‘It’s all been preposterous’: Stephen Merchant on fame, standup and the pressures of cancel culture
Stephen Merchant has always been obsessed by the idea of the ordinary man “thrust into extraordinary circumstance”. Since he was a kid in Bristol, the son of a plumber and a nursery nurse, those were the kinds of films he sought out and the stories he wrote, about normal people who experience something that “jolts them out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. He’s talking to me from his office in Nichols Canyon, LA, in a house once owned by Ellen DeGeneres, where he lives with his partner of seven years, actor Mircea Monroe. It’s early morning there, the white light offering shadows of shifting leaves, and he wears a black baseball cap and speaks thoughtfully without pause. Is he, I ask, that ordinary man? “Well, possibly,” he says, slowly. “Maybe. Yeah.”
Merchant’s early career is perhaps better known than the success that followed. He met Ricky Gervais when he got a job as his assistant on the radio station XFM and the two went on to write and direct The Officein 2001, quietly changing expectations of British comedy for ever. Then there was some acting, a lot of very popular radio and standup. In his 2011 show, Hello Ladies, which later became a sitcom, he talked about his height: “6ft 7in is too big… Growing up I spent as much time as possible in the distance.”
In 2019, he wrote and directed the feature film Fighting With My Family, a wrestling comedy starring Florence Pugh, and in 2022 played serial killer Stephen Port in the shocking BBC drama Four Lives. Today, we’re meeting to talk about the third series of The Outlaws, a comedy thriller about a disparate group of offenders on community service, which he stars in and co-wrote with film-maker and ex-convict Elgin James. It’s about normal people who experience something that jolts them out of their lives.
For Merchant, the route to his extraordinary circumstances felt “like that frog in the pan of water. It slowly heats up and you don’t realise you’re being boiled alive. It wasn’t like I was an X-factor contestant.” Was there a moment when he realised his life was changing? “I guess there were sort of staging posts along the way,” he says. “Like, you do your first interview for the Guardian, and they spelt my name wrong. I think that was ‘Stephen Mitchell’?” Then there’s an award show. “Then you’re on, like, Graham Norton, and that all seems very exciting.” Then you’re having a meeting in Hollywood, dating a string of beautiful actresses, moving to LA. “And each of the stages seem preposterous in a new way.” Where does it culminate? “I guess, going to Stonehenge with Christopher Walken [a co-star on The Outlaws] on a day trip? Christopher’s a very quiet man. A reflective man. He didn’t say a lot for about an hour, then eventually, as the sun was setting, he said: ‘The bluestones have healing properties.’ It was all very surreal. And yet at the same time, weirdly ordinary.” That was one point where: “You’re just like, OK, now I’m boiled.”
As the temperature has increased, so has his wealth. The Mirror has reported that, at 49, Merchant is the UK’s highest earning comedian with a net worth of £26.6m. “I’m not going to question it, but the numbers are always wildly off. Obviously things have changed for me dramatically. But the thing that hasn’t changed is the enjoyment of the work. I find it very nutritious intellectually.” He enjoys it to the point where friends have accused him of being a workaholic. “Although, I always think that term’s very pejorative, the suggestion is I should be doing something else, more important or worthy.”
Recently, he’s been going back to standup, waiting around in the back room of a pub to perform 20 minutes of material. “You know, I don’t particularly want to leave the house at 8pm and drive, and park, and hide around in the back and get nervous, and go out on stage, and some of it doesn’t land and you drive home slightly embarrassed.” And yet something is pushing him to do so. “It’s not like I’m craving the adulation of an audience. I think it’s just… the conundrum of standup. The building of that puzzle?” It’s hard and exposing, and as well as the impulse to get the laugh, there’s also something about the challenge of it for him – “the climbing Everest of it” – that is pleasurable. He saw a documentary recently about Jerry Seinfeld, and chuckles at the memory of a heckler calling up at him: “Have you done this before?”
Last month, Seinfeld joined comics like Ricky Gervais and John Cleese in condemning “cancel culture”, blaming the apparent death of TV comedy on “the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. (Cleese was a childhood hero: “He went to school in Bristol and he was a tall person who was funny, so at some point I was like, well, if you need tall people who are funny from the West Country, I’ll give it a go?”)
Merchant approaches the subject of cancel culture cautiously, as if walking barefoot on stones. “Well,” he says, “it seems to me that there’s always been policing of comedy, of there being… guardrails. I think the difference is that it used to feel like it was the Right that was policing it. It feels like it’s the Left that’s doing it now, and it’s allowed the Right to become the arbiters of free speech. Which does feel like quite a significant shift.”
There are, he adds, carefully: “Sensitivities that seem out of all proportion with the joke. I’ve noticed it in standup, how you’re more cautious because you don’t want to spend weeks on Twitter trying to justify a joke you were just experimenting with. Because putting out the fires is exhausting. But” – and perhaps this is where he differs from Gervais – “I’m also aware that sensitivities shift over time and that people are allowed to criticise and query things, and we do look back at old comedy and think we wouldn’t do that any more.” He takes a breath. “I have no objection to the sands shifting. I think that makes sense and I’m loth to become a kind of ‘old man of comedy’, railing against the younger generation. But you do feel like there’s a sensitivity to the words before they’ve even heard the joke or the context. And that is inevitably a straitjacket of sorts – it quashes experimentation.”
What riles comedians today, he says, is that they grew up feeling nothing was sacred. “And that’s easy for me to say as a white, heterosexual middleclass bloke, but it used to feel like the things you weren’t allowed to joke about were the very things you should. So for the older generation like me, you do feel a bit like there was a freedom there. And that it was your own conscience and judgment that meant you were the arbiter of your own taste. And that didn’t mean people weren’t offended or that you didn’t make mistakes. But now it does feel like there’s a danger, that there’s a prescriptive list of things you can joke about. Everything else is off limits, which is a hard thing to