From Melbourne's The Age newspaper (taken from The Guardian):
Make mine a shandy
"I don't want to be someone trying to spin the public image of me," says Steve Coogan.
Sam Wollaston
June 25, 2006
From tabloid tales to Tristram Shandy, Steve Coogan talks about his life and opinions.
There's a scene in the film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story in which a journalist approaches the character called Steve Coogan, played by Steve Coogan, and says: "Knowing me Gary Wilson, knowing you Steve Coogan."
He's an idiot, this journalist, who thinks he's being clever - as if he were the first person ever to do that to the man who gave birth to Alan Partridge, the character who coined the phrase. Coogan gives him a you-sad-twat look. "It was eight years ago, that series," he says witheringly in the film to Gary Wilson, who's after an interview.
For some reason I think it would be a clever idea to recreate that scene when I meet Steve Coogan for our interview. "Knowing me Sam Wollaston, knowing you Steve Coogan," I mumble, not very convincingly. Coogan shakes my hand but gives me a you-sad-twat look. Help, he doesn't realise I'm doing a line from the film. He thinks I mean it, that I'm really like the Gary Wilson character. Or maybe he does realise, but still thinks I'm a sad twat. Oh well, it doesn't matter, I'm not here to be liked. I'm not going to abandon the scene recreation entirely.
But about the film. Tristram Shandy is Michael Winterbottom's film of Laurence Sterne's rambling mock autobiography, which everyone said couldn't be filmed. What Winterbottom has done is make a film in the spirit of Tristram Shandy: a rambling movie about an attempt to film Sterne's novel. The idea sounds awful, too clever by half. Weirdly, though, it works beautifully, and it's belly-laugh funny - in a Shandean kind of way, of course. Steve Coogan plays Tristram Shandy. And he plays Steve Coogan playing Tristram Shandy. Got it?
So, Steve Coogan, why Tristram Shandy, a film many would say is unfilmable? (This is my question but again I'm quoting from the film. I think he realises this now.) That's really a question for the director, he says, but Winterbottom likes to try things that shouldn't work. He - Coogan - wasn't initially convinced, but he trusts Winterbottom. "As soon as I see period costume, I turn off. Of course I had my doubts, because I read it and I thought ..." He makes a screwed-up face.
So has he read Tristram Shandy? "The novel? Come on! Of course not. I read the script, the bit with my lines in. I heard of the novel 20 years ago - I knew what it was about, that it goes off at tangents, that it's about extrapolating everything to the point of deliberately being unmanageable, almost a wilful self-conscious deconstruction of the novel. But that wasn't enough to get me to read it."
Damn. I tell him I've brought a couple of questions to test him on the book. "You thought I'd say I'd read it, and you would rumble me? Well, I'm sorry," he says, sounding far from sorry - more like delighted for foiling the plan.
I return to Gary Wilson, the idiot-hack character in the film, for inspiration. Wilson uses an old trick to get Coogan to talk, threatening to dish the dirt about Coogan and some girl. He wants to do a piece about Coogan the actor and family man - entitled The Life and Opinions of Steve Coogan, after the full title of Tristram Shandy. I tell him the same - that everyone in my office wants the dirt, but I want to talk about Steve Coogan, the family man.
He has one daughter, aged nine, with someone he wasn't with for very long and isn't with any longer. I ask how having a child changed him. "It didn't really change me that much. I don't want to be someone who's trying to spin this public image of me. I have had some negative tabloid press, I'm sure you're aware, but I don't like to portray myself as somehow a nice, well-rounded person. I regard myself as a quite hands-on, attentive father, but even that sounds like the f---ing Waltons."
What about that tabloid press then? Coogan's wild private life is touched on in the film: in one scene his agent asks him if he remembers anyone called Heather. (Heather is a lap dancer and, according to what she says they got up to in his hotel bedroom, he ought to remember her). In real life, of course, Courtney Love dropped a bombshell late last year when she announced not only that she had had drug-fuelled romps with Coogan, but also that she was going to have his love child. Steve was "a f---ing sex addict", she said. "And has a major substance problem."
So, I ask, does he remember anyone called Courtney? "Let me just say something before that," he says. "The broadsheets tend to have their cake and eat it. They wait for the tabloids to dish the dirt and then they talk about the tabloids dishing the dirt while enjoying it themselves. So put that in."
Right - I have done. Now, does he remember anyone called Courtney? "Yes, I do remember someone called Courtney but I'm not prepared to talk about it because I don't talk about those kind of things." He will say that what really annoyed him about the whole Love affair were the people who rang him afterwards to ask him if he was all right. And then that "the stuff that was reported was 80 per cent inaccurate and 20 per cent pretty on the nose".
Was she having his child? "No, that was inaccurate from the start. Don't ask me to tell you how I know."
How does he know? "I don't know. I mean, I'm not telling you."
Did he have sex with her? "Erm ... I'm not even prepared to answer that."
Not prepared to answer it in a yes kind of way, or a no kind of way? "I know her better than most people. That's it, end of sentence."
She didn't seem to have problems talking about it, I say. "She's a very vulnerable lady. I'm made of stronger stuff."
Are they still friends? "Erm, no comment. No - I mean yes. I'm still friends with her, yes, if that's the question. I don't have a relationship with her."
And his reputation for bad behaviour isn't entirely unfounded? "Erm, partly true. There's more to me than what's in the tabloids - that's disproportionately representative of what I am. But is it completely without foundation? No. OK?"
If this exchange comes across as difficult, then that's wrong, because it wasn't. I don't think Coogan really minds people seeing his dirty laundry at all. He is far more chatty, friendly and easygoing than I had expected, and less prickly. Dead funny, too. In the course of a little over an hour, he rambles on, in an almost Shandean manner, on a whole range of subjects.
Coogan goes to the bar. In the film he is forever ordering vodka tonics. Is that what he's going to have now, I wonder? "I might, actually. What's the time?" It's 3.30pm. He buys vodka tonics for the two of us and the photographer. Why vodka tonics?
"It's what I drink. I also drink warm bitter. But you don't associate warm bitter with narcissism, whereas vodka tonic you might. It has more potential." He'd like a cigarette, but doesn't want to be photographed with it because his daughter may see it. She doesn't know? "I said I'd give up. I will, but I haven't. It's OK, she won't read it. Lots of people won't."
Some of the films Coogan has been in haven't exactly been critical smashes - particularly the kids' movie Around the World in 80 Days. Not funny any more, people have said. "Not the coolest film in the world," he admits. "But I spent three months in Thailand, and three months in Berlin. Cool places to be. And I got to watch Jackie Chan - I've learned a few moves from him."
Is Hollywood what he does now? "Basically, there's an opportunity there, and I'll pursue it until I make so many mistakes that I have to come home again."
He's also writing a new TV character for himself, a man who used to be a roadie and now works in pest control.
As millstones go, his faux-chat show host Alan Partridge is not a bad one to have around his neck. "If you do something very successful, you will then be defined by it, and you'll be competing against yourself," says Coogan. "It's like a band who want to play their new album and people only want to hear their hit singles."
In the US, Partridge didn't really take off the way The Office did, and Coogan is still seen as new and fresh. This is something he's trying to take advantage of - a "honeymoon period", he calls it.
Is he jealous of Ricky Gervais' success? "Yes and no. Yes, because obviously I'd like an Emmy, a Golden Globe, one of those. He's got them; I haven't. But the fact that my character isn't defined there as it is here can be an advantage."
The Steve Coogan in A Cock and Bull Story is much more likeable than most of the characters he has played before. But he's still flawed: arrogant, insecure, with zero self-awareness. Coogan says that in real life he is probably slightly more pleasant, self-deprecating and intelligent. He says he doesn't mind his weaknesses being highlighted - neuroses make better comedy. His one great fear, he says, is being dull.
The drinks are finished, and Coogan has to go home. Before we leave, there are two more tiny things from the film to recreate. In the film, Coogan is always being hugged by people. And every time it happens, he looks as if he wants to die. I want to see the hug thing, so he does it, with me. And I want to see the awkward photo-with-arm-round-fan, which also happens in the film. So I'm the fan - and he's Steve Coogan, being Steve Coogan, being Steve Coogan.
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