Interview: Philip Glenister, actor

Gene Hunt does funny things to people. Just ask Philip Glenister, the charismatic actor who for five years played the defiantly un-PC PC in BBC1’s Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes.

I’m meeting the performer in a bland office at BBC Television Centre in West London and the beige facelessness of our surroundings merely accentuates the vividness of Glenister’s personality.

Wearing a blue shirt and faded jeans, Glenister has a winning playfulness about him. Far more refined, well-spoken and intelligent than his most celebrated alter ego, the actor manifests an appealing refusal to take himself too seriously. The sound of laughter frequently punctuates our conversation. At one point, for instance, he jokingly reveals that, “There are two collective nouns for actors: a moan and a ponce. I can’t work out which I prefer.”

Underscoring his keen, self-deprecating sense of humour, the 48-year-old goes on to recount some of the more bizarre occurrences that have happened to him as a result of “Gene Mania”. “I have had the odd strange request,” Glenister says. “I quite often get invited to weddings by people I don’t know. ‘Would you please come to our wedding and do a speech as Gene Hunt?’ I have to tell those people, ‘Shut it!’”

But still the hardcore Hunt fans will not give up. Glenister whose brother Robert is also a successful actor with parts in Hustle, Spooks and Appropriate Adult, adds, “They say, ‘OK, would it be possible to send a life-size cardboard cut-out of yourself instead?’ I reply, ‘Of course, I’ve got hundreds of those knocking about in my loft. Where is this one going? Oh yes, Basildon, for the marriage of Maria and Tony at 3:30pm this afternoon.’ There are certainly some funny people out there.”

Over the past five years, Glenister, who lives in south west London, has had to get used to the attention. But the actor, who could almost be the dictionary definition of the word “craggy”, has learned how to deal with it. “I always have a backup plan. Years ago, I was in Waitrose when someone came up and pointed at me, saying, ‘Where do I know you from? What have you been in?’ So I went through my entire CV, and when I mentioned that I’d done two lines in The Bill in 1991, he said, ‘That’s it.’

“So now when people approach me in Waitrose and ask, ‘Where do I know you from?’, I simply reply, ‘I shop in here a lot.’ ‘You’re not on the telly then?’ I say, ‘No, you’re thinking of my brother’, and move on very quickly.”

Glenister, who has recently finished work on Hidden, a brooding BBC1 political thriller, enjoyed “overnight success” as Gene after 20-odd years in the business. Previously, he had delivered excellent performances in dramas as varied as State of Play, Clocking Off, Calendar Girls, Hornblower, Vanity Fair, Island at War and Sharpe, without ever breaking through to superstar status.

But it was his turbo-charged performance as the dinosaur detective Hunt which transformed Glenister’s career. With that role, he fired up the Quattro and drove into a different league. The actor brought a rare, kinetic energy to the part, investing with genuine relish such memorable lines as, “Take that seatbelt off! You’re a police officer, not a bloody vicar!”

Since hanging up Gene’s camel hair coat, Glenister has become the go-to guy for producers in search of a magnetic leading man with “lived in”, defiantly un-Botoxed features. Reflecting on the way the character has catapulted him on to another level, he says, “What has Gene done for my career? Now a producer will approach me and say, ‘We want to attach your name to this project’, and the broadcaster will say, ‘All right’.

“I got the chance to be in a drama that meant something to people and became required viewing, and that is great.” With typical self-effacement, Glenister adds, “But there was no plan to it. To begin with, Gene was very much a supporting character, but he soon became very popular.”

In an era when people felt gagged by the stifling aura of political correctness, Gene was a very welcome breath of fresh air. The joyously and unrepentantly plain-speaking 1970s cop, who appeared opposite Sam Tyler (John Simm) in Life on Mars and Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) in Ashes to Ashes, did not bend the rules so much as nut to them to the floor and then give them a good kicking. As he told one suspect, “Anything you say will be taken down, ripped up and shoved down your scrawny little throat until you’ve choked to death. Gene Hunt, Chapter 1, Verse 2.”

Glenister, who is happily married to fellow actor Beth Goddard, with whom he has two young daughters, says: “It was all about timing. In 2006, we were seeing the back end of Tony Blair and New Labour. People felt duped because New Labour had not fulfilled their expectations and the media had taken over politics and replaced it with spin.

“People didn’t know where they stood or what they could say without being accused of sexism, racism or homophobia. Then this character came along and became a spokesperson for them. He was a channel for what a lot of people were feeling but were too fearful to say themselves because of political correctness and the nanny state that had been imposed on them by spin doctors.”

There was an eerie confluence of art and life when during the 2010 general election campaign New Labour superimposed David Cameron’s face on Gene Hunt’s body for a poster whose caption read: “Don’t let him take you back to the 1980s.” Glenister smiles at the memory. “It was a fabulous moment. It was one of the biggest political mess-ups of recent times. You would have thought that an advertising agency would have said, ‘Hold on. Women want to sleep with Gene and men want to be him. If we portray the Leader of the Opposition as him, won’t we be shooting ourselves in the foot?’

“Gene was even mentioned in Prime Minister’s Questions. That’s a remarkable testament to the character’s popularity, and the moment where you think you have arrived. Then Cameron actually used Gene’s catchphrase – ‘Fire up the Quattro!’ I thought, ‘Oi, Dave, get your own catchphrase’.”

Hunt also turned Glenister into a huge sex symbol. “That is only to be expected,” the actor deadpans, before bursting out laughing. “No, it was not me they fancied, it was the character. I merely channeled a sex object. People didn’t say, ‘Isn’t Philip Glenister hot?’ I didn’t have people throwing their underwear at me in the street. I wasn’t fighting them off, if truth be known.

“It was also to do with the timing. There was this whole debate about, ‘Where are all the real men?’ Then this character turned up, and everyone said, ‘There he is.’”

Funnily enough, in his latest drama, Hidden, which begins this week on BBC1, Glenister plays a character who falls victim to the sort of, shall we say, robust police questioning Hunt used to specialise in. The actor says: “I said to Tom Craig, who plays the policeman who is brutally interrogating me, ‘This is not right. I’m on the wrong side of the desk. I’m not taking this’. But he told me, ‘You’re not Gene Hunt anymore.’ It was interesting to be on the receiving end for once.”

In this absorbing, complex four-part drama written by Ronan Bennett (The Hamburg Cell, Face, Public Enemies), Glenister plays Harry Venn, a down-at-heel solicitor whose troubled past comes back to haunt him.

Before you can say “conspiracy theory”, he is embroiled in a scandal whose tentacles stretch into the highest echelons of society.

Venn is one of life’s losers, a downtrodden, dishevelled man who is light years away from the energetic exuberance of Gene Hunt. The contrast with his most famous character was one of the principal attractions for Glenister, who is quite understandably keen to avoid any pigeonhole marked “shouty copper”.

The actor jokes that Venn’s scruffiness, “...is why they cast me! I didn’t want too many costumes. He’s a high-street solicitor who has a shabby office and drives a ten-year-old car. It’s very much about keeping it in the realms of reality. If you start dressing him in Prada and putting him in a flash office, you soon think, ‘I don’t believe you.’ Harry is not cool. He’s an ordinary guy who gets mixed up in this extraordinary situation.”

“As his life begins to unravel, Venn finds solace in recreational drug-taking. “Will the scene where he takes cocaine cause a stir?” asks Glenister. “That didn’t occur to me. If it does, it does. Sometimes people want to create a stir for the hell of creating a stir. But it doesn’t worry me at all. It’s essential for the scene.

“The idea is that Harry is staying up late and taking a little snifter to keep him going. It’s certainly not glamorised – you see what he looks like in the morning.”

Glenister has showbiz running through his veins – his father John was a well-regarded TV director on such productions as Play for Today, Z Cars, Softly, Softly, Casanova, A Bit of a Do and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The actor thinks Hidden is part of an encouraging return to thought-provoking TV drama. “When you get a script, you can either say, ‘Children, here’s some drawing paper,’ or, ‘Hands-off – this is daddy’s drawing paper!’ Hidden is very much daddy’s drawing paper.

“When I read it, I could see immediately that it was very well written. It’s the sort of thing I would like to watch. We’ve seen some really good dramas recently, such as The Shadow Line, Exile and Page Eight. We seem to be making a lot of intelligent slow-burners. It’s great that we’re getting back to proper storytelling and not treating the audience as though they have the attention span of a gnat. In the past, there was a danger that we were making too many dramas which valued style over content. Everything looked very slick, but you ended up wondering, ‘What about the story?’ But now we’re seeing the tide turning, and we’re making grown-up drama for grown-ups.”

Despite his success, Glenister remains likeably down-to-earth about his craft: “If you start acting like a prima donna, you’ll get a reputation very quickly. That gets about. One of the most enjoyable aspects of filming is coming together as a collective. Everyone is important, from the runner to the director. We’re all in it together. People see you as an example. If you set the right mood, that has an infectious effect.”

The actor has just returned from shooting the second series of Mad Dogs, to be seen soon on Sky1. The first series, a big hit, focused on four old friends (Glenister and three equally big-box office names, Simm, Marc Warren and Max Beesley) who went to visit a mate in Majorca and soon found themselves mired in crime and way out of their depth.

Filming in Majorca, a party destination for millions of British holidaymakers, presented its own problems. Glenister acknowledges that, “You need to know where to go and where not to go. You’re not going hit Magaluf at 2am on a Saturday night. That would be messy.

“But in the first series we did have to drive around Magaluf one night. Our car was on a low-loader. We looked like something out of Doctor Who or a travelling nightclub. It was a case of ‘spot the film unit’. People started shouting out, ‘It’s that wanker from Life on Mars.’ I called back, ‘Loving your work, too.’ You can rest assured, those catcalls were cut from the finished version.”

Heckling aside, the actor has clearly had a ball on Mad Dogs. “John, Marc, Max and I work together really well,” Glenister muses. “The chemistry between us is great. It’s like being in a band. We’re like The Eagles. We turn up, do our work, go off to do a solo projects, and then don’t speak to each other.

“Mad Dogs is a great thing to be part of. We were very fortunate to be shooting in the sunshine on the gorgeous island of Majorca. It’s important to remember that we’re enormously lucky to do what we do – that is too easy to forget.”

So, Glenister concludes with a wry grin, “I told everyone on set, ‘We won’t get any sympathy if we complain about this job to our families back home. Let’s not be a moan of actors’.”

And once more the air fills with a roar of laughter.

Hidden is on BBC1 at 9pm on Thursday.