‘I wasn’t funny until I was fat’

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 12:46PM UAE / November 14. 2009 8:46AM GMT

JEFF VESPA / CONTOUR / GALLO IMAGES

As co-creator of TV’s workplace satire The Office, Ricky Gervais won acclaim on both sides of the pond. But the British writer, actor and comedian prefers life out of the spotlight and talks to John Hiscock about Hollywood stardom and his new film, The Invention Of Lying

Ricky Gervais is brooding about his recent cricketing encounter with the England fast bowler Stuart Broad, when he took a bat in his hand and donned pads and gloves to face him on the British television talk show Friday Night With Jonathan Ross.

“I was rubbish, wasn’t I?” he says, seeming anxious to explain his poor performance. “But I was genuinely scared. He can bowl at 95 miles an hour and although he only bowled to me at 70, and he may be accurate, it’s a hard ball and everyone makes mistakes. I could see myself getting hurt and I’m still paranoid from when I played at school and there were psychos just trying to take your head off.”

The 48-year-old actor, writer and comedian may not have enjoyed his brief cricket innings but it served its intended purpose of bringing attention to him and his new film, the romantic comedy The Invention Of Lying, opening in cinemas here next week, which he co-wrote, co-produced, co-directed and stars in. The film was backed by Warner Bros and it is important to Gervais that it’s a success in the eyes of Hollywood. There are hints of an underlying tension and nervousness behind his jovial facade as well as an uncelebrity-like aversion to being recognised in the street by star-spotting fans.

In the 1980s, Gervais, left, formed one half of the short-lived pop duo Seona Dancing. DFERNS / GALLO IMAGES

“The worst thing about this job for me is the fame – the glib and bland recognition,” he says, as he sits down to talk in a Toronto hotel suite during this year’s film festival, at which The Invention Of Lying had its premiere. As one of the star guests at the festival, Gervais has been caught up in the relentless celebrity whirlpool of television lights, screaming crowds and cameras and he is clearly finding the experience somewhat bewildering.

“I was always cynical about people who just wanted to be famous for the sake of it,” he says. “I’ve never understood why people want people to know who they are. That’s the thing I wish I could turn off.”

He does, however, talk earnestly and enthusiastically about The Invention Of Lying, although sometimes his brand of very English humour can startle his listeners.

At a press conference with Canadian journalists he was asked how he, as co-director, had managed to persuade a child actor to look so upset and traumatised in a scene. He answered with a straight face, “I told him his mummy had just died.”

Then, after a moment’s stunned silence from the shocked Canadians, he cackled with laughter. “I’m only joking.”

Like Gervais himself, The Invention Of Lying is a somewhat odd mixture of comedy and serio-sentimentality. It lacks the biting edge and embarrassing, wince-making laughs of The Office and Extras, the award-winning TV comedies he wrote with his longtime collaborative partner Stephen Merchant, and takes a tamer, middle-of-the-road path designed, presumably, to appeal to American audiences.

Set in a world where lying does not exist and everyone speaks the truth with no thought of the consequences, the story centres on a down-on-his-luck writer (Gervais) who suddenly develops the ability to lie. He lies his way to fame and fortune, invents religion and becomes a messiah, with the whole world hanging on his every word. But, of course, he finds out that he cannot lie his way into the heart of the woman he loves, played by Jennifer Garner.

The idea came from a young American writer, Matthew Robinson, who contacted Gervais. The actor liked the premise and worked with him on the script.

“I just took a chance,” Gervais says. “I don’t know why, because I usually say no to everything but it was a stroke of luck that we got together and we hit it off straight away.

“I think it’s a very sweet, romantic film. The comedy concept is just a device to deliver all those other things: the satire, the romance, the big questions of life and death. And I hope we do it in an entertaining way. It’s not meant to be propaganda and it’s not me getting stuff off my chest; it’s me exploring stuff artistically and, at the end of the day, it’s an hour and a half of entertainment, hopefully.”

Despite mainly good reviews, the film has performed poorly in North America, leaving Gervais something of an unknown quantity there, despite his high reputation among his fellow performers.

For this film, he was able to entice the likes of Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, nominee Edward Norton and Tina Fey to make cameo appearances, in the same way he gathered his guest stars for Extras – he asked them. The same tactics worked previously with such stars as Kate Winslet, Clive Owen, Orlando Bloom and Ben Stiller, who happily agreed to lampoon themselves so unmercifully on Extras. “I just asked them and they said yes,” says Gervais. “The reason people do Extras and things like it is because they think it’s a day off and they’re not counting it as part of their career. It’s fun; and it all came from The Office and winning two Golden Globes. Everything started there.”

The Golden Globes, Hollywood’s freewheeling party/awards show that is televised around the world, does not usually feature a host, but now Gervais has been asked to do the honours at the next one, in January. As a presenter last year, he stole the show, coming on stage with a beer in his hand and telling Kate Winslet, who had just won a Globe for her performance in The Reader: “I told you, Winslet. Do a Holocaust movie and you’ll win an award.”

A conversation with Gervais is like a chat with a friend in a pub – a few jokes, a bit of introspective reflection on serious matters and the occasional, unexpected revelation about himself. He veers between the comical, the sentimental and the serious as the thought and mood strike him. The son of a builder’s labourer, Gervais was born in Reading, 60km west of London, and then moved to the capital to study biology and philosophy at University College London. While a student, he met his longtime partner, Jane Fallon, a television producer.

Although fame took a long time to find him, he has been in the entertainment business since his university days when he and a friend formed a pop duo, Seona Dancing. They released two singles on London Records, More To Lose and Bitter Heart, which reached 117 and 70 respectively in the UK charts.

A year later, More To Lose was re-released in the Philippines and became a hit.

“I was a failed pop star everywhere but the Philippines,” Gervais recalls. “My pop career lasted about six months but it was fun and I’ve still got pictures to prove that I was thin once. Now that I’m famous in a couple of places, people usually wheel out a video or picture of me 25 years ago and I go, ‘Oh no.’ They think I’m embarrassed about how I looked then but I’m not: I’m embarrassed about how I look now. I had a jaw line then… I had features.”

After his stab at pop stardom, he briefly managed the band Suede and a Queen tribute band, and then, in the mid-1990s, went into radio, working at the small London station Xfm as “head of speech”. His assistant was a young film and literature graduate, Stephen Merchant, and soon the pair were presenting their own show on the station – the start of their collaborative career.

When Merchant moved to the BBC he enlisted Gervais to act in a short film called Seedy Boss, a 30-minute film set in a dreary office that would parody the “docu-soap” genre of reality series. The result would later be used to pitch The Office, which was commissioned two years later by the corporation.

The first series drew relatively low ratings, but through word of mouth and critical acclaim, became a hit during its repeat run. A second series was commissioned and became the biggest British comedy of the decade and the highest-selling British comedy DVD ever.

“I’d never tried as hard with anything as I did with The Office and it was one of the things I’m proud of,” says Gervais. “I wasn’t trying to be famous or a comedian but this opportunity came along when I was 38 or 39. It came late, and I couldn’t have been prouder of it. I remember saying to my girlfriend, ‘Why didn’t I do this earlier?’ And she said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t have been any good at it.’

“I think that with age you come to terms with your own inadequacies, and I wasn’t funny until I was fat. I could have stayed thin, of course, but pizza is too good.”

He attributes his work ethic to his father, a French Canadian who emigrated to England while serving during the Second World War. “Half my genetic material is in Ontario,” he jokes. “If I’d been born in Canada I’d be taller and have better teeth and a bigger neck and be much stronger. But I went to England, ate bad food and forgot to grow.”

Then he becomes serious. “My father got up at 5.30 every morning and went to work in the snow and heat, carrying bricks around all day. It made me a workaholic. He died a couple of years ago but he saw the beginning of it for me when The Office went out. My mum just missed it. She died a year or so before him.”

The Office is one of the few British comedy series to successfully undergo an Americanisation, with an all-American cast and storyline (there are also versions in France, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Chile and Russia). Gervais is executive producer of the US version, in which Steve Carell plays the David Brent-type character.

“I think the reason it worked when everything else fails is that on the face of it, The Office looks quintessentially English, but it’s not,” says Gervais. “All the themes are universal and human. It was about wasting your life, and everyone identifies with that.”

Gervais and Merchant’s second TV series, Extras, followed the career of aspiring actor Andy Millman and became a cult hit. Curtailing it at the peak of its popularity, Gervais turned to the big screen, taking small roles in the feature films Stardust, the Night At The Museum comedies and For Your Consideration, and a major role in Ghost Town.

Although he had a new writing partner for The Invention Of Lying, Gervais still works closely with Merchant, who has a cameo role in the film. They co-wrote Gervais’s next film, Cemetery Junction, which has just finished filming and is set in the 1970s in a small English town. Gervais describes it as being “sort of working class and blue collar”, but adds: “It’s not a gritty Brit drama; it’s celebratory and a bit about my memories of being a child and growing up in the 1970s.”

He believes it is important that he and Merchant occasionally go their own ways. “If someone asks me what my day job is I’d say it’s sitting in a room with Stephen Merchant, but even if you’ve got the chemistry we have it gets homogenised over 20 years and I think it’s good to go away and cross-pollinate.”

He may not have been famous for very long but Ricky Gervais has already made comedy history as the only British comedian to write and star in an episode of The Simpsons. His one-man shows are sellouts, he is a regular guest on US late-night television talk shows and a six-part television series based on his children’s book Flanimals was commissioned by British television.

While David Brent or Andy Millman would have revelled in the limelight, for the down-to-earth Gervais, the whole experience is slightly unnerving and embarrassing. Although he is perfectly comfortable on stage in front of an audience, he dislikes being recognised when he is out socially and no longer goes to the pubs he used to frequent in London because, he says, “It’s a nightmare.”

When he is not on stage or in front of the cameras, he shies away from being the centre of attention. “I’m always up for a laugh but I’m not one of those people who feel they have to entertain. Since I started becoming a professional comedian I sort of performed less and less if you know what I mean. I didn’t feel that I had anything to prove. And there’s nothing more nauseating than a performer showing off in a room. I just want to go, ‘Shut up. Just shut up. Just talk normally.’ I don’t want to be that guy.

“I’ve got about six friends dotted around the world and they’ve known me for 20 years and they’re normal, and so are my family. And that’s what keeps me normal. These people don’t think I’ve changed and don’t treat me any differently.”

Although he doesn’t go to pubs any more, he and Jane still go out to restaurants with friends, but he could never be described as a party animal. “My favourite evening is when I finish work, get home, work out or have a swim – yes, I do work out, believe it or not – and I’m in my pyjamas by six o’clock, watching bad television.”

The only thing that mars his life at the moment is the thought of money. Not the lack of it; just the opposite. He seems to feel genuinely uncomfortable at the money that is pouring into his bank account. “My first big pay cheque was probably for the DVD sales of The Office and that scared me a bit,” he says seriously. “It made me feel guilty and a little bit weird, because it ruined it a bit. I worried it was too much. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand that? I can’t explain…

“I’ve never done anything for money that I wouldn’t do for free, and that’s the truth. I mean, the money comes in, but it’s way down the list. And you know what? The more successful I get, the less money means, because I’ve got some. But I haven’t changed. I never want to do something that’s rubbish just because it’s popular. I’m not one of those actors who has to up my profile. I don’t even know what that means.”

Gervais is fond of referring to the characters he plays as “chubby little losers” but he distances himself from that description. “I’ve never felt like a loser because Bob Dylan said a man can consider himself a success if he wakes up in the morning, goes to bed at night and in between does exactly what he wants,” he says. “And that’s what I do, so I must be a winner.”

The Invention Of Lying opens in the UAE on November 19.