Watch
the Three and Out trailer
Mackenzie Crook beams. “I can’t wait to go back! I just can’t wait,” he says,
more excited and animated than at any time during the previous 60 minutes of
our conversation. The 36-year-old star of The Office and the Pirates
of the Caribbean trilogy is talking not of Hollywood, though, but of
Zimbabwe. “I haven’t been there in about eight years and, obviously, the
family farm was taken a few years back,” he says. His aunt’s property – part
cattle and crop farm, part vast African bushland – was seized under the
“land reforms” of Robert Mugabe’s regime. As a child, Crook spent his summer
holidays there.
“It was my favourite place on Earth,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking what’s
happening to the country, and I’d like to be more vocal about it, to speak
up about it. But I’ve still got family there and I don’t want to stir
anything up.”
Crook is full of surprises. Who would have thought that the cadaverous-looking
actor, born and raised in Dartford, Kent, and famed for playing the
hilarious English provincialism of The Office’s Gareth Keenan,
once roamed the African bush, discovering cave paintings and hunting
pythons? Or that he’d have such hipster chic in person, scrubbed down in
skater-boy denims, goatee and diamond stud earrings? Or, more importantly,
that he’d pack such a dramatic punch in his new movie Three and Out,
in the tragi-comic role of Paul, a London Tube driver caught up in a suicide
scam?
In the film, after two passengers fall under Paul’s train in quick succession,
the vaguely traumatised driver is told that a third kill will mean instant
retirement on compassionate grounds – and ten years’ pay. He thus trawls the
city for potential suicides, catches an Irish alcoholic (Colm Meaney) about
to attempt a bridge plunge, and convinces him to use the train instead.
“As a movie, it’s a lot more poignant than the poster suggests,” says Crook,
nodding uncomfortably at the Day-Glo sheet opposite him, which features
Crook, Meaney and the movie’s female stars, Imelda Staunton and Gemma
Arterton, against a cartoon green landscape and blue-sky background.
“Obviously they didn’t want to flag up the poignancy, but I hope that people
don’t go along expecting a zany comedy, because it’s quite moving at some
points.”
Indeed it’s a testament to Crook’s acting that not only has he eschewed the
gangly weirdo supporting role for the standout lead, but that his
performance in one of those poignant scenes – a climactic heart-racer,
featuring Crook in his train driver seat with tears streaming down his face
– will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. “I’ve always had this
slight worry that I’m winging it as an actor,” he says. “But I’ve been
proving it to myself over the past few years. The theatre job helped a lot
too.”
The “theatre job” is Crook’s critically lauded role at the Royal Court last
year as Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull, opposite Kristin
Scott Thomas. Until then he was in danger of being boxed into cutesy
bean-pole background roles. Indeed, there seemed to be a period when a
studio movie wasn’t complete until it featured a Crook cameo, zany or
otherwise – he popped up successively opposite Al Pacino in The
Merchant of Venice, Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland and Matt
Damon in The Brothers Grimm.
“There was a moment when American producers discovered the British Office,”
he explains. “They felt like they were the first to discover it, and it was
quite precious to them.
And so they’d want someone from The Office in their movie. They’d
go to Ricky Gervais first, and if not Ricky then Martin Freeman or me. We
were flavour of the month for quite a long while.”
Typically, Crook speaks highly of The Office, and of the writing skills
of its creators, Gervais and Stephen Merchant. But the presence of Gareth
Keenan, with his nerdy observations and mock machismo, has been hard to
eradicate. “Growing the hair and the earrings are basically a way of getting
as far away as I can from Gareth,” he says. “I’ve probably gone too far the
other way – I’ve never actually stood on a skateboard in my life – but ever
since The Office it has been me trying to get away from Gareth.”
His normal shyness was, and still is, severely tested by the international
celebrity that The Office brought. “People stop me and say: ‘Are you
from . . . ?’ And I say: ‘Yeah.’ And then there’s a pause and I don’t know
what to say or what to do. You know? ‘Would you like my autograph?’ sounds
awful.”
Seemingly uncomfortable in his skin, he’s never had, he says, an easy
relationship with his body. As a ten-year-old child, the son of a BA
executive dad and hospital administrator mum, Crook discovered the thrill of
performance when dominating an end-of-year school variety show with magic
tricks and comedy gags.
However, his teenage years were cruel and his body refused to grow. Daily
hormone injections were the only solution. “As a teenager the last thing you
want is to look young for your age. It was shit. All my friends were
blagging their way into pubs and going out with girls, but me, I was still a
little kid! So the injections were actually a relief.”
As he grew into his hormone-assisted frame (he is now 5ft 9in) his performance
bug was fed by, first, the Dartford Youth Theatre and then a hard-fought
career on the stand-up circuit – exclusively in character, as the tacky
comedian Charlie Cheese, or the PE teacher Mr Bagshaw. His gifts for
physical comedy were exploited by a small role in The 11 O’Clock Show
on TV, the Brit-com Still Crazy (1998), and then the impossibly
successful “ Office and Pirates” double-whammy (although
the latter role, as Ragetti the one-eyed comedy relief, was, he admits,
broad enough to require very little “real acting”).
Even now, though, Crook’s so-called quirky appearance is still paramount.
“Somebody recently wrote in the paper: ‘Blokes who look like Mackenzie Crook
may have you reaching for your sick bag’,” he says. “And I thought, ‘F***ing
hell! That’s a bit harsh!’ I don’t actually want to make people vomit.”
He says that he’s “at peace” with his looks, and that as a father of two
(five-year-old son Jude, and five-month-old daughter Scout) he has more
important things to worry about – “Like, am I doing the right thing for
them, and will they hate me when they’re teenagers?”
Crook lives in Muswell Hill with his wife Lindsay (a former advertising
executive who met him on the comedy circuit), in a house once owned by Peter
Sellers. “It sounds glamorous, but it’s really just a small terraced house,”
he says.
He is writing a novel and a children’s book, and hopes to write a screenplay
too. And he wants to revisit Zimbabwe as soon as Mugabe’s gone and the
country’s back on its feet. Meanwhile we’ll see him next “getting my arse
kicked” by Bill Murray in the post-apocalyptic fantasy City of Ember,
and skulking around the sidelines of the big-budget action epic Solomon
Kane.
“I’m back to my normal thing of going in there and playing a weirdo,” Crook
says. “The job I do, the places I go and the people I meet – I’m so aware
that I’m living a life that people would pay to live. So if I can carry on
playing parts in movies, quirky or not, and maybe do a play every two years,
then that is perfect.”
Three and Out is released on April 25, 2008
