‘I obsessively write. I don’t have a lot of mates, I don’t have a girlfriend’
Joe Gilgun, the creator and star of Brassic, talks about its return to Sky with Georgia Humphreys
The launch of Brassic was overwhelming for its creator and lead actor, the inimitable Joe Gilgun.
The Chorley-born star, 36, doesn’t own a TV, and so didn’t watch the Sky comedy air; instead, he sat in silence for hours, waiting to hear about the reaction to it.
“It’s autobiographical, so if people had thought it had been rubbish, it would have had serious mental health implications for me,” he confides.
“I laid myself bare, so if it had been boring, I’d have been mortified.”
Luckily, Gilgun – whose varied CV includes Emmerdale, This Is England and Misfits – could breathe a huge sigh of relief, because “initial reports that came back said, ‘It’s the best comedy drama [on Sky] we’ve had in seven years’.”
Now, there is a second series coming our way. Once again, it follows the crazy escapades of Vinnie, a Lancashire lad with bipolar disorder (played by Gilgun), and his group of working-class mates, as they try to win at life in northern suburbia.
The show is that perfect blend of comedy and drama, as the pals – who have grown up scamming and stealing – face all sorts of trouble.
And it’s a heartfelt exploration of friendship, particularly between Vinnie and his life-long best mate, razor-smart Dylan (Damien Molony).
So, what’s it like on set for Brassic?
“There’s a lot of love,” Gilgun says of his co-stars and crew. “I mean, I’m not going to witter on about that too much, because actors do, and it does my head in.”
The star, who has bipolar disorder in real life, says he “was terrified during the shooting of season one. I felt like a massive impostor as a creator”.
But the success of Brassic has made him more confident about writing other material.
“I obsessively write. I don’t have a lot of mates, I don’t have a girlfriend, I’m like a bit of a loser who feeds the pigeons – which has actually become a bit of a problem, them s **** ing all over my balcony – but I do have a lot of ideas,” he quips.
For the last three years, Gilgun has spent six months of the year in the US filming horror show Preacher. When he was back in the UK, he used to squat in a house without running water.
But Brassic proving to be a hit means he has been persuaded to buy himself a house.
No one sums up Gilgun better than himself: “My personality is a bit intense,” he notes.
He talks a lot – and swears a lot – and at an insanely fast pace, seeming to have no filter at all.
We discuss the current lockdown, and how Gilgun is coping with the impact of the
Covid-19 pandemic.
“Genuinely, Vinnie’s mental health is exactly mine; he’s a mirror image of me, Vin,” reveals Gilgun.
“What you see on screen is pretty much who I am, especially when it comes to the mental health, even down to the medicine he’s on – I’m on exactly that medicine I’ve spoken about, to the actual milligram.
“And I am not social; really, I’m not. I spend a lot of time on my own, so it [lockdown] hasn’t made a massive difference.”
If anything, he’s probably “thrived” during lockdown, he adds.
“I’ve started running again – that’s been good. I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s been good for my mental health. I don’t enjoy running, the process of, I just know that it helps me.
“I’m eating healthy for the first time in my adult life, dude. I’m having salad every day.
“I think I’ve done all right, actually. I’ve handled it well. There are moments when I think I’m going to fall off the face of the earth and it’s very real that, when it happens. But, the majority of the time, I’m doing all right.”
One topic he has been writing about recently is his experience on dating apps; he’s realised he will “never, ever, meet The One on Tinder”, he admits.
“It’s taken a good year and a bit to dawn on me that actually it’s full of lying sociopaths. People are just mean, like you get dropped... I don’t understand how people can just drop each other like that. Just because they’re not in front of each other is what it is.
“Because I’ve never been involved in, like, a social media-type platform of any kind, Tinder’s come as quite a jolt, man. No-one really cares about anyone.
“I’m not very successful on it, I don’t get many matches. I’m not much of a ladies’ man at all. It doesn’t complete me, know what I mean?”
“What you see on screen is pretty much who I am”