It’s both intimidating and ironic to interview someone who’s made a career of playing an awful interviewer. Steve Coogan’s best-known character, Alan Partridge, is the fake media personality who—on BBC comedies Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge and I’m Alan Partridge—launched the actor into superstardom in the U.K. and cult status in the U.S. Coogan’s inept alter ego is notorious for poorly researching his subjects (he mistakes Roger Daltrey for Roger Waters during a chat with The Who legend), being vain and all-around closed-minded, and delivering painfully cheesy puns. (“If this show was a car,” he told his audience in a typical bit, “it would be…Chatty Chatty Bang Bang.”)
Coogan’s standout film performance as Factory Records cofounder/music impresario Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People put the British actor on the indie map in the U.S. and led to memorable roles in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and another Winterbottom feature, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which took on the daunting task of adapting Laurence Sterne’s “un-filmable,” ahead-of-its-time novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Despite adoration from critics—and more mainstream exposure with big-budget family films Night at the Museum (co-starring Owen Wilson) and Disney’s Around the World in 80 Days—Coogan still isn’t a bona fide movie star in the States. He joked in a New York Times profile that if he ever wants to be recognized, all he has to do is step into an indie record store to find 24 Hour Party People fans. More Americans might know him today from a 2007 New York Post article that tied him, via comments from ex-girlfriend Courtney Love, to hard drug use and Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt—allegations that he dismisses here as “horse shit.”
With a pivotal role in Ben Stiller’s blockbuster Tropic Thunder and a starring slot in Hamlet 2 (one of the few success stories at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival), Coogan could lose that anonymity on American soil. Interestingly, Coogan plays misguided directors in both. He’s the “method” Hollywood director of a big-budget Vietnam War drama being made in Tropic Thunder. He’s a Tulsa drama teacher who casts himself as Sexy Jesus in his original high school production in Hamlet 2. Both characters are passionate and dedicated but ultimately not particularly talented.
Which brings us back to Partridge, the all-style-no-substance media type Coogan saw come to prevalence in the U.K. in the 1990s. Partridge has become both the catalyst and bane of his acting career. “Because Alan Partridge was a very successful show for me in the U.K., anything I do often gets compared to that. That’s not very healthy for me ’cause I want things to be judged by themselves, on their own,” he says. To “exorcise his fears,” this October Coogan returns to the stage for the first time in a decade with his one-man show Steve Coogan Is Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters.
Although Coogan is still cynical about entertainment, he doesn’t come off as the fussy cultural critic one might expect. During our interview, he knocked “snobbish elitism” as “stifling,” and when we sat down with him, he was well-mannered, dry-witted and, refreshingly, not bent at all on self-promotion. As our talk steered away from the reason for this interview, Hamlet 2, to topics like why great BBC shows don’t get picked up in the States or butting heads with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he became a sort of anti-Partridge: all substance and no fluff.
