Interview: Steve Coogan, actor and comedian

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:34

He may have been crowned king of the underworld, but Steve Coogan admits he has yet to make it big in America. He tells Siobhan Synnot how he hopes to change all that, with help from Alan Partridge

'I'D QUITE like X-ray vision," decides Steve Coogan. "Not right all the way through to the bone though, I don't want vision that is completely X-ray. I'd have to have the power to turn it on and off too, because I don't want to see everyone in X-ray – my god, that would be a curse."

Even when considering what godlike power he would most like to possess, there's a touch of the Alan Partridge to conversations with Coogan. Not just in the way he emphatically flattens the last word in a sentence, but the pedantic manner in which he tackles a question. There's also a hint of the Norwich acrylic pullover in his latest character, even if he does wear rock star trousers and have millions of dead souls under his command. Coogan's sly, subversive performance brings comic discomfort to the Olympian god, hinting that Mr and Mrs Hades aren't getting on terribly well in the bedroom department.

Yet Hades is also a rare thing in the pantheon of Coogan characters – rather attractive. In his usual line of work, Coogan is often unflatteringly coifed and costumed, but Hades is allowed to cut a bit of a dash. In the flesh too, Coogan is a spruce 44-year-old, with pale skin, skinny limbs, a leonine mass of dark curly hair and teeth that appear to have been straightened.

"I always play sort of hideous or slightly physically unattractive characters." he admits. "It looks like you're not vain, but in actual fact I'm incredibly vain. And it always means that if people are used to seeing you look horrible or wearing awful clothes then, when you scrub up, people are nicely surprised."

Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief is the first film in what it's hoped will be a franchise to rival Harry Potter. Logan Lerman (3:10 To Yuma) is Percy, a dyslexic teen who discovers he's the son of Poseidon and, therefore, the demigod relation of many of the best known characters of ancient Greek mythology, including the neurotic, narcissistic Hades, who can change himself into a fiery demon, but prefers snakeskin hip-huggers and Cuban heels.

In a cast that includes Pierce Brosnan as a centaur and Uma Thurman as Medusa, Coogan is not the biggest name in the movie, nor is Hades the biggest part, but the lack of responsibility suits him fine. "This is low risk," states Coogan. "It's like a holiday: you don't have to write the damn thing, I just have to do the fun part. The bottom line with this film is that I hope that it will be a huge success so that we can have more fun and be paid for it, but if it's a disaster it won't really affect me because I'm not carrying the movie."

Coogan now splits his time between a home in Brighton, close to his nine-year-old daughter, and Los Angeles where, despite having been in the business for more than 15 years, he is still treated as a fresh face. A lead role some years ago in a remake of Around The World In 80 Days failed to make him a global star, while Michael Winterbottom's indie music hit 24 Hour Party People, in which he played Factory Records musical entrepreneur Tony Wilson, didn't break him outside the arthouse circuit.

• Coogan in 24 Hour Party People

Blink and you'll miss his small roles in A Night At The Museum and its sequel (as a miniature Roman general), or Tropic Thunder (an ineffective British film director, blown up in the first 15 minutes). Safety Glass gave him a relatively straight lead role as a sleazy newspaper reporter, while Hamlet 2 starred Coogan as a hopeless drama teacher, but these pictures flopped in America, and even in Britain both films headed straight to the DVD shelf. And yet Coogan reckons there is still everything to play for.

The duality of his career must be odd for Coogan. After the interview, I spot him in a smokers' huddle at the side of the hotel just as a passer-by clocks him, and mouths "Ah-ha!" Coogan doesn't even look round. In Britain he's a success not just as an actor, but as the boss of his own production company Baby Cow, which includes The Mighty Boosh among its current shows. His personal life has long been subject to intense media interest, with tabloids clearing their pages to publish bad-boy details of drug use, infidelities, and his brief relationship with Courtney Love, who accused him of supplying drugs to a suicidal Owen Wilson; a claim Coogan says was "total fiction".

Over in America, however, he readily admits he has practically no profile with mainstream audiences barely aware of what British fans already know he is capable of. Among the US comedy cognoscenti, however, he has a fan club that dates to early episodes of Knowing Me, Knowing You. Ben Stiller and Wilson are friends – as is Larry David, who had Coogan play his psychiatrist in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

"It's quite strange because I'm established in Britain, but in America I have to audition. Even for Curb Your Enthusiasm, I had to sit on a chair in a corridor and then go in and audition. It's weird because you think, 'I thought I didn't have to do this kind of thing anymore.' But it's good, quite humbling."

Doesn't he find having to climb from the first rung of the ladder rather frustrating? Coogan affects a Zen master's stoicism: "If you're unknown, then your problem is selling tickets. If you're very well known, your problem is, will you be as funny as you were last time? So there are always things to contend with.

"Being unknown in America is an advantage in some ways actually because producers and directors see me as an interesting character actor, while in Britain I can generate my own projects but I don't get offered that much work unless I create the work myself. In Britain, they see me as outside or apart from normal actors. In America, I'm on the lists."

• Coogan in Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

Usually, the more famous actors get, the more they want to be likeable on screen. One case in point is Ricky Gervais whose cringe-inducing David Brent was followed by the more sympathetic Andy Millman in Extras. In his last film, The Invention Of Lying, he played an even more likeable everyman, who cried when his mother died and held out for true love. Coogan, on the other hand, remains thirled to portraying awkward customers. Nobody is better at small, choreographed dances of hideous embarrassment: his immersion into character is absolute, and he's almost fearless in showing us the desperation that frequently lurks under their seen-it-all, know-it-all exteriors. It's this bravery in playing toe-curling characters that makes him so admired in the UK, but perhaps distrusted in the US.

However, you can't keep an appalling man down, and Coogan has just finished filming a small villainous role in The Other Guys, a new Will Ferrell comedy. Alan Partridge – The Movie is also in the pipeline, with Coogan and Armando Iannucci finally gripped by an idea that will introduce Coogan's most enduring and exasperating character to American audiences. Partridge has been part of Coogan's life for almost two decades. Coogan admits Partridge is almost tangible. "He certainly feels as if he is this other character that exists in his own universe who I visit now and again. Or, if you like, I embody him. He possesses me for a short period of time."

Before Partridge returns, Coogan is also working on an elaborate film and TV show crossover project with Rob Brydon, which reunites them with Winterbottom, their A Cock And Bull Story director. The two men will play fictionalised versions of themselves, inspired by the improvised interplay between Coogan and Brydon in A Cock And Bull Story, where they needled each other about the size of Rob's billing and who did the better Al Pacino impression.

With a blockbuster, the revival of a favourite character, and now a double act in prospect, could 2010 be the year when Steve Coogan finally reaches a peak of recognition?

"The secret of my career is never to peak," Coogan responds firmly. "And I'm doing very well at it."

Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief is at cinemas from Friday. www.percyjacksonthemovie.com

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010