Steve Coogan: ‘I’ve always wanted to tell an Irish story, to make a film about a nice priest’

The prologue to Laurence Olivier’s 1955 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III concedes that history without its legends would be “a dry matter indeed”, an acknowledgment of the artistic licence which was likely taken by the Bard. Remarkably, the final ruler of the Plantagenet dynasty, who was killed during the War of the Roses in 1485, is still capable of generating debate. This week, with the release of a new film, The Lost King, there’s considerable controversy around the discovery of Richard III’s remains under a car park in the English city of Leicester in 2012.

“I’m not like part of some great campaign to reappraise Richard III,” says Steve Coogan, who co-wrote and co-stars in The Lost King. “I do think it is interesting how history is interpreted, in who tells the story and what their reasons are for telling that version. But Philippa Langley interested me more than Richard III.”

Langley (played by Sally Hawkins in The Lost King) is the amateur historian who campaigned for the excavation of the site where Richard III’s remains were discovered.

“This woman who was ostensibly an amateur took on this seemingly impossible task and achieved it,” says Coogan. “And then the sting in the tail is the establishment who couldn’t handle the idea of an amateur doing what they collectively had failed to do. I like stories in which humble people win out or come together as a collective. I’d love to do something about Knock airport because I’ve always wanted to tell an Irish story. And I would love, after all the horror stories, to make a film about a nice priest.”

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Coogan, who grew up in Lancashire in an “Irish, Catholic and socialist” family, is not a monarchist. He is, however, diplomatic regarding the timing of The Lost King, which arrives in cinemas less than a month after the death of Elizabeth II.

“I don’t want to say it’s a happy coincidence because I’ll be hung, drawn and quartered. But certainly I think it’s helped us because, you know, the monarchy is a fascinating topic, whichever side of the fence you’re on. I’ve made my feelings clear on it. But the actual conversation around the monarchy is something that defines being British because attached to it is your view of class, privilege, entitlement, poverty, duty, all of those things.

“Certainly I’m not predisposed towards the monarchy but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect some individuals who find themselves carrying the responsibility of that. It’s not black and white. I don’t like moral certainty in any way.”

Coogan’s mother Kathleen comes from Mayo; his father’s parents arrived, respectively, in Manchester, from Kilkenny and Cork just before the first World War. Entertainment runs in the family. His older brother Martin is a music producer and the former lead singer of the Mock Turtles; his younger brother Brendan is a former Top Gear presenter. Their paternal grandfather established a dance hall for Irish immigrants during the 1950s. He is currently awaiting word on his application for Irish citizenship. (“It’s in the works,” he says cheerfully. “Apparently, there’s a backlog.”)

“My family stems from the Irish diaspora in Manchester on both sides,” says Coogan. “My grandfather had a dance hall that became a focal point of the Irish community. Because back in those days, there was a lot of poverty around, certainly among the Irish who were ostracised by the British. I know everyone loves the Irish now. Or at least that’s what everyone pretends. But they were ghettoised back then. Growing up, there was a culture of having to sing for your supper as it were. Everyone had to do a turn. You told stories. You had to be a raconteur. You made people laugh.”

As a boy, Coogan developed a knack for impersonation before training as an actor at Manchester Polytechnic; his impressions landed him vocal work for the satirical puppet show, Spitting Image.

“I come from an age where you would rush home from a friend’s house at breakneck speeds to not miss a TV show you liked,” recalls Coogan. “Probably Fawlty Towers. There were no video recorders. If you missed a show, my mum would say: never mind, they’ll probably repeat it in a couple of years. So that was it. I learnt to become my own video recorder. If my mum was talking to a friend of hers at the dinner table, saying, oh, did you see that show last night on TV? Oh, there was a very funny bit. And then she’d turn to me and say: you do it for her. It was quite useful to me and it helped me to develop those skills that were just seen as stupid, extracurricular, useless skills. But I did somehow actually manage to make a living out of them.”

Coogan introduced his most famous character, Alan Partridge, on the BBC Radio 4 programme On the Hour in 1991. By 1994, Partridge had spawned both a radio and TV spin-off, Knowing Me, Knowing You. As long ago as 2002, co-creator Armando Iannucci suggested that the Norwich-based TV presenter was probably spent. One feature film and several resurrections later, Partridge has returned — again — with a second series of his From the Oasthouse podcast and a 2022 live tour.

“It’s very different with each project,” says Coogan. “I enjoyed the podcast most of all because I can be as esoteric and self-indulgent as I like and not worry about it. When you do a show for a large group of people, you have to give cues that say: this is the punchline, you can laugh now. The live shows are more tabloidy. With the podcast, I can be more experimental and introspective. So Partridge does change. At least we try. Without betraying his essential DNA.”

Does he ever get sick of Alan Partridge?

“Yes, definitely. I mean, yeah, if I wasn’t able to do films like this and other projects, I would go mad.”

Partridge has cast such a huge, compelling shadow across Coogan’s career that it can be weirdly easy to overlook his success as an actor. With credits in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Coogan has crafted a parallel US career. He has worked with Jackie Chan on Around the World in 80 Days, played Larry David’s psychiatrist on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and put in a phenomenal turn opposite Julianne Moore in the 2012 What Maisie Knew. He’s the Academy Award-nominated co-writer of the Mother and Baby Home drama, Philomena. He won at the Venice film festival with the same film. He has written or co-produced dozens of television shows, most recently the post-MeToo series Chivalry, which chronicles a feminist director (Sarah Solemani) hired by an old-school producer (Coogan) to detoxify the set of his new film.

The entire MeToo movement, he says, was illuminating.

“It’s difficult to have an open discussion about sexual politics which isn’t just virtue signalling or reactionary,” he says, “Chivalry [a six-episode series for Channel 4] was a real pleasure to write with Sarah Solemani because he gets away from that right-wing reactionary anti-woke backlash which is so tedious and predictable. I couldn’t have done the show myself or with another man. But with Sarah, who is a very strong, feminist voice, we were able to use humour to talk about this.

She challenged me. She was tough with me. We would often have a tussle and sometimes quite raised voices.”

It’s been a busy — and sometimes traumatic — time for Coogan. In the incoming BBC TV series The Reckoning, he’ll play Jimmy Savile, the late TV presenter and sexual predator, who sexually abused hundreds of victims.

“He was a fascinating character to play, just purely from an acting point of view,” says Coogan. “Because he was real, and familiar to many of us growing up. He had a certain charisma, I wouldn’t say there was a warmth. Mesmerising is probably the word. And because of that, he was able to hoodwink people. There was great trepidation making it. The atmosphere on set was very serious. When I was doing scenes with young women actors playing underage girls, I introduced myself before we worked on the scene, before I went into make-up and was transformed. We had to be really respectful and careful about the way we did the scenes and to make sure that we weren’t trivialising the subject. I feel like it is an important story. That it was well written. I thought I knew how to do it, not caricature it, but do it in such a way that made him real and didn’t turn him into a pantomime villain because that ultimately would be a disservice to those who suffered at his hands.”

A less traumatic role awaits with Martin Brennan, Alan Partridge’s Irish cousin and singer of Come Out Ye Black and Tans.

“I’d love to do something with Martin Brennan,” says Coogan. “Because I spent all my summers in Ireland growing up, mostly in west Mayo and in Dublin a bit. I have real affection for all the characters I knew growing up. And I had my extended Irish family, which is a thing that only the Irish do that well. I remember my mother was very concerned about doing Black and Tans. She was worried people would think it’s insulting. But I knew I was being really, really specific. Not some generic top of the morning stuff. I also told my mum he was from Sligo, but really he’s from Mayo.”

The Lost King is in cinemas now