Hi Will!” I smile, before realising what I’ve done. Will, of course, is Will the Intern, the hapless work-experience guy from BBC parody W1A. The person in front of me is Hugh Skinner, the actor who played him with bumbling aplomb. In my defence, we are at a café right outside Broadcasting House, where the comedy was set. “It happens,” he reassures me later of my faux pas. “I’ve played a lot of Wills and Harrys.”
He really has: there was Will the Intern, then Prince William in royal spoof The Windsors, before Harry the sweet boyfriend in Fleabag and Harry the younger version of Colin Firth in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. A long line of posh doofuses, essentially. “I went to a private school, so I know that world,” he says with a chuckle. “And I love playing people who are perceivably getting things wrong.”
But Will was Skinner’s real breakthrough – and now he’s back in Twenty Twenty Six, a W1A spin-off set in Fifa HQ. The character first apologised his way onto our screens over a decade ago in John Morton’s follow-up to his Bafta-winning Olympic mockumentary Twenty Twelve. W1A skewered hopeless BBC management and corporate jargon, and centred around Hugh Bonneville’s “head of values” Ian Fletcher as he coped with various low-stakes catastrophes, such as allegations of anti-Cornish bias, or rumours that Claudia Winkleman was leaving Strictly (ahem).
Will was perpetually perplexed, a typical line of his dialogue going something like, “Yeah, no worries, yeah, cool. Say again?” And Skinner made the character into a firm fan favourite whom we all felt helplessly sorry for, whether he was struggling with an expired work pass or tasked with accosting celebrities in the foyer of the Beeb’s offices. For his return, he’s nabbed a job as a PA for Fletcher, who’s now “head of integrity” at Fifa, in the lead-up to the World Cup.
Fans of W1A will be pleased to hear that not a lot has changed when it comes to Will. “Well, yeah, I don’t know, yeah, mental,” is literally his opening line, as he expresses his surprise at getting the job. And even though nine years have passed since we last saw him, he doesn’t appear to have grown any older (or wiser). “Being clean-shaven with a full face of makeup really ages people down,” explains Skinner, who is 41, of his young appearance on screen. In person, the actor is a joy and has an endearingly giddy nervous energy. There’s a black coffee in front of him, but I don’t think he needs it. He is constantly moving in his seat: the body bounces, the eyebrows quiver, the hands waggle. “I find these things so nerve-wracking,” he says of interviews. “I’m so sorry.”
On the topic of ageing, he goes off on a glorious tangent about hair loss. “I started taking pills and stuff, but then I started developing, like, some sort of devil horn from, like, a blocked gland? So yeah, maybe a hair transplant, I don’t know? Sorry. Why am I talking about this?!”
There’s more than a hint of Will the Intern about him. Allegedly, he based the character on a lovely, earnest boy he met at a wedding once, but these days he often encounters real-life Wills when he’s at the BBC. “When I’m here, interns will come up to me and go, ‘Oh my God, it’s so funny, I’ve actually got your job and everyone says I’m like you!’”
Skinner had been a fan of Bonneville since Notting Hill, and says his real-life dynamic with the Downton Abbey star isn’t a world away from Will and Ian’s. “He is just such an amazing actor and a lovely person and stuff, and so I do – oh God, I sound like a child – I feel a desire to impress him. You do find yourself looking for the parallels, and I genuinely couldn’t believe my luck the first time I was cast as Will, and I also can’t believe I'm back, and I don’t think Will can believe he’s back in Ian’s orbit.”
Will got the new job as Ian’s assistant through nepotism (“Something to do with horses,” he mutters), and he spends most of episode two hovering around with his bright orange rucksack, wondering where to sit. Skinner loved getting stuck into Morton’s scripts again, unmatched in their ability to nail filler words and crosstalk, and the way British people speak in confusing riddles to avoid confrontation. “His writing is so distinct,” says Skinner. “He’s so good at showing the verbal tics we get stuck on in an awkward situation. I find it hugely relatable.” Where a typical script for a 30-minute sitcom might be about 30 pages, a Morton script could be as many as 75, because it’s all dialogue and everyone talks so fast.
Twenty Twenty Six – written long before America became such a controversial host country, and all that malarkey about Trump receiving the Fifa peace prize – does have a different patter to Morton’s two original series, because it’s set in Miami. Replacing the British cast of Jessica Hynes, Sarah Parish and co are an ensemble of American, Canadian and Mexican actors, and Morton plays with the culture clash. “The American characters are so earnest and so enthusiastic that [us Brits] aren’t quite sure whether they’re a threat or not,” says Skinner.
Filming ‘Mamma Mia’ was honestly mind-blowingly good, and slightly ruinous
He wasn’t always going to be an actor. His parents, who are medics, initially tried to dissuade him, but after attending Eastbourne College, Skinner earned a place at the London drama school Lamda. It was around that time, during the 2000s, that he met Phoebe Waller-Bridge, then a Rada student, and in 2009 the pair starred together in an election play called 2nd May 1997, one of the Adolescence creator Jack Thorne’s early works. Talk about a dream trio. One contemporary critic said: “Full marks to the actors – Hugh Skinner and Phoebe Waller-Bridge – who are both bound to go far.”
Seven years later, of course, they co-starred in Waller-Bridge’s seminal BBC comedy Fleabag, with Skinner playing the protagonist’s neurotic boyfriend, Harry. I still weep with laughter thinking about the scene where Fleabag, dressed as a ninja, sneaks up on Harry in the shower and he bursts into tears. Skinner and Waller-Bridge remain friends to this day. “I’m just so happy for her,” he says of her success. “And I remember really enjoying that scene. It was just funny being in the shower, and acting, you know? It felt sort of novel.”
But he’s never had more fun on a job than when he was shooting 2018’s Mamma Mia! sequel. “It was honestly mind-blowingly good, and slightly ruinous,” he says. “I barely filmed in Croatia – I think I did a couple of days’ work, and then we were just out there, and it was heaven. There were dinners every night; you’d get a message saying, ‘Tonight, Pierce [Brosnan] requests your presence...’ and you’d just go and have dinner at his place with everyone. There were loads of parties.”
He recalls getting “sort of incredibly drunk” after filming the group performance of “Super Trouper”. “We were all in spandex, and Meryl Streep and Julie Walters and Christine Baranski were coming down in a cherry picker with fireworks coming out the side, and then Cher’s at the other end with this sort of big bouncy hair... I mean, it was honestly unbelievable.”
In his big musical number, “Waterloo”, he plays air guitar with a baguette. What was it like being in the film as a non-trained dancer? “What are you talking about?” he cries, feigning offence. “Absolutely terrifying. And to add insult to injury, there were lots of incredible dancers there in the ensemble, and they’d work out the choreography and show you your bit, and you’d go, oh God.”
He’s very excited for the third film, though he says he won’t be involved. Next, he’s starring in Two Weeks in August, a BBC drama about a disastrous friends’ holiday. Apart from that, this spring, Skinner has decided he’s going to get very into gardening. As we say goodbye and leave the table, he accidentally reaches for my tea and apologises profusely. But I’m relieved to report that I do manage to get his name right.
‘Twenty Twenty Six’ premieres on BBC Two at 10pm on Wednesday, 8 April
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