“Life, career, relationships, everyone’s figuring it out as they go”
Stephen Merchant’s new project, Fighting with My Family, is a wrestling movie with The Rock. The writer/director talks to Alice Jones about his take on the sports film, finding love in LA and leaving sitcoms behind
Stephen Merchant was 27 years old when he co-created The Office with Ricky Gervais, and 29 when it ended, having won every award there is, and nailed down a place in comedy history. After that, he thought: “Wow. I ticked off the one thing that was driving me forward. I’ve done it. Now what do I do?”
The answer, for the past few years at least, has been: whatever he fancied. “Everything since then has been scratching different itches. Everything else, as they say, is gravy,” he says, going more Bristolian. He does this when he says things that in London might be considered mildly embarrassing but are par for the course in Los Angeles, where he lives half of the time, in a house that once belonged to Ellen Degeneres, with a “vast, huge, cineaste’s collection of DVDS” and a pool. “Please. What good Englishman in LA doesn’t have a pool? That’s the one thing. You could live in a shack, but you need a pool.”
Now 44, he describes his career, modestly, as “staggering around, trying to find things that are interesting”. His choices have been unpredictable of late, from playing a “freakish mutant” in the Wolverine film Logan, to the real-life Grindr killer Stephen Port in upcoming BBC drama The Barking Murders .So when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson sent him a wrestling documentary and asked him if he wanted to make it into a feature film, he said: “All right!” although he knew nothing whatsoever about wrestling.
The documentary was a 2012 Channel 4 film about the Bevises, a family of wrestling obsessives from Norwich whose unlikely dream comes true when their daughter, Saraya-jade, signs with the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) aged 18. Now known as Paige, she became the youngest woman in history to win a Divas Championship, aged 21.
Johnson, WWE legend turned Hollywood superstar/mogul, saw the potential in the colourful family and gave Merchant a call. They had met on the 2010 comedy The Tooth Fairy and got on so well that co-star Julie Andrews had to tell them to stop goofing around on set. “I like to say we’re gym buddies,” says Merchant. “But we’re not. He doesn’t have the discipline I have, you know?”
The Rock wanted a British touch, says Merchant. “He knew my sensibility. He knew my sense of humour, that I like things which are heartwarming, which make you cry.”
Fighting with My Family is the charming, tearjerking result. Florence Pugh plays Paige, with Jack Lowden as her jealous brother Zak, and Nick Frost and Lena Headey as the parents. Julia Davis and Merchant are in the supporting cast, and Graham Coxon wrote the soundtrack. It’s as much a story of Paige’s triumph as of Zak’s disaster. “There are so many American films about sporting exceptionalism but there’s something very British about celebrating both success and failure,” says Merchant.
He is now a fan of wrestling, although he didn’t try it, worried he would hurt himself.
“It’s the same reason I have never gone skiing. I’m too big to fall.”
Yes, by the way, Merchant is very tall. When we are introduced at Soho House, he stays sitting down. “It’s not a power move,” he says, peering up at me. “If I stand up, I’ll just tower over you.” Being 6ft 7in means he had a head start in coping with fame because he has always, literally, stood out from the crowd. “One of the virtues of celebrity is that at least it’s on your own terms.”
People have always joked about his height and he used to hate it. Now he knows that it’s an asset, “but I felt selfconscious because no one told me that. Now I’m perfectly happy.”
It is tempting to map the story of Paige – bumpkin-ish Brit outsider winding up in sunny, pert America – on to Merchant’s own experiences in Hollywood not least because that was the premise of his HBO sitcom, Hello Ladies. “I was very moved when Paige told me about the loneliness she felt there and feeling isolated. I definitely felt that.”
Now, you get the impression, he loves Hollywood. He tells me a story of being out and about with his father and bumping into Larry David. “And before I said his name, my Dad went: ‘Oh, hello Mr Seinfeld.’ Had no idea.”
Growing up in Bristol, he used to draw comic strips of television shows like Fawlty Towers and write his own dialogue. He started performing comedy sketches and doing radio at Warwick University before getting a job on XFM as the assistant to the
“What I do share with Ricky is the feeling that nothing should be off limits”
Head of Speech, who was Ricky Gervais. The rest is history, although it could very nearly not have been. It’s only because they won a British Comedy Award in 2001 that the show got another chance, he says.
“We might have been dead in the water. When they test screened it, the only thing that scored lower with the audience was women’s lawn bowls.” (When he first showed it to his mother, she said: “Well, I could tell it was very well written...”)
These days, he thinks they wouldn’t get away with some of its more nearthe-knuckle moments, but unlike Gervais who has made the politics of offence his favourite topic, Merchant has little interest in shocking people. “Ricky has a little bit more of a punk rock element in his DNA. He likes the idea of kicking at the system for the sake of it. What I do share with him is the feeling that nothing should be off limits.”
Did he miss having Gervais as a
co-writer/director on Fighting with
My Family, his first solo outing? “Not really.” They don’t hang out a lot socially and never did – colleagues first and friends second, with a 13 year age difference, Merchant points out. “Ricky used to joke, just as I was discovering my favourite hiphop album he was discovering his favourite chair. He’s in his sweatpants by 9pm, drinking wine and watching the telly. I love to dine out; he has the worst eating impulses of anyone. He just wants the most basic foodstuffs; I want Fat Duck levels of wankery.”
Having coasted through his thirties, Merchant found turning 40 disconcerting. “I became more conscious of death. Just a sense that time is somehow more precious.”
He is now dating Mircea Monroe, an actress. “Aside from the fact that she’s great, hitting the age of 40, there’s something very pleasing about not having the endless concern about filling that part of your life. That’s a very lonely life, the life of a single person. There’s a lot of nights where you’re watching those DVDS on your own.”
He did a lot of dating in LA before meeting Monroe and found it hard work. “I was spending a fortune. You’re going out, eating threecourse meals. It’s expensive, you’re overweight, drinking a lot...”
He is now thinking about returning to stand-up for the first time since his 2011 tour and has an idea of structuring a show around the advice he would give to his twentysomething self. First, that being tall is fine. And second, that everyone is winging it.
“Life, career, relationships, everyone’s figuring it out as they go. Going to Hollywood, hanging out with people that are seen as the pinnacle of success, and then you realise, oh, they’re frightened children like the rest of us.”
He is less keen about returning to sitcoms, feeling that he’s done that. “Yeah. For all of the plaudits The
Office has had, I’ve always felt it was a little bit like it was ‘very good for a comedy’. There’s a snobbery about sitcoms. So the idea of just doing a knockabout comedy... I want to take it to some other place, make you cry.
“But I don’t want to be one of those people that turns their back on comedy,” he says, blinking. “And everyone says: ‘I wish he was still doing that’.”
Fighting with My Family is out now