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I’m very bad in interviews,” admits Doon Mackichan, about halfway through our interview. She means TV interviews. Hopefully. Mackichan has been in a slew of the most notable British comedies of the past 30 years – sitcoms such as I’m Alan Partridge, Two Doors Down, or Toast of London, as well as films like The Borrowers and Happy New Year, Colin Burstead – but you’ll barely ever see her interviewed on a chat show. “I find them excruciating,” she growls. “I find that the pressure is people always want me to be funny. But I might want to talk about militant politics!”
It becomes clear, pretty quickly, that Mackichan is categorically not bad at interviews. She’s open, expansive, funny, and righteously, outspokenly feminist. (It helps, of course, that this is a very un-TV environment: we’re in a cosy and unhostile meeting room somewhere in the upper floors of the National Theatre.) And her politics aren’t that militant, even if friends and family nicknamed her “Millie Tant” when she was in her twenties, after the crude feminist caricature in the Viz comics. Now 63, Mackichan reckons the old wisdom about growing more conservative as you grow older is a “myth – especially now”, she adds. “People say, ‘Oh, I have to send my kids to private school because they’re so clever,’ or, ‘Yeah, I need my second home.’ I mean, of course, we’re all hypocrites. I’m a hypocrite with the way I live – I still fly. I’m not hardcore. But if anything, I think I’m going the other way. I’m going even more to the left.”
It feels apt, then, that just 10 minutes ago Mackichan was a few floors down, rehearsing a revival of Summerfolk, Maxim Gorky’s 1905 anti-rich satire. Mackichan describes the play to me as “like a more political Chekhov”; I’ve heard someone else describe it as “if The White Lotus was set in pre-revolutionary Russia”. Also among the cast are some other recognisable TV faces: Alex Lawther (Black Mirror), Paul Ready (The Terror), and Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders). Mackichan plays a poet, coasting through a life of opulent lethargy. “But the revolution’s about to happen,” she says. “These people are about to be wiped away. [Gorky’s] not cruel with his characters, but he really does skewer their hypocrisy and entitlement. I think it’s very feminist.”
For Mackichan, the role has involved a lot of practising the piano – an instrument she played as a child, but now has to perform onstage. She heaves out her working script to show me, and sure enough, among the stack of papers is a wad of well-worn sheet music.
Of course, there’s a timeliness to staging a play like this in 21st-century Britain, where wealth inequality is pushing the country to a political breaking point. Just a few weeks ago, a damning Oxfam report revealed that the UK’s richest 56 people now hold more wealth than 27 million others combined. “I think every decade, Summerfolk finds its moment, and this just seems to be the right moment,” she says. “I mean, you might picture a lot of entitled people drifting around a stage and think, ‘what’s the point of that?’ But actually, it’s political.” A few times, she mentions the phrase “looming doom”: the idea that the rich are out there living lives of blithe tranquillity. At the same time, impending turmoil – political and environmental – lurks just around the corner. “I think one character goes, ‘We’re lunch, my friends. We’re over.’ And, you know, unless we all change our ways, we’re over as well. There’s still a lot to fight for, even though it’s overwhelming… but I suppose [this play] is like, ‘Don’t disengage with the looming doom.’”
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Even when she’s talking about grave matters like these, Mackichan has a sort of ineffable liveliness to her. As she sits across from me, in a casual tracksuit, her face seizes every opportunity to stretch into a bright, impish grin. While I’m bound by house style to keep referring to her by her surname, it really is hard not to think of her as Doon. (Her first name is actually Sarah.) That single characterful, reverberant syllable seems to belong to her alone: it’s easy to see why she lent it to her radio series, Doon Your Way, in 1996.
That series was, says Mackichan, a “silly comedy with lots of characters” – the sort of larger-than-life send-ups that she’s proven so adept at playing down the years. Inexplicably, however, Doon Your Way prompted a record number of complaints to BBC Radio 4. “I was really shocked by that,” she says. “It was completely unexpected and it came mostly from Christians, who were angry about a young Christian character that I was doing. I was being very irreverent and talking about, ‘We don't want female bishops, and we don't want homosexuals.’ It was quite near the knuckle, and there were some very, very angry people writing in.”
Angry may in fact be an understatement. “One person said, ‘If there was such a thing as a [Christian] fatwa, I would launch it against Doon.” She widens her eyes. “That’s what happens sometimes, with religion, doesn’t it? It just gets very dangerous.”
Mackichan was born in London and moved to Scotland as a nine-year-old; by adulthood, she had started performing in various capacities. Alongside traditional theatre, she would mount her own stage comedy routines, which she described in her terrifically candid 2023 memoir, My Lady Parts, as a mix of “physical humour, sexual politics, misogynistic raps, beatboxing and fighting Ken and Barbie dolls”. Her collaborations with Chris Morris (on The Day Today and Brass Eye) helped bring her to the attention of a larger audience, as did her work as various characters across several incarnations of Alan Partridge.
In 1999, Mackichan teamed up with Fiona Allen and Sally Phillips for Smack the Pony, an eccentric Channel 4 sketch show that won two Emmy awards. “We didn’t win anything here,” she says. “We were seen as too much of a challenge. But in America, they were like, ‘Oh my God, you girls are amazing.’ They really loved us.” Mackichan was offered the chance to sign with a US agent and move to America; simultaneously, the agent offered Hugh Laurie, another of Britain’s brightest comedy prospects, the same opportunity. Laurie took the deal and went on to become, well, present-day Hugh Laurie. Mackichan stayed behind.
“I had two small children, and my husband at the time [Anthony Barclay] was an actor, very much in musical theatre,” she recalls. “It just felt like I didn’t want to do that. And I could have ended up in Frasier or something! You know what I mean? I absolutely could have done it. I’m happy to do it now, now my kids have scattered. But at the time, it just… felt like too much. My family came first.” She looks somewhat sombre as she says this.
“Yeah, I really regret it now… because if I’d gone to America, I’d be the lead in The Night Manager now.” She grins.
In truth, there’s little point in wondering about roads not taken. Mackichan went on to have three children with Barclay, whom she divorced in 2005. A couple of years before this, their nine-year-old son was diagnosed with leukaemia. The ensuing nightmare naturally brought her life crashing down around her, and put her marriage under a strain it could not survive. Mercifully, their son made a full recovery.
There’s so much gratuitous use of female flesh on TV
But the flirtation with America does, in a way, sum up something fundamental about Mackichan: more than most actors, she is resolute in her willingness to say “no” – be that to agents promising stardom in America, or to directors pressuring her to compromise herself on set. She recalls working on an ITV drama, in which she was asked, midway through shooting a scene in a sauna, to remove the towel that was covering her body.
“We’ve got intimacy coaches now to protect people who don't want to show flesh, and who don't want to drop the towel,” she tells me. “If I’d had someone there, perhaps, they would have said, ‘Well, a) this towel is tiny, and b) why does Doon have to drop it?’ If I hadn’t fought that battle, you would have seen me naked on an ITV drama, and that would still be banging around on the internet.”
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It’s one of many personal experiences Mackichan sees as symptomatic of wider problems in the TV industry. “There’s so much gratuitous use of female flesh on TV,” she says. “And really extreme sexual violence – and any violence. Women being slapped across the face or pulled down the stairs. I just will not watch any of that. It’s absolute zero tolerance – because it really does affect the culture.”
Much of Mackichan’s work of late has been on TV – including Two Doors Down, the Scottish sitcom on which she was a series regular, and the Neil Gaiman adaptation Good Omens, playing the Archangel Michael. Her last theatrical work was in 2019, when she starred alongside John Malkovich in Bitter Wheat, David Mamet’s 2019 play about a Harvey Weinstein-esque predator.
If she ever felt like a big payday, there’s always I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. ITV’s grossout reality series has come knocking more than once, and each time, Mackichan has shooed them away. Has she ever regretted that, I ask?
“Not for a single second,” she shoots back. “I mean, I'd live in a nice house now, wouldn't I? A lot of my friends are like, ‘You’re mad, just do it, do it, do it.’ So, you know, you weigh that up against… no, I absolutely loathe that sort of telly.”
She keeps going. “Sorry... I know people love [reality shows]. But it’s taken away a lot of art from TV. Everything is either police dramas or reality telly. Where are the other stories? Where are the one-off plays? Where are the things that really sit in people’s hearts? Something that’s really moved them, and changed them, in the way that film, or good dramas can?”
Forget being “good” or “bad” in interviews: the real question is how on earth no one’s thought to throw money at Mackichan to host a podcast.
She softens with a smile. “But I watch Gogglebox.” Even for Doon Mackichan, it seems, there are some things you just can’t say no to.
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