James Fleet: ‘My wife lends me out to other women'
James Fleet enters the cafe, proffers a large, warm hand and sets out his stall for our interview. 'I'm going to be as bland as I possibly can,' he announces with an ameliorative smile worthy of dim-but-sweet Hugo Horton in The Vicar of Dibley.
I'm having none of it and so I bat back the equally smiling assertion that I fully intend to gently prise something interesting out of him. 'I'm not sure I am terribly interesting,' he says, in case it helps his cause. 'Also, I don't want to say anything that gets me into trouble.'
Trouble? As actors go, Fleet, 73, is not associated with any sort of argy-bargy – either off or on screen. Until now, that is. In the new Channel 5 thriller The Feud, he has pulled off inarguably his most hateful character to date. 'I did once play a Russian spy years ago,' he muses. 'But I think I was just a bit too nice to be believable. This time, being horrible came far more easily; I even got to throw a shovel at a builder.'
But first to appearances; Fleet is wearing exceedingly well; full head of hair, the sort of abundant beard to have any hipster slack-jawed with envy and the effortlessly erect six-foot bearing that makes him a shoo-in for the officer class. Even though his actual beginnings were modest - he was brought up by his widowed mother in rural Aberdeenshire - he remains the embodiment of bumbling-but-kind aristocrat Tom in Four Weddings and a Funeral, once accused by Hugh Grant's Charles of being the richest man in Britain.
'Oh, no! No!' he demurred, way back in 1994 – yes really, that long ago. 'I believe we're about – seventh. The Queen, obviously, and that Branson bloke's doing terribly well.' So, you could say, is Fleet, for all his straight-from-central casting self-deprecation: 'I'm shy and not too bright. I think that makes the best actors. You don't want someone full of confidence who just plays themselves every time; ideally you want someone who hasn't got a personality.'
Fleet has never stopped working – in theatre, television and film – since he left the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now rebranded as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) in the mid-1970s. Fleet's latest role as an angry racist bully in The Feud will surely see him undergo a rebrand of his own in public perceptions.
Set in semi-detached suburbia, the eminently watchable six-parter opens with a snapshot of middle-class life on Shelbury Drive; a street fete with bunting, the wives bringing out secretly competitive platters of home-baked sausage rolls, the menfolk drinking bottled beer and murmuring.
All terribly civilised, idyllic even. Until Emma, played by Jill Halfpenny and her husband John, aka Rupert Penry-Jones, decide they want a kitchen extension. Nothing too elaborate, not a big deal – until their erstwhile friends start lodging objections and deep cracks start to appear in the carefully maintained facade of neighbourliness.
Fleet's character, Derek, lives next door with his downtrodden wife Barbara, played by Only Fools and Horses actress Tessa Peake-Jones. To say he's not happy would be an understatement. But his animus runs far deeper than common-or-garden nimbyism and from the moment he hammers on Emma's door we know, with a sense of terrible foreboding, that this will not end well.
'Derek is an absolutely abhorrent human being,' says Fleet bluntly. 'You hear about actors who stay in character on set and sometimes even bring that persona home with them. I couldn't bear to be him a single moment longer than was necessary – in between takes Tessa and I would tell jokes and make one another laugh as a sort of palate cleanser.'
Peake-Jones and Fleet have known each other for many years as she is a close friend of his wife, the actress Jane Booker, 68, probably best known as the Sloaney receptionist Felicity Spicer-Gibbs in hit sitcom Don't Wait Up. During filming, Peake-Jones would mischievously text Booker revealing what fresh indignity (or worse) his monstrous character had perpetrated on her, Fleet tells me with an indulgent little 'what-can-you-do?' sigh.
'I know that disputes over planning permission can be a real flashpoint when you all live up close to one another,' he says. 'We live in a converted barn in Oxfordshire so our neighbours aren't that near, although when they built an extension they moved out for four months and left us with the sound of concrete mixers, lorries driving in and out and the builders' music blaring.'
I wonder aloud if he's succumbed to grumpiness – he immediately demurs. 'I am very conscious of not being grumpy in front of my wife,' he insists, which doesn't quite answer the question. 'I don't ever complain about the way the dishwasher is stacked, although I might suggest there are other ways to do it…'
The couple live there with their adult son Hamish, who prefers to stay out of the limelight and occasionally disagree about whether to get a dog. 'My wife wants a 'doodle or a 'poo but I'm not in favour of designer dogs. I want a Bill Sikes bull terrier but she says I can't have anything that looks too scary in the countryside, so we remain dog-less.'
Fleet spends most of his time either painting, more of which shortly, or mending things. 'I changed the battery in my phone just the other day, which isn't at all easy,' he tells me proudly, waving about a venerable iPhone 6. For reference: the rest of the world is currently salivating over the new iPhone 16.
'I am very handy. I struggle to understand how any woman can give herself over to a man who can't put a screw in a wall or mend a tap. My wife lends me out to other women who need washers replaced; they shower me with such praise that I'm sure their husbands must hate me.'
He is beaming with satisfaction at the thought before confiding his ambition to quit acting completely and be a full-time mender-of-things and artist. His canvases sound the very antithesis of bland. 'Richard Curtis has bought a couple of them, including a surreal one set in the Edinburgh festival featuring people in costume running about and fighting with one another. It would be wonderful to devote myself to that.'
Maybe in time, but right now he still can't resist the allure of an intriguing play or a challenging film. To his knowledge, he can't recall turning anything down, and suggests I consult the internet if I want to know more about his years at the Royal Shakespeare Company, or his appearance in vampire movie Wolf Manor, as he really can't recall them. My question about Four Weddings is met with an 'Oh Christ, not again'. Of Dibley, he says: 'Everyone's dead apart from Dawn. And me.'
While Fleet is keen to push boundaries, he despairs that younger generations are hooked on rubbish. 'I despair of the way young people watch Marvel superheroes and TikTok, where everyone breaks the fourth wall,' he says, in grave danger of getting fired up. 'It started out with Fleabag which was well done, but now everyone's at it, because they think it's cool. But it creates viewers who can't understand emotional depth or cope with too much complexity.
'If I had my way they would watch classic black and white films or French movies which are far more interesting than these franchises made for a global audience.
Or they could start in domestic noir territory with The Feud, where nobody is quite as they seem and that nice posh bloke from The Vicar of Dibley turns out to be a violent bigot...
The Feud begins on Channel 5 on Monday April 14 at 9pm
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