Expressing your view is a perilous thing these days
Much-loved character actor David Haig talks to Benji Wilson about Kipling, offence and wretched times at Rugby
D‘I committed heinous crimes such as talking after lights out too many times’
avid Haig, on screen at least, is the face of the Establishment. Running down his long list of TV credits you’ll find a doctor, two majors, a colonel, a headmaster and three knights of the realm. He played a detective inspector in The Thin Blue Line, the head of security at MI5 in Killing Eve and a spin doctor in The Thick of It.
So it was little surprise when COBRA, Sky’s high-stakes thriller set in the crucible of government, launched last year, to find Haig as Home Secretary Archie Glovermorgan – a senior politician trussed up in a three-piece suit. Archie was an unreconstructed, scheming dinosaur, a brazen opportunist fond of phrases such as “virtue-signalling ponce”, and Haig had a blast.
For the new series of COBRA, which sees Robert Carlyle’s Prime Minister facing a global cyber-attack, Archie returns, but this time he’s more nuanced.
“He comes back as Foreign Secretary,” says Haig, ensconced in an armchair at a central London hotel. “And towards the end of the series, he has to make a choice, whether he is a Mephistophelian politician or a man of personal and political integrity.”
We talk a little about government decision-making in times of global crisis. Haig is, by his own telling, a Labour voter, yet many of his screen roles have seen him cross the aisle.
“For some reason I’ve played a lot of entitled, well-brought-up, tending-to-right-wing personalities who often perhaps are enmeshed in politics – that sort of authoritative figure. It could be the voice [an audiobook-friendly RP baritone]. For years it could have been the moustache.”
Ah yes, the moustache. For the first 30 years of his career Haig’s headshot came with bonus facial hair. The moustache was finally removed for his lead role in The Madness of King George III on stage at the National in 2011. (Haig was Olivier nominated for his portrayal of the king.) “There was a mad, authoritarian man – who didn’t have a moustache. I thought [it was] time.”
It turned out that there was more to the man than the moustache and the work has continued to flood in, even in the pandemic. While some actors sat and twiddled their thumbs during lockdown, Haig focused on his writing. He is the author of three plays: The Good Samaritan; My Boy Jack, about Rudyard Kipling and his son, who was killed in the First World War (adapted for TV in 2007); and Pressure, about the preparations for D-day, and he has a further two in the works. One of them is the sort of thing you might expect from the mustachioed David Haig – it’s called Magic and is about the relationship between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – but the other is quite different. “Magic was my idea, the other one was a suggestion: I was asked to write a [stage] adaptation of [Philip K Dick’s] The Minority Report. That immediately felt anathema to me. But then I thought anathema can be quite interesting. So I immediately accepted it.”
Self-anathematising is the sort of thing that makes writers interesting, and Haig lights up when talking about his plays. Is that because he’s been doing more of them during lockdown or is it because…
“I wondered if you were going to ask me: ‘Have you still got the acting bug?’ What with me being a 66-year old in… my position. And the answer is: I absolutely have, but on a slightly different basis. Now, I only take either parts I really like or projects I really like. Although if, in five years, I’m completely broke I might give you a different answer.”
Haig is an intriguing split between the Establishment figures he often portrays and a liberal “creative artist”. The son of an opera singer and an Army officer, married to his partner of 30 years with five children, all grown-up, he went to Rugby School, but was expelled at 16 for what he describes as “hippy high jinks”.
“You know, you meet girls down in the town and you’re not allowed to. You do heinous crimes like talk after lights-out too many times. Then I started writing terrible songs and playing my guitar to the whole school saying what an appalling establishment it was.”
Then again, he says, it was that same appalling establishment which gave him the acting bug. “The school was split up into 12 different houses, and each house did a play every term for the whole of the rest of the school to go and see. So there was the opportunity to be in or see plays all the time.”
He finished his A-levels at a crammer in Oxford and joined up with the National Youth Theatre before heading off to live on a kibbutz for eight months. There he met a Danish girl and moved to Jutland for two years. But he knew he wanted to be an actor and when he returned to the UK in the late 1970s he found a stream of stage and screen work.
High points he cites include a reformed paedophile living under a false identity in the first round of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads in 1998 and, of course, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), where he played Bernard the bumbling bridegroom. Low points include 2013’s The Wright Way, a Ben Elton sitcom in which he played a health-and-safety manager working for a local council.
“That didn’t go down well. In order to do anything half well you have to believe in the product you’re in, a lot. Both Ben Elton and I believed it was working very well. I still think that in the old days series – particularly comedy series – were given longer to evolve. But yes, it did hurt.”
How does he think My Boy Jack would be received if it were published today? A Nobel laureate and once Britain’s most-read author, Kipling is now seen as a colonialist dinosaur by the “cancel” mob.
“The thing that most interested me,” Haig says, “was here was this apologist for Empire who told his son you must fight [in the First World War] whatever. And only when he hears that his son is probably dead does an emotional comprehension of what he’s been complicit in land. So actually, what the world thinks of Kipling as a poet or a writer didn’t really bother me either way.”
Haig concedes, however, that a 66-year-old writing for a younger audience today has to tread carefully. “It’s a perilous tightrope we walk at the moment, socially. Any of us expressing a view that is… you have to be with a very safe group of friends, sometimes, to be sure that you’re not offending or hurting somebody.
“But then I’m lucky – I can go and play a character like Archie who will just diss views he doesn’t like. So that’s another case of me hiding behind somebody, just to have fun.”
All episodes of COBRA: Cyberwar will be available on Sky from Oct 15