Shakespeare was posh white people in tights
He is asked if the switch from funnyman to serious acting was easy. “It was really difficult,” he replies, “because I couldn’t act.”
A chance meeting with a theatre producer after hosting a radio show led to him doing Shakespeare in 2009. “The thing that changed my life was Othello. That was the real beginning of it,” he says, revealing he thought working class people from Dudley wouldn’t be the sort of people to do Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare was always posh white people in tights with a cabbage down the front. They always had a lisp,” he laughs. He recalls one performance where two women, their faces hidden by niqabs, watched intensely.
After his final monologue and dramatic death scene, he heard one say: “Shame man”, the other replied: “Innit though”.