‘I thought, “This is really killing me…”’
Eight weeks ago, Stephen Campbell Moore had a brain tumour removed. His wife, The Crown’s Claire Foy, and a leading role in a new BBC drama are helping him through, he tells Eleanor Steafel
Stephen Campbell Moore is having what could gently be described as a big year. For a start, the actor – who made his name in 2004, when Alan Bennett cast him as young teacher Irwin in The History Boys
– has been working flat out. This week alone has seen three major projects released to wide acclaim. First, he devastated audiences as Charles in A Child in Time on Sunday opposite Benedict Cumberbatch;
then came the film Goodbye
Christopher Robin, which went on general release yesterday, in which he plays AA Milne’s illustrator EH Shepard; and tomorrow he will hit our screens again in the first instalment of the BBC’S new military drama The Last Post, written by Peter Moffat and co-starring Jessica Raine and Jessie Buckley.
Meanwhile, his wife, the actress Claire Foy – whose star was firmly on the rise even before she took up the role of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s
The Crown – has herself experienced an eventful few months, with the small matter of a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and countless other accolades, thanks to her dazzling performance.
Add to that the wonderfully demanding two-and-a-half-year-old daughter that the couple – who met in 2011 while filming the Nicolas Cage film Season of the Witch – have brought into the world, and who is, he says, already running rings around them (“she’s either going to be a defence barrister or a boxer”), and you would forgive them for wanting to pack their little family off to a remote Scottish island and shut the world away.
“Yes, it’s been eventful,” Campbell Moore says, deadpan. “Having a child, and her career becoming stratospheric, there have been a lot of things going on at one time. But that’s nothing to complain about, it’s all good. If anyone moans about that, you just think, ‘Oh, shut up…’”
He is characteristically relaxed about the madness of the past couple of years, as Foy’s career skyrocketed and they became parents for the first time – she has spoken about the bizarre experience of breastfeeding their daughter while wearing a Queen Elizabeth wig on the set of
The Crown. How have they managed to stay sane? “We, like anyone, adapt to any situation,” he says. “Yesterday’s normal is not today’s normal, it’s just what’s happening. When you’re a bit older, you can separate all that from what the reality of the world is. The reality is we all get up, brush our teeth, our house is a mess and there’s breakfast to do and stuff like that. We don’t talk about work much at all. Apart from anything else, there’s no time – but also it’s lovely watching what your partner has been doing without really knowing much about it.” What has it been like seeing her become a household name overnight?
“I fell in love with her not knowing if she was a good actor or a bad actor, it
didn’t make any difference to me. All of that stuff is just a bonus. It’s all very nice, but our life is completely separate to our profession.
“And, actually, she’s remarkably free. She very rarely gets stopped [for autographs]. She’s lucky because in her roles she often looks very different to how she looks in real life. She doesn’t look like the Queen.”
It’s this solid, stable home life that has made the last few weeks bearable. Because alongside all the usual chaos that comes with a life lived to the full, the 39-year-old actor has been recovering from a period of serious illness.
Eight weeks ago, he underwent major brain surgery to remove a tumour from his pituitary gland. The news that he needed a potentially life-threatening operation understandably came as a shock although, unlike most people, he had been there before.
Five years earlier, following a bout of serious anxiety that no GP or psychiatrist could get to the bottom of, one doctor suggested a brain scan. It revealed a benign tumour the size of a walnut on his pituitary gland, the peasized organ at the front of the brain that controls hormones.
Before the diagnosis, Campbell Moore had been in such a bad way that he almost pulled out of the Arthur Miller play he was rehearsing for, having become inexplicably frightened of going on stage – a result of the pressure the tumour was placing on his pituitary. He had surgery to remove it and vowed to move on with his life.
“You can’t be dragging it around with you like a big sack of letters,” he says. And so, in the years that followed, he married Foy, they had a baby, and he sought out fulfilling work, hoping illness was firmly behind him.
But last winter, just as he was preparing to go to South Africa for four months to shoot The Last Post, he started to feel unwell again. A scan confirmed his worst fears: the tumour had returned, and this time it was more serious.
“I have quite a thick skin in lots of ways,” he says. “Even the first time I had the operation, it almost bounced off me. They told me that it was a lot more dangerous this time, that there were a lot more potential problems. And then suddenly I was like, ‘Oh God, this is really killing me’.”
Campbell Moore decided not to proceed immediately with surgery – the tumour was slow-growing and his surgeon was happy to leave it a few months to operate – and instead went to South Africa for the filming.
On his return, however, he was struck by how different he felt about the extremely high-risk operation, as now he was a husband and father. “You realise you’re not the most important person in that process,” he says, “and everybody who loves you goes through far worse. My daughter didn’t know what was going on, at all. But my family did, and I could see it in them.
“There are certain things that you make sure you’ve done before you go into surgery. You write a letter. But it’s all very much on the off-chance that something did go wrong, because every part of you is saying that nothing will.”
Waking up and being told the operation had gone well was understandably a huge relief. “Realising in those first few hours after the operation ‘I’m still me, and I can still think and communicate’ was great. And I feel just 100 per cent better. I feel so lucky.”
He was in hospital for a week and, remarkably, felt almost completely himself after just 10 days. Today, he does not look like a man who has recently had major brain surgery – far from it.
“Luckily, they didn’t have to take my lid off to do it,” he jokes, running his hand through his hair as we talk over coffee in a rowdy pub near his home in north London. He is still in
possession of the boyish good looks which helped win him his role in The History Boys.
These days, Campbell Moore says he’s not keen on roles, stage or screen, that take him away from home for too long. “It’s hard being away, but I think you pretty much realise: ‘Well, I made this bed so I’m going to lie in it’.”
And thanks to Foy’s demanding filming schedule on The Crown, there have been periods recently when he has spent most of his time looking after their daughter. “I feel really lucky to have spent so much time with her, and seen every single change,” he says. “A lot of people don’t get that.”
He hopes The Last Post – which begins tomorrow night on BBC One and features Campbell Moore as a British Military Police lieutenant living on an army base in Yemen during the Aden Insurgency – will run to a second series, as he loved working on the show.
“Hopefully, it’ll be set somewhere in Europe this time so I can pop home.”
For now, he’s focused on getting well and finding new scripts to get his teeth into. “I feel more positive and enthused about acting than I have for a few years. And the truth is life goes on.
“The outlook is good, and now I feel good. I’m not going to let it define me at all.”
‘She told me it was a lot more dangerous this time’