Mackenzie Crook melts into the armchair of a bar in Soho, a cap low on his
unwashed hair. He is in a grey jumper and oversized blue tweed jacket, his
big, quiet, childlike blue eyes have smudges beneath them, and his hands are
white. “I drove into Central London and it was stressful. I found a car park
and ran the rest of the way,” he says diffidently. Polite, thin and softly
spoken, his skin is shadowy and he's at the end of a cold. I worry that
anything I ask will make him uncomfortable.
“People I haven't seen for years will say, ‘How did you get to be in The
Office?' as if I wrote off to Jim'll Fix It or won a competition,” he wrote
once in an article. “Well, I trawled the stand-up and cabaret circuit for a
decade, ruined myself emotionally, financially and annually at the Edinburgh
Festival, and then auditioned along with every other skinny actor in the
country for the part of Gareth. That's how I ‘got to be' in The Office.”
Now rich and fêted, starring alongside Johnny Depp - who personally
recommended him for the part of the one-eyed pirate Ragetti - in the Pirates
of the Caribbean franchise and opposite Kristin Scott Thomas as Konstantin
in The Seagull on Broadway, he has had a real-life fairytale ending after an
excruciating ten years on the stand-up circuit. Much of it was on the dole,
some of it working at Pizza Hut, and you can still trace the quiet
determination that kept him lugging a backbreaking wheel of cheese, a prop
for one of his stand-up characters, Charlie Cheese, to venues on public
transport, and surviving on little or no money before landing the part of
the skeletal Territorial Army creep Gareth.
“The wheel of cheese,” he murmurs, an unexpected gleam of pleasure lighting
his face. “It was ridiculous; it was like a piece of sawn timber.” He stirs
his extra-strong cappuccino vigorously, turning it to a grey mousse. “I
think my mum and dad were desperately worried. They couldn't really see how
it would work out. I did have a plan, to use it to get into acting in three
to five years, and at times it just didn't seem to be going anywhere. But
eventually it worked. It just took a lot longer than I thought.”
He says he knew at once that The Office was really good. “Though I didn't
predict it would do quite as well as it has done.” And did he see Gareth as
nasty? He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “More misunderstood and naive. He
wanted to be loved and respected, and that was his twisted way to go about
getting it. He didn't understand that's not how you get respect. He's a
childlike character, really. I'm very fond of him.” The Office and Gareth
made his fortune. The penalty was that he became recognised everywhere.
Still today, in Soho, eight years since the series ended, is he recognised?
He nods. “Yes,” he says simply. “I wear a hat with the peak down when
I'mhere ... it's odd, I spent four of the past six months in America and I
forgot how recognisable I am over here. It's only very occasionally in
America that I get recognised. Here, everyone recognises me.” He gives a
faint smile. “If you're in a good mood, you can deal with it. If you're in a
slightly bad mood, it's really irritating.”
Just back from filming in Los Angeles - The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of
the Unicorn, due for release in 2011 - Crook, 37, is spending some time at
home writing and with his family - he and Lindsay, his wife of seven years,
have a son, Jude, 6, and a daughter, Scout, 15 months. He has already
written a children's book, a “diary” based on his character in Pirates, and
is working on film and television scripts. “I'd love to write a novel,” he
says, “but I'm very ill-disciplined when it comes to writing. I find it hard
to sit down and do it. I'm writing scripts at the moment, and with a script
I know it's going to be taken farther and people are going to interpret it.
Whereas a novel, every sentence has to be word perfect and the best it can
be.”
He lives in an Art Deco house in Muswell Hill, North London, once owned by
Peter Sellers. “Before he was famous,” he points out hastily. “Everyone
thinks that it must be some mansion. Can I show it to you?” He shows me a
picture of a semi-detached, white, neat, round-bayed house on his iPhone. I
ask how he met Lindsay and he says that she booked him to perform at her pub
when he was doing the stand-up. “Her sister was a stand-up comedian and they
used to run a club called the Comedy Ward at
The Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place [Central London].” Lindsay has just set
up an online concierge business as a virtual assistant, helping clients with
event organisation and administration. I ask how the family spends time
together. “When it comes to holidays we like getting in the car and going
places in the UK,” Crook says. “Last year we went to Chesil beach [in
Dorset] and for a few years running we've always gone up to the Edinburgh
Festival. That's where I did lots of comedy, and where my wife and I got
together.”
The rest of his spare time is spent in his own personal wood, eight acres of
400-year-old woodland in Essex, which he bought just over a year ago. “It's
lovely,” he says. “It's just beginning to bloom and the spring flowers are
coming out, so it looks great. It's carpeted in wood anemones, which are
white, and soon the celandine, and it will be all yellow. Then the
bluebells.”
What about diet? Does he eat a lot? “I eat everything,” he says, perhaps
suspecting that I doubt him from his ectomorphic frame. “In fact, my son
yesterday called me a freaky eater - you know that programme, Freaky Eaters?
Because he eats very little, very few types of things, and he said, ‘You're
the freaky eater because you eat everything, and that's weird!'”
So does Crook eat a lot? “I do!” he says. “I eat as much as anyone. But it
makes no difference to my weight. And if I'm not eating - there are times
when I've been away and just lost my appetite and have eaten like a sparrow
for weeks or months - it just doesn't seem to affect my weight. I'm always
the same shape. I guess it's a metabolism thing. I don't sit still.”
Does he exercise? “I have never stepped inside a gym in my life. The idea of
it is really intimidating. I mean, I'm probably very unhealthy. I walk
everywhere. The wood, that's my gym. I work there, sort of physical work,
clearing undergrowth, sawing dead wood and what have you.”
Guilty pleasures are Coca-Cola and chardonnay - “it gets a bad press, doesn't
it? I don't know why, but chardonnay's my favourite” - and smoking roll-ups.
“I feel bad about admitting that, in this day and age. It's not acceptable
any more.”
He orders another strong cappuccino. “I don't mind doing interviews,” Crook
says. “But I don't want to appear like I'm bragging. Do you know what I
mean? I find myself talking about myself an awful lot in everyday life.
Whenever I meet an old friend they always want to hear about what I've been
doing. But eventually I want to say, ‘Tell me about what you've been doing'.
And then they say, ‘Nothing much'. I got a letter the other day from someone
I'd been to school with; he'd found some drawings that I'd done and sent me
copies of them, and he said something about how my life had turned out so
much more exciting than his. I was like, ‘Come on, mate'.”
A newspaper once ran an interview with Crook with the headline: “Hollywood's
least likely player.” ‘Why is it all so bleeding unlikely?' he demands
amusingly. But it does seem that the boy who was christened Paul, hated his
grammar school in Dartford, flunked his A levels, kept a menagerie of
amphibians in his bedroom (his parents Michael and Sheila didn't like pets),
and was so small that he found it hard to make friends until he had had
hormone-growth injections for a year at 15, has had a Cinderella reversal.
“It really does feel exciting.” He smiles. “It's not that I can't believe
it, but that it has all worked out, that I'm doing these amazing things and
having such a great time - I'm very grateful. And aware that, perhaps, it
won't carry on for ever.”
There must have been times in his twenties when he thought it might never
happen. “Yeah.” He nods doubtfully. “Though I never got too despondent.”
