Rafe Spall: 'Dieting is the opposite of sex!'
In October 2005, Rafe Spall was starring in the role he thought he was born to play. Only 21 at the time, he’d bagged a part in Anna Mackmin’s reimagining of Francis Beaumont’s 1607 comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the Barbican. The play isn’t just any old Renaissance play in the Spall household, it’s a hallowed text.
His father (Timothy Spall, you might have heard of him) had played the same part in a 1981 RSC version that changed his life for ever. It was while playing that role he met his wife, Shane, and the pair loved the play so much they decided to give their first child the name of the character his father played: Rafe. To make it seem even more preordained, it was Rafe’s grandmother’s favourite ever performance by his father. No pressure, then.
“I thought, great, I need to confront this head on,” says Spall, who is now 37. “This is the next thing where my and my father’s world converge.”
Things didn’t exactly go to plan. “It was a massive flop,” says Spall, matterof-factly. “There was a big picture of me in the Guardian with a big arrow in my head, next to a one-star review. The headline was A Turkey for Christmas.”
He can laugh about it now, but at the time it was torturous. Spall had just about recovered after failing to get into Rada four years earlier, which was the path his father took – one that led him to become one of the UK’s most respected character actors. “Another thing where I thought, this isn’t the way that things worked out for my old man,” he says. “But it put hairs on my chest. You need that. You need massive slaps in the face, especially if you’re following in the footsteps of your actor father who is a national treasure. You need it because it makes you realise you’re really wanted when things go right.”
At the moment things are going right. Secluded in the Cotswolds with his family – three children (aged eight, seven and four), his dog Lucy and his wife, the actor Elize du Toit (best known for her role as Izzy in Hollyoaks) – before the UK’s lockdown he’d had an impressive run. Hollywood roles in blockbusters Life of Pi, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Men In Black: International, dovetailed with a starring role in the BBC’s The War of The Worlds and highly praised stage performances in London (Constellations) and on Broadway (Betrayal). Not bad for an actor who was once billed as the “go-to man for feckless losers” when he first caught people’s attention in The Rotters’ Club, Pete Versus Life and Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy.
Behind the “feckless loser” tag was a subtext about Spall’s weight. He believes there’s always been an unhealthy focus on his body image, which started when he got the lead role in the romcom I Give It a Year, alongside Rose
Byrne. Casting directors told him to lose weight. Spall started jogging and got his hair cut – and as a result interview after interview focused on his reinvention as a new leaner, fitter, more believable leading man. “My body fat level had no equation to whether or not I was funny in that film,” says Spall. “I was in a fucking romantic comedy for Working Title, I wasn’t playing Jake LaMotta.”
Spall expects to be asked about two things in interviews: his weight loss and his father. When it comes to nepotism there’s a pithy response:
“Accusations of nepotism?” he asks, rhetorically. “They’re not accusations – they’re facts. I benefited from nepotism.” On his weight loss (he shifted five stones before the romcom gig), he’s more guarded now. “I understand it, but you’ve got to be very careful with peddling the basic idea that being thin is happy and being fat is unhappy because all my problems are the same, regardless of the size of my waistline,” he says.
More importantly, his wife hates it when he’s on a strict diet. “I don’t know who it is for,” says Spall, visibly agitated. “It’s so subjective: the idea of what we find attractive in people. When I’m extremely disciplined and not eating anything my wife doesn’t find me attractive – what she finds attractive is eating together and the sensuality of food.”
There’s a pause. “Look,” he says. “Eating nothing but fish and salad for 12 weeks is the opposite of sex.”
His current project doesn’t require a diet, thankfully. He’s about to star in Apple’s first British commission, Trying, a comedy about conceiving and adoption created by some of the team behind Catastrophe. So what’s life like on the set of a production from one of the world’s biggest corporations? “The coffee is slightly better,” Spall deadpans. Perhaps more importantly, he says, the influx of Silicon Valley money into the UK TV industry isn’t only about bigger budgets, better coffee and more cash for everybody – it’s the all important creative control.
Spall always looked back enviously at cinema in the 1970s, films such as Performance, Klute and Three Days of the Condor, which were all studio movies with serious financial backing. “People were like, ‘Why can’t we make films like that any more? Why won’t studios pay for films like that?’ That is now in TV. We’ll look back at this time and it will seem halcyon.”
Spall’s last two projects have had fatherhood at their centre. The oneman play Death of England, which started life as a Guardian and Royal Court microplay before going on to get a full commission at the National Theatre, followed a Londoner’s grief and complicated relationship with his own racist father and his best friend, Delroy. Trying is on the other end of the scale, a black-ish comedy about the complications of conceiving in your mid to late 30s.
So what is he like as a father? “I make a lot of mistakes,” he says. “I try to be kind and loving but kids can really test your patience and it can be really difficult not to shout or get angry. But I really try.”
He adds: “But my kids know that they’re loved. The biggest gift that my parents gave me was confidence. Confidence as a result of warmth, love, appreciation and encouragement.”
Spall describes Death of England as the thing he is most proud of in his career. An hour and 40 minutes of “acting with a capital A”, where he tackled Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s state-of-the-nation play – two black playwrights giving voice to an angry, disenfranchised white working class male, Michael. It was a chance to be subversive.
“I’d be bantering with the audience, giving them biscuits,” says Spall, who prepared by watching hours of standup routines. “I’d get them onside. Then I tell them a story about my best friend Delroy and how I once called his mother a ‘black bitch’ and you feel the whole temperature of the room change.
“You’re doing it for the National Theatre audience, which is a particular demographic,” he adds. “I would get down into the audience and make eye contact with them and it struck me that a lot of these people would never have interactions with people like this. They never meet people like Michael.”
Spall says his childhood going to school in New Cross, where he was one of half a dozen white kids in a class made up predominantly of secondgeneration West Indian kids and firstgeneration Nigerian children, might make Death of England the role he was really born to play. “It was like some mad possession,” he says.
At the same time Death of England was on, Laurence Fox was presenting his own ideas about race in the UK on Question Time. Spall and Fox have known each other for years, and get on, but Spall wasn’t impressed by his friend’s performance. “If you feel like you’re being attacked then you can get angry, you can spout stuff,” he says.
“You might think you’re being cogent and original but actually it’s just born out of anger. So that’s not pushing the conversation forward, because it’s angry and reductive and without nuance.”
Does he think, as some argued, Fox had been radicalised by right-wing YouTube commentators? “We can all go on iamright.com and have our shitty opinions vindicated,” he says. “Then you start writing tweets about the mainstream media, and before you know it you’re banging on about 5G conspiracy theories. It’s a really slippery slope. When you pick and choose bits of information that suit your agenda, that’s bigotry.”
It’s not just about Fox, Spall insists. He’s making a general point about the state of public debate and whose opinions are heard and valued. “I get dressed up, wear foundation and pretend to be other people,” he says. “That’s a lovely thing and people enjoy it, but I’m not a political commentator, I’m not a sage. I mess about and get paid for it.”
So should we take all actors on Question Time with a pinch of salt? “Put it this way,” he says, “I think there’s an inelegance when people from any walk of life go shouting from the rooftops about something when they’re not equipped to. It’s like, ‘Babe, you’re wearing base.’”
• Trying starts on Apple TV+ on 1 May.