The eyes are hollower than on screen, the tombstone teeth more yellow. The limbs move arthritically, while the hair sticks to his head like a piece of roadkill. Mackenzie Crook, however, could not be more delighted with his appearance — or, rather, that of the 6in-high action figure based on the character he plays in The Pirates of the Caribbean films. For a man who collected Star Wars figurines as a child, being immortalised in plastic is particularly sweet.
“I almost brought it with me today,” he says. “I was hoping there’d be a big unveiling, but it just snuck into the shops. One of my sister’s colleagues said that she’d seen ‘me’ in Forbidden Planet, so I went in and bought a couple, one for me and one for my mum for Mother’s Day. The guy behind the counter said, ‘Why are you buying two?’ I wanted to say, ‘Because it’s me, isn’t it? Look at it, it’s me!’ But I hesitated, and he asked, ‘Is it a present?’ I said yeah and just left.”
Not being recognised has become an increasingly rare occurrence for Crook. Playing Gareth, The Office’s West Country whipping boy, has made the 34-year-old one of British comedy’s best-known faces.
And what a face: thousands of words have been expended on describing the Crook look. Depending on who you believe, he looks like a gargoyle, a scarecrow, a drug addict or Chaucer’s Reeve. Forbidden Planet notwithstanding, his is not a mug that melts easily into a crowd — or escapes the attention of casting directors. Crook may not be exactly leading-man material but, since The Office, his film career has been ticking along nicely. Not only has he shared a screen with Al Pacino (The Merchant of Venice), Heath Ledger (The Brothers Grimm), Christina Ricci (The Gathering), Christian Slater (Churchill: The Hollywood Years) and Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland and Pirates), he has managed to survive a lead role in the disastrous Britcom Sex Lives of the Potato Men.
He’s been a stage presence, too. As the stuttering virgin Billy Bibbitt in the West End adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Crook more than held his own against Slater and Frances Barber. And, as if to show his versatility, earlier this year he played a Texan wrongly convicted of murder in the death-row drama The Exonerated. Of this last part, he says: “I’ve spent a lot of time playing grotesques. Even Gareth in The Office, who’s supposed to be quite realistic, is still an exaggerated character. The opportunity to play someone who is just a regular person was a challenge.”
Not that everyone has caught up with the post-Office Crook. Strangers still shout “Where’s your stapler?” at him in the street. Hence the disguise — a skater hat, screwed low onto his brow — he turns up in when we meet at a private members’ club on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Is the attention so bad? “People have only ever said they’re pleased to see me. But... I don’t know... Sometimes I crave going to a pub on a Saturday night, and that can’t really happen any more.”
The diffidence is genuine. If he was on the radio panel show Just a Minute, he would be penalised for hesitation. Pauses for thought punctuate his conversation. He often interrupts sentences with a whispered “I don’t know”, as if he’s weighing up some abstruse philosophical proposition rather than publicising the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.
In Dead Man’s Chest, Crook reprises his role as the pirate Ragetti, as thick as the plank he makes people walk, and cursed with a wooden eye “that does splinter something terrible”. His double act with the equally dim-witted Pintel (played by the American actor Lee Arenberg) was one of the unexpected joys of the first Pirates film, The Curse of the Black Pearl.
According to its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, that film has made $600m since its 2003 release, not including DVD sales or merchandising. Unsurprisingly, then, Dead Man’s Chest declines to tamper too much with a winning formula. Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa is resurrected from the deep, Orlando Bloom is a little less soppy and there’s a new villain in the shape of Bill Nighy’s half man, half sea monster, Davey Jones. “Lee and I are still the comic relief,” Crook says, “although I think our parts have probably been bumped up a bit. There are a few more eyeball gags.”
The second and third instalments in the Pirates trilogy were filmed back-to-back in LA, St Vincent, Dominica and the Bahamas (nice work if you can get it). The shoot took more than a year, and it has left its physical mark on Crook, in the shape of a very un-Gareth-like suntan and a wispy moustache. “I’ve got a few more piratical duties to perform,” he explains. “But I’m thinking of keeping the moustache. We’ve all been living this strange tropical lifestyle, and I’d feel naked now without it. I’ve got a lot of pirate bling,” he adds, showing off his Pirates of the Caribbean cast knuckle-duster. “Everyone, including Johnny, has one.”
It was Johnny — as in Depp — who recommended him as Ragetti, after Crook had played a minor part in the JM Barrie biopic, Finding Neverland. Does he socialise with Depp? “He’s so in demand, he tends to keep himself to himself on set, and rightly so,” Crook says. But they are well enough acquainted that when Crook’s son, Jude, was born, Depp told him he should cut the baby’s umbilical cord. (“It wasn’t very romantic. It was actually very hard work.”) There is something intrinsically comic about Crook’s adventures among the Hollywood A list. On the set of The Merchant of Venice, he spent a lot of time talking about children to Al Pacino, who has young twins. On The Brothers Grimm, he got to know Matt Damon. The two hang out when they’re in the same town.
Even Crook sometimes wonders how he got to where he is: “In the Bahamas, I ate out every night with Geoffrey Rush and Bill Nighy. I can’t really hold my own in conversation with those guys — I don’t have the weight of anecdotes behind me — but I listen and take it all in. Quite often, I found myself a bit removed from myself, thinking, ‘Look at you, sitting with those actors.’” Yet any self-doubt he feels is kept firmly in check. The most surprising thing about Crook is the quiet self-assurance concealed beneath his dreamy facade. One suspects it was forged in adversity.
Paul Crook (he changed his name to avoid a clash with another Equity member) was born in Maidstone, Kent, and went to grammar school in Dartford. His father worked for British Airways; his mother was a hospital administrator. In many ways, it sounds idyllic. “It was only a bike ride down to the river and the countryside,” he recalls. “One of my earliest memories is of having lots of things in cages and tanks, like Gerald Durrell.” In the summers, he had the run of his uncle’s tobacco farm in Zimbabwe.
By the time he was 10, however, he was so small for his age that he had to inject himself every day for a year with growth hormones. In his teens, while his school friends were going to the pub and meeting girls, he was left behind in case he cramped their style.
Around this time, he joined a local youth theatre. Was it a reaction to what was happening at school? “That’s not to say I was bullied. It wasn’t like I was escaping and being someone else. I don’t know... It’s not like I was insignificant and craved attention. I got it because I was small anyway.”
His creativity expressed itself in other ways than theatre. “I was bewitched by the idea of the struggling artist,” he says. So obsessed was he with the pre-Raphaelites, he painted a copy of John William Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose on his biker jacket. He also excelled at practical jokes: “The biology class had to clean out the school pond, so I buried this box with supposedly stolen diamonds that I’d got from my sister’s costume jewellery. The hoax blew up out of all proportion when the police were called in and the ‘diamonds’ were taken away to be analysed.”
Not surprisingly, given the energy he put into this kind of scheme, he flunked his A-levels and, after failing to get into art school, ended up working in Pizza Hut and a chicken factory. He might still be there if the woman who ran the youth theatre hadn’t seen his potential and become his manager, guiding his fledgling stand-up career. Even then, it took Crook the best part of a decade to get his big break. Championed by Bob Mortimer, who saw him perform at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997, he ended up on Channel 4’s 11 O’Clock Show, the series that launched the careers of Ali G and Ricky Gervais.
A return to stand-up seems increasingly unlikely. But so is decamping to LA. The worst part of the Pirates shoots was being separated from his wife, Lindsay, a former advertising executive and club-owner, and Jude, who is now three. The Crooks live in an art deco house in Muswell Hill that used to belong to Peter Sellers. (“Although that’s not why we bought it,” he says.) “I definitely want to bring Jude up in London. I’m having a real love affair with the city at the moment, because I’m writing a historical film script that means going out and walking the streets.
“I spend all of my time in the garden. My wife and I are making this conscious effort to be greener, and it’s part of that. It’s a haven. I’ve got robins nesting, woodpeckers, owls, everything.” You don’t get that kind of haven in LA.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is released on Friday
