Ricky Gervais: ‘The Irish just seem to get me’
Comic opens up on laughter and loss in pandemic
RICKY Gervais has said the new series of his hit creation After Life will strike a particular chord with Irish people fearing for their loved ones in nursing homes amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new episodes continue the story of Gervais’s character, Tony Johnson, a writer for a small local paper.
It shows him struggling to cope with the loss of his beloved wife Lisa (Kerry Godliman) while keeping a watchful eye over his ailing father Ray (David Bradley) in residential care. And the writer and comedian says that this new series may have a more immediate appeal to an Irish audience, particularly those with loved ones in nursing homes under the threat of Covid-19.
“If you look now at people in care homes and nursing homes, I don’t know if all the themes are particularly affected by these times but it might resonate even more now.
“I put it like this, it has always been better to be kind and to look after the elderly and to have a nice life and not hurt anyone. Times like this do make people appreciate things a bit more.
“Just the fact that families are talking to one another a bit more than they usually do.
“People are worried about their relatives and it weighs more on their mind all the time. We don’t know how long lasting these changes will be but I guess for the moment it does make you reflect on all the important things in life.
“You suddenly think, ‘why am I worried about that?’
“When people are worried about getting enough food and keeping their grandparents alive and not losing the house.
“All those things that we usually worry about don’t matter anymore.
“I think that people genuinely can’t wait to get back to doing mundane things and doing things that don’t matter.
“After Life is not about these times, but I think it might resonate more.
“Look, I am not in much of a position to moan when there are nurses doing 14-hour days.
“And I didn’t really go out that much anyway and there is always enough booze in the house for a nuclear winter.”
Series one of After Life was one of the most watched TV shows on the Irish Netflix platform for 2019.
And Gervais has always played well with the Irish crowd, promising that he will return to play his postponed sell-out shows at Dublin’s 3Arena which had been scheduled to take place at the end of May. “The Irish just seem to get me and that gig will happen,” he says.
He further impressed himself on the Irish public in 2016 when he called for a ban on the sale of Irish greyhounds to China.
One of the world’s more outspoken celebrities when it comes to animal welfare,
Gervais called on the Irish Government to ban any further exports of the animals to China. While a ban never emerged, fellow actor Brendan Gleeson also helped to heap pressure to stop the Irish Greyhound Board selling dogs to the now infamous Yulin festival, which takes place annually in June.
“It meant a lot to the people who contacted me and I was glad to do it, thank you very much,” he said when asked about it.
In truth, Ricky Gervais appears to really like Ireland.
With a projected global audience of 40m viewers (Ricky was adamant about that), the writer, actor and producer is already getting calls to commit to a third series of After
Life — something he resisted with both The Office and Extras. However, he concedes that if enough Irish people (and you assume the other viewers across the globe) shout loud enough online, he will begin work again.
“The truth is for the first time I am considering a third series but I am not going to do an unwanted encore,” he said.
“People have got to love series two and it has got to go through the roof and it has to be loud cheers for me to come back out on stage for a third series. It gets harder and harder and honestly, people have got to be breaking my door down.
“But if they [the Irish viewing public] did, I think for the first time ever, I would do a third series.”
The first series of After
Life ended on a positive note with Gervais’s character Tony appearing to find some solace in the company of his father’s full-time care nurse.
But Gervais suggests that it won’t be plain sailing for his character as he has no interest in propagating the myth of a Hollywood ending.
“I have never liked this happy ever after ending,” he says. “I never liked that. I have always resisted that. It is the same here. You just don’t snap out of grief or depression. So, he is still going through stuff, but I don’t think I made it darker. What I did do, I was much more aware of what the audience related to. Just from people coming up to me on the street and all the letters I was getting I realised that everyone was grieving. And I wanted them to see something they hadn’t seen before portrayed in drama or comedy.
“We hit the ground running in series one and he was going through his seven stages of grief. And you had shock, anger and denial and now he is negotiating.
“So, if he is not going to kill himself what is he going to do?
“He tried anger and violence and drugs, he tried it all.
“Now he is trying getting along with people and kindness and only being an arsehole to people that deserve it.”
All six episodes of ‘After Life’ season 2 are available on Netflix
‘All the things we usually worry about don’t matter anymore’