Coogan Behaviour

Sorry for the absence of new posts this week... I had my hands full co-ordinating my newspaper's coverage of the massive Edmonton International Fringe Festival. That means lining up reviews of more than 130 plays in just four days, a task that kept me up past 2 a.m. writing and editing for the last four nights in a row. But I'm back now, with a review of Hamlet 2 and an interview with its star, British cult comedian Steve Coogan. Hamlet 2 doesn't necessarily show Coogan at his best, but it'll be interesting to see if the combination of this film and his supporting performance in Tropic Thunder helps raise his profile with North American comedy fans.

I felt a mild sense of trepidation about interviewing him; in his films, he gives the impression of a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly. But he was very warm and engaged, providing me with thoughtful answers even though I was only one stop in the long parade of interviews he was doing that day. Plus, all the Alan Partridge fans among my friends are now totally jealous of me! Here's how I wrote the piece up for my newspaper...

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To watch the filmography of British comedian Steve Coogan is to bear mortified witness to life at the lowest rungs of the show business totem pole... to experience an endless succession of snubs, failures, and personal humiliation... to spend hours in the company of some of the most clueless, hapless, and just plain self-absorbed characters ever to have stepped in front of a camera—or, for that matter, behind it.

Many of them are even named Steve Coogan: in 2005’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Coogan plays himself as an insecure actor convinced that his co-star Rob Brydon is upstaging him in every scene; and in his segment of Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 anthology film Coffee and Cigarettes, he meets fellow British expatriate Alfred Molina at a Los Angeles café, his air of barely disguised boredom speedily replaced by calculating, careerist eagerness the moment Molina mentions he’s friends with hot, hip director Spike Jonze.

It’s doubtful whether Coogan’s most famous character—talk show host Alan Partridge—would even know who Spike Jonze is. (We’re talking about a man, after all, who once accidentally shot a guest dead on live television. On another episode, he punched a wheelchair-bound man in the face.) Fatuous, selfish, and mesmerizingly unpleasant to his guests and his staff, Partridge is perhaps the kind of character who could only be a cult figure in Britain—and indeed, Coogan played him to great success on two radio series, three TV series, and various specials and one-offs, most of them unknown in North America beyond devotees of British comedy.

Around these parts, we know Coogan better for his performance as legendary TV presenter, record executive, and proud Mancunian Tony Wilson in 2002’s 24 Hour Party People. Wilson would count as Coogan’s only successful “creative” character—this is the man who discovered Joy Division and The Happy Mondays and ran the thriving Hacienda nightclub—if it weren’t for the fact that Wilson was such a terrible businessman that his record label and nightclub were losing money even when they couldn’t have been more popular.

Coogan turns up in two big comedies currently in theatres, and he plays incompetent directors in both of them. In Tropic Thunder, he’s the in-over-his-head auteur of the “biggest war move ever”—a production so disastrous that just five days into production, it’s already a month behind schedule. And in Hamlet 2, which opens this Friday, he has a much more substantial role as Dana Marschz, a dim-witted failed actor and failing drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona whose stage adaptations of Hollywood hits like Erin Brockovich get routinely panned by the school’s prepubescent drama critic. The principal has had enough: come next semester, Dana’s position will be eliminated from the school.

But desperation can sometimes fuel the greatest feats of creativity: inspired by a roomful of skeptical new students (and an accidental dose of LSD), Dana feverishly hammers out a new play for his class to perform: a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet featuring graphic sex, a time machine, and Dana himself playing a singing and dancing Christ during the show’s showstopping number, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”

Coogan talked to me earlier this month about the difference between “pathetic” and “foolish idiot,” crying on camera, and whether Jesus has sex appeal. Here’s our conversation.

Q: In Hamlet 2, you’re once again playing a character who embodies the more foolish, undignified aspects of being in show business. Are you deliberately seeking out these kinds of roles, or are they finding you?

Steve Coogan: I’ve not consciously done that, but it’s nice to gravitate towards things that you know about, and things that are familiar. And this is certainly territory I’m familiar with. I’m not sure why I do it, though—I’m sure there are probably deep-seated psychological reasons for it.

Q: Would you say that this character is the most pathetic character you’ve ever played?

SC: I do think he is pathetic—but in the pure sense of the word, in that he evokes pathos. He is a bit of an idiot too, but I think he’s vulnerable and innocent too, and I think the reason the film works as well as it does—and I think it does work—is that there’s an emotional truth to the character that makes people care about what happens to him. I don’t normally play characters who are that naïve or that innocent or who try to do the right thing. I usually play people who are much more unpleasant, so playing vulnerability was something quite new to me.

Q: I was wondering whether this is the kind of character that actors would find it hard to look down on. Do all actors know on some level that if they hadn’t gotten a couple of key breaks, that could be them doing the cheesy late-night infomercial?

SC: I’m sure any actor who’s smart will realize that luck and timing and things beyond their control have an awful lot to do with their success—that it’s only partly due to their talent.

Q: Which begs the question: how talented do you think Dana is? He’s a bit of a laughingstock, and yet Hamlet 2 does come together into something the audience enjoys.

SC: The director, Andrew Fleming, and I talked a lot about this: if he’s an idiot, how can he produce such a successful play? I don’t think he’s without talent—he’s just a hapless person who lacks a certain amount of self-awareness. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got something to say. And if there’s enough authenticity and originality and passion in what you do, that can still carry you through. I always compare it to a rock song by a band who are not maybe great musicians, but has such verve and energy that they charm you anyway.

Q: Is there an equivalent to this sort of figure in Britain—the painfully earnest drama teacher?

SC: There may be, although I’d say there’s a streak of cynicism that goes through British culture that makes it less likely. They exist, but they’re probably not as earnest and open and unsullied as Dana.

Q: I believe this is the first movie you’ve done where you’ve worked mainly with young actors. Was that a novelty for you?

SC: It was great. It was really good. It taught me a lesson, actually. Skylar Astin [who plays Rand, the teacher’s pet], who’s 20, came up to me a couple of times to give me pointers and advice. At first, I thought, “Why is this kid giving me suggestions? I’ve been around the block a few times, you know.” But I was shocked to realize that what he was telling me was incredibly good advice that I’d wind up using—small, technical things that were such funny ideas. After that, I encouraged the younger actors, if they had any ideas, to chuck them my way.

Q: Do you have any favourite moments in your performance—any small touches or line readings that you’re particularly proud of?

SC: I do quite like it when I do things that are funny and sad at the same time. I like it, for instance, when I do that speech about growing up as a little farmer’s boy. I genuinely feel those moments, and those are real tears. I’m really feeling that emotion, but at the same time, I know that it’s funny. I also like the scene where I’m writing and crying at the same time, because the creative process is so demanding. That makes me laugh—I’m so overwhelmed by the beauty of my own words that I can’t stop crying.

Q: Hamlet 2 was one of the big successes at Sundance—Focus Features almost paid as much for it as Fox Searchlight paid for Little Miss Sunshine in 2006. What was your Sundance experience like? Is it even possible to have a sense of what's going on?

SC: Well, you see a lot of Hollywood people walking around in earmuffs and mittens and big, fat coats. It’s just a change of scenery, I think. As for our film, I think there’s a freshness and a positivity to Hamlet 2—it’s not self-conscious in the way that a lot of Sundance movies can be. There’s often a feeling that independent films can’t be too funny, and this one is very funny, so perhaps it stood out that way.

Q: Would you be surprised if a struggling actor or a struggling director came up to you and told you he found Hamlet 2 inspirational?

SC: No, because I think there’s a positive message at the heart of the film. There are a lot of people in the world who are prepared to tell you how bad you are, and this is an encouraging, life-affirming film that tells you anything is possible and to feel good about yourself.

Q: Let’s close on a short question. Is Jesus sexy?

SC: I’ll take that as a loaded question. I mean, when you hear it in the film, it sounds like an error in judgment on Dana’s part. But if you break it down and look at it, there will be people who will be offended by it—wrongly so. They will say you shouldn’t apply that adjective to a religious figure. But that presupposes that “sexy” is an insulting, pejorative term, and I don’t think it is. I would say that if you asked Michelangelo or Caravaggio if Jesus was sexy, he’d say He is. Is Jesus sexy? Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar seemed to take the attitude that he was. So I’d say, all in all, without being too controversial, in a certain way, probably yes.

Q: Wow. That’s a much more thoughtful answer than that question deserved.

SC: You’re very welcome.