Sex, drugs, cardigans, Courtney Love . . . and Coogan
What's he like, then? Steve Coogan, comic actor of some repute, film star of not quite so much repute, father, ex-husband, former "love rat", constant celebrity-gossip fodder and, most intriguingly, maybe even Courtney's lover, if the interviews given by Kurt Cobain's widow last summer are to be believed.What's he like? Perhaps he's something like the semi-fictionalised character called Steve Coogan who appears in A Cock and Bull Story ostensibly an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, but really a film about a group of actors, including Coogan and Rob Brydon, making a film. This "Steve Coogan" is also a comic actor of some repute (though of no little insecurity: the height of the heels on his shoes is a constant concern). He's a father too, and a media target: if he doesn't give an interview to a lurking journalist, there's the risk his relationship with a lap-dancer called Heather might be splashed all over the front page. .
Or maybe you'd recognise him in a character from Annie Griffin's Edinburgh comedy Festival: an English comedian who mixes womanising with a kind of equal-opportunity contemptuousness to all around him. The fact the character, played by Green Wing's Stephen Mangan, is a television star looking to make it in Hollywood has led some to suggest Coogan is the inspiration. Griffin, though, has never said. .
Or is Coogan more like an Alan Partridge or a Tony Wilson: two preening, full-of-themselves characters he has also played? "I think Partridge and Tony Wilson are aspects of who he really is which he then exaggerates," argues Michael Winterbottom, the director of A Cock and Bull Story and also of 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played Wilson, the founder of Factory Records. "I don't think they're a million miles away from the real person." .
All these are possible versions of Coogan, but is any of them the real one? And, if so, who's this 40-year-old guy sitting in this central London hotel suite, up from Brighton for the day? He looks like he could be Steve Coogan, though if you weren't introduced you might be unsure. Viewers are so used to seeing him in wigs and cardies that the real thing looks a little, well, un-Coogan. This real Coogan is obviously not wearing a cardie. He's gone for the moleskin (or is it velvet?) jacket and frayed jeans look. This afternoon he's drinking tea and talking about Alan Partridge, psychoanalysis, stand-up comedy and knock-down fist-fighting, but not sorry, gossip-lovers Courtney Love. .
I'm disappointed, because I thought I had crafted a wonderfully witty way to broach the subject. We are playing a game. I have written down ten random questions, and at intervals during our conversation he gets to pick one, by number. The first time we try it, he chooses the Courtney question (always put the query you most want answered at number seven). So, I say, who is the most famous person you've ever slept with? (Yes, I thought that was subtle too.) "I'm not going to answer that question," he says, in a surprisingly equitable voice given the sheer affrontery of the query. Umm, not at all? "No." .
For those of you who missed the details, last summer Love claimed she'd had a fling with Coogan in Los Angeles. Viagra, sex toys and drugs were all mentioned; the result, she says, is that she got pregnant. Of course, whether Love is a reliable witness is up for discussion, to say the least. In the little he has said about the story, Coogan has admitted knowing Love (and, tacitly, that they were an item), but has maintained he is not the father of any child. All he'll say to me today is that "some of the stuff that has been recently reported is just wildly inaccurate". .
Not that he's about to start setting the record straight. "Some people need to have approval from the media and [other] people, and to do that they open themselves up. They say, 'This is who I am; look, this is the bad part of me and this is the good part of me,' and then the media can have a balanced picture of you. But you have nothing left of yourself which is private. I'd rather have the media misinterpret me and have part of myself private and not play that game, not seek their approval. So even though it's frustrating thinking that's not what I'm like, I don't want to take the bait and start saying, 'Yeah, but look, I do this this is part of my life this is part of my life there's a huge part of my life that's well adjusted and wholesome.' I don't want to do that." .
Nature, and readers of Heat magazine, abhor a vacuum, so inevitably we assume that the Coogan we read about is the real one, blown up to fill the Coogan-sized space in the body celebritic. And that, he says, is the lesser of two evils. "I would rather they get it wrong than open the paper and go, 'Oh, they know me completely and they've got it right.' I'd rather they got it wrong and I don't like it but at least it's wrong." .
IT'S A FUNNY THING, sitting in a hotel room and trying to ask a relative stranger about their sex life. It's the sort of thing you'd imagine Steve Coogan could make even funnier if he hadn't already in A Cock and Bull Story. Funny is what he's good at. It's why we're here: because of a CV ranging from Paul and Pauline Calf through Alan Partridge to his latest creation, a pest-control guy and former roadie from Stevenage who will appear on BBC2 later this year. .
There are a few blips on the career radar, he concedes. "I suppose Dr Terrible's House of Horrible was too much concentration on production values, not enough concentration on the material," he says. "It should have been sharper. I took my eye off the ball, really. I think that's not the wisest move I've made." He also admits his cheesy singer Tony Ferrino didn't totally work, though he says he's immensely proud of the album he cut: "Simon Cowell was the A&R guy when I did that." But he knows that when he's on top of his game and he's definitely in the right ballpark with A Cock and Bull Story he is, in the words of Joe Pesci, a funny guy. .
"I think I work best when I portray people who are essentially unsympathetic and make them sympathetic or at least empathetic with an audience," he says. "Make the audience be compelled by the character, even if their initial judgement is negative. I don't think I'm actually that good at playing characters who are generally likeable." .
Alan Partridge sports broadcaster turned chat-show host turned Radio Norwich DJ is the sine qua non of his unsympathetic oeuvre. He's a more cartoony vision of embarrassment than, say, David Brent, but then Coogan and his co-writers have never weakened. There's been no Christmas-special happy ending for Partridge. "I've set a standard there that makes it difficult to compete against myself in some respects," Coogan says of his most famous alter ego. .
It's safe to say he doesn't suffer from insecurity about his talents too much. I ask who he thinks is funnier than him. "Who is naturally funnier than me?" Note the immediate qualification there. "I don't think I have funny bones. I think someone like " He pauses. "Peter Kay." Another, longer pause. "Rob [Brydon, his Cock and Bull co-star]." Pause. "I think Rob's probably naturally funnier than me." .
He takes a long time to ponder the question before continuing. A long time. "Rob makes me laugh a lot," he eventually says. "Rob's naturally funnier than me, but I don't think his programmes are as funny as mine. That's me having my cake and eating it, isn't it? Who's just funnier than me?" Another, perhaps telling, qualification of the original question there. "Okay, well, umm, you know, uh, probably Matt Lucas I suppose. Uh." He tails off into silence. Reader, I believe there is no-one Steve Coogan thinks is funnier than he is. .
Random question number five: has Steve Coogan ever undergone psychoanalysis? "Yes, for suffering from panic attacks," he says. This was 12 years ago, he explains, when he was beginning to reap some success. "I thought I was going mad. I found them quite overwhelming. I had them for a year and then they stopped. They stopped after I got psychotherapy. Psychotherapy taught me how to deal with it. I didn't want to take medication so I saw the psychotherapist and he told me how to do deep relaxation. Panic attacks are totally irrational. You hyperventilate and you think you're going to die, and then that has a domino effect. You can start getting depressed about the panic attacks. So I had this psychotherapy and he just taught me a method for dealing with it." .
Did Coogan find out what was behind the attacks? "No. I was working very hard at the Edinburgh Festival doing two shows, really mad." Drugs, it has been intimated in the past, were also involved but really it didn't go any deeper than working too hard, and possibly playing too hard. The psychotherapist, Coogan says, "did a reconnaissance of the deep recesses of my mind and said there's not much there, frankly. There was no sexy explanation. I had an unremarkable but happy childhood, really, so there was no kind of scarring there." .
Coogan, the son of a computer engineer, was the fourth of six children, and grew up in a Manchester suburb in the 1970s. "Lower middle class, upper working class" is he how describes his background. That and Irish Catholic. "When there were a lot of people around the table, there was a lot of banter, mutual mickey-taking, which is an oblique form of affection. You had to be on your toes." His fondest memories, he recalls, are of the family gathering round to watch Fawlty Towers or The Two Ronnies; Morecambe and Wise or Porridge. "Good comedy shows back then were little events, so the appreciation of good comedy was part of being brought up." .
Coogan's father had Tony Hancock records on vinyl. His older brothers had Monty Python albums. Coogan loved them all. "I used to record TV shows on cassette point a microphone at the TV set and record. I remember recording Ripping Yarns, that Michael Palin thing, and listening back to it and enjoying the dialogue." He liked music too he was in a school band for a while. But comedy was paramount. He remembers inviting friends back to his house to listen to his brother's Monty Python records. "I'd sit watching someone else enjoy it and watch them laugh at the moments I'd laughed at. I enjoyed seeing that effect." He was never the class clown, though: "I wasn't a big people-pleaser." .
During his teens this love of comedy began to translate into a desire to work in comedy. At 18 he had something of an epiphany; "a sort of moment of clarity" in which he realised that comedy heroes couldn't go on for ever, and that a new generation of comedians would always emerge. "The same people don't rule the roost for ever. So why can't I be one of the new generation?" .
He applied to drama school in London and didn't get in, but did manage to wangle a place at the Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre, where he hung out with Caroline Aherne, who would go on to create Mrs Merton, and the future Cold Feet star John Thomson, who would play Paul Calf's mate Fat Bob. Coogan had always been good at voices (his first TV work would be as an impersonator for Spitting Image) and he remembers going to see a comedy revue by the law society at Manchester University in the mid-eighties, in which an actor friend of his was involved. The revue wasn't going too well, so his mate got Coogan up on stage and said he was going to do some impressions. "And I got up and started doing impressions with this friend of mine. And the audience laughed, not because what I was doing was especially good, but because the supposed comedy before had been so bad that by comparison I was a breath of fresh air. And they laughed a lot and I remember thinking, 'This is an incredible feeling.'" If he could make people laugh just standing there making stuff up, how much funnier would he be if he prepared material beforehand? .
Coogan had a curious apprenticeship. There was, he says, no alternative comedy circuit outside London, so he ended up supporting indie bands at "dirty student venues". "This is before ecstasy culture and happy, smiley Happy Mondays stuff," he points out. "This was during the days when there were lots of Smiths fans around. It was fashionable to suck your cheeks in and look morose. Smiling wasn't fashionable then." .
Still, he got a routine together that, at the age of 22, took him as far as the London Palladium alongside Jimmy Tarbuck. But that was never the direction he wanted to go in. His student-hating creation Paul Calf saved him from turning into another Joe Pasquale, though it was Calf's sister Pauline Coogan in a push-up bra and short skirt who really suggested the comedian's range and eye for detail. (I'm not the only male who found Pauline a bit fanciable, am I?) Then, after Spitting Image, he got involved with the seminal BBC television news spoof The Day Today, and Alan Partridge was born. .
He is still not bored of the character, even after one series of Knowing Me, Knowing You (a Day Today spin-off) and two of the more sitcom-esque I'm Alan Partridge (truly his finest half-hours never has the comedy of awkwardness been so painfully, eye-gougingly realised). There's a rumour of a film. "It's just a rumour, but it's a real rumour," he says. "I'd like to do something with the character." Not another series, he says, but maybe a one-off. He's always said there is something of himself in Partridge. That could be taken as a brave admission, but maybe it's wise not to read too much into it. As Michael Winterbottom says: "I really like Steve. I don't think I'd like Alan Partridge." Either way, with Partridge Coogan became a success: big enough to attract the interest of Hollywood he took the lead in Around the World in 80 Days and is to appear in Sofia Coppola's upcoming Marie-Antoinette and big enough to attract the attention of the media too. .
SOMEWHERE in the middle of all this, the Steve Coogan of the popular imagination emerged: the guy with a penchant for fast cars and fast women. His relationship with his solicitor girlfriend Anna Cole the mother of his daughter Clare ended in 1996 after it emerged he'd had a fling with the model Nancy Sorrell (these days the wife of Vic Reeves). An almost-too-good-to-be-true detail of the assignation was the claim that Coogan covered the bed with thousands of pounds' worth of tenners. In 2004 his two-year marriage to Caroline Hickman foundered when he was alleged to have spent a night with a couple of lap-dancers and a bit of charlie. The couple were granted a "quickie" divorce last summer. .
It's this sort of thing with which A Cock and Bull Story, his new film, has some fun. "I don't think it's the tabloid version of him," observes Winterbottom. "I think it's the public version. We're playing on the public perception of who he is." All of which suggests the actor could be taking something of a risk. "Well," says Coogan when the point is raised, "I trust Michael totally and I wouldn't have done the film with anyone else. I knew he wouldn't be exploitative about it, and that he would use it in a way that had some depth. It was a bit risky. It made me nervous, but that was also what attracted me." .
He's also quick to point out that the "Steve Coogan" character in the film isn't actually him. "It wasn't like I was literally being myself. I don't have a baby son I've got a nine-year-old daughter and Kelly Macdonald is not my girlfriend, unfortunately. She's married. So that's a deliberate bit of fictionalising." .
Fictionalising cuts both ways, of course, and you could say that, if anything, the film lets him off lightly. We see him resist temptation, for instance: he turns down the chance to spend a night with one of the prettiest members of the crew to go back to his girlfriend. "The thing is, there is an aspect of it working as a film," he says. "If I'm just too unsympathetic, the film won't actually work, so what's good for me is good for the film." Anyway, he adds: "I don't go around claiming I'm a paragon of virtue or I'm a politician preaching family values." .
His private life is his private life. "I'm quite a private person. When someone has status or celebrity, it's almost become a tired response for them to say, 'It's none of your business,' so some don't bother. But I still think it stands repeating. It's none of anyone's fing business what I do in my private life." .
He has not, he says, "danced with the devil", the devil in this case being the media. "I have not appeared in Hello! magazine for a free kitchen. I produce comedy. I write comedy. I don't sell myself as a personality. I don't do panel shows. I don't do any of that." .
Which is why he's happy letting Courtney Love's wild-eyed stories circulate without reply or at least almost without reply. How many times did he hear the name Courtney Love last year? "Not that many times, not that many times." I'm not sure he's telling the truth. Is he on the road to self-destruction a charge the media has levelled at him more than once, and one Ms Love has endorsed? "It's just a clichι," he replies. "I've had a few late nights, and a long time ago I was pretty wild, but I'm not like that any more." .
It's almost time to leave him to his tea and the next journalist who will want to talk about Courtney Love and his private life, and who will find instead a quiet, polite, earnest comic actor who looks like Steve Coogan in a certain light and who would rather hide behind the media version of his life than reveal anything too personal. Does anyone know who he is? Maybe. .
A final random question. Number nine. When was he last in a fist-fight? "About five years ago in Manchester, in a kebab shop with my brother. I later found out my brother had provoked the whole thing, but I jumped on this guy who, as far as I was concerned, was attacking my brother, and I was banging his head on the floor and it was a real proper fight. And someone pulled us apart and the guy stood up and said, 'Are you Steve Coogan?' And I said yeah, and this guy I'd jumped on said, 'I've got all your stuff on DVD.' And he suddenly started smiling at me like he was really pleased to meet me. I ended up signing an autograph for him." .
What's he like, then? Good to his fans. When he's not beating them up, anyway. .
A Cock and Bull Story is released on January 20. .