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Louise Thomas
Editor
It might only be summer, but Rob Brydon is already fielding questions about the festive season. “I’ve had quite a few times where people have come up to me and said, ‘Hey, I bet you’re looking forward to Christmas,’” he says, his singsong Welsh accent lending a little dramatic emphasis. “And I go, ‘Yeah, it is a nice time of year...’” That’s not what they mean, of course, he realises. They mean “the Gavin & Stacey Christmas thing”.
In May, co-creators Ruth Jones and James Corden confirmed that their hit sitcom, which initially ran for three seasons from 2007 to 2010, will return for one last special episode, set to air on Christmas Day. When they brought back the show in 2019 – a move that the “rather cautious” Brydon thought “might be a mistake, because I thought we ended it on a high” – it broke BBC viewing records.
In it, Brydon plays Uncle Bryn, father figure to Joanna Page’s Stacey. Earnest, excitable and ever-so-slightly oblivious, he also happens to be one of the series’ best loved and most quotable characters. Hence the people coming up to Brydon in the street since the special was confirmed. Before the announcement, the 59-year-old notes, the news was leaked to the press.
He’s good friends with both Jones, whom he has known since secondary school, and Corden, famously taking the latter to task over what Corden has called “brattish” behaviour in the immediate aftermath of Gavin & Stacey’s success. He still defends his divisive pal over his media reputation, recently telling The Times that “the James Corden I know is not the person I sometimes see being reported on. He gets a lot of stick. I’m hugely fond of him.” Their closeness meant he “knew about [the plans to bring Gavin & Stacey back] ages ago”. But he and his castmates “had to deny it” because the programme makers “hadn’t done the deals, they hadn’t got the crew”.
Filming won’t start until the autumn (Corden has admitted that the schedule will be “tight”, to accommodate the “Jenga puzzle” of the ensemble cast’s various projects). But whether the cameras are rolling or not, “Gavin & Stacey is a constant” for Brydon. “When I stop and think about how long it’s been, it’s quite hard to get your head around,” he says with a touch of bemusement. “There’s certainly not a week where somebody doesn’t come up and tell me how much they love it, or call me Bryn, or ask me what happened on the fishing trip [one of the show’s long-running jokes]. And that’s all fantastic, because most actors don’t work, let alone get something that people want to celebrate and tell you how much they love.”
Beyond Bryn, though, Brydon has carved out an enormously varied entertainment career. After starring in musicals alongside Jones at their secondary school in Porthcawl, south Wales, he studied drama in Cardiff before stints in radio, as a voice-over artist, and as a shopping channel presenter. A tape of Brydon’s character sketches eventually made its way to Steve Coogan, who’d end up producing his comedies Marion and Geoff (in which Brydon played a deluded taxi driver convinced he can win back his cheating wife) and the pitch-black Human Remains, created with Julia Davis.
He and Coogan have since played heightened versions of themselves in four seasons of the brilliant improvised comedy The Trip, in which they travel around Europe’s best restaurants and try to outdo each other with their Michael Caine impressions. (Brydon impersonates people all the time, I might add. In our conversation, his voice jumps around as he tells anecdotes, mimicking everyone from a posh theatre luvvie to an elderly neighbour to a gruff cockney Gavin & Stacey fan he once met outside a stage door.) He has also acted alongside Kenneth Branagh in the West End, hosted panel show Would I Lie to You? since 2009, and launched a podcast where he chats to celebrity pals.
His latest venture is another departure: a role in My Lady Jane, a riotous Prime Video period drama. It’s based on a YA novel, and imagines an alternative, fantastical Tudor history. In this version, Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Days’ Queen” who holds the unenviable title of England’s shortest-lived monarch, manages to dodge being beheaded shortly after she is crowned; instead, Jane (Emily Bader) lives to outwit and fight back against her rivals. Brydon, who describes the show as “a hysterical, historical romp”, plays a (heavily) fictionalised version of Lord Dudley, Jane’s calculating, machiavellian father-in-law, who is constantly hustling to try to get her (and his son) onto the throne.
He was drawn to it, he says, because director Jamie Babbit had worked on the Disney comedy Only Murders in the Building, a show he loves – but also because it meant going against affable type. Brydon, being a warm, avuncular sort of chap in person, tends to get cast as, well, a warm, avuncular sort of chap. When he appears as “himself” in The Trip, it’s as the cheerful, happy-go-lucky foil to the grumpier, more self-serious Coogan. “There was the fact that I was being asked to play somebody who was duplicitous, two-faced, scheming and manipulative – I don’t really play that [normally], and that was very appealing.”
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Working with a streamer was a far cry from the tighter constraints of British comedy. “The production values and the budget are really more akin to a movie than a TV series, or certainly any of the series that I’ve done,” he says. “I went into it thinking I’m making a British TV show, but it’s not, it’s a global thing.”
Most actors don’t work, let alone get something that people want to celebrate and tell you how much they love
To distance himself from his usual TV look, he decided to grow some period-appropriate facial hair. “What I forgot was that this was a seven-month shoot for me, so I was stuck with this goatee beard,” he recalls. “And if people don’t know you’re shooting this period piece, they assume it’s a personal choice. They assume that I’ve got to my late fifties and have decided now is the time. I was doing my podcast throughout all of this, and we do a shorter [video] version of it on YouTube, and you should read some of the comments. ‘You look like a n****’ and all sorts of stuff.”
How else did he prepare? “I ordered a book on Lord Dudley, but I didn’t read it,” he jokes. For a while, he toyed with the idea of throwing one of his many impressions into his portrayal. “There’s a very famous British politician [and] I thought I could play it like him, I could do his voice,” he says. “That was my plan for a while. But then I thought that would be quite restrictive [...] He was somewhere in the back of my head. I think if you saw it now, if I told you who it was – and I’m not going to – you’d say, ‘Well, he’s not that much like him,’ but it was a starting point.”
It’s not the only thing that Brydon won’t be drawn on. It feels a little like he is in performance mode when we speak, which makes it a bit tough to extract an unequivocal response when it comes to more contentious subjects. My Lady Jane has, like many recent period dramas, opted for colour-conscious casting, with actors of colour playing real-life royal figures like King Edward and the future Elizabeth I. Even though the show obviously takes place in a fantasy parallel universe, it’s the sort of move that you can imagine riling a certain type of, say, Twitter/X commentator or right-wing news channel. How does he expect that aspect of the production will be received? “I think that some people have one opinion. Other people will have another opinion. ’Twas ever thus.”
Asking how he feels about viewers retrospectively applying the values of our present moment to Noughties comedies like Gavin & Stacey elicits similar hedging. “I say, knock yourself out... You have your opinion. That’s absolutely fine, but that opinion is no more valid than my opinion or her opinion or his opinion.”
Someone who certainly has a pretty positive opinion about the show is Margot Robbie. The actor is a longtime Gavin & Stacey fan – so much so that she requested Brydon’s presence in Barbie, the highest-grossing film of 2023, which she starred in and also produced. “I recorded a video message for her birthday as Bryn – somebody in her camp got in touch and said, ‘We’re putting together some messages, would you do that?’” he says. He’d all but forgotten about it until the Barbie call-up came through.
On set, Robbie quizzed him about the sitcom, but director Greta Gerwig (who must have slightly more esoteric tastes in comedy) “would ask me about Human Remains [...] They were happy to have improvisation and collaboration – and that, for someone like me, is just perfect. I love that, where you start with a brilliant script but you’re allowed to offer stuff to add on.” He’s still “so proud to be a part of it, because I really think it’s a wonderful piece of work that says a lot of important things while at the same time being hysterically funny”.
Unlike many of his British comedy peers, Brydon has never been particularly fussed about making inroads in Hollywood. Did seeing the Barbie machine up close change that at all? “The great thing about Barbie was I spent one day on it,” he says. “Literally, one day. The reality of being a movie actor is being away from home for months on end, getting up at the crack of dawn, working all day long. It’s as if your life goes on hold. [...] Maybe once my younger children have flown the nest [Brydon has two teenage sons with his second wife, TV producer Clare Holland, as well as three older children from his first marriage] and I’m in no rush for that to happen.”
He’d make an exception to work with Wes Anderson, he says, although “I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish, but I really like my career the way it is.” We’re “almost indoctrinated to think” that Hollywood is “what any actor must crave”, he says. “When I was younger, definitely, that would have been the case. If I’d given this answer when I was younger, I’d have been lying, but not now.”
Finding fame relatively late – he was in his mid-thirties when Marion and Geoff became a critical hit – has shaped this resolutely un-starry-eyed approach to his industry, he reckons. “By then, you’ve hopefully formed your personality. By then you’re not going to get knocked off [course]. And if you have perspective, you realise that success in your career is not necessarily the key to happiness. You know having a balance in your life is the key to happiness.”
‘My Lady Jane’ is available to stream on Prime Video now
