Watch a clip
of Kris Marshall in My Family
Last time I saw Kris Marshall, he was cheerfully burning in hell, sweatily
narrating his way through a BBC4 comedy drama called Heist. It was a sort of
Men Behaving Badly 700 Years Ago. Call me harsh, but there was something
quite satisfying about seeing “mum’s new boyfriend” from those
self-consciously modern BT adverts spreadeagled - presumably for all
eternity - on a giant toasting rack.
“I’m contracted to do the BT ads for three years,” he says, in a slightly
weary tone. “My first chance to opt out is in October. But I’ve learnt to
deal with it. It’s not all bad. There’s a hell of a lot worse that actors
do.” He glares at me - an enjoyably fierce glare. Then he tells me he
chooses a mixture of good scripts (a smallish part in the film Iris, for
example) and commercialism. Of course, I say, you have to earn a living. “I
don’t have to justify it,” he insists, belatedly.
Then again, Marshall, 35, was barely a jobbing actor for years. He worked as a
builder’s mate. He worked on the conveyor belt in a printing works. He lived
in Slough. This was not the glamorous existence he had pictured in his teens
- admittedly a “rose-tinted view of acting” - when he deliberately flunked
his A-levels at Wells Cathedral School, where he had boarded since he was a
naive 11-year-old. He enjoyed it, was quite sporty, was never bullied.
He would have become a pilot, like his RAF father, who flew the Queen around
the world, but failed the eye test. He had worn glasses since he was five.
In any case, he says: “My father will tell you I didn’t have the discipline
to be in the forces.”
Marshall had laser surgery three years ago to correct his short sight.
Considering he was knocked down by a car at an accident black spot in
Bristol three weeks ago, during a stag weekend (“I was merry, but not
drunk”), the day we meet, he’s looking great. There’s a cut above his right
eyebrow and he’s just had six staples taken out of the right side of his
head. “I saw the neurologist last night, and he says there’s a small chance
of depression in a couple of weeks’ time,” he says calmly. “But I’m feeling
very zen at the moment. He said I’d made a remarkable recovery, considering
I did a full cartwheel in the air and landed on my head 12ft away.”
He has no animosity towards the driver (“Just a kid”). He doesn’t remember
anything about the accident, which left him in intensive care for 48 hours,
but says it has done him good. “I’d got to a point where I was nonplussed
about my job. The excitement had tailed off slightly, and this has reset the
parameters. But I can’t say it’s changed my life. It was worse for my family
and my girlfriend - they were worried, especially when I was in an induced
coma.”
Marshall has a short fuse. What sets it off? “People who are stupid, who don’t
get it.” Ah. Like those who suggest that the characters he’s best known for
are pleasant but slightly bumbling? “Nick was the smartest character in My
Family. He pretended to be stupid, but he got away with things.” Something
else that annoys him is “people meandering. Make a decision and do
something”. He admits he can be forthright to the point of rudeness -
“Cutting.”
He shares this trait with Carter, the character he portrays in the American
writer Neil LaBute’s new play, Fat Pig, now on in the West End. A typical
line: “I don’t think we were put down here to be nice.” Carter is
unimpressed by his friend’s attempt at a relationship with a big girl - the
“fat pig” of the title. How unPC. “But he is most people’s view on the
world.” Some would describe Carter as sadistic. Marshall calls him “fairly
arrogant - but a voice of reason”.
“People accuse Neil of misogyny, but this is the opposite. It’s a piece about
judgmentalism. There are two strong female characters and two weaker male
characters. He touches on people’s flaws without explaining them. He lets
the audience think, ‘I’ve done that.’ He makes no excuses for people’s
drawbacks.” This play is going to be a big hit with all his friends, he
says, because it’s only an hour and 40 minutes long. “With no interval.
They’ll all say, ‘Great! See you at the bar at 9.30.’ ” Marshall’s parents
split up when he was 14: “Best thing that ever happened. They’d been
threatening to since I was five.” (Both are now happily remarried.) He went
through a “boisterous” phase - the angry young man. “Thinking I was the
dog’s bollocks, when I wasn’t. Not picking fights - as any man who’s been in
a fight will tell you, it hurts! But if someone hits me, I hit them back.
You have to. It’s the boarding-school way.” He laughs. “I don’t get so angry
any more. I try not to give out any shit, but I don’t take any, either. If
someone’s in my face, I’ll tell them to eff off.” Ooh, that glare again.
His reddish-brown hair is a mess, in a good way. His accent is soft home
counties, his clothes are fashionably casual (Diesel shirt, battered old
brown boots). He had an office job briefly, in insurance, and at one point
considered going into the City. It’s not hard to imagine him as a maverick
trader. “I always took the view that rules were there to be broken,” he
says.
But he can be too moody, he says - not depressive, but grumpy.
Marshall’s openness about his own flaws is attractive. “Do I like myself? No!
Who does? But sometimes I look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m okay.’ I
wouldn’t mind being two inches shorter, though.” He’s 6ft 2in. “It makes you
stand out in a crowd.”
Surely he loves the attention? “When I’m acting,” he says. “Not when I’m on a
railway platform. I don’t mind being looked at; I don’t like being stared
at.” He has the sort of face that can be handsome or plain - which, in
theory, means he should get a variety of roles. “People who are dazzlingly
beautiful don’t need to be vain; vanity belongs to the ones who can be okay
one day and dog ugly the next.” Which category does he fall into? “The
latter.”
For seven years, Marshall was broke - he lost his licence for six months for
driving uninsured. (“When you’re skint, you cut corners, don’t you?”)
Finally, in his mid-twenties, he was cast as Nick Harper, the son in the BBC
sitcom My Family, becoming an amiable presence on television for five years
until he left the show in 2003. He played another likeable bloke in the film
Love, Actually. And now BT Boyfriend: “Someone who’s dealing with having a
lot land on his plate.”
So it’s a pleasant surprise that Marshall is not dull at all. He’s fascinated
by what can lie beneath a quiet, nice-mannered veneer. “There’s darkness in
people,” he says. “At my school, there was a boy who was a genius at the
piano, and a meek person, who at the end of the first year was expelled for
throwing glass milk bottles from three storeys up at the headmaster’s wife.
People like that are the most interesting characters to play.”
His father was “quite stern” and “away all the time”; his mother had an
undiagnosed digestive condition that meant she was often in hospital. So,
Marshall and his younger sister (now a dental nurse) were often looked after
by his grandparents. “In any family with two children, one of each, there’s
a certain loneliness,” he says. Really? “My childhood was good,” he says
firmly. But then he adds: “In the last few years, I’ve become a lot closer
to my parents.”
Marshall has been with his present girlfriend for two years - “a long time,
for me. Perhaps I’m not good husband material”. Because he’s unreliable?
“No, because I’m a little bit selfish. I like my own company. I wouldn’t
rule [marriage] out. But I wouldn’t rule it in either.”
He has lived in Windsor for 14 years and is involved in the local community,
to the extent that he recently went round leafleting against the proposed
closure of the fire station. “I’m an Anglophile,” he claims, “and I’d miss my
friends if I moved to America.”
Marshall says that he’s “on the healthy side of cynical” and sometimes judges
people too quickly. But he hates the same trait in others. “There’s no
excuse for a complete lack of charm. If you’re going to insult someone, at
least do it in a witty way. I can be a little sharp, but I can be all right
as well. I can be friendly.”
He can indeed. He’s a softie, really. “I don’t like being criticised, but I’ve
had to get used to it,” he says. Which is just as well, because that BT
advert is going to run and run.
Fat Pig is previewing at the Trafalgar Studios, SW1
