The nicest man in acting is back with new comedy, Bill’s Included. He talks about rejecting Hollywood, refusing to play a villain – and why he just can’t make fun of Steve Coogan
‘I’m a nice person, you know,” says Rob Brydon, as I met him in a basement green room of the BBC, where probably nobody with such a mellow ego has ever sat. “I am a people-pleaser. That’s who I am.” It’s an unnecessary clarification – at 61, he’s been nice on TV, as himself and in character, for most of our adult lives.
We’re here to talk about his new six-parter, Bill’s Included, but his character in it, the eponymous Bill, is such a distillation of pure Rob Brydon that it’s (accidentally, he says) a celebration of his entire career. As the show opens, Bill has just been left by his wife, who’s run off with the gardener. At no point does he ever fire the guy – “I like him!” – but otherwise, his life is completely upended. The utterly plausible cocktail of his civic mindedness and howling loneliness drives him to take in four lodgers, local university students.