Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:09 pm Post subject: Stephen Merchant
Stephen Merchant carving his own comedy niche by DAVID BALDWIN
Monday, August 4, 2008
Stephen Merchant is a big, lanky, goggle-eyed freak. Well, he was a big, lanky, goggle-eyed freak. Back when The Office was considered by most people to be the sole creation of Ricky Gervais, Merchant's only visibility other than his co-writing credit was when he played 'the Oggmonster', turning up for a brief scene in which he's insulted by David Brent for his bulbous eyes and then scurries off in tears.
That was all before Merchant took a key role in follow-up sitcom Extras as Andy Millman's useless agent, and much was made of him beating Gervais to Best Comedy Actor at the British Comedy Awards two years ago.
Bolstered by his own BBC 6 Music show, it finally looked like Merchant was starting to move out of the shadow of his comedy partner, despite the fact that they both chose to use their higher profiles to start stand-up careers. The problem at first, though, was that Merchant was just doing the exact same shtick as Gervais. Wandering onstage with a hefty sports bag, he used to dig out his many Baftas and his cherished comedy award, playing the whole ironic arrogance card that Gervais perfected.
Instead of being amusingly smug, it was just smug. That's a line Gervais often trips over, and Merchant was no more cautious a performer. Luckily, somewhere along the way, Merchant started to downplay the pomposity. Gervais plays mega-arenas but Merchant has kept to smaller arts centres and comedy clubs, bringing his jokes back down to earth.
He's realised that British audiences will smile at faux self-importance, but they'll laugh at self-deprecation, and in recent sets he's played off his gangly frame and general awkwardness. It suggests that, provided Merchant steers clear of the smugness, he could become a very fine stand-up. Just so long as he doesn't boast about it afterwards.
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"Stephen Merchant is a big, lanky, goggle-eyed freak" - I doubt there's many positive reviews which have ever started like that before!
Stephen Merchant interview Ricky Gervais's low-key creative partner explains why there's no shame in schmaltz.
By Craig McLean
12 Apr 2010
telegraph.co.uk
Stephen Merchant was trapped in his 40-bedroom north London mansion, bought with the fortune he amassed by writing, co-creating and occasionally starring in The Office and Extras, fretting about the difficulties inherent in enjoying the hedonistic spoils of his success. What if an amateur paparazzo snapped him 'acting wild’? What if the pictures made it onto the internet?
Merchant, imprisoned in his luxurious Sunset Boulevard-style home with nothing but caviar in the fridge, became ever more agitated. 'You can also put,’ he instructs me when me meet in the drowsy lounge of a central London hotel, 'that I was off my head on coke…’ It should here be pointed out that all the above is pure fantasy – the life that Merchant thinks some people believe he has. (Although he does live in north London.)
'There is this weird idea,’ he tells me, 'that you get a bit of money or success and suddenly your life is endlessly being carried around in a sedan chair just throwing caviar away. It isn’t.’ Perhaps not, but isn’t it true that Merchant’s friend and long-time collaborator Ricky Gervais has an underground swimming pool? (One of his neighbours in Hampstead once compared it to Hitler’s bunker.)
'Has he got an underground pool?’ Merchant wonders. 'In London or New York? Well, I’ve not seen his New York place. But that doesn’t mean that you…’ Merchant, a thoughtful man whose brain seems to work too fast for his mouth, pauses. 'I knew people growing up,’ the 35- year-old begins in his Bristolian burr. 'I remember going to a party once at someone’s house and they had a pool. I thought, these people must be Richard Branson!’
Such are Gervais’s huge transatlantic achievements – presenting the Golden Globes, writing for and appearing in The Simpsons, directing and starring in Hollywood film The Invention Of Lying – that it is not improbable that the riches flowing his way have allowed him to buy a subterranean splash pool.
But wealth and success, Merchant insists, 'don’t mean you detach yourself from reality’. Nor do they mean you immediately cash them in, or go off the rails. 'My point is, it’s funny to be aware of the disparity between the real life you lead and the life that people think you lead. They think we’re endlessly jetting off and doing stuff. We’re not. We’re sat in our office and we can’t get the heating to work.’
Rather, Merchant and Gervais have leveraged their hefty clout into their first feature film together: Cemetery Junction, which they co-wrote and co-directed. Gervais, while far from being the lead, has a significant part. Merchant, in keeping with his cameo in The Office (as Gareth’s friend 'The Oggmonster’), has a brief role.
Set in the Seventies in an idealised version of Gervais’s hometown of Reading, Cemetery Junction centres on three young lads setting out on adult life. The focus is Freddie (played by the relatively unknown British actor Christian Cooke), who doesn’t want to work grinding metal in the factory like his dad (Gervais). When Freddie lands a white-collar job as a door-to-door insurance salesman he starts to aspire to greater things: the mansion of his boss (Ralph Fiennes) and the affections of his school sweetheart Julie (the boss’s daughter).
The film is suffused with warmth, affection and nostalgia. It’s modest, in every sense – the budget, according to Merchant, was '£5 or £6 million’, which is less than Sam Taylor-Wood’s low-key John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (£7 million), for example. Merchant and Gervais wanted to avoid knockabout laughs. 'We describe it as a feel-good drama,’ says this 6ft 7in streak of amiability. 'Which is something we’d been moving towards for a while. Ricky and I, when we phone each other, say: “Did you see that on telly?”, it’s not comedy. It’s TV drama, movie drama. We rarely watch comedy.’
Rather, their touchstones were films like The Apartment, Diner, and Billy Liar. 'They’re films which have humour in them. But they’re not necessarily a comedy or a drama, they’re their own thing. We’re not really interested in 3D other-worlds. We’re interested in things that [affect] people on the periphery of life.’
Inspiration, in part, came from Merchant’s own father, who for a time was a door-to-door salesman. 'My memory of growing up is that it was always sunny and hot in the summer. Sort of balmy. It’s got a bit of a softer, hazy focus to it in my memory. So we were trying to give that spirit and not a brutal portrait of the Seventies.’
This sepia-tinted view of the past, and of their filmic world, makes for a gentle, warming film. But one that is also not a little schmaltzy. 'I’m not afraid, and neither is Ricky, of being emotional,’ Merchant says. 'Of pressing emotional buttons. Those are the pleasures I take in cinema particularly. I love Casablanca and films which give you big emotions. But you wouldn’t accuse them of being cheesy. It’s about approaching it honestly. I want to be taken on an emotional journey when I’m watching a film.’
Music, he says, is an important vehicle for this journey. He and Gervais decided to take a slot DJing on XFM in 2001 – they first met at the radio station in 1997 when Merchant, then 23 and a recent film graduate from Warwick University, was hired by Gervais, XFM’s head of speech, as his assistant – 'because we liked the idea of playing records for people. It wasn’t just to dick around.’
Their music obsession is apparent on the soundtrack for Cemetery Junction, which is stuffed with big, air-punching period tunes. For Merchant, a key inspiration here was Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, particularly the line 'it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win’. 'It’s funny, a lot of people accuse Springsteen of being cheesy, and I never think he is. When that saxophone comes in at the end of Thunder Road, I don’t think: “This is corny”. It makes me well up.’
Is Merchant a big old softie? By his own admission, yes. 'People often think Ricky and I are very cynical and it’s all about black comedy. But if you look at our work, in the end it’s about friendship and romance, and making some kind of connection with other human beings.’
He’s 'generally more cautious’ than Gervais. 'I prefer to come across as more level-headed – because I probably am. I just like an easy life. Ricky’s quite happy to provoke opinion, to blur the line between his acting and his stand-up persona. He likes to be a little bit provocative. He takes pleasure from that and he’s good at it, and to him it feels challenging. It feels important. That doesn’t concern me.’
Merchant, too, has done stand-up on and off for years, and did a few nights last year. 'I like that it forces you to stand on your own feet. But my stand-up comedy is a lot safer than Ricky’s. He’s got a bit of that punk-rock sensibility.’ 'Steve wasn’t interested in punk,’ Gervais tells me over the phone. 'He did actually go to school in a bow tie till he was about 15 or 16!’ he adds with a cackle of deliberate – and affectionate – provocation.
'When The Office broke, because I was in it I got all the attention. I was suddenly in this big TV sitcom and I was offered everything,’ Gervais recalls. 'And Steve goes to me: “What’s the best that can happen? You’re either funny and people go, 'well you should be, you’re a comedian’, or you’re not in control and it’s not really you.”’
Gervais mentions an invitation he was excited about (he professes not to remember what). Merchant’s deadpan reply: 'Yeah, that might be fun. But would Woody Allen do it?’ A still crestfallen Gervais accedes that his partner, 13 years his junior, was right. Daniel Radcliffe remembers watching this dynamic at work when the Harry Potter star filmed his episode of Extras. 'Ricky is obviously much more of a showman,’ says Radcliffe. 'But you almost get the sense that he wouldn’t be able to do that without Stephen.’
Gervais is a bona fide Hollywood celebrity now, with multiple projects on the go (he’s currently working on a 'major CGI-type movie’ based on his Flanimals books). How has this impacted on his and Merchant’s relationship?
'I think the biggest impact is on time,’ Merchant muses. 'When we first started writing The Office we would sit for hours in cafés and pubs, listening in on conversations, chewing the fat. It all just felt much more leisurely and much more fun. Now there’s always something pressing. So in that regard it becomes more like a job that needs to be managed, rather than a hobby that you’re lucky to be paid for.’
How, then, does the 'more cautious’ Merchant spend what spare time he has? He’s bought a guitar and is trying to learn how to play it. He watches television. He goes to nice restaurants. He doesn’t go to premieres and parties with his girlfriend ('I’m not terribly showbizzy’).
Anyway, he’s single. But 'media rumour’ has it that Merchant is one of the anonymous boyfriends in Ex And The City, Alexandra Heminsley’s 2007 memoir of being dumped. Is he in the book? 'Possibly. I’ve never read it. But I did go out with her. It doesn’t concern me terribly if she writes about the real me. I didn’t…’Beat her up? 'Exactly. I like to think I’m a good person. I’ve not sent rude texts to anyone.’
What, I ask Gervais, would surprise people about Merchant? 'Not much. You get what you expect. He’s funny and smart and trustworthy. He’s a lot cooler than he’d let on. He’s a throwback, a man of integrity and honour. I would trust him with anything. I just don’t want to go to his parties.’
Given that Merchant’s idea of a great night out seems to be a quiet night in trying to master the chords to Neil Young’s Heart Of Gold, I see Gervais’s point. But has he invited him to use his pool yet? 'Yeah,’ Gervais begins. 'It was funny when he came to the house. He looked around and he called the promoter and said: “Right, I want to do some gigs!”’
Humility is hardly something Gervais is renowned for, but discussion of Merchant ('I’ve never talked about Stephen like this’) brings out his softer side:'He’s a brilliant bloke.’ He adds that Merchant is working on a film of his own now – something that the unassuming Merchant had neglected to mention.
'I’ve got a tendency to be allergic to stuff,’ Merchant offers by way of 'personal’ revelation. 'Plus I’ve got a weak bladder. So when I was editing Cemetery Junction I was endlessly in the lavatory, and I was always blowing my nose and sniffing. It only takes one of the people in the edit suite to say: “That’s a bit suspicious.” And then,’ he says brightly, 'I’ve got a massive coke problem. Of course,’ he says with a wink, 'that could just be my excuse. A cover for my massive coke problem.’
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