After 12 years in film and TV, Paul McGann tells Kate Bassett, a return to the stage has revived his passion for acting.
"MAYBE I have been a bit quiet," says actor Paul McGann, his Liverpudlian accent muffled by a forkful of salad. He's acting outraged at the suggestion that his forthcoming crop of lead roles on screen and -- after a 12-year gap -- on stage, might constitute a comeback. "A comeback? I haven't been anywhere. That is very provocative," he protests, blue eyes blazing but with a grin on his face.
"Whenever you're not on the telly people think you're dead. And I have been a bit sparing, because of the drop in standards," he says, clearly not crazy about cop and hospital dramas. "Of course everybody does money jobs, but I am choosy -- and probably a bit serious."
McGann is not wild about interviews either. "I never do chat shows. It dissipates everything when you've put your heart into some part and then you're seen on the Big Bed talking to some bunny rabbit. It's not me."
The 38-year-old -- perhaps best known for his role as an innocent, addled Cupid opposite a gothically wasted Richard E. Grant in the cult comedy film Withnail and I -- lives with his interior-designer wife, Annie, and their children, Joseph and Jake, in Bristol. "Because," he says, "it's a hundred miles from London."
He is matey, but you sense a wary, private person underneath -- perhaps not surprisingly, given the glare of tabloid attention he found himself caught up in three and a half years ago, after he was photographed giving the actress Catherine Zeta Jones (from Darling Buds of May) a kiss. The press descended on the tiny Donegal village where McGann was with his brothers filming The Hanging Gale and pursued him and his family for weeks. When I raise the subject, I get a steely reply: "Look up the files on me and make something up."
But later he breaks his silence, firmly denying that there was any affair with Zeta Jones. McGann speaks about the press harassment with a mixture of concern for his family and exasperation.
"It's pretty shocking, the things that happen," he says. "It's bad to remember. The kids were really spooked by it. I had to cover them with a blanket in the back of the car -- wee kids, Jake was four -- as I was being tailed. The elder boy hates having his photo taken now. It's sad." Finally, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, his wife wrote to the Press Complaints Commission about their ordeal.
Maybe time has healed the wounds a little. McGann shows some resilient humour, remembering one photographer who stopped the traffic to get a picture of him, only to be politely informed that he had got the wrong brother. "God, the stories. Actually it is good to talk about it," he says.
The real McGann enthusiasm emerges when we move on to his return to the theatre. The production is Snoo Wilson's new play Sabina (at the Bush Theatre in west London from Thursday), a challenging, partly surreal portrait of psychologist Carl Jung's relationship with a patient, whom he took on as an assistant and with whom he had an affair.
"It's great," McGann says, "a gale of intellectual ideas. Snoo doesn't write in a naturalistic way, so it's very different to doing film or television. You use different muscles."
His acting muscles first twitched in plays at his Catholic grammar school, which led him in the direction of Rada [sic] at 18. His brothers Stephen, Joe and Mark became actors too, having started playing music in Liverpool pubs and clubs. All four got their big break in the rock 'n' roll musical Yakkety Yak. "Stephen was still at school at the time," recalls McGann, "but he came down to London. We couldn't believe it when it transferred to the West End, but the music was sensational, everybody dancing in the aisles and brawls on the balcony."
McGann briefly became the new Doctor Who, in a doomed pilot for a projected series on American television, but he will definitely be returning to the small screen in the BBC's new dramatisation of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (scheduled to be broadcast in March). He plays Eugene Rayburn, the lawyer who becomes fixated on the boatman's daughter. "Whenever there's a fixation," as McGann breezily puts it, "the phone rings for me."
This was clearly the case in the first of his two upcoming feature films (both due for release next week). As an action hero cum comic romantic hero in Downtime, McGann plays a police psychologist who talks Susan Lynch's single mum out of suicide, becomes obsessed with her, then saves her life again in a lift shaft. "It's all very improbable," he says.
In the other release, Fairy Tale: A True Story, about two little girls who fooled the public with photographs of fairies in 1917, McGann pays a gentle, sceptical Yorkshire dad. These roles show him to be a flexible actor resisting typecasting, though he says, "To me they all look like the same part because it's always me. You read the character on the page and meet it half way with elements of yourself."
McGann can be very laid-back about his craft. "I'm a fairly low-maintenance actor, just turn up and do it. It's not a mystical art. You could do it easily, believe me, with very little passion. Sometimes all they want is for you to give good face."
However, as he says, "Passions tend to rejuvenate." His love of his work has clearly been revived by returning to the stage. "I'd forgotten what it's like, really rehearsing, working in a group, delving deep." Suddenly he's singing loudly -- "Everything is beautiful. Just like starting over" -- and grinning again.
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