Rob Brydon interview: ‘Steve Coogan's very sure of himself and his opinions. I'm not'

Telegraph

10-07-2025

'I've got a terrible walk,' says Rob Brydon. 'I mean, I walk like an ape. I have a very wide gait. Did you not notice?'
Truly, everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Watch Brydon, who can act, present, sing and tell jokes with equal grace, and you might get the idea he was comfortable in his skin by now. He can do pathos (Marion and Geoff), loveable eccentricity (Gavin & Stacey), amiable repartee (Would I Lie to You?), a great Michael Caine (The Trip), belt out a tune, interview fellow celebrities on his podcast… He has an MBE, five Bafta nominations (or six if you count the Welsh Baftas, which he probably would), and a cameo in the billion-dollar Barbie film. He is the closest thing Britain has to a light-entertainment Swiss Army knife, a man capable of delivering an almost infinite number of versions of Rob Brydon.
Yet here he is, on the verge of conquering another frontier, reality TV, fretting about the way he walks. Is this anxiety something that has long plagued him?
'I wouldn't go that far, but I respect your journalistic mind,' he says. 'I can see the headline now: Gaitgate.'
His latest role is hosting Destination X, a travel-themed reality series for the BBC, which is an adaptation of a format that
has already aired in the US and Belgium. Contestants are taken on a special bus, with the windows blacked out, to an undisclosed location somewhere in Europe; they must work out where they are from whatever clues they can gather. The person whose guess is furthest off is eliminated at the end of each episode.
'Other shows have come my way and I've said no,' Brydon says. 'But I loved The Traitors, and I loved Claudia [Winkleman] on The Traitors. I felt about [ Destination X ] like I did about Would I Lie to You?, that tonally it was a fit for me. A big part was the scale of it. It was very ambitious. I liked the idea of being part of a big show. In that sense it was more like my experience on some of the films I've been in.
'There's a Traitors element, a Race Across the World element, a Big Brother element, and there's the most stunning photography of the most wonderful locations,' he continues.
'I've never been a big reality television fan,' he adds. 'I've always been a bit sniffy about reality TV. I was never a Big Brother watcher. I'd watch Celebrity Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, because I found that interesting, to see people with a public persona put under hard conditions. But I found [ Destination X ] to be far more creative than I expected. We had about 10 to 12 cameras on the go at once; because it's reality, the directors have to react in real time.
'So I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and for more reasons than I thought I would.'
We meet at his publicist's office in west London, where Brydon sits in a conference room in front of an enormous picture of Bill Nighy. Not unlike Nighy, Brydon has achieved borderline national-treasure levels of celebrity, over a long career, without drawing a whisper of scandal or misdemeanour. A few weeks earlier he turned 60, a reflective moment.
'I'm the same as everyone else,' he says, eyes widening slightly at the thought. 'You can't believe it. You think, 'How on earth has this happened?' Especially when you think back to being a kid. When you heard someone was 60, they were practically dead.'
Trim, in a fitted white shirt, and hair still neatly swept back from the photo shoot, Brydon at 60 looks not only not-dead, but remarkably like the Brydon who became famous in his mid-30s, which he puts down to the obvious methods. 'The past 10 years I've exercised much more and I'm more careful about what I eat,' he says. 'I've just done a documentary about country music, so I spent three weeks driving around the Deep South. You're sitting down all day, eating the food of the region, which is not known for its health benefits. You put the weight on.'
He is entertaining company, breaking into impressions and seasoning his answers with a bit of gentle teasing about the interviewer's 'art'. I wonder if his aversion to reality TV might have been to do with his respect for the traditional skills of performance, having grown up in an era when stars didn't feel the need to advertise every atom of their being.
'Oh, you want to pick at that thread, do you?' he says, with a grin. 'I've always had great respect for talent and skill. And also there's a certain cruelty to Big Brother, which I wasn't comfortable with. But that's just not for me.'
True to his word, for his performance on Destination X, he says he is channelling the Fringed One's Traitors mix of bonhomie and camp. 'With Jeffrey Dean Morgan [an actor known for The Walking Dead ], who presents the American version, the impression I get is that he plays it a bit more like a character. Whereas I can only be me, which is warm and affable, hopefully witty and encouraging.'
That is certainly a version of himself he has cultivated for the past 30 years. Brydon was born in 1965 in Baglan, Glamorgan, to Howard, a car dealer, and Joy, a schoolteacher. He grew up in the village with his younger brother, and always had the gift of entertaining. 'I heard an interview with [the American talk-show host and comedian] Jimmy Fallon recently. He said that he was a people pleaser and likes to entertain people, but the key one was that when he was growing up and doing his schtick, people told him he was good and encouraged him. That was my experience.'
After a year and a half at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, Brydon joined BBC Radio Wales aged 20, working as a DJ, and later picking up the odd screen job where he could. It wasn't until 2000, at 35, that he had his breakthrough year. He starred in the surreal comedy Human Remains, with Julia Davis, and Marion and Geof f, a touching one-man, fixed-camera comedy about a man coming to terms with his wife's affair, produced by his old friend Steve Coogan. They also teamed up on 24 Hour Party People (2002) and A Cock and Bull Story (2005), both directed by Michael Winterbottom. There were many chat and panel shows, to the extent that his Marion and Geoff character, Keith Barret, had his own spoof chat show, beginning in 2004, and Brydon starred in the scandalously underrated comedy Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive (2006-2007), about a fictional panel show.
His biggest break came in 2007, playing the eccentric but enormous-hearted Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey, written by James Corden and Ruth Jones. The sitcom's success helped complete his journey from darling of the Radio 4 classes to nationwide star. Corden used Gavin & Stacey as a springboard to take on America, via his stint hosting The Late Late Show. Brydon says he never had the same ambition.
'One of my favourite sayings is, 'To what end?'' he explains. 'People would ask, 'Why aren't you doing such and such? Don't you want to go to America?' And I would say, 'To what end? What for?' It's a very common question, especially when James went and indeed conquered it. It seems, in a lot of journalists' minds, the natural progression… I can only assume that if you do America, they ask, 'What about Neptune and Jupiter?''
Partly it was down to family, he says. Brydon has been married twice: to Martina Fitchie, with whom he has two daughters and a son, from 1992 to 2000; and since 2006 to Clare Holland, with whom he has two sons. 'I have quite the age range, 30 down to 14,' he says. 'I'm desperate for a lie-in. They all do different things. My eldest is in casting, then chef, teacher, still at school, still at school.
'Getting older gives you perspective, having kids gives you perspective,' he adds. 'When I was younger, I would have loved to have gone [to the US]. If I had the opportunities I have now when I was younger, before family and stuff, I'd have been there like a shot. But now it's simply not practical, because I like my family. I think maybe if you're in an unhappy marriage you jump at the opportunity to travel. And I travel a fair bit – Destination X is a prime example – but if you have a happy life, which thank God I do, you want to enjoy it. I love the simple things in life. I do like going to the garden centre.'
Corden's run in the US ended in 2023. He returned to British screens for the triumphant finale of Gavin & Stacey last Christmas, which had an audience of 12.3 million overnight; by the time it had been streaming for 10 days, that number had risen to more than 19 million. For Brydon, who grew up on terrestrial TV, it was like a window into an earlier era.
'The good thing about 2025 is that someone like me can go and do so many different things,' he says. 'People watch what they want to watch. You don't have to sit and watch something you don't want to. I was in Barbie and I know there was social-media reaction going, 'What the hell is he doing there, the guy from Would I Lie to You? ' The bad side is that it's harder to get traction on anything. Sometimes you think it would have been lovely to work in those days. I used to talk to Ronnie Corbett about it; he'd know if he went for Sunday lunch to a pub or restaurant, that whatever percentage of the people there had watched The Two Ronnies last night. That'll never come back.'
Could there be another Gavin & Stacey? 'There's nothing on the horizon. Anything could happen, but as it is at the moment, I can't see anything else. What a great thrill to be part of that.'
He is hardly short of offers. 'I'm very lucky, I'm 60 and people are still asking me to do things. I like doing lots of different things. The downside of that is you don't get the respect that somebody who focuses on one thing [gets], because one minute I'm hosting, the next I'm acting.'
It's the closest thing he will offer to a grumble. When we meet, he is about to fly off to film yet another version of himself for a fifth series of The Trip, perhaps his most successful collaboration with Winterbottom and Coogan, in which Brydon and his old mucker play fictionalised takes on themselves who are sent to review restaurants. Improvising around Winterbottom's plot, the pair bicker, eat wonderful food and compete to do impressions of celebrities: Al Pacino, Michael Caine, Mick Jagger.
The first series, in 2010, took them around the North of England; subsequent outings have been to Spain, Italy and Greece. For the new one, they will go to Scandinavia. It has been five years since the Greek Trip, which at the time the three men said would be the last. Why another now?
'Because Michael Winterbottom said, 'Let's do another one,'' Brydon laughs. 'We just turn up.'
Does he have any new impressions lined up? 'I wish I did. I have been thinking of a couple of people. Should I tell you? Should I be clever? On the last [series], I thought I was going to do Andy Murray at the end of the meal, you know' – Brydon slips into his Murray impersonation – ''I thought I did really well, I tried really hard.' And I was doing an impression of Richard E Grant a few years ago for my daughter, and it was as if he was in the room, I was just channelling him. I've never been able to recapture him, but in that instant, [in Grant's voice] he was there. The other voice [as Jeff Goldblum ] would be hmmm, brrrr, Jeff Goldblum, I'm thinking about him.
'I wouldn't say I've fallen out of love with impressions, but they don't interest me like they used to,' Brydon says, sounding like himself again. 'Lee Mack is always joking on Would I Lie to You? about me doing people who are dead. There's a simple explanation: I'm doing people from my childhood, because that's when I would look at them and go, 'Oh, I'm gonna sound like them.' It's always a love letter. It's always people I like. That's fallen away.
'I have an ear that hears the music in a voice. I'll hear voices that appeal to me: Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Jacob Rees-Mogg. All very interesting and appealing voices, but I only do people I like and I'm drawn to. They're not my cup of tea. I'm not a political satirist.'
On the contrary, Brydon has remained studiously unpolitical, though we might infer he is not a card-carrying Tory. 'I'm reminded of Elvis Presley's press conference in 1972, when he was asked what he thought about war protestors, and whether he'd today refuse to be drafted? He replied, [as Elvis] 'Honey, I'm just an entertainer, I'd rather keep my views to myself.' I've always felt that way. I don't have the stomach for it.'
In this Brydon couldn't be more different from his fellow Welsh star Michael Sheen or Coogan, both of whom are endlessly inveighing on behalf of one cause or another. But it is probably part of the reason Brydon has by and large succeeded in keeping himself out of hot water.
'It annoys Steve that I don't [make political statements],' he says. 'In Italy we were in some lovely setting and at one point he just said, [Coogan voice] 'Why don't you put your head above the parapet?' And my only answer was, 'It's not me.' Steve's got an opinion on everything. He'd have an opinion on where the plug sockets are on this table. He's very sure of himself and his opinions. I'm not.'
Beyond The Trip, Brydon has been coaxed into another sitcom, set to come out next year. 'I've said no to every sitcom I've been offered since Gavin & Stacey because I didn't think they were good enough,' he says, adding that most scripts wanted him to play a variation on Uncle Bryn. 'I think that's the norm, for anyone who's had a hit with something. When you cast people, you naturally think, 'Oh, they do that thing, I'd love them to do that thing in my show.''
But Bill's Included was promising enough to tempt him back. Written by Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen, the comedy duo sometimes known as The Pin, it will star Brydon as a divorced man who takes student lodgers into his spare rooms to help make ends meet. 'It was a little bit different, with an interesting dynamic,' he says. 'It'll be exciting to go back into that world.'
The warm, genial Brydon variety show carries on, in other words. His Honky Tonk Road Trip, the series he filmed in the US, will come out in September. If he has any real regrets, or bugbears, or personal beefs, they are staying close to his chest. It is ironic, given how often he has interrogated a version of himself on screen.
'I have a lovely spread [of work],' he says. 'I've had this amazing life doing something that I love and it's a cliché but it's true. I'm never looking at the clock. And a by-product of what I do is people come up to me every day and say nice things.'
He is midway through a story about his fellow 'Welsh rat pack' member Matthew Rhys when we run out of time. 'I was in New York making a special about Neil Diamond for ITV about 10 years ago,' he says, 'and part of it was Neil did a show at his old school in Brooklyn, where he'd been with Barbra Streisand…'
He is interrupted by his taxi arriving. 'I'm telling an ANECDOTE,' he declares, in Ronnie Corbett's voice, returning to his subject.
'And we were going back to Manhattan, and I started to do my Richard Burton, and then Matthew did his, and I shut up pretty quickly. I knew I was out of my depth.'
I don't believe for a second he'd ever concede to anyone in a Richard Burton competition, but there is no time to interject. He's off. His walk is absolutely fine.