‘I couldn't get rid of Finchy': Ralph Ineson on The Office – and becoming a Hollywood superstar at 55

The Guardian

12 hours ago

How do you portray Galactus, a gigantic, amoral, immortal superbeing who thrives by draining planets of their energy? If you're making a film of any part of Marvel's Fantastic Four journey, your best bet is probably to depict him as a cloud. That's what happened in 2007, and even though fans complained about it a bit, it solved a lot of problems.
Matt Shakman, director of the new The Fantastic Four: First Steps, cast Ralph Ineson, who still sounds faintly surprised by the move. 'I've been working for a long time,' he says. His first role was a small part in Spender, the Jimmy Nail vehicle, in 1991, and he's in a similar mould to Nail: tall with a handsome, rough-hewn face, a guy who looks as if he knows how to do guy stuff.
'I've been a jobbing actor for a long time,' he continues, with the same disbelieving, 'how the hell did I wind up in this huge movie?' tone of voice. 'There's no denying it's really nice to have a huge trailer. And it was huge. Bigger than mine and my wife's first flat.' (He married Ali Milner, a radio host, in 2003.) 'Nice trailers, nice cars, and a paycheck. But it's a privilege and an honour to be the first person to bring this character to life. Twelve-year-old me wouldn't have believed some of this shit. I don't have any snobbery about it. I loved it.'
Then Ineson describes what it took to make this character, in terms I could already hear, after five minutes, were extremely true to form: stressing the industry and professionalism of everyone on set (including the two people whose job it was to blow cold air into each of his gauntlets between takes) except himself, the dude who just has to show up and try not to sweat. 'They had to shoot me on a white background, with lots of bright light, and I'm wearing this enormous costume, so it was incredibly hot and there was nowhere for the heat to escape. Obviously, Galactus can't sweat. So I had a Formula One pit crew of people around me.'
It sounds like a nightmare, I suggest. 'For me, there's something quite masochistic about acting. Sometimes you only really get the good stuff when you're at the edge of something, either mentally, emotionally or physically. It unlocks stuff.' And then, mindful that he has skated way closer to pretension than he'd prefer, 'Occasionally I had to have the physio at my knees, because I'm 55 and falling apart.' His calling, as an actor, has been playing one bad guy after another, but he is one of the most personable people you could ever meet.
Ineson grew up in Leeds in the 1970s, when he 'felt as if acting was something that was almost shameful, or maybe that's too strong a word. But it wasn't really something to be proud of, when I was a kid.' His parents were supportive in the sense that they would never miss a show, but nobody thought it was a serious career prospect, and after doing theatre studies at Furness college in Lancaster, he worked as a drama teacher at a sixth-form college in York.
He got involved with the York Mystery Plays – a tradition that's been going, on and off, since the mid-14th century: a Bible story told every year, once performed on a roaming cart, then, by the time Ineson did it in 1992, at the York Theatre Royal. All the characters were played by the people of York, except for one professional actor, who that year was Robson Green.
'He was pretty lonely on his own, sat in his hotel. We'd go out for a drink and I ended up sharing a dressing room with him. And he said: 'You're not wedded to being a teacher, are you?' I wasn't, although I did enjoy it, but I hadn't been to drama school, I wasn't classically trained. He said: 'Go home and watch TV tonight, look at the characters you could play.' So I watched a soap, I watched the nine o'clock drama, and there were about five people I thought I could play.'
He describes the next phase as a series of lucky strikes: meeting an agent through Green and getting the part in Spender, 'basically because I could ride off-road motorbikes – the character was a professional motocross rider'. Then another agent, more parts, but still 'I don't think I realised I wanted to be an actor until I'd been doing it for 20 years,' he says. 'Shoots were something I really enjoyed, but almost pretended I didn't. Then, I was sitting on a horse on the plains outside Santa Fe, dressed as the man in black, a posse leader' – that was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Coen brothers film. 'And I thought: 'This is exactly what I have always wanted to do.' I just didn't realise it until I was in my mid-40s.' But that was 2018, and quite a lot had happened in the years before that.
If you feel as if you know Ineson personally, it will be because of The Office, in 2001, where he occasionally breezed in as Finchy, the boorish sales rep whom Ricky Gervais's David Brent hero-worshipped all the more for his proudly offensive humour. Ineson was sent the pilot episode on VHS, 'which is how long ago it was. I remember being really terrified. How brilliant they were, the central four, firing off each other. I was slightly intimidated. My first thought was: 'Shit, can I do this?''
When he first started out, he often felt as if he was on the back foot because he hadn't been to drama school. 'I don't know whether I would have suited it, but it felt like a big thing for the first few years, because that is all young actors talk about.' Slowly, he came to have more regard for his own idiosyncratic apprenticeship: 'For years I've had the chance to work on big productions without a lot of responsibility – mainly getting my horse to stand in the right place, being in that part of the screen, behind the main villain's left shoulder. You learn a lot about acting, doing that.'
Anyway, feeling that he had to be on his mettle – which was fair, Gervais, Mackenzie Crook, Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis were explosively good together – he made a fateful decision. 'I thought: 'I'll use my own accent, I'll play Finchy as a Yorkshireman so I don't have to think about anything except keeping up with the rest of them.' That was a big mistake, because it meant that everybody, for at least 10 years, thought that I was Finchy. That I wasn't acting; that was just my personality. So having people thinking you're Chris Finch, looking at you with amusement, but also a bit of disgust, a bit of fear. He's just such a shitter. It's not a nice skin!' It didn't end with regular human interactions, either – 'career-wise, it was a bit of pain. I just got offered wankers, racists, misogynists and homophobes.'
Before The Office, he was always having to recount his CV for people in the street – they'd come up and go, 'what have I seen you in?', and he'd have to size them up and figure out whether they remembered him from Goodnight Sweetheart or an episode of The Bill. He remembers thinking it would be nice to have something so major that nobody would have to ask. 'Be careful what you wish for, because then I got Finchy and I couldn't get rid of him for about 20 years. At least Galactus simply exists, he's a cosmic force. He doesn't do it out of malice. You can't really get much worse than Chris Finch.'
He remains a big fan of The Office, which I smoke out by getting him to adjudicate between the British and American versions – he didn't watch the US one for ages, because he caught snatches of it and thought: 'No, they're doing it wrong.' Five years ago, his daughter watched the whole thing and he realised, 'it's different, but it is good. Because I have a slightly twisted sense of humour, I prefer the British Office, it's darker. You would actually let Michael Scott [Gervais's US counterpart, played by Steve Carell] look after your 18-year-old daughter, whereas I'm not sure you'd let Ricky Gervais's character look after your 18-year-old daughter. Same with my character, he's a lot darker than Todd Packer, the American version. Whether that makes it better or worse, I don't know. It's nastier underneath, which I kind of like.'
The late 00s were taken up at least partly with the Harry Potter movies, in which he played the dark wizard Amycus Carrow. His son was 10 and his daughter was six when he shot Half-Blood Prince in 2008. It was the perfect age, you get the impression he'd have done it just so they could meet Daniel Radcliffe. He also got to hang out with Michael Gambon for days on end. 'He's the best storyteller in the world, ever. Joke-teller, raconteur, everything. He told me this joke that lasted a whole week; I could tell it in 15 seconds. It was one of the best weeks of my life.'
Nevertheless, he had no lines at all, 'a supporting artist, basically'. The producers enticed him in with the next two books, in which there's more meat on Carrow's bones. But when they came to make the astronomically long Deathly Hallows, parts one and two, the plot had been very slightly tweaked to remove the pivotal moment when his character spits in Professor McGonagall's face and unleashes hell. 'I did three Harry Potter films without saying a single line.'
As the father in The Witch, Robert Eggers's acclaimed, hypnotising horror movie, which won lots of indie film awards, including best director for Eggers at Sundance, Ineson felt that he'd got the first part with its own arc. This was 2015, when he was in his mid-40s, realising he actually was an actor, perhaps relatedly, at around the time the industry realised how good he was. He speaks so highly of his co-star, Kate Dickie – 'she should be a dame, she's that good,' he crescendoes a little surprisingly. But his collaboration with Eggers was intense. Ineson sat at the director's shoulder while the other actors were cast. 'It was a weird experience – it felt terribly unfaithful, as if I was cheating on my profession.' They worked together again on The Northman in 2022, which had a broader canvas visually and emotionally, but had the same feeling of The Witch, a film that had an immense amount of knowledge go into it, only a fraction of which you could pin down. 'I have got no idea how Rob has managed to read so much in his lifetime, it feels as if he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of almost every period in history.'
If Ineson was never prepared, post-Office, to give in to being typecast as a wanker, he's pretty comfortable with being a supervillain. 'I think with my size, face and voice, 90% of the time I've been on the bad guy side of the line anyway. I would be fighting a losing battle if I was trying to get myself into romcoms. Some things are beyond the realms of casting.' If The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a turning point, the difference is mainly one of scale. 'Although I've been involved with big films before, I've never played a character that is this important to the film and the franchise,' he says, with an amount of trepidation. It's true – there are other people in the movie (Pedro Pascal! Vanessa Kirby!), but if the villain doesn't work, nothing does. 'So if it doesn't make a profit, it's my fault? Is that what you're saying?', he says, mock petrified. The film is already doing fine at the box office. He should relax.