Stephen Merchant pops by for a chat

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14It's The Treatment, which you can also get at KCRW.com slash The Treatment. The last time I saw our guest, multiple award winner, actor, director, comedian, writer, I still think primarily as an actor, Stephen Merchant. And he was telling me the best thing he'd ever done was something I saw him do, which was the library at the L.A. County Museum of Manhattan, in which he plays the lead role. First of all, it's a pleasure to finally get you here, Stephen. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be here. But I still stand by that. It was funny because you were figuring out the character in real time.

0:47Yes. Which is, it's always fascinating to watch an actor do it. Because the thing I thought made library work so well is not just doing classic scripts, but for the L.A. audience, it's theater. Yes. And to see you play it, just sort of taking on the character and actually be genuinely befuddled by some of his choices, it was a great thing to watch. Well, I, as a lot of people of my age and, you know, who perhaps weren't the most, and this is going to shock you, but weren't the most sort of sporty or athletic at school. I think we were drawn to the movies of Woody Allen and his ilk, you know, Albert Brooks, people like that.

1:20So I sort of absorbed a lot of his comic rhythms growing up. And so when Jason Reitman said, oh, do you want to play his character in Manhattan for the live read with no real rehearsal, I just felt like I kind of had the sort of rhythms and the DNA of his comedy sort of in my system somewhere. And so to this day, because we didn't really rehearse it, we just sort of read it cold. And I hope I did a good job. I feel very proud of that. I feel incredibly proud of that. And the fact that only you and a handful of people saw it and there was no recording of it and no documentation of it is both frustrating but also kind of magical.

1:55No, I want it to be that. I want to feel like all Tomorrow's Party or something like that, where if you weren't there, you weren't going to see it somewhere. And it's there I got to really sort of have something confirmed for me, which is your acting skills and how you responded to character. And watching so much of the stuff you've done, just telling you before about how terrific you were in the series, Four Lives, where that guy's constantly sort of, he's playing to the people in the room around him, that character Port. He's somebody who's made an agreement with loneliness. Unlike many of the other characters you played, he said, this is where my life is.

2:28I'm going to be this guy. This is the cost of, if you pardon the expression, the life I lead. I saw this kind of fascinating, so 180 of that, these characters you play so often communicate their needs, and he was preying on the needs of others, the emotional needs. Yes, well, that, as you've pointed out, was a BBC drama about this real-life serial killer, Stephen Port, who was not long ago convicted for killing at least four men. And what was extraordinary was there's very little footage of him. There's some kind of police interview tapes. The thing that was extraordinary to me, and it was a real challenge for me because someone who sort of, with no formal acting training, but who'd sort of come through the comedy world.

3:13But now as I get older, it's sort of, you know, it's kind of eager to push myself. The way it was like, how do you dial into what is essentially a serial killer? And the thing that occurred to me was that either they know what they're doing and they are lying constantly in a very self-conscious way to a courtroom or to their friends or to the police, or they have somehow convinced themselves that none of what happened happened in the way that it's being presented to them or and so you could never figure out as an actor what was the real truth so the position i took was here is a lonely man who has who is almost childlike almost reacts to the world as a child does who you know a child can do something wrong and perhaps not be fully aware of the crimes they've committed you know and they sort of convinced themselves they didn't steal that cookie or whatever and so that was the only way I could kind of dial into it really.

4:10And it was a real challenge, but an absolutely fascinating one. And it actually kind of, it was the first time I'd done acting, I think, where it felt almost rightily in the approach. You had to write some kind of internal monologue or internal thought process, particularly when he's on the courtroom stand, to just figure out what is his motivation every time he opens his mouth. He's, I hate to say this, he's got a little bit of glee on the stand because people are paying attention to him. Sure, that's right, yes. absolutely absolutely and yet again it's he's a sort of unknowable quantity really but um what i thought what was smart about the scripts would they was they had never made him the front and center of the drama he was this killer but he was circling around like i always thought of him as like the shark in jaws you know what i mean he's not he's he's the antagonist and he's there but he's sort of you he's unknowable and he's just constantly circling the main characters as this constant threat.

5:03What I didn't want to do was to make him delicious in some way because that's what these people, these people are not that. They're not fascinating when you actually scratch the surface. There's sort of, there's a banality to their evil. That's incredible, Stephen, because I was thinking, especially given that you can sometimes make characters kind of arch because they're constantly explaining themselves. I'm not sure what it took for you to sort of play this guy and to not sort of like make him into an arch villain. Right. To not make him into a Hannibal actor. to sort of like have him almost have this kind of negative quality to him that makes you lean in closer as he's speaking.

5:40Yeah, like a sort of black hole in a sense of emotion. He's very contained and therefore you're having to fill in the blanks for what makes him tick. And I think there's this tendency that we have culturally to sort of have a fascination with evil as being charismatic and intriguing and kind of, and there's an origin story to their behavior, whether it's Norman Bates or Lecter or whoever else. Or Caliban. And actually the truth is that I don't think there is an easy answer to these people, is there? Either there's, maybe there's some wiring, maybe there's some adult, there's some childhood traumas, whatever it might be.

6:21But they are kind of, in the end, it's not sort of binary. It's a mush of unknowable factors. Which makes that character, for me, all the more unforgettable. And all the more churning, I think. I think because he's not trying to make an impact. But again, when he's on the stand, and I'm not saying he becomes an arch villain even then, but it's like, oh, finally the world is seeing me. Sure. This negative achievement of mine is at least getting some attention. And there was a weird kind of pleasure in his eyes as you played him, wasn't there? Yeah, I think that's it. I think you're right. I think there's a feeling of, he was a man who was constantly sort of putting on a facade.

7:00Like he was balding, but he wore a hairpiece. You know, he had pseudonyms for his kind of, you know, his online dating life. And there's something about that stripped away on the stand. He's forced to have his real hair, his real name, his real actions kind of cross-examined. And there is a sort of, oh, well, now this is me, you know. And he's still not presenting the truthful him, but he certainly, as you say, he's the center of attention. He gets to see the families scrutinizing him. Oh, the whole world is there. I'm not saying he's taking his bows or anything, but it's like, I had to play this thing, but now I get to be who I am.

7:34And the world is going to see me now. Sure, sure. I mean, it's an incredibly complex performance, I thought. Thank you so much. In fact, as you say that now, I've read, and I don't know that this is 100 % true, but I had heard that someone had told him they were going to make a TV adaptation of his life. And the real port had said, oh, I would like Eddie Redmayne to play me. Like the idea that he saw, I could be part of the casting process. I'd like that handsome award winner, Eddie Redmayne to play me. And he got me instead. The final punishment. We're talking to another British award winner who's talking about unlikability with like a Stephen Merchant.

8:11It's The Treatment, which you can also at kcow.com slash The Treatment. But so much of what you've done to me is commenting on what British comedy had been before. I mean, between The Office, Outlaws, there's usually a kind of a boldness and British sort of incompetence that we respond to, be it Basil Fawlty or any of these kinds of characters. And these things that you've written have been people who 20, 30 years ago were taking center stage. But now we get to sort of see in real terms just how sort of desperate they are. Well, I think there's always been a thread, particularly in British comedy, of the sort of desperate man, almost generally used to have been a desperate man who sort of is after some kind of recognition or social status, whether it's Basil Fawlty, the John Cleese character, or Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge, David Brent, later Michael Scott in the office.

9:10and it dates right back to the 60s. There was a comedian called Tony Hancock who was huge and the pubs would be emptied because his TV show was on. I suppose he was the sort of, he set the template of the British sitcom in the way that maybe Lucille Ball did in the US. But that character was this sort of, this kind of needy sort of wannabe actor who was constantly kind of, he was after status or glory. And he was a reaction to the kind of bravado of the goon show. Yes, yes. And I think also the sort of bravado of the kind of the sort of British war hero. You know, he was just sort of, there was a sort of cowardice to him.

9:45But, you know, there's a famous episode where he has a kind of home radio, like a radio ham. And there's a guy in distress. You know, his ship is sinking and Hancock's the only guy. But he's just, he's more obsessed with like how it's going to be reported. And like, is he going to get the glory than actually saving this guy, you know? And there was a show called Step Two and Son, later remade as Stanford and Son, where the character is like, you know this guy middle-aged guy trapped with his father in this sort of awful situation and this was a comedy this was like a smash hit comedy and if you took the audience laughter away it would be one of the most bleak existential plays that you could possibly imagine and so for some reason british comedy has always embraced that idea of the sort of the person who's who's sort of failing at life and maybe they're still trying they're still hoping that their moment will come.

10:36God, because you're saying that you make me think about all the Ealing comedies with the lady killers or all these guys. But then there's still a kind of a leading man bravado that they all had. In the case of Hancock, because I know that episode, if you describe to somebody, they say, well, isn't that crap's last day? Are you describing Beckett? Oh my goodness. It's very Samuel Beckett. It's very Harold Pinter. A lot of that stuff, these sort of existential lives that they're in, they're trying to find some kind of status or meaning in this sort of bleak universe. And maybe it's reflective of that sort of post-war Britain.

11:07And it's interesting because I remember when I was young, MASH was on British TV. Okay. And when MASH was shown in the UK, it did not have a laugh track. Oh, that was their dream come true. And I know that if you buy the DVDs now, for instance, you can switch the laugh track on or off. So I was presented with it as a laugh-free comedy show where Hawkeye would make these witticisms, but no one was responding and they were like he was firing them off into the into the ether as a way of dealing with the trauma of war and i came to the states and i saw it rerun and there's a lot there's an audience laughing at all of his lines and i hated the guy i'm like what shut the hell up do your job save some lives and there's something about the laughter that just made him kind of like a performer like almost obnoxious but i think what's funny too about this literally funny is that it comes down to camera technique for something like the office we're using different lenses and the camera's not moving so we're forced to sort of watch the performance in in ways that even with the hancock show that there had so there were cuts but in the office it's really stripped i mean you're talking about beckett or pinter it's really stripped down these are comedies and i think what you're talking about happens in mash too that performance comedies that demand empathy and a lot of british comedy we laughed at from the outside even steptoes i said well thank God it's not me.

12:26It can't be me. But in The Office, it could be us. Well, I sometimes look back at our British version of The Office and the silences that would happen that we'd leave in after someone has done something kind of excruciating. People would tell me they watched it through their fingers and there's a sort of agony to it. And I think it was a bit like on set. We're a bit like people making a horror movie where you knew the blood was fake. You knew the monster wasn't real. And so there's more blood. And then you watch it with a theater audience and they're like there's too much blood and it was kind of like that with the sort of agony of some of the situations we put the characters in we just let it sit there with this kind of awkwardness because we were giggling with glee in the editing room and actually you watch it with people oh actually maybe we pushed that too far but i think there was always that feeling of there but for the grace of god go we you know that there's a constant fear of what we didn't want to be sort of sneering about office life but more that we were we were always fearful of being those people trapped in a job that we didn't like in a life that we didn't like and that was always a fear that certainly i had growing up just that constant anxiety about being stuck somehow stuck in a job or a life or a marriage or a family that you couldn't escape from and that was always a fear and i think that sort of pervades the office in some way.

13:48Oh, when you put it that way, I love the fact you introduced me as a comedian. It's just weird to the most... I was just saying, when you put it that way, it sounds hilarious. We're back with more existentialism with our guest, Stephen Merchant. It's the treatment, Stephen Merchant.

14:09It's the treatment. My guest was taking a moment to swallow amidst all this existentialism and angst is Stephen Merchant. We're talking comedy because why not? It's The Treatment, which you can also see at KCRW.com. First, I'm still so glad you're here. But secondly, I think what you're talking about is the thing I think links a lot of the stuff you've done, which is the theater of the 70s, I always thought, which is why I respond to you as an actor, because you're talking about Pinter or Stop Hard or any of these playwrights who were doing kitchen sink drama, which also about how surreal the desperation was.

14:43But I think there's a thread of it in American popular culture as well that was informative to me growing up. So, for instance, you see it in kind of 70s cinema, something like Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson, which is at times very funny. You know, his famous kind of ordering scene in the diner, but it's also very bleak, you know, and he kind of leaves his relationship at the end and gets on a sort of logging truck to Canada or somewhere. Oh, and when he jumps on the piano, it's just playing in the middle of the freeway. And he's a kind of wannabe pianist that it never happened for him or he turned his back on it.

15:12you see i think even in the film the film will match which goes from bleakness and bloodiness to accommodate yeah and i think you see in some of billy wilder's movies you know i love the apartment one of my favorites which people think of as a rom-com but surely mcclain's character tries to kill herself midway through there's adultery there's uh it's a comedy about a man's proximity to a predator yes that's right not only and the predator but also the idea of kind of corporate life and the sort of office drone who's sort of who's forsaking his morals for ambition and careerism. I wasn't one to ask you if the apartment was an influence on the office.

15:47Big influence. Okay. Big influence, yes. Because, you know, there's that famous shot early on in the apartment where Jack Lemmon is in the foreground at his desk and there's this long, these long rows of desks, which supposedly I think use forced perspective and maybe they even have children or small people at the very back to give that sense of depth. And so obviously we couldn't really do that on a BBC budget, but we always wanted that feeling in the office. So we would spend a lot of time, you know, in the grade, we would drain the colour out so it looked like a documentary that had been left on the shelf for years.

16:17The BBC didn't want to screen it. We would very carefully, there was a dead plant that we would sort of edge into the side of a shot just to feel like no one, there was no light in the room that the plants were dying. And the frames were slightly off on the walls behind them. That's right. Or it would just be like a part of a notice board but no notices on it. Just, and it would, again, the more I describe it, again, it's just hilarious. But again, for the office, part of the connecting it to the apartment, which I always did, part of it was just that at a certain point, because there's this alternation of scenes in the apartment that are either funny or melodramatic, but they're all heightened.

16:52Yes. What that awkwardness does in the office, it sort of heightens it in that way without using camera technique to do it. You're basically asking actors to sort of tell us a story. That's right. That's right. And we were very influenced as well by Cheers. And I would argue that Cheers is another example where if you took that audience laughter out, that's a sad world of these barflies that are just, they don't want to go home to their wives or their mothers. They don't have much going on. And they are living vicariously through this alcoholic former ball player. It's like, you know, again, it's like when you pick away at comedy, even some of the most classic comedies, they are full of despair.

17:31air, even the ones that seem very fun and just pure sitcom. Roseanne, like if you watch the Roseanne show, you know, that idea of the sort of the working class family struggling. And you have two of the greatest dramatic actors of our era between Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman, who I've seen on stage, who bring that sort of sense of kitchen sink realism. Realism to it. Absolutely. But it's funny, I want to talk a bit, Stephen, about, because I like it so much. I liked so much what you did in Outlaws, just because you're this camera movement. We're actually following people's growth. And there's a moment that Ronnie, one of the characters who becomes the center and heart of the show, has in the first episode, she goes, oh, well, we're all types, aren't we?

18:13Right. And she starts picking them off as if she were casting directors. Yes. Which I thought, oh, how did this recover from the show calling itself out? Right. Which I thought was a really bold thing to do. No one asks you about doing something that meta, that early on, and then asking us to really, again, have feelings for these people. That was a really tricky obstacle to set for yourself. Well, the origin of that was that, you know, with any kind of TV thing, you're looking for ways of bringing characters together in an organic way and then watching sparks fly, right? Whether it's in an office situation where these people only know each other because they happen to walk around on the same piece of carpet.

18:50And my parents had worked in community service, you know, supervising offenders that had done minor crimes. It's about a bunch of people who basically have to work off, rather than going to jail, they have to work off. They're doing good time for their crimes by picking up, basically people you see on the side of the freeway here in L.A. Picking up garbage or in the U.K. they'll have you like paint a municipal building over graffiti, whatever. And so that seemed interesting to me as a backdrop because what Mike's parents' experience was that you had people from all walks of life doing that, right?

19:21From a kind of successful businessman got caught drink driving and had to do it to some kid who had been dealing a little weed or whatever. And so you have these people that would never normally meet and associate forced literally to work together. And it was at a time when Brexit was happening in the UK. There was the Trump thing here. And I'm naturally someone who feels like we should try and find common ground and that there is common ground between people. And so I like the idea of let's take these types that people would see in newspaper articles or on TV, the sort of militant left wing activist, the very kind of right wing blowhard.

19:57Let's take these and let's throw them together and let's see if they can find some kind of empathy. The East Asian woman. Yeah, that's right. And so they were types and they were very deliberately types so that we could pick away at the layers and hopefully show them as more rounded people, as more conflicted people, as people with origin stories, with backgrounds, rather than just the sort of type that you would perhaps dismiss because they're not part of your cultural or political persuasion. And so I felt it was important to kind of state that, in a sense, in that first episode, to sort of literally make that point so that you knew, oh, no, we understand that you think these are types, but stick with us because we'll explore them more fully.

20:37It's the treatment. We're talking architect and simulacrum with my guest, Stephen Merchant, because it's so funny to talk about these things. And a number of things, but his terrific show, which you can find, I think, on Amazon still, The Outlaws, which is three seasons. And I was telling you before we started that it felt like a movie to me. The first three episodes, especially the way things are sort of like interwoven and each thing sort of pays off five scenes in in the way we want a movie to. And you were telling me that. Yes, it began life as a movie. I developed it with a writer based here in L.A.

21:07called Elgin James. He's most recently was running the Mayans MC show. And he's from a very different background to me. He ran with gangs in real life. And this will shock you, but I've not been in a lot of gangs. and um okay i guess i'm gonna write that down too unless it's like a chess game um and so uh so we met up and there was just a although we came from very different backgrounds we just naturally kind of connected and that was a perfect example of what i meant by people from very different lives finding common ground finding empathy and so we worked actually a thing that my ends i mean interrupt but so much to talk about here and and and this show has in common in your work is they're both people who talk a lot who are constantly kind of explaining themselves and sort of taking stage in a way that people do in a way so in some ways in temperament terms or tonal terms you guys seem to be incredibly simpatico to me oh well thank you yes and that we certainly felt that way when we were working but it began life as a movie and we wrote it as a movie script and we realized that because we wanted seven or eight main characters it was kind of unwieldy as a film unless it started to become a a kind of nashville robert altman style three hour ensemble and so we realized as a tv show it could allow us to explore the different characters much more fully and we could and we and we just have more breathing space with a with a tv show it's interesting too because finally what it's it's each and these these things this is something that i find myself thinking about especially in light of what you did in four lives is at some point characters have to come to an understanding about themselves and then decide what they're going to do after the moment of understanding obviously the four lives to that never that moment never happens, that moment of catharsis for us as an audience.

22:44And it happens so beautifully in the last episode of The Outlaws, where not only is like a sort of a con game being played off, but also even these characters have to ask themselves who these people have been that they've been working with for so long. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they find out there are things about them that they don't know, which I thought again is sort of flipping that thing on its head where in that first episode she says we're all types, if it turns out, they're not types at all. Right. They're much more, I hope, much more kind of complicated people than they first seem. And again, that's one of the pleasures, I think, of sort of long form TV is that you can kind of keep digging away at the characters and keep giving them challenges.

23:26There was a moment where there are kind of right wing sort of middle class sort of small business owner. He ends up smoking. I think he ends up smoking crack. We thought, how on earth can we get this character to smoke crack? It just seemed like a fun... That's the antithesis of everything he stands for, culturally and politically and socially. How can we get him to that point? Things like that, it was constantly trying to find ways to make the character end up in a place where if you just watched the first and the last episode, you'd never quite know how they went from A to B. Because I think of what you do in comedies, it's so often, even something like Hello Ladies, to make us ask questions about a genre that we've seen before.

24:05And I thought with Outlaws, rather than make these guys a bunch of lovable scallywags, there's something at stake. I mean, I think about what happened with Ben's sister, which, I mean, that still sends chills through because there's still something that felt like is kind of light about the show until that moment happens. And that's when we realize that lives are at stake. Yes. And not only like literally, but also figuratively too. Well, that was why it was interesting working with someone like Elgin because, you know, he, by his own admission, he'll admit, you know, he ended up doing some jail time and for mistakes he'd made in his life.

24:37And what was fascinating to me in talking to him was that he would sort of, he'd be telling me these quite dark stories about life. And then he'd suddenly tell me something that was completely hilarious. Like for instance, he was running with a gang, but he didn't want them to know he was a reader. So he would like hide the books that he was reading. Like it's just the idea that like the other gang members come in. So like you slip Jane Austen, like under your shotgun. Well, that's the kind of gang he was in, not a chess gang, but that's okay. the sense and sensibility gang. But I just find that such a fun, like that idea that you can go from something very dark or bleak and in a moment it can become funny or vice versa.

25:15And that just feels like that's how life plays out so often, you know. But there is this thing that I wanted to ask you about in the couple of minutes we have left here that you've gone to quite a bit. And there's even a moment in Manhattan, these characters that you've written and played, even with Port in Four Lives, have this fear of being exposed. And I wonder where that comes from for you. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I wonder what that is. I definitely am interested in people presenting a version of themselves to the world and keeping something back. And I think probably when I was young, as a teenager, I was always nervous, I think, of revealing the true me.

25:58For fear of criticism, for fear of vulnerability, There was probably something there. And I don't quite know where that came from. I always felt like it came from a very supportive family. But there was just that anxiety about sharing everything, trust it. I always remember feeling very terrified. I never wrote a diary because I was worried that someone might find my diary. Really? You know, what a strange thing. Like, I won't write a diary because what if someone... Like, who cares what's in my... No one cares about my diary. But I'm like, God, I can't write these thoughts down. I always figured you'd be a compulsive journalist just because...

26:28Or journal, rather, because there's so much detail in your work. But I think maybe that writing from a young age was a way of putting those thoughts safely into the minds or mouths of someone else, right? Into characters, into whatever it might be, into stand-up, into whatever it might be. It was a way of smuggling some of that truth, those more private thoughts, into characters. There's this fear, this moment of... That's actually the most tense moment in anything you've ever written. And we even get to see it play out in the courtroom scenes in Four Lives. that moment of like, oh, it's happened.