How I stepped out of my father’s shadow

Just a few years ago, Rafe Spall was 18½ stone and struggling to live up to the brilliance of his father Timothy. Now he’s the star of a romcom that’s set to make him the new Hugh Grant. By Rebecca Hardy

‘My dad’s one of the funniest men in the world,’ says Rafe Spall. ‘I grew up with him making me laugh so much I’d beg him to stop. To this day, he makes me crack up.’ Rafe chuckles as he says this, revealing a wide, fleshy grin that’s weirdly familiar.

Weirdly, in fact, like his brilliant father, Timothy Spall’s, one of the best-loved character actors on the planet. Rafe, 29, now a father himself to 21-month- old Lena and 12-week-old Rex, is ‘very close’ to his dad and speaks to him daily. There was a time, though, he’d have sooner stuck his pants over his head and run down Oxford Street than talk about his dad in an interview. ‘Perhaps earlier in my career I was driven by wanting to prove I wasn’t just Timothy Spall’s son and that I had something to offer in my own right,’ he says. ‘When I was young I’d be seen by certain casting directors because I was his son. If you’ve got a list of actors and you’ve got Timothy Spall’s son on it, they’d be interested just to see what he’s like so you got through the door. But you’re not going to get hired because of who you are. If anything you’ve got more to prove, but I think I’ve gone some way to doing that now.’

Make that the whole nine yards. After appearing as The Writer in the Oscar- nominated film Life Of Pi, Rafe is about to star in romantic comedy I Give It A Year as novelist Josh, newly wed to the gorgeous Nat (Rose Byrne). The film follows the couple’s struggles to hold their marriage together with the help of a deranged marriage guidance counsellor (Olivia Colman) after a disastrous honeymoon, while the reasons they ended up drifting so far apart are presented through flashbacks. It’s Rafe’s first film as a leading man and is potentially huge, produced as it is by Working Title, makers of Four Weddings And A Funeral and Love Actually. ‘I had three or four auditions as I had to prove I was able to lead a Working Title romantic comedy because the last person to do that was that bloke Hugh Grant – although we’re very different, obviously.’

They are. Rafe’s easy-going, thoughtful and brilliant in various roles from the hapless cop in Hot Fuzz to drippy Ian in One Day. He’s also drop-dead gorgeous, having had to ‘work on being handsome’ for I Give It A Year, and very happily married to ‘the woman of my dreams’, ex-Hollyoaks actress Elize du Toit.

Rafe has only ever had two ambitions in life. Firstly, ‘to find someone to spend my life with’. Tick. Secondly, ‘to make a career out of being an actor playing a varied range of parts’. Tick. He’s had to work at it though. Rewind less than a decade and Rafe, having flunked his drama GCSE and failed to get into RADA was, as he says, ‘a fat kid’. He was 18½ stone and insecure. More character actor than romantic lead material. Make that fat character actor. ‘I was a glutton,’ he says. ‘I loved food. I still do. But I didn’t have a thing in my mind that told me when to stop eating. There’s something of a chunky gene in the Spall side of the family. I was always chubby, then I got fat. When I was in my early 20s I was 18½ stone. You don’t control it. I think you get to a certain point where you think, “Sod it. There’s no point doing anything about it because I’m fat now and it’s going to take a massive revolution in order to face this, so I may as well carry on the way I am.”

‘ If you get to a certain level of fatness and you carry on eating the same amount of food, you’ll only get bigger. That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t exercising. I wasn’t active, but I wasn’t happy being fat. It didn’t feel nice. You can’t walk up escalators on the Tube without being out of breath and you’re insecure. It hurts your feelings if people call you fat. I didn’t feel good about myself. Perhaps eating was something to make me feel better. Who knows? I’m sure that my father becoming seriously ill when I was 14 had a lot to do with my going from chubby to fat.’

Rafe is the middle of three children, sandwiched between two sisters, who enjoyed a ‘golden childhood’ until it was rocked in his early teens when his father was suddenly diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukaemia and given days to live. ‘To be told your dad might not get better when you’re a young boy with two young sisters...’ His voice trails off for a moment. ‘I don’t want to be flippant in saying it was incredibly painful, but it really was.’ So painful, in fact, that Rafe rarely talks openly about his dad’s frightening illness. He stopped trying at school. Mucked about, pigged out – anything to live in the moment and not dwell upon thoughts of losing his father.

‘He’d had a few courses of chemotherapy and then we were told he might not get better,’ he says. ‘He was ill for about two years and in hospital for a long time.

‘Dad was ill for two years. We were told he might die’

But he was so worried about us that whenever we went to see him he’d always be in a good mood and make us feel good about it. He kept his sense of humour the whole way through.

‘Then my mother [Shane] was trying to hold the whole family together. My mum and dad have got an extraordinary marriage. It’s an amazing thing and just the thought of one of them being without the other is enough to make me upset. They’re swans. They’ve mated for life and they’re very, very close.’ He looks upset now.

‘Anyway,’ he shakes himself. ‘Kids have this extraordinary way of coping. You can’t just be maudlin and lie around thinking about it. You’ve got to get on with it, which we did. Although that was a very difficult thing to go through as a child, he got better so I got off lightly and I’m very lucky. This luck has been the thing that’s punctuated my life.’

Losing weight was another lifechanger. Rafe was in his early 20s when he decided he no longer wanted to be the fat kid. ‘I remember getting sent a script and it said, “Bosey – I think it was Bosey – an extremely fat man enters the room.” I thought, “I don’t want to be an extremely fat man.” I didn’t really know I was extremely fat. I thought I’d better sort this out. After I got that script I thought, “God, I’m going to go for a run.” I ran round the park once and my lungs were burning for three or four hours afterwards, but I made myself go and do it every day, just carried on and on through the pain. That’s when it started.’

He lost the bulk of his weight in the first six months by eating less and exercising more. The rest disappeared gradually over the next three years. ‘It took a lot of hard work but I did it and I’m proud I did it,’ he says. ‘I completely revolutionised the way I went about my health. I’m all the better for it. It changed my life.’

Rafe was less fat boy, more dashing leading man when he met his wife on a blind date five years ago. ‘We were set up by some friends of mine who knew Elize,’ he says. ‘I was newly single. We went out to a bar in London. Elize arrived with my friend. It was midnight. I don’t know if love at first sight exists, but Elize is the only person I’ve ever met whose exact expression I can remember the moment I saw her. Then we kissed. That was the 1st of February five years ago. ‘They say the thing that will break you up in a relationship is the thing you know within the first week of meeting someone. You try to ignore it, but along the line it will break you up and I don’t think you’re a full grown- up until you’ve had your heart broken and you’ve broken someone else’s. I’ve been through that. But the great thing about my relationship with Elize is I’ve never once questioned it from the day I met her. That’s why I married her and that remains so to this day. I just knew.’

The need to prove himself beyond being his father’s son has, he says, disappeared with the weight, the hefty roles – and fatherhood. ‘When I had my girl – a honeymoon baby – I felt immediately grown up,’ he says. ‘It’s like somebody had pushed a button because within three years of meeting Elize, we snogged on the first date, then we were going out, then we got married and got pregnant on our honeymoon and had our baby. Then we bought a new house and renovated it. It’s like waking up and finding you’re a full-grown adult. Then I had my boy. When I had him I was more worried. For a man, there’s a big responsibility that comes with having a boy because men are made by their fathers. If you’ve got a good productive man around it’s better. I have such a close relationship with my dad and that responsibility to produce a good man is something I think about.

‘I had such a golden childhood. My anxiety would be wanting to reproduce that which is something of a responsibility to live up to. My parents instilled a few things in me. One of the biggest gifts you can give a child is confidence because confidence will take you miles – more than talent, more than anything else. So yes, I want my children to have confidence and to be kind.’

Which, given this brilliant young actor’s iron will and genuine likeability, I’m sure he’ll pull off.

I Give It A Year is out on Friday.

Rafe with his father Timothy

With Rose Byrne in I Give It A Year