From Tim in The Office to Arthur in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Martin Freeman has become an Everyman for our times. He tells Donald Clarke what it's like to always be avuncular
By the time Martin Freeman and I meet up, he has already put in a full day's work promoting his new film, Confetti. Keeping in mind how quickly broadcast journalists are pushed past the stars, it is reasonable assume that he has been asked to muse upon the legacy of his role in The Office, the most admired British sitcom of the last decade, on at least a dozen occasions since breakfast. Despite that, Freeman, a man who talks as others breathe, is still more than willing to mouth off about how playing Tim, the sat-upon wage-slave hopelessly in love with the office receptionist, still affects the public's attitude towards him. So, what are the downsides to achieving fame through playing a thoroughly nice bloke?
"Well it does frustrate me if people think I am like that in real life," he says. "There are, of course, worse things to be known as. But I think if you were known for something other than being a nice guy then people might be a little less likely to take liberties with you. If you are Ray Winstone, and people have seen you kick a few people to death, then they are a little less likely to approach you or whatever. Now Ray is not actually a killer. And I may not be quite as avuncular as Tim."
Well, yes. But, though Freeman may not enjoy hearing it, he does indeed come across as a very decent fellow. Shabby in a cultivated way, he is, it is true, prone to launching into long, articulate diatribes, punctuated with disturbing torrents of swearing. But his tone is that of one mate mouthing off to another in the pub. No wonder fans feel able to take liberties.
Since The Office made his name in 2001, Freeman, now 34, has gone on to consolidate his position as a contemporary Everyman. He played Arthur Dent, suburban drone flung into space, in last year's adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He remained determinedly ordinary in two fine, though underrated, TV sitcoms: Hardware and The Robinsons. And he is at it again in Confetti.
Largely improvised in the style of ensemble pieces by Christopher Guest, such as Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Debbie Isitt's amusing film follows three couples as they compete to stage the most outrageous wedding for a competition run by a bridal magazine. The film is notable for featuring an extraordinary array of the finest contemporary British comedy performers. Confetti finds roles for actors from such excellent television shows as Green Wing, Peep Show, Nighty Night and I'm Alan Partridge. Freeman and Jessica Stevenson, star of Channel 4's Spaced, play a couple intent on singing and dancing their way through the ceremony.
I would imagine that when you get all those comedy professionals improvising together, the atmosphere must get pretty competitive. "Hand on heart, I didn't feel that," Freeman says. "Because I always have this thing in my mind: I'm not a comic actor. I was too f**king scared to get competitive. If ever I am in doubt about comedy I always remember: don't put the cart before the horse. It is more important to be true than funny. That may be why comedians do not always make good actors. They are always thinking: how can I make that bastard laugh."
Freeman makes an interesting point when he observes that he is not really a comic actor. It is true that he doesn't get to deliver many jokes. Like Ian Carmichael in an earlier era of British comedy - though, times being what they are, classless rather than posh - Freeman tends to play the sane man around whom insane things happen.
"I think it would have surprised me when I was at drama school to learn that I would come to be seen as a comedy actor," he says. "That certainly would never have been the plan. I always loved comedy and I could always make people laugh. But I had always seen myself as serious. I saw myself as a serious actor. And in the way you kind of always see yourself as a child even when you're grown, I still see myself as that."
A glimpse at any profile of Freeman's suggests an early life of near-Dickensian misery. He was born in Aldershot to an Irish mother, Philomena, and a dad who was once in the navy. While Martin was still a toddler, his parents split up and he went to live with his father. But Dad died soon after and the poor boy was shuttled back to his mother and a new stepfather. As a youth he was prone to eczema, asthma and bouts of fainting. All jolly stuff.
"I suppose there was a lot of grimness there," he laughs. "But I have to say I had a very happy childhood. I would be really laying it on if I said otherwise. People say: 'You had to contend with a lot.'
"But it is all relative. Though we weren't thieving from bakeries, we didn't have much money. But we did have love. I was really supported when I said I wanted to go to drama school. I know a lot of people who were kicked out of the house and told they were poofs."
AT THIS POINT, Freeman drifts off on one of his sweary diatribes. His mother was a Catholic and he admits that traces of the faith still lurk around his psyche.
"People forget the good things that the church did," he says. "They ask about what the church did, or didn't do, during the Holocaust, but don't talk about the good work priests did."
Bolstered by support from his mum - and still, as now, believing in God - Freeman excelled at London's Central College of Speech and Drama and made a reasonable living for himself following graduation. He took roles at the National Theatre in London, and, by his reckoning, was only properly unemployed for three months in the five years between college and the first series of The Office.
"So that's why it seems like I have a knee-jerk of antipathy when people suggest The Office discovered me," he says. "The implication being I was a f**king bum before then. Well, thankyou very much, but I wasn't. I wasn't rich. I wasn't famous. But I did well and I had a fairly good reputation. I am as proud of a lot of the stuff I did before The Office as I am of anything else. Now, as it happens, I am also very proud of The Office."
The extraordinarily popular series, starring and co-written by the now ubiquitous Ricky Gervais, was quickly recognised as one of the greatest of British situation comedies. Indeed, it already seems to have been set beside Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers as part of a holy comic trilogy. Like the latter of those two shows, The Office, a mock-documentary following life in a Slough paper merchant, was wisely retired long before it got stale. In the final moments of the final episode, the 2003 Christmas special, Tim and Dawn, long secretly in love with one another, finally get together. It is a moving scene, but surely it disturbs the carefully constructed tone of the show? This is like Rigsby getting to kiss Miss Jones in Rising Damp. Or No 6 escaping the village in The Prisoner.
"All I can say is that I didn't see it that way," Freeman says. "If they had produced a brilliant script with a different ending, then that would have been fine too. As it was, this was a really interesting ending. Look, let's not forget that, though the British are very good at doing darker comedy, sometimes good things do happen to good people. There is room for happiness."
Freeman, unlike Gervais, has not quite become a star in the wake of The Office. (While Freeman is in a film that looks a bit like the work of Christopher Guest, Gervais actually is in the next Guest flick, For Your Consideration.) But life seems to be ticking along nicely. Late last year, he and his long-time girlfriend, actor Amanda Abbingdon, had their first child.
"It gives me an excuse to stay home," Freeman says. "I never much wanted to leave Amanda, but when you have a proper family you have a real excuse to stay put."
HE HAS THREE films in the can and, intriguingly, is set to play Rembrandt in a feature to be directed by Peter Greenaway, the formidablyhighbrow talent behind such conundrums as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. It is, in some ways, an odd notion, but glance at the painter's self-portraits and you will detect physical similarities to Freeman.
"So that will probably shut people up who always talk about me and comedy," he says. "I wasn't quite sure what Greenaway based his choice on. But apparently he saw something in The Office. He saw something in there that was dark and troubled."
But what if the Greenaway film doesn't "shut people up" about Freeman and comedy. Might he be stuck with the nice-guy persona forever? For the (at least) 15th time today, he shrugs his shoulders.
"If that is all I am ever going to do, I wouldn't like that," he says. "But I have done some roles - like Tim - that I am really proud of. And, yes, a few of them have been nice guys. I can live with that. I have done these things that I really, really liked. And that puts me ahead of a lot of actors."
Confetti is on general release from May 5