Rafe Spall is stalling. He’s got a one-hour window between rehearsals for To Kill a Mockingbird, but for reasons that will soon become clear, he doesn’t really want to talk about the play. “Did you grow up in London?” he asks, dipping an egg sandwich into chicken soup, leaning forward so as not to drip on his blue three-piece suit. “When’s your birthday?” He takes a bite. “You gonna have a party?” Another dip. “Where did you go to uni? What was your X Factor-watching boom period? We’re talking Little Mix, right?”
The actor is so instantly likeable, I find myself going along with it. If you’ve seen I Give It a Year, the 2013 romcom that supposedly transformed him into leading man material (we’ll get to that later), or the wonderful Apple+ comedy series Trying, in which he plays a happy-go-lucky Londoner trying to adopt a baby, you’ll know the cheeky, slightly geezer-ish charm I mean. He is more sharply dressed than either of those characters, though – so sharp that I assume he’s in costume, until I email later to check and it turns out he just enjoys a nice suit. By the time he’s explaining to me why “perhaps the greatest ever X Factor performance was when James Arthur did ‘No More Drama’ by Mary J Blige”, I realise I’m going to have to put a stop to this. We need to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird.
