One winter morning, a Doctor Who comes calling. The Glaswegian actor Peter Capaldi lives about an hour’s walk from me and instead of us meeting in some midway café, the 65-year-old wanders over (leather booted, woolly jumpered, cloaked in a dark winter coat that sets off his pale-grey hair) to have coffee at my kitchen table. My son is off school with flu, medicating on Marvel movies and barely able to believe his luck as the actorly embodiment of an alien superhero wanders through our flat. While we’re waiting for the kettle to boil, I ask Capaldi whether he ran into any other Doctor Whos on his walk through the actorland that is suburban north London.
He grins an unguarded grin you don’t often see on screen. Capaldi became famous as the permanently angry spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC comedy The Thick of It, which ran from 2005 to 2012 and, after that, between 2013 and 2017, he played the sternest, least imp-ish Doctor Who in decades. In his new Apple TV show, a police procedural called Criminal Record, which Capaldi co-produced with his wife, Elaine Collins, he stars as an ageing detective: another scowler. Now, coffee in hand, he smiles affectionately. So, did he bump into any other Doctor Whos this morning? “David [Tennant, 10th Doctor] used to live in Crouch End, near me. Matt [Smith, 11th Doctor] lives around here. Jodie [Whittaker, 13th Doctor] is nearby, Christopher [Eccleston, 9th Doctor] too, I think.” But no, no encounters with his fellow alumni this morning, Capaldi says.
“You do run into each other. You have a laugh, a gossip, you share. There aren’t a lot of people who have been in that role in the centre of that storm. Most people think the job is being on the Tardis and running around with Daleks. Which it is. That’s the fun part. But there’s a lot of other stuff you have to do, too. You’re kind of the face of the brand and the brand is very big. You can’t be the cynical melancholic I naturally am. You have to pretend to be a version of yourself that’s far more amenable.”
Is it a bit like being the Queen?
“Kind of,” he says. “You embody for a time this folk hero, this icon. I was able to comfort people in a way that would be beyond the powers of Peter. You could walk into a room and people gasped with delight. It doesn’t happen any more.”
Capaldi grew up in 1960s and 1970s Glasgow. His Italian-Scottish family lived in a tenement block. “We had nothing. We had zilch.” From a young age he exhibited signs of artistic talent, though he characterises himself, then and now, as a seven- or eight-out-of-10 at various crafts. “When I was young, I was good at drawing. My grandmother used to say that came from Italy. She felt that I was an absolute throwback to Leonardo da Vinci – her direct line to Michelangelo! It confused me because I wanted to do these other things, play music, act – which one was I supposed to do?”
After graduating school at 18, this confused cross-artistic trajectory continued. “I tried to be an actor, but I didn’t get into drama school, so I went to art school. When I was at art school, I joined a band.” In his early 20s, Capaldi released a single as part of a group called Dreamboys; then he quit music and spent most of his 20s acting, getting small jobs in theatre and TV as well as a walk-on part opposite John Malkovich in 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons. In his 30s, he decided to concentrate on directing.
In 1993, a short film he directed, Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, won him an Oscar, industry recognition that launched Capaldi off on a heady but doomed sojourn in America. Well caffeinated and gripping the edge of my kitchen table to tell the story, he recalls what happened when he was courted as a hot prospect by the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey, then the co-presidents of Miramax and at the height of their power and influence. Capaldi spent a year working on a screenplay for them, at the end of which Bob flew him out to Manhattan to discuss casting and production. As far as Capaldi was concerned it was a formality; bottles of champagne were cooling at home.“I thought I was off and away.”
Miramax sent a limo to pick him up from the airport. “I fell into conversation with the driver, lovely man, Ralph. When I got out of the car I gave him a big tip. Because I was a big shot now, you see. Then Ralph said: ‘I’ve been told to wait for you here.’” Uh oh. “Inside, all the people in the office were avoiding my eye. Bob said, ‘I’ll come straight to it, we’re not gonna do the movie, my brother Harvey says he doesn’t know how to sell it.’ He said, ‘But we love you! You’re one of the family! You’ll always have a place here!’ Needless to say, I never heard from him again. Obviously, while I was in the air they’d had a discussion and changed their minds. I was so dumbfounded as I climbed back into the limo I just laughed. I had no money, because we’d bought a little house in Crouch End, and I had no career, because I’d turned my back on acting.”
In a gesture that Capaldi has never forgotten, Ralph the limo driver tried to give him back his big tip.
As we chat, the postman rings the bell, delivering packages. Council tree surgeons are working on the road outside. My son needs water, words of comfort, possibly he just wants another good long look at Capaldi. I’ve never interviewed anyone in my own home before and the limitations of the format are becoming apparent. But Capaldi seems to respond well to the setting and its lack of frills. His adult daughter and her family have been visiting, brand new baby in tow. When I apologise for all the noise and interruptions, Capaldi says it’s nothing compared to a newborn.
He and Collins were young parents themselves when his directing career fell apart. Arriving back in London from the disastrous Manhattan trip, “The initial feeling was shock. Then a pragmatic survival instinct kicked in.” Capaldi rejoined the auditioning circuit. “I was a psychiatrist in Midsomer Murders. I was a beekeeper in Poirot – AN Other Actor. Someone else would have turned down these parts first.” Collins, until that point an actor, too, decided to pivot into development and production, a career move that has worked well for her.
Artists often do their best work while they’re at their lowest, perhaps because they feel they haven’t much to lose, little to be afraid of. Sloping into a Soho audition room in the mid-2000s to meet Armando Iannucci about a new political comedy, Capaldi remembers being in a foul mood. He’d just come from an unsuccessful audition for another BBC show, “being taped like I was Vivien Leigh reading for Scarlett O’Hara”. He remained grumpy when Iannucci admitted there wasn’t yet a script for The Thick of It, they were going to try improvising instead. “I knew Armando was supposed to be a comedy genius, but at that moment I was, like, ‘Yeah? Let’s see some of your comedy genius then. Fucking show me what you’ve got, you Oxbridge twat.’ My whole attitude that day was essentially Malcolm Tucker’s, and it informed the improvisation we did.”
When The Thick of It debuted, Capaldi entered the sitcom pantheon overnight. Revisiting episode one, what’s glaring is how fully formed, how exquisite a character Tucker is. Alan Partridge, Samantha Jones, Frasier Crane, David Brent … these creations had to be discovered over time by their actors and writers. With Tucker it’s all there from word one, the controlled fury, the foul-mouthed eloquence, that constant convenient deployment of hypocrisy. Capaldi played the part for seven years, winning a Bafta mid-run. It led to other memorable gigs, as a news producer in 2012’s The Hour and as Count Richelieu in a 2014 adaptation of the Musketeers story. He was Mister Micawber in Iannucci’s 2019 reimagining of David Copperfield, a fun role that was bookended by two equally fun Paddington movies, released in 2014 and 2017.
Promoting these projects, Capaldi would be asked to give a view on political events of the day, as seen through the eyes of the character who made his career. What would Malcolm Tucker think of Brexit, or the pandemic response, or the premierships of Johnson or Truss? Capaldi long ago stopped answering these questions. “For one thing, I need about 10 writers, Tony Roach and Jesse Armstrong among them, to supply Malcolm’s bon mots. But more than that, I think these [recent Conservative] governments have been too terrible to make fun of. I think they’ve been incompetent and corrupt and I’m not going to make jokes to give them time off.”
We talk about how weird it is that political satire should have fallen into abeyance in the 2020s – perhaps because, as Capaldi says, “things have been too bad to make fun of. Making fun normalises situations I don’t think should be normalised. The planet is burning. They’re pumping shit into the rivers. I’m not gonna be part of making jokes about that… All this highfalutin life I’ve had,” he says, of the awards parties, the film roles, the immortal runs as a sweary spin doctor and an inscrutable Doctor Who, “is because I went to art school. My parents couldn’t afford to send me. I went because the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back. There was a thrusting society then, a society that tried to improve itself. Yes, of course, it cost money. But so what? It allowed people from any kind of background to learn about Shakespeare, or Vermeer, or whatever they wanted to learn about. Why did we lose this, this belief in ourselves?”
For Capaldi, the world of acting feels narrower now, meaner in a way that seems to mirror British society at large. He thinks of his industry as one in which subtle discriminations hold sway and “gatekeepers and Aztecs still decree who shall be admitted… I think there’s a real problem. There isn’t the funding or support for young people from poorer backgrounds to get into the theatre. And indeed there aren’t the theatres.” He wonders about the teenage Anthony Hopkinses out there, talented, without the obvious means or encouragement to train in the arts. And the inverse, actors who Capaldi, in his frank and acid way, characterises as privileged duds.
“This business is full of people who are not the real thing,” he says, “people I perceived to be artists ’cos they had posh accents, but who didn’t have it, they just sounded like they did.” He goes on to tell a tantalising but intentionally vague story about a major star he worked with, someone who revealed themselves through the course of an acting collaboration to be a dud hiding in plain sight. He won’t provide details (“Too easy to figure out. When everyone’s dead I’ll tell you”), but he says the experience changed him professionally, leaving him more aware of his own limitations, but grateful to have a little vinegar and grit in the mix. “There’s a kind of smoothness, a kind of confidence that comes from a good [paid-for] school. That’s what you’re struck by: they seem to know how to move through the world recognising which battle to fight, where to press their attentions. But it can make the acting smooth, which to me is tedious. I like more neurosis. More fear. More trouble, you know?”
I think this part of his skillset expressed itself well during the three-season run on Doctor Who, when Capaldi was prepared to come across as remote, a little unreachable. “I don’t set out to make the audience like me,” he says. “Because my characters don’t know an audience is there.” For me, his high point as the Doctor was an episode called Heaven Sent, a chronology-stretching tale written by Steven Moffat in which the Doctor is set a sisyphean task of endurance that lasts about 50 minutes or so in screen time and several millennia in narrative terms. Capaldi didn’t play it as a hero. He wasn’t charming or boyish. In this episode especially, he was grim and patient and knackered. It was a rare occasion when the character, apparently alive for hundreds of years, seemed old.
In the new TV show, Criminal Record, he explores a more mortal kind of ageing, life’s third act, its inevitable professional humblings. Capaldi plays a London DCI in his 60s, coming to the end of a career, already moonlighting as a private security contractor, intimidated by the thrust and purpose of a younger colleague at the Met played by Cush Jumbo. As Jumbo’s character grows in confidence, Capaldi’s shrinks. It is a paradox of experience he can relate to. “I find the older I get, the closer I am to who I was,” he says.
I ask him to explain.
“Like I’m returning to… ‘roots’ is the wrong word. I feel more and more like my mother and father, more and more keenly aware of the values they had.” He provides an interesting example, how he has become all thumbs around the act of tipping in restaurants: “I can be in a complete sweat about that.” He can imagine his parents, both dead now, in a similar muddle. “From the background we come from, you can have a bit of anxiety about coming across as grand. So you have to allay that by making sure you are communicating with everybody, all the time.”
Capaldi shakes his head, chuckling softly. He has finished his coffee. He’s about to put on his big coat, say goodbye to my son, and walk back through Whoville to his home and his family. Before he leaves we return to the subject of actors from privileged backgrounds. He says he feels mean, like he took unfair advantage of them in their absence. “It’s not their fault,” he says. “It’s just that there’s less and less of my lot in the arts.” And this concerns him, he continues, because “people of all backgrounds are sophisticated, are interesting, are equally prone to tragedy and joy. Any art that articulates that is a comfort. Art is the ultimate expression of you are not alone, wherever you are, whatever situation you are in. Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.”
He nods, feeling he’s expressed himself better. I agree.
• This article was amended on 14 January 2024. The episode in which the Doctor is set “a sisyphean task of endurance” is called Heaven Sent, not Heaven’s Gate as an earlier version said.
Criminal Record is streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes every Wednesday
Fashion editor Helen Seamons; Grooming by Kenneth Soh at The Wall Group using Eighth Day; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistants Tom Frimley and Tilly Pearson; shot at Loft Studio
