ONE LUCKY MAN
James Nesbitt tells Gerard Gilbert what it feels like to star as the first Northern Irish superhero in ‘Stan Lee’s Lucky Man’, Sky1’s biggest hit drama to date
Despite being the star of one such drama, James Nesbitt says that he doesn't actually like superhero fantasies. “It's a genre I've never been drawn to,” he admits when we meet in the offices of the production company behind Sky1's biggest drama hit to date, Stan Lee's Lucky Man, in which he plays a gambling-addicted London murder detective who is granted the ability to control luck. It's a superpower that might be thought to appeal to the racehorse-owning Northern Irish actor, but no: “It's something I was never really interested in,” he reiterates.
Nesbitt's involvement, it seems, is all down to timing. He had just finished the first series of The Missing,
the BBC1 drama in which he played the distraught father of a boy who vanishes while the family is on holiday in France, and decided he needed something less draining.
“I know fuck all about Stan Lee, but kind of went with it,” he says. “Also the idea of being a Northern Irish superhero in a Stan Lee vehicle, and at times being able to throw in my own Northern Irishness. As the director said to me the other day, ‘how many Stan Lee super-heroes get to say 'what are you doing you fucking eejits?’.” Anyway, he's pleased with the show's success, and responsive to fans' warmth, promising interesting new angles in the second series. “We really decided to embrace fully that whole fantastic super-hero world – I think it's really stepped up and gets better and better.”
Since his big break in Cold Feet in 1998, playing the womanising Adam Williams, Nesbitt’s has become an unexpectedly versatile screen actor, either in deeply serious dramas about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, such as Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and Guy Hibbert's Five Minutes to Heaven, as the lead in more genre fare like Murphy's Law (in which he played an undercover policeman with a very Village People moustache) and Munro (as a brain surgeon), or more idiosyncratic productions like Danny Boyle's Babylon and Peter Bowker's Occupation, in which he portrayed a British soldier during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite this, in a review of another Bowker production, The Miller's Tale in BBC1's 2003 adaptation of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the late AA Gill called Nesbitt a “lazy actor”.