SIMON SAYS...
...THAT THERE’S NOTHING FUNNIER THAN THE TRUTH. SIMON AMSTELL COMES CLEAN TO SIMON GAGE ABOUT HIS MENTAL HEALTH AND WHY HE TOOK MAGIC MUSHROOMS
THE truth will set you free!’ says Simon Amstell, sitting in a workroom covered in Post-it notes with ideas for his new show, Spirit Hole, and his next film and a line-up of gonks – one from Russell Brand – perched on the back of his sofa. His hair is wet from the shower, his sweater lemony yellow and, even though he’s mucking about, he’s deadly serious. I mean about the truth thing. You don’t call your Netflix special Set Free for nothing.
‘The more honest I am on and off stage, the freer I am,’ he says. ‘And the funnier I am, because you get to the point where you’re just yourself rather than a constructed idea of yourself that you think people will accept.’ You can tell he’s been in therapy, can’t you?
When it comes to honesty, we mean fairly out-there stuff. In Set Free, for instance, Simon talked about going to a sex party with his boyfriend. And he talks about taking magic mushrooms as part of a mental health regime, something that’s actually illegal, if you think about it.
‘I’m not very worried about talking about that,’ he says, pointing out that the mushrooms even turn up on the poster for Spirit Hole. ‘I suppose I feel like they’re only illegal now… What you’re going to arrest me? Because they’re illegal? Yes, but only in the present!’ And then he laughs at how magicmushroom-y that sounds.
Again, he’s serious about the mushrooms. Having suffered anxiety and depression, he went to the rainforest to experience the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, famed for rewiring the brain, and has now moved on from talking therapy to mushroom therapy. ‘It’s important to be responsible, though,’ he says, ‘when you’re talking about it and when you’re going to embark on a ceremony. I’m not talking about it as a fun thing to do but as quite an intense journey towards healing.’
In fact, it’s not just the therapy and the ten-year relationship with his lovely boyfriend and the Netflix special that are going great guns for Simon: even his debut film as writer and director was a smash.
‘It went better than I could have imagined,’ he says modestly of Benjamin, an indie hit on the festival circuit a couple of years ago. ‘The whole point of that film was that the character had to let go of his attachment to external validation… and the film gave me loads of external validation!
‘He’s obsessed with reviews and being destroyed by them being less than great… and then the reviews were all great! I thought, “How am I ever supposed to learn anything?”’
Not that the validation sticks for very long: one of the reviews for Set Free branded Simon ‘the definitive comic for 2019’.
‘I felt safe for about a minute,’ he says, ‘then I thought, “But it’s almost 2020 so this is useless.” I can’t even put it on a poster because people would think, “Oh, it’s a shame we didn’t see him then…”’
Being this open about his mental health is all part of the cure. ‘I’ve learnt that the funniest thing is the truth,’ he says, ‘so if you can bear to express the thing you’re most embarrassed about, that’s the biggest laugh. And also for your own healing. You want to extract yourself from those ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ [a quote from the poet William Blake] that have been holding you back.’
The new show is totally new – ‘You have to start from scratch, especially if you’ve been on Netflix’ – even if the themes are familiar. ‘I’m always trying to shed some old skin,’ he says of his process. ‘I start out trapped by something ridiculous in my head and by the end of the show I’m freed from all the nonsense that I was thinking. In this show…’ and he checks the Post-its on the wall, ‘I begin terrified by getting older and by the end I realise that we’re all just decomposing and it’s fun. We all go back into the ground and become a mushroom again.’
So, who comes to see these fairly deep if highly hilarious shows? ‘It’s fun for the whole family!’ he says. What, sex parties and magic mushrooms? ‘If you’re a fairly modern family,’ he adds with a laugh.
‘The thing I forget to say is that I might be talking about shame and anxiety and pain but it will be the funniest night of your life. That’s the key message.
So, who will come? I hear
Metro readers are big fans!’
The Spirit Hole tour kicks off at the Theatre Royal, Margate on September
8, ticketmaster.co.uk
‘By the end I realise that we’re all just decomposing and it’s fun’