Armando Iannucci & Peter Capaldi

Armando Ianucci

Peter Capaldi has probably found the role of his life as ‘Malcolm Tucker’, the acid-tongued Downing Street spin-doctor, last seen in the award-winning “The Thick Of It” which is, of course, the brainchild of Armando Iannucci. Iannucci, who also created I’m Alan Partridge and The Day Today, sat down with Capaldi to talk about his first foray to the big screen, In the Loop.

Q: There is a line in the film regarding adult movies  and MP’s expenses which got a spontaneous round of applause at the first screening. With the current media attention on this issue, does this mean you got your satire spot on? Or did you not go far enough?

AI: Well you write all these things in advance and sometimes you think “This is too silly, will anyone believe this?” and other times you think “Well, this isn’t silly enough” and you have to make a judgment on what you think is believable. So you put stuff in and then these events happen in real life. Then you start worrying about whether the things that we had really made up about the war are actually going to happen and whether that’s a good or a bad thing to say. A lot of it is based on research and finding out what actually goes on in these closed government buildings and you worry whether it’s too silly or too unbelievable but then somebody from government comes up to you after the screening and says to you “Oh it’s far, far worse”.

There is a thing in the State Department in America where Chad hangs outside an important person’s office with a squash racket and that is something that goes on all the time apparently.

Q: Peter, when you are playing Malcolm in full flow, is it exhilarating or exhausting?

PC: Well it’s a combination of both. It’s great fun, obviously, because he’s much cleverer than I am because he has six writers who have come up with lots of wonderful lines and he has a bigger vocabulary and is smarter than I am and so on. But I inhabit him and become the keeper of his black soul which is a great job to have and it’s nice to get that cauldron of bile boiling.

Q: Does the ‘cauldron of bile’ ever simmer hen you are nose-to-nose with James Gandolfini?

PC: First of all, I’m a huge fan of James and it was an enormous thrill when I walked into the rehearsal room and we had to have a go at facing up to each other which was tough because I was inches away from Tony Soprano and he’s a big guy.  When you are filming something like that you can’t be intimidated by how you feel. You have to just get into ‘Malcolm’ mode and just let him take over. I wish we had more…I would have been happy to go at for another two hours and I would’ve sorted him out.

Q: How much did you have to pay and who did you have to bribe to film those Downing Street scenes?

AI: Normally when films take place at Downing Street, it’s a set and we wrote to Downing Street thinking they would say “no” and they came back saying “Yeah alright, we don’t normally do this but go on”. The Prime Minister was at a Labour Conference in Blackpool that week so Downing Street was sort of empty. You’d think that there would be someone there running the country but it was fundamentally quite quiet. So, the opening scene of Malcolm coming out of No.10 is Malcolm coming out of No. 10. It’s great because all the “Malcolms” who work at number 10 had brought their cameras in because they were quite excited and we were excited and I couldn’t understand why people would be more excited over a fictional character.

I remember when I was out researching the film, I spoke to Joe Biden’s Chief-of-staff when Biden was a senator. He’s a sort of youngish, intelligent, good-looking guy, but powerful in Washington. He said “It’s great people to speak to people in films, it’s very exciting this job. Last week we were at a reception and Bradley Whitford, Josh Lyman from the West Wing, was there. I was very excited.” And I was thinking “you are him! Why are you excited?!”

Q: How different is it filming in Washington to filming in London?
AI: I had no idea what happened behind the scenes in order to get the locations but it felt fairly free in terms of having Malcolm outside The White House. They said where you could stand and where you couldn’t stand and, provided you kept to that, they left you alone. I’m sure there were hidden snipers everywhere ready to do something if we wandered onto the wrong part of the sidewalk or something.

Q: Did you find that people in America were aware of The Thick of It?

AI: The politicians were yeah. America is very into British comedy anyway. As we were going through customs in New York the guy said “What do you do?” and I said “BBC Comedy” and he sang the words “French and Saunders” at me. I remember one driver actually going “A-HAAAA” as well. Because you can download comedy anywhere now, they’re really into British comedy and some of them knew of The Thick of It.

Q: To what extent is Malcolm Tucker based on Alastair Campbell?

PC: What we are seeing in the film is a point that we have arrived at with the Malcolm Tucker character and, I think, when we started, none of us sat down and said “this is Alastair Campbell” so the idea that it is him and that is how he behaves is some kind of strange melding of a concept of him and what we have done because I have never seen any film or heard of any verbatim reports of him behaving like that. So, I think people kind of want Alastair to be Malcolm and I think he quite likes it too. So, there was no great conscious effort to make him Alastair but he sort of become that now but I think it’s time for us to push away from that to some extent and to move in a slightly different direction with him.

Q: Playing such an outspoken, foul-mouthed character, did that rub off on you at all?

PC: Yes it does rub off. You sort of have to get yourself into this zone of patience and nastiness. It usually happens in my kitchen when I’m sitting learning lines and my daughter hasn’t done her homework and I’ll suddenly tear into her. My family has to live with Malcolm…(goes in to character) “Where is the fucking remote control. I left it there. Who’s doing the fucking school run in the morning, not me, don’t fucking look at me. Now you listen to me right now, take those toys and put them upstairs right now!”…and all that sort of stuff.  They are very patient in living with that. Of course, that is a comic version of it but it does kind of go on. If you’re playing a part that knocks you then you have to kind of get into that kind of zone.

Q: You slipped so effortlessly into character there Peter, did you at any idle moment count how many f-words there were in the script?

PC: No, it takes enough time just learning them. The truth is all of the written material has been sweated over and really some of it is like restoration comedy. The writers really like you to put the “fucking fuck” right there. If you put the “cunt” in the wrong place then the “fuck” won’t come out properly.

AI: (laughs)…there’s our poster!

Peter Capaldi as acid-tongued spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker

PC: They don’t like it when you fuck it up. So, you’ve got to try and learn them. The bad language is just rocket fuel for all this other wonderful linguistic stuff that’s going on. It’s a sort of conjuring trick to make it look natural. It’s not really natural, there are big mouthfuls in there. So, you have to study it and learn it properly and hopefully in the next series I will do that. It sells it short to just call it swearing. It is profane but the writing around those swear words provide scope for very beautiful, inventive ideas.

Q: When you see politicians in scandals now, does it make you angry?

AI: I sort of feel that I’m genuinely not interested. It tells me nothing about what goes on in their private life. There was a story about four weeks ago about a senior civil servant who was up before a Select Committee in the House of Commons saying that when they drew up a dossier they knew that some of the sources were very unreliable and all the information had been a bit eschewed. The MPs kept asking “Why didn’t you say anything?” and he said “Because it was made pretty clear that if we objected, our careers would be over” and that was a tiny little story on one broadsheet and that, for me, is just a much more interesting and profound a story than what Jacqui Smith’s husband watched because she’s away in London all year.

Last edited: 24th May 2009