Bald at 6, a father in prison... Matt Lucas’s childhood could read as a misery memoir. Yet it wasn’t quite like that. Here he talks frankly about family, fame, body image and relationships, and how, with comedy as his weapon, he’s emerged a thoroughly grounded man who couldn’t be more unlike the gallery of grotesques he’s so famous for creating
The comedian Bob Mortimer once described Matt Lucas as “the angriest man I have ever met”. Lucas was 18 when Mortimer said it and he’s 35 now; the quote has been hanging around his neck for a long time, so maybe it’s time to take it off. “Teenagers can take themselves very seriously; you spend too much time on your own, you start to mythologise yourself. You wear your perceived nonconformity on your sleeve.”
Lucas didn’t seem angry when I met him. Not at all. He gets upset and depressed from time to time, he says, like many people. But in our interview he was amusing, polite, most of all thoughtful. He seemed like a man who has put in a lot of work on himself, and the work has paid off. The tears of a clown may well have flowed 15 or 10 years ago; I’m not sure they do any longer.
We meet in a photography studio in North London. He is here to publicise his new BBC series, Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a “Blackadder meets Red Dwarf kind of thing” in which he plays an “Alan Rickman-esque Sheriff of Nottingham psychotic baddie. I got the script and it really made me laugh. I auditioned for it and got the role. It was a giggle.”
He’s been followed to the studio by paparazzi, “but it would be churlish to aspire to be on television for many years and then to be on television and moan”. The media have, in any case, “cottoned on to the fact that a picture of me as Vicky Pollard is a lot more interesting than a picture of me walking my dog [Milo, two, chocolate Labrador]. Also, for the majority of the time that I’ve been famous, I’ve been in a relationship, and to be in a monogamous gay relationship is not as interesting as being, say, straight and single.”
Like his Little Britain partner, David Walliams, for instance? “Like David or Russell Brand or all those people. And they would be considered sexier and more attractive than me. I don’t crave more attention than I get. I will always, like the vast majority of people, look at a photo of myself and wince or cringe. I’ll always have that, but I think it’s quite natural.”
When we met some months ago, Lucas was single again after his long relationship with Kevin McGee ended in summer 2008. “I was with Kevin for almost six years, from August 2002.” The two men had had a civil partnership in 2006, finally dissolved in January this year. Lucas and McGee have both a gentlemen’s and a legal agreement not to discuss their relationship. “We turned down offers to photograph our ceremony. Kevin didn’t ask to be in the public eye, I still feel very protective towards him,” says Lucas. “I’m not in another relationship,” he said at our interview, “and it’s not something that I am looking for.”
Months later, however, during a telephone update, that situation has changed. “There is someone I like at the moment,” he says, “who likes me. It’s very early days and it came as a surprise to me. That’s all I’m going to say; I don’t want to jinx anything.”
The other big change between the initial interview and the phone follow-up is that Lucas has been on a serious, and so far successful, diet. “I was 106 kilos [getting on for 17 stone] when we met. I’m 90 kilos now.” This equates, he says, to ten inches around his stomach. He wants to get to 70-75 kilos (about 11 and a half stone) which, for a man of 5ft 6½in (“I really treasure that half”), “may still be a bit tubby, but I don’t mind”.
Is he feeling more attractive? “A little, maybe. But then, almost everybody I’ve ever dated, I’ve felt they were really handsome and they’ve felt the opposite. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
For the photo shoot, Lucas is wearing a green corduroy suit and a bright red shirt. You’d think maybe he was a classic look-at-me extrovert, but he isn’t at all. Instead, this chap who dressed up in a Babygro when he was first on TV at the tender age of 18 in Shooting Stars, or strutted around in spandex as Daffyd the only gay in the village, is self-effacing to the point of shyness.
We sit in the café at the photography studio. He has a hot chocolate and a cookie (this is pre-diet). He speaks quietly, doesn’t draw attention to himself. His humour is the opposite of slapstick: so deadpan it takes a moment for the gag to register. When I ask him if he weighs himself, for instance, he says, “Yeah, I do, and then I get peckish and eat the scales.”
I say I’m someone whose weight also fluctuates dramatically. “Whereas I’m lucky I can eat and eat and eat and not put on an ounce.”
The early years
Lucas hasn’t given that many interviews, and those he has done tend to major on the stereotype of the sad funnyman. Admittedly, the stereotype has some mileage. But if there is one theme to our interview it is Lucas’s insistence that this unhappiness is not and never was the whole story.
“There were loads of happy memories from my childhood. There’s a temptation to characterise comedians as having a monopoly on suffering, and you can look at the facts and say, ‘Well, his hair fell out when he was 6, his parents divorced, his dad went to prison, questions over sexuality, struggles with weight,’ and assume every waking hour was a tyranny, but I don’t regard it as such at all. I had many happy moments watching Arsenal play, going to the theatre, wonderful friends, many of whom I still see, and a happy family. Many people have difficult lives and I don’t regard myself as one of them.”
The hair loss may have been the result of his being knocked down by a car when he was 4 and on holiday in Portugal. “Some medics thought it might be delayed shock.” Growing up, he says, he was “the bald kid. The Bald Man of Stanmore. I couldn’t get away with anything. I did feel very self-conscious about my appearance. Going through puberty was hard.”
The sudden and total hair loss is more likely to have been hereditary, as his father had also lost his hair, when he was about 13. “My dad wore a wig when we were growing up, a brown, Frankie Howerd style.” One of the traumatic things about visiting his father in prison in Aylesbury was he was not allowed to wear his wig. “I had never seen him before without it.” Going to visit his dad in prison was, he says, “really, really horrible. But I loved seeing him.”
Lucas’s parents separated when he was 10. He stayed with his mother and saw his dad every weekend. Then, when he was 12, his father, an aluminium importer, “made some bad decisions” to try to protect his failing business. “‘Cooking the books,’ I suppose they would call it. His intentions were good but his actions were a mistake.”
Lucas’s father was convicted of fraud and served six months of a nine-month sentence. He later remarried, as did Lucas’s mother. A decade later, when Lucas was in his early twenties and well-known for Shooting Stars, his father died. “There was a period, about the age of 25, when I became very depressed. I was dealing with bereavement, I was dealing with fame and I was dealing with trying to express myself and be gay and have relationships. I was out to my friends, but not my family. I saw a therapist regularly for three years; it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.”
His mother and stepmother are now friends. “It’s all very mature and amicable. They both came to my birthday recently. Good things sometimes come out of bad things.”
Lucas grew up “at the top of the Jubilee line”, on the border between Stanmore and Edgware, as part of northwest London’s Jewish community. His mother’s family had got out of Berlin in the late Thirties; his father’s, originally called Solotsky, had emigrated from eastern Europe to the East End three decades earlier.
Lucas went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a fee-paying school with a large (20 or 30 per cent, he thinks) Jewish minority. Sacha Baron Cohen and David Baddiel also went there. “I was number two goalie in the hockey squad until Jayesh Makan displaced me, and I shall never forgive him. I won’t be happy till I get my place back. These Baftas are meaningless.”
Lucas’s Jewishness is important to him. For one thing, he says, the crutch for many Jews is food, whereas for Gentiles, particularly in showbusiness, the crutch is more likely to be drink or drugs. “I’m lucky because many people in my industry struggle with alcohol or drugs. I struggle with my aunt’s delicious chocolate cake.”
He gave up smoking on New Year’s Eve, 2000, and “hasn’t had a drag since”. He is virtually teetotal bar the occasional sip “to be polite with friends. If I never drank alcohol again I wouldn’t be in the least bothered.” He remembers being in a pub with his dad only once. “It just wasn’t part of my culture.” He’s never had anything to do with drugs, he says. “I can’t be doing with all that. You could be spending your money on crisps, couldn’t you?”
Having made the point about his ethnic attachment to comfort food, Lucas is keen not to use it as an excuse. Having once lost a lot of weight as a teenager, he put it all back on. “Because I ate like a greedy fat bastard. It’s a way to seek solace, isn’t it? Eating is very pleasurable. Everyone who is fat is overweight for similar reasons. I mean, if I’m big-boned it’s only because I ate some big bones. I’m a greedy bastard. I like crisps and chips and chocolate. They’re nice.”
In terms of religion, he describes himself now as “a Jewish agnostic. Or probably a Jewish atheist actually. I would say I don’t believe in God but I am extremely proud of my Jewish heritage and it’s a big part of my life.” His elder brother is “very observant” and won’t watch Arsenal on a Saturday. Lucas’s mother and stepmother and cousin are involved in their local synagogue. He attends regularly but infrequently. As a child, it was synagogue on Saturdays, Hebrew classes Sunday morning, Jewish youth movement Sunday night, bar mitzvah lessons Tuesday night, Jewish cub scouts Thursday. Jewish cub scouts? “Yes, it was an exclusively Jewish pack.”
How has his ethnicity played out in his humour? “I don’t know that it has significantly. It’s not something I’m running away from, but I think you’d identify me as a gay comedian quicker than you would identify me as Jewish by looking at my work. I’ve had a few ideas about doing Jewish characters. We wrote one once but it was only half working.”
Lucas and David Walliams write together, alternating between each other’s homes. They start at 10am, break for an M&S ready meal and the news at lunch, crack on again until 4.30, 5pm. They are writing more material for Little Britain USA. Nor have they ruled out a fourth series of Little Britain here. Certainly, there will be further Christmas specials. After work they go their separate ways, often to their respective fitness regimes, Walliams to the pool, Lucas to his personal trainer for “stretching, toning and light cardio”. Lucas’s father died of a heart attack at 52, and his father died of a heart attack at 56. “I need to get out of the danger zone,” he says.
Unlike some comedy partnerships, Walliams and Lucas are also close friends, often meeting up again in the evening to socialise. “We had dinner together last night, we’re having dinner together again tonight. We’re going out with David’s mother, Dale Winton, Barbara Windsor and her husband Scott.” What’s it like going out with Barbara Windsor? “Like going out with the Queen. In fact, who needs to meet the Queen? Has the Queen’s bra ever pinged off into Kenneth Williams’s face? No. People are utterly in awe of her and so am I. She’s The Link. I love her.”
Lucas is steeped in both TV and comedy history. “I love telly. I’m very mistrustful of anybody who didn’t grow up in front of the telly. I mean, fair enough if you didn’t have a telly, but if you had a telly and a video and you didn’t watch it, I want to know why. And I didn’t stop watching when kids’ telly finished; I’d watch the test card until Laurel and Hardy came on at 6 o’clock.” Had Channel 4 started? “Yes, I remember the first day because I had a tutor after school and I rushed home to see the start. November 1982.”
Why the tutor? “I was at primary school and there was an entrance exam for Haberdashers’, so I had this tutor, Mrs Madeley, to help me cover some things that weren’t on the curriculum at our primary school. Money well spent, I guess.” He makes this last remark with a trace of bitterness. He was put on a report card after a year at secondary school, “because I was academically failing. I lacked confidence, I wasn’t applying myself and I probably wasn’t capable academically.” Surely not? “It’s possible. I still can’t do long division.” He says later it was the sort of school “where your best was still not quite good enough”.
Comedy heroes
Back in front of the telly though, Lucas was educating himself in different subjects in a different way. Not just contemporary comedy, but the classics, going back through Leonard Rossiter and Galton and Simpson and Tony Hancock all the way to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and his hero, Charlie Chaplin. “When I was 16 I had 2 heroes: Chaplin and Freddie Mercury.” His favourite films, he says, are Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Tootsie and Singin’ in the Rain.
“I just love comedy. I do it for a living but I’m also a fan. I sit at home and watch Gavin and Stacey and I love The Office, I think Ricky [Gervais] and Stephen [Merchant] are brilliant, and I love Peter Kay and Catherine Tate and Have I Got News for You, and I used to watch The Two Ronnies. I’ll watch Harry Hill, Vic and Bob, The Fast Show, Caroline Aherne, The League of Gentlemen.”
As a teenager, Lucas was serving a twin comedy apprenticeship. Besides absorbing so many other performers’ work, he was also producing his own, albeit as an amateur, albeit perhaps for the wrong reasons. “My self-esteem was low and I thought if I could be the roly-poly funnyman, the entertainer, I’d be allowed into the group.” He regrets this now, saying he didn’t know any better, but also admits it worked, both socially and in terms of starting to learn the trade.
He is suspicious of attempts to link the grotesque characters he and Walliams have created to his own biography. When I say an amateur psychologist might look at Daffyd, say, and suggest there was a degree of self-loathing being expressed, he responds sharply. “An amateur psychologist would, yes.” But he can identify with “those experiences of being in the closet too long and then coming out and people saying, ‘Oh, we figured that out,’ or, ‘We don’t care.’ I had used my gayness as the thing that made me special, my special secret,and suddenly I had to redefine myself.”
More generally, he admits, he and Walliams have used comedy “as a kind of weapon. Being a comedian is a great way of controlling other people’s laughter against you. If you make jokes about yourself, you’ve beaten other people to it. So coming out dressed as Bubbles or Marjorie or Andy, characters who are aesthetically undesirable, if someone points out that you are physically undesirable, you can say, ‘Yeah, I know.’ Or no one is going to snigger behind your back and say, ‘Did you know he’s gay?’ because it’s like, ‘Yeah, I told you.’ There is a sense of empowerment.”
Empowerment, and equilibrium. He seems an essentially stable character. He doesn’t complain about fame as many celebrities do. Nor has the money gone to his head. He does not have expensive tastes. Just the one house. No car. (Can’t drive.) “I sit with my dog – it makes me happy; I watch a nice film – it makes me happy. I bought a piano and taught myself to play. I keep the cupboards stocked. I’ve always got crisps in the house. I make sure there are always Cornettos in the freezer.”
So it’s all in the bank then? “I think it’s vulgar to talk about money. I bought a projector, a TV projector, that is something I always wanted as a kid. I can see the stress lines on Arsène Wenger’s face in high definition.” Football, he says, is his soap. He has a season ticket at Arsenal, having first been taken by his dad when he was 6 or 7. One of his extravagances is, “I have better seats than I used to. Better position and more comfortable. When I don’t earn money again they’ll be back where they were. Which is fine, because I’ll be watching Arsenal and I’ll be happy regardless.” It is unlikely, I think, that he will have to downgrade his seats at the Emirates any time soon.
Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire starts on BBC Two on June 11 at 9pm
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