The not-so-little Briton is branching out from his wildly successful comedy partnership to embrace more ‘classy things’, David Walliams tells Louise East
DAVID WALLIAMS pauses at the door of an east London restaurant to assess which table we should take for lunch. “Oooh,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “A banquette.” In best Carry On fashion, he pronounces it “bonk-ette”.
“I love a banquette, don’t you?”
Walliams is one half of Little Britain; Matt Lucas is the other. Together they dreamed up Vicky “yeah-but-no-but” Pollard, Daffyd “only-gay-in-the-village” Thomas, and Emily “I’m-a-lay-dee” Howard, characters who arguably exercise a stronger grip on the public imagination than Barack Obama does on the American presidency.
Although Little Britain has been on our screens for less than five years, so many of Walliams and Lucas’s catchphrases have entered the language, I have to keep reminding myself not to inadvertently quote one back at him during the interview. Actor Roger Moore showed no such restraint, Walliams tells me, once stopping by his table at a restaurant to say: “But I’m a lay-dee.”
Right now, though, Walliams is playing a different role, that of apprentice thesp rather than comedy grandee. He’s two weeks into rehearsals of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, which opens at Dublin’s Gate Theatre this month, with Walliams as Foster, Michael Gambon as Hirst, David Bradley as Spooner and Nick Dunning as Briggs. After four weeks at the Gate, the production will transfer to London’s West End, a pretty impressive, not to say intimidating schedule considering this is Walliams’s first major theatre role.
“On the first day of rehearsal, I was an hour early, because I was so paranoid about being late,” he says. “I thought, I don’t really know what the rules are. Are we allowed to go and have a cup of tea when we want? Do we have to ask the director when we need to go the toilet?”
Walliams’s involvement in the production is the result of an unlikely collision of Harold Pinter and the Premier League. During the half-time chit-chat in Matt Lucas’s private box at an Arsenal game, Walliams told his neighbour, West End producer Sonia Friedman, that Sir Michael Gambon was his favourite actor and that he loved the plays of Pinter. By chance, Friedman was already putting together a production of No Man’s Land with director Rupert Goold.
“I’ve been obsessed with Pinter ever since the sixth form,” Walliams says. “The spell he casts over the audience is extraordinary. You get it with Beckett, but it’s rare. Normally, with theatre, you’re just watching events take place, but with Pinter, there’s something else going on, this terrible sense of doom.”
Goold might have demurred about a catch-phrase king waltzing into his production had Walliams not just played a blinder in Steven Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary for the BBC. As Greville, Walliams added a nice patina of creepiness to the trademark Poliakoff dreaminess, and unwittingly created for himself the perfect audition tape for Pinter’s Foster, a man of such exquisitely ebullient menace that you want to wash your eyeballs after watching him.
“Creepy comes very naturally to me. Maybe I’m naturally creepy. I’m not sure I want to play the nice guy. That’s not very interesting,” he says. “Think of the Batman films – who do you want to play, Batman or the Joker? The Joker, of course. Morally compromised characters are really exciting to play.”
Walliams is clearly taking a great pleasure in rehearsals, particularly in watching Michael Gambon put together the character of Hirst.
“He’ll be lascivious one minute and really prim the next, and yet it doesn’t feel just random. He’s in control of it, so it’s incredible to watch.”
Rather unnervingly for Gambon, Walliams passes the breaks in rehearsals describing how the older actor held his hands in a particular performance of Ben Travers’s farce, Tons of Money, more than 20 years ago. “He couldn’t believe I remembered it, but it was etched on my memory because it was the moment when I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do. I want to be like him’.”
Recently, the entire cast went round to Pinter’s house and did a readthrough of his script in his study. It’s hard to decide whether it’s wonderful or faintly ridiculous to hear that Pinter had never even heard of Little Britain.
“Apparently, he said to the director: ‘Who is this Walliams character?’” Walliams says, delightedly. “But Geri said he hadn’t heard of the Spice Girls either, so I’m not offended.”
DAVID WALLIAMS WAS born David Williams in 1971, and subjected to that most artistically damaging of entities, a happy middle-class childhood. His parents were keen theatregoers, and at 16 Walliams joined the National Youth Theatre, where he met Matt Lucas for the first time.
After studying drama at Bristol University, Walliams started to write and perform with Lucas, and over the course of the next 10 years created a number of television pilots which garnered some critical praise but went nowhere. Their last attempt to crack mainstream comedy was Little Britain, which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series in 2001. The first television pilot aired in February 2003, and a year and a half later, when the DVD of Little Britain’s first series was released, it sold more than two million copies in its first 12 months.
Walliams puts the show’s success down to timing. “The Fast Show and The League of Gentlemen had finished,” he says. “Obviously, we owe a debt to both those shows because they’re both really great character-based sketch shows. I think we also hit the zeitgeist with Vicky Pollard, in the same way Ali G did. People went ‘this is so now, so of the moment’.
“I think too it was because there was a warmth behind it. People accuse us of satirising teenage single mothers with Vicky Pollard, but the thing is, we’re not laughing at her. In a way we’re celebrating her. She always comes out top in all the sketches.”
“Warmth” is hardly the obvious word to describe Little Britain, which excels at a kind of broad, base comedy of cruelty, but Walliams and Lucas have clearly become rather adept at defending their show against allegations of classism, racism and sexism. Even as their ratings went through the roof and their 250-date live tour sold out, cultural commentators questioned its message.
“There was a critical backlash, but then we toured and played to a million people, and I decided not to worry,” Walliams says lightly. “If you’ve got a populist success like Little Britain, you’ve got to be able to separate what someone writes in the paper from what the public is thinking.”
Now Little Britain is heading for the not-so-little US, where a new series for HBO, erstwhile home of The Sopranos, airs on September 28th.
Walliams jokes that every cab driver he encounters asks him: “But are the Yanks gonna geddit?”
“We got wildly different advice,” he says. “Some people told us we had to make all the characters American and then the next person would say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t change it, keep your characters as they are.’ In the end, we went our own way with it and invented new characters who were mainly American and then brought the British ones to America. We’re pleased with it.”
If a second series is commissioned in the States, there will almost certainly be another live tour, which should keep the pair occupied until 2010, when the film they’re putting together for Dreamworks and Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour, will be ready to roll.
FOR MOST PEOPLE, those would be pretty comfortable laurels on which to rest, but Walliams is evangelical about seizing “opportunities”, particularly what he terms “classy things”. These include having his forthcoming children’s novel (about a boy who goes to school in a dress) illustrated by Quentin Blake, being in a play with Sir Michael Gambon and opening a play at the Gate Theatre “with all its history”.
In 2006, he smeared himself in goose fat and swam the English Channel in a very respectable 10½ hours, raising more than £1 million for charity. “There’s nothing enjoyable about swimming the channel, apart from the bit when you get to the other end,” he says.
The swim, and the fact he didn’t miss a single training session in nine months, did much to change the public perception of him as little more than a playboy. Walliams is rarely out of the tabloids, in part because he goes out a lot and lives in Noel Gallagher’s old house, Supernova Heights, in part because he has dated such over-Heat-ed lovelies as Abi Titmuss and Lisa Snowdon, and in part because he has cleverly refused to say he isn’t, in fact, gay.
“Fame is not a negative experience,” Walliams says, rather sweetly bragging that he and his mother are having dinner with Barbara Windsor that night. “I think you’re meant to say you hate it, but I saw Eric Morecambe in a documentary once and he said: ‘Some people say they hate being famous – what are they in it for, the money?’
“The only problem is that the person who shouts ‘I’m a lady’ at you from across the street thinks they’re the first person to have ever done it. It’s lovely, but you can’t switch it off. My dad passed away last year, and when we were in the hospice, me and my mum stepped out of his room for a few moments and people asked for my autograph. You just think: ‘Oh God, I’m in a hospice.’ At that moment, I wasn’t David Walliams out of Little Britain; I was just a son.”
Lunch done, it’s time for Walliams to rejoin Gambon et al in the rehearsal room. For one of the most well-known men in Britain, he’s remarkably relaxed and unguarded in interview. Only as we wrap things up does he suddenly look rather anxious.
“Was that all right? Was I okay?” he asks. “I wish I hadn’t said ‘do you know what I mean’ quite so much. Do you know what I mean?”
No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter, opens at the Gate Theatre on Tues, Aug 26