anticipate what’s going to happen to you. Matt and David have both been very helpful to me in trying to prepare me and talking to me about it, Russel T Davies [former showrunner] has been very supportive too, but I remember from being a fan myself how important the show was to me, so I simply try to be respectful of that, of their affection. I’ve read lots of interviews with all the Doctors, and they often refer to this sort syndrome: people project the Doctor onto you when they meet you, so they’re already smiling. They’re really pleased to see you. That’s a privilege that is rare among human beings, that you get this warm welcome, and you haven’t done anything to deserve that. I am simply playing this part for the time that I have it, and to look after the character of Doctor Who while I’ve got him. Part of that is to be kind, I guess. It’s a fairly privileged position to be in. You get the best of people. That’s wonderful. That’s what this show does you see. I think it’s what it’s always done. It brings out the best in people.
With the dust only just beginning to settle on PETER CAPALDI’s Oscar, the Scottish actor is regaining his sense of perspective. He speaks to Kathleen Morgan.
[transcript under the cut]
For someone who has just been catapulted into the world of Oscar winners, Peter Capaldi is sounding rather tetchy. Days after the golden award was thrust into his sweaty palms under the gaze of a worldwide television audience of about a billion people, the actor is desperate to inject some reality back into his life.
That has involved beating off a string of journalists he believes are determined to wrap his achievement in tartan. The fact that Capaldi’s directorial debut Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life attracted a coveted Hollywood accolade is utterly divorced from the small matter of his Scottish roots. Anyone who dares suggest otherwise is likely to feel the rough edge of a nippy sweetie.
‘Scottish journalists want your Scottishness to be what people love, but it’s in a kind of kitsch way,’ says Capaldi in an impeccable Bishopbriggs accent. ‘It’s liberating to be Scottish, and also to be appreciated as a creative person.’
Behind his reluctance to play the Scottish card, Capaldi is immensely proud of winning the award for best short live action film with Franz Kafka – a black comedy starring Richard E. Grant and Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins. Funded by the Scottish Film Production Fund and BBC Scotland, the 25-minute Tartan Short has attracted not only a lump of metal for his London mantelpiece, but the attention of Hollywood executives, craved by any aspiring filmmaker. It is not the blissful memory of thirty seconds of fame Capaldi relishes, but the prospect of directing a full-length feature film. Without the tartan bows.
In the days before his Oscar-winning performance at the Los Angeles event, Capaldi was busy touting the script for Moon Man – ‘a sort of film noir comedy fantasy.’ Days afterwards, he believes he has bagged a deal which would see his dream become a reality. Until it is signed and sealed, he is unwilling to divulge the details, but he stresses his commitment to using Scottish actors if – when – it goes ahead.
Capaldi is in no doubt where his loyalties lie. They are certainly not rooted in a dewy-eyed devotion to Scotland. ‘I would like to do a large section of the film in Glasgow, but I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to do that,’ he says. ‘I will certainly use a large number of Scottish people, but my loyalty is to the project. It’s a bit difficult to be curtailed by meaningless nationalistic instincts. I don’t see the point in filming something in Glasgow when it’s more economic to film it somewhere else.’
Tough talking from the 33-year-old actor who in 1983 captured the heart of a nation in Bill Forsyth’s gentle comedy Local Hero. The film that put the north-east fishing village of Pennan and its public phone box on the cinematic map, also proved a turning point for Capaldi. An aspiring actor, Capaldi had caught the eye of Forsyth, who decided he was a safe bet and plunged him into the role of the blundering Oldsen. ‘I was thrown in at the deep end, doing something I had wanted to do five years before,’ says Capaldi, adding in typical monotones: ‘It was scary.’
It was also a triumph for someone who had been rejected for drama school in London and had gone to Glasgow School of Art instead – a move that pleased his parents, who believed his career prospects had improved as a result. ‘They always supported me, but were worried for me because they were just ordinary folk,’ says Capaldi. ‘You move into a world they don’t understand – it saddens and hurts them because it’s not as if they can talk to someone who might be able to get you a wee job somewhere. They really wanted me to go to art school and do the drama on the side like any other responsible, normal person.’
On Oscar night, Capaldi’s family was no doubt relieved he had chosen to ignore his responsible, normal impulses and pursue a career in film. Since his often hilarious face was launched on the big screen in Local Hero, he has had a few memorable, if sporadic successes. In 1988, he was John Malkovich’s Machiavellian side-kick in Dangerous Liaisons and in 1992, he wrote and starred in the wonderfully frustrating feel-good movie Soft Top, Hard Shoulder. Based unashamedly on his own Italian-Glasgow family background, it captured the agonies and ecstasies felt by anyone who has made a long, nostalgic journey from London to Glasgow.
Ask Capaldi about his roots and you are likely to get a scathing reply. ‘People would rather like to imagine you have a family with the mother cooking spaghetti,’ he says. When pushed, he reveals his Italian grandfather moved to Glasgow from a village south of Rome: ‘He started off as a shepherd. His business was vagrancy and he moved into ice cream.’
Capaldi has lived in London for eleven years, but wants to move back to Glasgow with Collins and their young daughter. He will do so when he feels he can tap into the film world and make money, without having to apologise for his home address. For now, he is still dealing with what he regards as the patronizing attitude rampant in London television and film circles – something he escaped from briefly in Los Angeles. ‘Your Scottishness is not an issue there,’ he says. ‘People are not discreetly saying you should be going off making a wee Scottish film people don’t want to see, whereas in London, there’s an instinctive agenda.’
It has not been easy so far. Capaldi freely admits there have been mistakes along the way, largely obscured by a lack of media interest: ‘No one wants to hear stories of miserable mediocrity.’ For a few people in the Capaldi household and in the film industry, his most recent achievement was a complete surprise. Bishopbriggs or Beverly Hills-bound, Capaldi sounds like he is capable of a few more like it.
Peter Capaldi stars in Runway One, a comedy thriller due to be broadcast by the BBC in August.
He went from pop star to pop has-been, Local Hero to zero, Oscar winner to TV-show extra… But it took the role of a foul-mouthed spin doctor in the BBC’s hit political satire The Thick Of It to transform Peter Capaldi’s fortunes
As the frerocious spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the biting BBC political sitcom The Thick Of It, Oscar-winning actor Peter Capaldi has demonstrated a talent for swearing that would make Alf Garnett blush. In person, Capaldi, whose talents have found a wider audience following the success of the recent big-screen spin-off In The Loop, barely cusses at all. The air only really turns blue as he warms up to a rant about the world of politicians.
‘Politics is a whorehouse,’ he says. ‘It’s a brutal world where there’s no place for the thin-skinned. I’m not saying that all politicians are awful. I don’t know any of them well enough to say whether they’re awful or not. But almost every day you find out something about them that’s appalling. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised any longer. But it’s still a shock to find out about Damian McBride sending emails filled with very unpleasant allegations about members of the Conservative Party. Like everyone else, I’m tired of all this. It’s a terrible way to behave, a completely disgraceful way to conduct any kind of business.
‘It shouldn’t be encouraged. There’s nothing smart about it whatsoever, but it’s part of the mechanism by which things are achieved in politics. Whatever anyone pretends, it’s not just McBride behaving appallingly and it’s not just Labour. It’s going on all over the place. The idea that David Cameron and George Osborne are going to come in and clean all this up is, frankly, laughable.
‘Forget it. Because it’s going on already. You can’t blame anyone for being cynical about politicians. I wish someone like Obama would come along and say, “Believe in me.” We’re in dire need of someone with a sense of honour, because I don’t see any honour out there. Personally, I have as little to do with politicians as possible. The ones I’ve met I’ve found very boring. They’re extremely egotistical, incredibly self-important. If I can help it, I try to stay as far away from them as possible.’
As he admits, this has become increasingly difficult since he introduced Malcolm Tucker to the world in 2005, when The Thick Of It first hit our screens. Directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci, the show followed a team of government ministers quaking under the rule of Tucker, a spin doctor with an Oxbridge degree in foul-mouthed intimidation. To ensure Tucker’s lines are as sharp and obscene as can be, a special swearing consultant is kept on the payroll. ‘He’s a mysterious chap called Ian who possesses a genius for creating grotesque insults,’ says Capaldi.
The show was hailed as both a brave new chapter in political satire and the funniest thing on TV since The Office. By the time it had been extended to two hour-long specials, Tucker was being wildely discussed as belonging to the pantheon of classic British comedy creations, alongside Del boy, Alan Partridge and David Brent.
Everyone involved with The Thick Of It has maintained that Tucker is a composite of several government spin doctors. Even so, Capaldi’s character is frequently compared to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications director, who is famous for his Tucker-esque short fuse and use of industrial-strength language.
Campbell himself seems to have few qualms about being associated with a character so profoundly monstrous that he’s at his most courteous when telling a special adviser, ‘If you don’t go and get me some cheese, I’m gonna rip your head off and give you a spinedectomy.’
While acknowledging Tucker is ‘a devious, lying, bullying, truth-twisting, warmongering psychopath,’ Campbell has also conceded that he is ‘to an extent, based on me’.
Given that Capaldi might sooner settle for a ‘spinedectomy’ than endure the company of politicians, imagine his delight when he attended a Channel 4 political awards ceremony last year and found himself sharing a table with Alastair Campbell.
‘It was a very strange evening,’ says Capaldi. ‘I had no plans to sit next to him and the first I knew about it was when I arrived. It was extremely rude of Channel 4 to have set it up that way. Equally, it would have been rude of me to have walked away from the situation. I never wanted to meet Campbell, because I knew he’d be very charming.
‘It was very entertaining to watch him in action. He provided a running commentary on the night’s proceedings which had its Tucker moments. Certainly lots of swearing. It was a riotous sort of night. Having attended comedy awards, which involve drunken losers getting more and more horribly drunk, I thought I’d seen the worst kind of bear pits. Nothing compares to being in a room full of politicians screaming abuse at each other all night. It’s hilarious but also a bit terrifying.
But Capaldi has come closer to the centre of power than that. While making The Thick Of It, he spend a day filming at 10 Downing Street. There, to his grim bemusement, real-life Malcolm Tuckers queued up to have their photo taken with him.
‘Number 10 could not have been more welcoming,’ he says. ‘They threw open the doors to us and gave us the grand tour. We ended up sitting in the Cabinet Room, thinking how bizarre the whole experience was. They all seemed very happy to have us around. The real-life Tuckers weren’t nearly as colourful as ours, but obviously they were all on their best behaviour.
‘It might seem odd that the find the show so funny. Maybe the spin doctors all see themselves as victims in some way. They work under tremendous pressure. Unlike most other office workers, the fruits of their day’s work have far-reaching consequences for all of us.
‘There are no health-and-safety regulations for what they do. Nothing is laid down in terms of how they should treat people. There are no restraints. Essentially they’re gatekeepers, the tough guys who ensure that politicians are protected from the media. Their position in the chain of command is not defined, but it’s understood that their task is difficult and vital. As such, they enjoy enormous liberty in the corridors of power. They’re free to dish out random b*****kings nd make them as savage as they like. If anyone feels that they’ve overstepped the mark, they can’t go to a tribunal and claim they’ve been abused.’
But not all politicians have seen the funny side of the satire. Conservative MP Michael Portillo has dismissed In The Loop as ‘exhumed satire, hopelessly dated, deeply boring’.
‘Portillo’s reaction was extraordinarily angry,’ says Capaldi. ‘It should have reminded us how much we all hate the man. He’s been through an interesting cycle. We all used to hate him and, to the fierce delight of a generation, he lost his seat in 1997. Then he became a lovable TV personality. Now we can hate him all over again.’
The film has a stellar cast, including Steve Coogan, Gina McKee and Tom Hollander. But none is more impressive than James Gandolfini in his first film since his eight-year run as Tony Soprano came to an end. For a hardened Sopranos fan, working with Gandolfini was the thrill of a lifetime.
‘Waiting for him to arrive, the anticipation was electric,’ says Capaldi. ‘Then he walks through the door and his charisma fills the room. I kept thinking that this is what it must have been like to spend time with Sinatra: everywhere he goes he’s recognised and everyone wants a photo or an autograph. He’s incredibly gracious with everyone he meets.
‘We finished filming in New York and an end-of-shoot party had been arranged at this fabulous steakhouse in Brooklyn. It’s very hard to get a table there and there’d been a miscalculation. The actors had been put with the producers, but make-up and wardrobe had been put in a separate room.
The maître d’ was very resistant to the idea of putting us all together, explaining that the table we needed was occupied and it would be bad form to ask those people to move. When James arrived I explained the problem to him, but even he couldn’t persuade the maître d’. But James became aware that the people at the table were looking at him in complete awe. So he walked over to the table and, of course, they were happy to do anything he asked, so long as they could have their photo taken with him. The way he dealt with it was so cool. He’s a real class act.’
Capaldi is no stranger to working with screen royalty, beginning with Burt Lancaster, with whom he starred in 1983’s Local Hero. ‘The thing I remember most about Lancaster is that he was a great swearer. It was my first film and I was a gauche 24-year-old. Meeting him for the first time I was nervous and doe-eyed. I asked him how his hotel was and he barked, “The hotel’s fine, but the woman who runs it is a ****.” At the end of the filming he turned to me said, ‘You have a good instinct for acting, but I can’t understand a f***ing word you say.”’
Before his acting career took off, Capaldi had a brief stab at rock stardom, singing in a Glasgow punk band with future US chat-show supremo Craig Ferguson on drums.
‘Originally we were called the B******s from Hell, but we figured that a name like that would prevent us from becoming as big as the Beatles. So we changed it to the Dreamboys, possibly the worst band name of all time. It made us sound like a bunch of oiled-up musclemen who stripped off at hen parties. We did manage to put out one single, though, which was called Bela Lugosi’s Birthday. The definite highlight for the Dreamboys was playing third on the bill at the Camden Palace to three rows of skinheads who kept threatening to kill us.’
He came close to missing his shot at an acting career. Having failed to win a place at drama school, he enrolled at Glasgow Art School, where he studied graphic illustration. One evening he came home drunk to find his landlady, a costume designer, chatting with director Bill Forsyth, then riding high on the success of 1981’s Gregory’s Girl. Forsyth decided there and then that Capaldi would be perfect for the role of Danny in Local Hero.
This lucky break would prove to be the first of Capaldi’s false dawns. He moved to London, confident that plum roles awaited him. Instead he spent much of the next decade working in repertory theatre and landing bling-and-you-miss-them parts in shows as diverse as Rab C Nesbitt and Poirot. Then, in 1995, he won an Oscar for directing his short film, Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Suddenly it seemed that Capaldi had arrived yet again.
‘The feeling of success was very short-lived,’ he says. ‘Collecting an Oscar in front of my heroes, people like Steve Martin and Robert De Niro, was unreal, like being on an acid trip or something. For the next couple of weeks, I was invited to every big Hollywood party. But it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I’d find myself at some swanky do being introduced to Al Pacino and finding I had nothing to say to him beyond, “I really admire your work.”’
Returning to London, he kept plugging away at writing scripts. When Miramax expressed interest in a piece he’d written called Moon Man, Capaldi once again thought his ship had come in.
‘I flew out from Heathrow having being assured that this was a goer. Unbeknown to me, the project was cancelled while I was up in the air. I landed in New York and took a cab to the company’s Tribeca HQ, imagining the popping of champagne corks and the handing over of a very large cheque. I gave the cab driver a massive tip and marched into the building. Within 30 seconds I’d learned that it was all off. So I got back into the cab. The driver felt so sorry for me that he handed me back the tip. Then I returned to London to direct dog-food commercials.’
For the next ten years he worked mainly as a journeyman actor, putting in solid but uncelebrated performances in TV shows such as Foyle’s War and Judge John Deed. By 2004, he chances of Capaldi landing a career-defining acting role seemed to have finally eluded him. Then Armando Iannucci happened to see him play a hot-tempered professor in an episode of Peep Show and invited him to audition for the part of Malcolm Tucker.
The Thick Of It was officially an ensemble piece, but the main star of the first series was Chris Langham, whose role of bumbling minister Hugh Abbot completely revitalised a fading career and won him two Baftas.
Then, in November 2005, Langham was arrested as part of an investigation into internet pornography. He was subsequently found guilty of possessing child pornography and sentenced to ten months in prison. Though his character has not officially been written out of the series, the actor did not appear in either of the two specials.
Capaldi is the most charming and accommodating of interviewees until the subject of Chris Langham is brought up. Asked to confirm whether the Langham case is the reason for the BBC not showing repeats of The Thick Of It, he says firmly, ‘You’d have to ask them; I don’t know.’
Iannucci is on record as saying that he’d love to have Langham back on the show but he realizes that it would be an impossibility. When asked whether he shares this view, Capaldi’s mood visibly darkens and he fixes me with the flintiest of stares, saying, ‘I’d rather not discuss that.’
The moment passes and he brightens up when discussing how the role of Tucker has transformed his career. After years in the wilderness, he is currently one of the most in-demand actors around. He’s recently starred in Skins, The Devil’s Whore, Torchwood and Doctor Who. So high is his stock at present that, after a tortuous ten years, he’s just received the green light for his pet project The Great Pretender, about the making of a movie about Bonnie Prince Charlie, starring his friend Ewan McGregor.
Our time is almost up. Capaldi is off to begin filming a new series of The Thick Of It and hints that this could be the beginning of the end for Malcolm Tucker. ‘I think this could be the last series with the present cast in it. Labour aren’t likely to be in power much longer. The show needs to reflect the times. So I imagine we’ll soon be gone. Of course I’ll miss it. Most of all I’ll miss getting into the character of Tucker. It’s always such a challenge for me. I’m incredibly mild-mannered and he’s the opposite. I’ve only lost my temper big time on three occasions. I’ve got a long fuse, but when I do go off on one it’s nuclear.
‘It takes weeks to get into character. Before filming I can be found ranting and raving, swearing like a demon in my kitchen, while my wife and daughter cower in the living room. I hope the neighbours realise I’m being Tucker and not simply losing my mind. When Tucker’s gone, I won’t have that outlet. Hopefully the writers have a colourful exit planned for him. A heart attack, maybe, or perhaps they could finally silence him by bringing him down with a nasty stroke. That would be nice.’
Peter Capaldi: 'There are a lot of big problems – there's no point burying our head in the sand'
Peter Capaldi reveals how new Apple TV+ police drama Criminal Record is tackling police failings head on – and why he's not missing Doctor Who
[transcript under the cut]
Peter Capaldi is looking as sharp as ever. Great shirt, even better shoes. “It’s all my stylist’s work,” he deadpans. We are in Claridge’s in Central London. A very expensive hotel suite, full of very expensive camera equipment recording our every move. “This is just the team we roll with,” Capaldi adds with a grin. “I’ve usually got some dry ice as well.”
We are here to talk about Criminal Record, which could just be your new TV police drama obsession. Capaldi stars alongside Cush Jumbo in a classy thriller in which two detectives go head-to-head – one in fearless pursuit of justice, the other to try to save their reputation and career. The title may be horribly generic, but this is a special show. And both actors have been involved from an early stage.
“Well, my wife’s the executive producer. First dibs? Well, yeah!” says Capaldi. “Both Cush and I were involved in the development, which was really exciting, because I’ve never been in something where the writers all knew from the start who was playing those parts. So they wrote specifically for us, they were picturing us as they worked on the scripts. It also meant we could respond to their ideas at quite an early stage. So that was lovely.
“Elaine [Collins, Capaldi’s wife] brought Vera and Shetland to the screen. She’s incredibly well read. People walk into our house, see all these books and say to me, ‘Have you read all these?’ I say, No, I haven’t but my wife has. I’ve read the Doctor Who annuals!”
Capaldi outlines how Collins was developing a project about policing in a recognisable, modern London. “I said, that detective part sounds quite interesting. And I haven’t played a detective before. So I became involved then.”
Capaldi and Jumbo had worked together before. “I met her on Torchwood when she seemed like a teenager to me,” he says of his co-star. “She was great. Then I directed her in a comedy called Getting On, with Jo Brand. And Elaine cast her in Vera as well. Cush also wrote a wonderful play about Josephine Baker, a one-woman show she did. So it’s just great to see her really blossoming – and we’d always said it could be nice to do something together. And this was ideal.”
The first meeting between their characters is one the finest scenes in recent television history. A beautiful dance of power as Capaldi’s DCI Hegarty pushes back against Jumbo’s DS Lenker as she attempts to reopen a case he led and ‘solved’ many years ago. A recent anonymous tip-off suggests they got the wrong guy. Suspicion is parried with veiled threat, all taking place beneath a thin veneer of politeness and police procedure. The result is electric. Line of Duty, eat your heart out.
“I know Cush is such a great actress and I didn’t want to anticipate what she would do,” says Capaldi. “I wanted to respond to it as it happened in front of me and vice versa. So we just went at it. We decided not to rehearse that scene so we could just shoot what came to us.
“Hegarty is a seasoned detective, probably at the end of his career and has been around the block. He’s been quite bruised, seen the worst and the best of people, and doesn’t welcome someone digging into his past. He doesn’t take someone casting aspersions on his integrity lightly. He’s not going to have it!
“I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong impression and think that’s all the show is – because there are car chases, action scenes, all that kind of stuff. But there are also these long, heavy scenes where you really get into the zone. So I’m glad you liked that one. It was crucial that we set them up in that way. And there are other ones later that we really go for!”
GOING DEEP
Despite his character appearing to be a little dodgy, maybe even properly bent, Capaldi relates to him. To a point.
“There is a great thing when you’re involved with a character from early on. They put a lot of you into it,” he says. “You know, I’m very proudly Scottish. But I’ve lived most of my life in London. I’ve lived here for over 40 years. I love it and Iknow a lot about it, historically. If you come here and choose to live here and survive here, you become part of the place.
“When the Blitz came and bombs landed in the city, they found these Roman villas that no one had known were there. All these mosaic floors, a whole part of the city that no one remembered. London’s like that. It builds up layer upon layer upon layer. And I think Hegarty is like that. He’s come here, and layer upon layer upon layer, the city’s had an effect on him and he’s experienced things and done things – good and bad – that have made him who he is. Bad things have happened to him as well as him doing bad things. So he’s a great character. Lots to play with!”
The London depicted in Criminal Record is one Londoners will recognise. Filmed on the street, it has a real energy to it. “It’s noisy, buses go past, but that gives it a vigour and a life, which is what we wanted to put on the screen,” says Capaldi. But to look at policing properly in modern-day London is to tackle important issues. And Criminal Record pulls no punches. There are big themes woven into this compelling tale. “It has to be done. Clearly there are a lot of big problems and there’s no point in us burying our head in the sand and not addressing them or not reflecting upon them or trying to draw attention to them,” says Capaldi.
“Responding to some of Cush’s input, we wanted to put in some every-day racism and misogyny. Not big dramatic moments, but the slow daily cuts of unpleasantness that people of colour and women feel and go through.
“It’s an incredibly difficult job, being in the police and trying to deal with all the terrible things they have to deal with. But, also, there’s not enough funding. For all its talk, the government isn’t behind them. They don’t put enough money in, they don’t recruit enough good people, they don’t pay them enough and they don’t look after them enough. But Hegarty is a leader of a team of old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool male cops who have a syntaz and a humour of their own, which is not always welcome. That’s the world he lives in. It’s also generational. I was born in the 1950s. That’s another planet. So the world I was brought up in is a world away – and Hegarty is not quite equipped to be on this planet.”
Whereas you’ve evolved.
“We can try. Because we’re lucky enough to be in the arts, which is constantly examining issues and trying to move forward with ideas and move with hope into the future. So I think we’re able to examine ourselves and say, how can we fit in and contribute to this new world?”
Talking of new world, Capaldi continues to revel in his return to the Doctor Who fandom. “I have to say it’s a relief not to be in the middle of that storm,” he says. “The role has a lot of other demands beyond just acting in it. It’s a kind of circus that you have to do for days on end. But it’s lovely to see ruseell T Davies at it again.
“And Ncuti Gatwa is lovely. I met him and his mum at the Scottish Baftas last year. It was lovely, because there’s still very few of us who have played that part, so it’s nice to be able to compare notes about it. He was texting me on the train back to London – and we realised he was in the next carriage, so we got together. He’s going to be wonderful.”
Heading into 2024, Capaldi has just completed season two of The Devil’s Hour for Amazon, with filming on the third season already slated for February. But he’s also got a whole new role closer to home. “I’ve just had a new grandson arrive,” he grins. “So our house is a bit chaotic and full of babies at the moment.”
And his big hopes for the year?
“I want peace for everybody. I want everyone to stop sniping at each other from these polarised positions and to take more time to consider other people and opinions. It’s just out of control, this polarisation everywhere. And politically it’s very useful because it’s just dividing us all. And we all have way more in common. So we have to change things. Because we’re really in a bad way.
“Peace, love and light,” he concludes. “That’s what we should all say. Now, who used to say that? Was it Spike Milligan or Ringo Starr?”
[Interview partly available online at bigissue.com]
We chat to Peter Capaldi about series 8, getting the part, the new Doctor's relationship with Clara, and being a Doctor Who fanboy...
INTERVIEW
Peter Capaldi interview: Doctor Who series 8
We chat to Peter Capaldi about series 8, getting the part, the new Doctor's relationship with Clara, and being a Doctor Who fanboy...
By Louisa Mellor | August 18, 2014
Peter Capaldi, as anyone who’s seen him interviewed will know, has a keen way with an anecdote. His punch-line timing and mastery of the long dramatic pause would be the natural accompaniment to a lazy lunch table or an after-hours bar. It’s less well-suited, admittedly, to a twelve-minute round-table interview, but twelve shared minutes with Peter Capaldi are still golden, especially now, on the eve of his Doctor Who debut proper.
This June, at the BBC’s Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff, Capaldi took us back to early 2012, when – he now realises with hindsight – Mark Gatiss first dropped him the hint that he was under consideration to follow Matt Smith in the role of the Doctor. He tells us about receiving the phone call that confirmed he’d won the part, the frustration of not being able to tell anyone, and about an uncanny encounter with a young Moravian Who fan. He also tells us about his take on the new Doctor, a character he describes as “not as user-friendly” as his most recent predecessors…
Steven Moffat has described your Doctor as “fiercer, madder and more unreliable”, does that sum it up for you?
Well there’s more to it than that I think, but it’s interesting to hear him say that. He’s never said that to me. I don’t know. Obviously everyone wants to know what the new Doctor’s like and to be honest, it’s almost as mysterious to me as it is to you because it sort of develops as we go. Obviously Steven has very specific ideas, but then sometimes they alter as we work them and sometimes we see things very clearly that are the new Doctor and some things that are not, and so organically it changes. But you just get on with it and see what works.
Whenever you ask anyone involved what they were looking for with the new Doctor, they always say someone who is dangerous, changeable and you can’t quite trust them, and the only person we ever thought of for that role was Peter Capaldi!
[Laughter]
Are you at all offended by that?
[Laughing] No, I’m not at all. I was laughing the other day because I used to do voiceovers – I don’t mean I used to do them, obviously I’m not doing them now because I’m doing this all the time – and I did a voiceover for butter or something and they said to me ‘Could you be a little less sinister?’ [Laughter] That’s how far it’s come! I’ve gone from amiable geek in Bill Forsyth films to sinister butter salesman.
Is avoiding being too sinister something you’ve had to think about in regard to the children in Doctor Who’s audience? I saw a sweet fan video where you were having to reassure two children that you were going to take care of the Doctor, that Matt had said it was okay for you to be the Doctor.
The constituency of the audience needs to be reassured that it’s fine. Whether it is fine or not I’m not sure! [laughter]. The Doctor is as he has always been and he is also totally different. I know that’s no use to you whatsoever but it’s true – that’s the great thing about Doctor Who, it carries its past with it all the time and so he brings the past with him. Even if he’s different, I think probably if people think he’s different they’re really meaning in contrast to Matt and David who were both very amiable and I loved what both of them did with the part but he’s probably not as user-friendly as they are. He’s unmistakeably Doctor Who – I think – I would say that, but I think so.
David Tennant said that his favourite was Peter Davison and he looked to him for inspiration and Matt Smith cited Patrick Troughton. Was there anyone in particular that you thought of as your Doctor…
No. No, seriously. Because Doctor Who started when I was four so Doctor Who is part of my upbringing in the sixties with The Beatles and Sunday Night At The London Palladium and school milk and bronchitis and smog and all of these things [laughter] so it’s part of me, so all of those Doctors, all of them, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for every single previous Doctor there’s been. I just stand on their shoulders and it’s due to each and every one of their individual charisma and talent and gifts that the show’s still here, so I don’t have a specific Doctor that I look to, but I look to them all. I do look to them all, but I don’t have a specific one that I say is mine.
Can you take us back to the moment you heard you’d got the part. We had a lovely anecdote from Brian [Minchin, executive producer] saying your agent told him you reacted like a drama student who’d just been offered their first professional role, it was that genuine sense of excitement.
Yes. Yes, well not long before we were talking the last time – because the last time we were talking I knew and I couldn’t say it because I wasn’t allowed to. You were asking me all these questions and I had to just sit there and say nothing.
It was sort of two phases. Initially my agents called about a year ago and said ‘How would you feel about being the new Doctor Who?’ and I just started laughing because it was such a joyful and ridiculous idea because I didn’t really think… although I’d seen it beginning to unfold in the papers. In fact some of the directors we’d had on The Musketeers had come from Doctor Who and as I’m kind of a fanboy I was always asking them what it was like and stuff like that and they kind of intimated that Matt might be going but I never thought… I thought ‘That’s interesting’, I was surprised he was going because I really like Matt. So I wasn’t expecting anybody to be calling me but I was interested in watching the process going on and then she called and said ‘how would you feel about that’ and I thought ‘that’d be great’.
A stranger thing had happened earlier in the year because Mark Gatiss has made this thing called An Adventure In Time And Space and he’d invited me to the set of that back in January. I went down and it was fantastic and saw the old TARDIS there, which was great and met all the actors, got my photograph taken with Doctor Who and all that stuff and Mark said to me ‘What would you feel about being Doctor Who?’, and I said ‘Oh I don’t know, I think that ship’s sailed don’t you?’ and he said ‘Oh, I don’t know’ and I thought, that’s an odd, strange question to be asked but I didn’t like to think it was in any way relevant, and perhaps it wasn’t, I haven’t talked to him about it, but I suspect he might have been checking me out or something, I don’t know.
What was it like when my agent called? It was hilarious. Then I had to go and meet Steven [Moffat] and we all had to make sure that we were all on the same page and then the BBC had to decide whether or not they thought it was a good idea and blah blah blah. It was a bit sort of drawn out, and then they called in the middle of The Musketeers, I was dressed as Cardinal Richelieu, I’d just done a scene torturing somebody or something and I got all these missed messages and finally got my agent and she said “Hello Doctor” and I couldn’t tell anyone! I couldn’t do anything. I had to go off into a corner and sort of scream, and walk around Prague singing the Doctor Who theme to myself.
The funniest thing that happened, the weirdest thing, was that while we were filming The Musketeers we left Prague and went to a place called Moravia in the north of the Czech Republic and there was a little town we were filming in because of some location we needed – we were supposed to be in the King’s Palace – and there was a little lad there who said to me in very very broken English “I really enjoy you as Doctor Who” so that was… I thought, this is really weird, what do you mean you really enjoyed me as Doctor Who? And he said “I enjoyed you in Fires Of Pompeii” which was an episode I did years ago, and he couldn’t speak English very well and I said ‘Oh right, so you saw that?” and he said “Yes, I’m a big, big Doctor Who fan, I’m a Whovian” and used the word Whovian. I thought this was so weird to be in Moravia with this…, so I said to him, ‘Have you got your camera with you? Go and get your camera, go and get your phone’. He wasn’t very interested in getting his picture taken with Cardinal Richelieu, but I said ‘I think you should get your camera’ because in a few weeks he’d have known I was Doctor Who.
You wrote in to the show when you were, what was it, nine or ten?
Slightly older than that, embarrassingly. I was fourteen.
What do you think your fourteen year old self would have said when he saw you dressed as Cardinal Richelieu taking that phonecall?
I think he’d be astonished, as the fifty-five year old version was, equally as astonished. I think he would have been… He would probably think it was more right [laughter], he would have probably thought it was [laughing] coming. I think when you’re a little kid, anything is possible. When you’re an adult, you don’t think that but kids believe anything’s possible, though I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. He would have been very excited and very embarrassing. I’m embarrassed to have all of my past dredged up. Who else would like to see your letters as a fourteen year old?
Every time the job’s come up since 2005, surely your ears pricked up?
I was always interested but I never thought they’d come to me, so I was always interested because I liked the show very much. I loved Chris, and David I thought was brilliant, and Matt, all of them I think have been fabulous, but I was always interested in being in it, I always hoped they’d call me, which they did at some point eventually, say come and be in an episode, but I never thought they would think of me as Doctor Who.
Why do you think the show’s endured so well? Why is it still so strong?
Well, it’s got monsters in it, they can change the leading actor – which, as Steven says, if every show could do that, they’d all last a lot longer – and I think because it has a grip on… it’s like a fairy tale, although it’s a sci-fi show, to me there’s an aspect of Grimm’s fairy tale about it where the Doctor takes you deep into the forest where there are monsters but he will return you to safety in the end and I think that colour in it is very potent and it appeals to a family audience.
It depends how long you’ve got! There are lots of other things in it which I think are deeper and they’re about death, and… Doctor Who has within it some of the cornerstones of the human psyche, the desire to be able to leave when the going gets rough – he always just disappears, he can just walk away from everything, and also that he dies, and is reborn.
That’s a Christian myth
Yeah, it is a very potent idea. It’s a show that young people and children can watch in which they are confronted with death but in a way that is not grief-stricken.
What can you tell us about your Doctor’s relationship with Clara?
It’s fun, I think. She finds it very difficult to deal with him. He doesn’t really do much to change himself in order to make himself palatable for her, so she struggles a great deal I think, to understand him and to find a way to like him. I think they do…, well, we haven’t finished yet, they struggle sometimes but she’s great, she’s very funny, I love Jenna and she plays it brilliantly, but it’s a more complex sort of relationship. It’s a relationship that doesn’t have any… you don’t look around in life and see any similar relationships.
Is it a case of her having to build up her trust again?
Yeah. Yes. There’s elements of that. He’s not a walk in the park.
So it’s definitely not a romantic relationship?
It’s not romantic, but it’s not without love.
So you’ve not been neutered then? Because you’ve got a lot of books and quite an avuncular look to your TARDIS…
I don’t think he’s avuncular [bursts out laughing] No. I don’t know where those books came from, but there they are.
The 'Doctor Who' and 'The Thick of It' star plays a veteran cop who clashes with a newbie investigator ('The Good Fight' actor Cush Jumbo) o
INTERVIEW
Peter Capaldi on Britain’s Real-Life Institutional Disorder Behind Apple’s ‘Criminal Record’
The 'Doctor Who' and 'The Thick of It' star plays a veteran cop who clashes with a newbie investigator ('The Good Fight' actor Cush Jumbo) over a cold case in the new crime thriller.
January 7, 2024 11:56pm
By Scott Roxborough
When Peter Capaldi flickers into view on the Zoom call, I half expect him to tell me to “F** Off!”
For TV viewers of a certain age, the 65-year-old Scottish actor will forever be Malcolm Tucker, the supremely sweary spin doctor in Armando Iannucci’s pre-Veep Brit political satire The Thick of It.
“It’s The Thick of It and Doctor Who,” says a charming (and clean-mouthed) Capaldi, about the roles he’s most recognized for (he played the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the cult sci-fi series from 2013 to 2017). “Surprisingly, The Thick of It is still incredibly popular [the series wrapped in 2012]. People, generally very cool, smart young people, recognize me from that a lot. They generally just ask me to swear at them.”
Of course, there’s a lot more to Capaldi than Tucker and the Doctor. His scores of film and TV appearances include playing alongside Burt Lancaster in Bill Forsyth’s 1983 classic Local Hero, starring as Rory McHoan in the BAFTA-winning TV adaptation of Iain Banks’ Scots drama The Crow Road (1996), giving a delightful turn as the grumpy Mr Curry in the Paddington movies, and donning a spikey electrode skull cap to play DC comic-book villain The Thinker in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021). Behind the camera, Capaldi won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for his 1993 short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, wrote and helmed the 2001 feature Strictly Sinatra starring Ian Hart, Kelly Macdonald and Brian Cox, and directed multiple episodes of the BBC 4 sitcom Getting On.
What Capaldi has never done, in his decades on screen, is play a cop. His role as Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty in Criminal Record, the new crime thriller, which drops on Apple TV+ on January 10, is his first time impersonating a police officer.
The series sees Capaldi re-team with his Torchwood co-star Cush Jumbo, best known stateside for playing Lucca Quinn in The Good Wife and spin-off The Good Fight. Hegarty is a veteran cop, one of the most decorated and respected members of the London Metropolitan police, the Met. Jumbo plays DS June Lenker, a newbie detective eager to prove herself. When an anonymous phone call raises questions about one of Hegarty’s old murder cases, the two are drawn into a confrontation, with Lenker doggedly questioning every aspect of Hegarty’s investigation, and the old vet determined to protect his legacy. While it has plenty of elements of the classic cop show, Criminal Record is no by-the-book procedural. The cold case investigation is the plot driver for a series more interested in examining issues of race, gender and institutional disorder in a politically polarized Britain.
“I’m a big fan of crime shows, but often, the leading characters at the end of the episode just revert to the way they were at the start, events have no consequences, they don’t change them in any way,” says Capaldi. “Here we wanted to show characters that are changed, where what’s happening in the course of the show has a real impact on their lives.”
Capaldi also produced Criminal Record together with his wife Elaine Collins (Vera, Shetland). Written by BAFTA-nominee Paul Rutman (The Virgin Queen), the series co-stars Charlie Creed-Miles, Dionne Brown, Shaun Dooley, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Zoë Wanamaker.
The Institutional disorder at the center of the series — in her investigation, Lenker is shown constantly battling bullying, misogyny and racism within the Met — is no invention. An independent government report released last year found London’s police force to be “institutionally sexist, misogynistic, racist and homophobic.” The report came after a police officer stalked and killed a woman in 2021 and another officer was sentenced to life in prison for a series of rapes and sexual assaults. The report said the Met must completely transform if it doesn’t want to be dismantled.
“There clearly are a number of problems, [the police] are unfortunately, recruiting people who are not suitable for that kind of work, and, clearly, there’s a funding issue as well,” says Capaldi. “[The issues] had a direct influence on how the show developed, because you can’t do a show about the police in London without engaging to some degree with those problems.”
But Criminal Record is more film noir than kitchen sink docudrama. The opening scene sets the mood. Hegarty, moonlighting as a limo driver/security detail, is chauffeuring a couple of VIPs. When the passengers ask him about his life, he begins to recount old cases of murder and mayhem in the mean streets of London.
“That actually happened to me and my wife,” says Capaldi. “We were going to some awards thing, the BAFTAs or something. You’ll get a lot of detectives doing the driving for these events because they’re trained in defensive driving and they’re security conscious. I often fall into conversation with the drivers. I asked him about himself and he revealed that he was a detective. And as we passed through these neighborhoods, he’d tell us what murder happened here, what crime went on on this corner or that. I just thought: ‘That’s a great opener for a series.'”
DCI Hegarty, a taciturn and withdrawn man of few words and many meaningful silences, is a new kind of character for Capaldi, who has become accustomed to doing more “front-foot” performances with figures like Malcolm Tucker and Doctor Who.
“I’m usually out there all over the place, trying to get people’s attention shouting and jumping up and down or whatever.,” he says, “As Doctor Who you’re giving these great long speeches about comic this and electronics that and you have to keep dancing all over the place to keep people interested. And with The Think of It, well, if Malcolm was angry, you knew about it. [Hegarty] is a very veiled character and it was very important to not let the audience really in to him. I hadn’t consciously done that before.”
Rutman’s Criminal Record script has plenty of twists and surprises but the show’s real tension comes from the cat-and-mouse game played between Capaldi and Jumbo and in the slow reveal of their characters, who are both fallible and flawed in their own ways. Their scenes together throw real sparks.
“We sort of mutually decided not to rehearse,” says Capaldi. “We didn’t improvise or anything because the scripts were really good and the words were important, they had to be delivered clearly. But whatever we did together we did for the first time on camera. That allowed us to respond in situ as opposed to practicing responses, which kept things tense. I loved doing those scenes, but they were exhausting because I wouldn’t know what Cush was going to do. And vice versa.”
The show’s cold case gets wrapped up in the 8-episodes of Criminal Record but a final scene leaves an opening for a possible second season. Capaldi refused to be drawn on whether this is the last we’ll see of DCI Hegarty.
“Who knows? We’re just excited that we’ve done it and it’s out there, it’s been a real journey getting it to the screen. Working with Apple has been great but it’s a whole new world,” he says. “When I was working with BBC or ITV, a show might get sold to Australia or Hong Kong or whatever. Now Apple just presses a button, and 130 countries all over the world get the show. Instantly. It’s a whole different ballgame for me. But I’m delighted, at my age, to still be part of it.”
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