John Simm: ‘Finding out my dad was not my biological father? It explained a lot'

Telegraph

19-04-2025

The first thing I ask John Simm is whether his new character, Gray, an angry, washed-up record producer in Chris Lang's new family drama I, Jack Wright, was written especially for him. Not that Simm is washed-up in any way, rather that across a career stretching more than 30 years he's established a reputation for playing volatile, pugilistic, screwed-up men. Yet Simm is ­flustered by the question. 'Hang on, what's this interview for again?' he asks. 'Oh, you mean Gray. Not Grace. Sorry. I need to get my head straight.'
You can understand the confusion. The week after we speak, the police procedural Grace, in which Simm plays the eponymous sensitive detective, returned to ITV for a fifth season. The highly bankable star of Life on Mars and Doctor Who has played the 'very straight, decent copper' since 2021 and the role has been his longest consistent job – a godsend, he says, in an increasingly budget-stricken TV industry in which many of his actor friends are finding themselves 'out of work'.
Simm, a restless, self-confessed workaholic, is one of the lucky ones. He never seems to stop. 'Much as I love playing Grace, who is a very good man, I sometimes find myself desperate to break out and do something else.'
Hence Gray, who is not a good man at all. It's a vintage Simm part – a nasty piece of work who tasted success during the then roaring music industry in the 1990s, but who squandered it on drugs and booze and is now in debt to the tune of 50 grand to a local bruiser, who often likes to remind Gray of the fact by punching him in the face.
Estranged from his obscenely wealthy father (played by Trevor Eve), Gray has great hopes of a ­lifeline when his dad dies in an apparent suicide. Yet the titular Wright has instead split his wealth between his granddaughter and various charitable causes, violently upending the expectations of his remaining feuding relations and leaving Gray, whose 1990s swagger is long passed its sell-by-date, a ­bitter desperate mess.
'I don't think Gray's a bad person, I just think he's had a really difficult life,' says Simm of a flailing manchild who finds himself, along with the rest of the family, a suspect when Wright's death is revealed to be murder. 'At heart he's a damaged little boy who felt rejected by his parents and who took the wrong path. And if you are in the music business, that's easy to do. It's easy for the world to leave you behind.'
Simm knows a bit of what he speaks. Having grown up playing gigs with his musician dad in the working men's clubs of the north-west, he spent the early 1990s in his band Magic Alex, touring with Echo and the Bunnymen and playing venues such as the Brixton Academy and the Royal Albert Hall.
'I saw a lot of casualties,' he says of a scene on which he also drew heavily for his roles in Human Traffic, about the late 1980s club culture, and Michael Winterbottom's 2002 Madchester comedy 24 Hour Party People. 'There was a lot of drugs, a lot of excess.' Does he see in Gray a case of there but for the grace of God? 'I guess in a way I did feel a bit of that. We nearly got signed, but by that point I was working as an actor, and starring in [ Jimmy McGovern's ] The Lakes. I'd chosen acting instead.'
In truth, it's hard to see much shred of screwy psychology in the amiable Simm, who is married with two children, and who cuts a ­surprisingly small and slight figure in the London hotel where we meet, almost dwarfed by the overstuffed armchair in which he is sitting. Some performers channel hidden bits of themselves into the parts they play; Simm opts for characters that take him as far from his seemingly equable, stable, untroubled life as possible.
For many years in the late 1990s and throughout the Noughties he was TV's leading pin-up in painfully-flawed characters, probing the wayward excesses of masculinity in blistering roles from the ­gambling addict Danny in The Lakes to a disturbed teenager in Cracker, his edge sharpened by his self-described reputation as a 'chippy northerner' who could be tricky in interviews and prickly about his fame. That Simm is long gone – 'it was more a reflection of who I was then', he says of a youthful penchant for being twitchily defensive, although a pathological shyness also had a lot to do with it.
He prefers to see the characters he plays simply as acting exercises in understanding. 'Hamlet, Macbeth, [Crime and Punishment's] Raskolnikov, Caligula: the f--k-ups are simply more fun to play. The point is to always find the humanity where you can.' He's careful never to push it too far. 'Some actors take the part home with them. But I go down the pub and have a beer. You have to remember it's not you.'
The one exception was Crime, the 2021 TV adaptation of Irvine Welsh's foul and filthy detective caper in which he played – in a turn of wincingly mesmeric grotesquerie – the psychotic paedophile Mr Confectioner. 'He had a milky eye, so I tried to shed him each night when I took it out,' Simm says, squirming. 'But it was very hard. I always said I'd never play that kind of part. I find it abhorrent; I've got kids of my own. To be honest, I only took it because it was so different from Grace.'
It was while filming the fifth season of Grace and also wrapping shooting on Jack Wright that Simm discovered, on ITV's DNA Journey, that his biological father was not his beloved dad Raymond, who had died in 2015, but a long-dead club manager from Lancashire called Terence.
The revelation both rocked his world and didn't surprise him. 'It explained a lot. I always felt guilty for feeling a bit different to my family and for leaving at 16 [for a three-year performing arts course in Blackpool]. So when I found out, I felt vindicated. I hadn't been going mad.'
What did throw him was the realisation he would have met Terence on numerous occasions. 'He used to run a couple of the clubs where me and my dad played. I'd have shaken his hand, he would have watched us and paid us, and he'd have probably seen me on TV. And yet none of us knew anything. That's a crazy Life on Mars, Back to the Future-style scenario.' He's okay about it now. 'I'm not damaged by it. My dad is still my dad.'
He still sometimes watches Life on Mars, the much-loved genre-hopping BBC show in which he played the time-travelling policeman Sam Tyler. 'You get nostalgic. Me and Phil [Glenister, who portrayed the distinctly non-woke, straight-talking cop Gene Hunt] sometimes get together with a bottle of wine and stick it on the TV.'
There were rumours the programme would make a return, but Simm says the idea got lost in development. He thinks that's probably for the best. 'As Phil says, you couldn't have a character like Gene on TV anymore. You'd have to water him down. We got away with it then because I'd roll my eyes at everything he said, but you can't do that now.'
He finds it hard looking at his younger self. 'I watched The Lakes again recently and thought, 'My God! My God! I don't look like that anymore!' I was lamenting those cheekbones.' He's accepted he's unlikely these days to be offered the young firebrands he made his name with at the start of his career, although there's definitely something of the arrested twentysomething agitator about Gray. 'I get it. I think, 'Okay, I'm now the dad. Soon I'll be the grandad.''
He likes to slip in the stage work wherever he can, partly because he trained in classical theatre and partly because he gets appalling stage fright if he leaves it too long. He once fantasised about faking a heart attack during the West End run of Speaking in Tongues in order to avoid going on. 'And then suddenly it was my cue and I had to get on with it.'
Getting on with what he is there to do is, in fact, very much Simm's style – a work ethic engrained in him by his father, and honed by the uncompromising demands of those early northern working-class audiences. 'They'd worked all week, they had one night out, they wanted to be entertained, and so if you weren't very good you got booed off.' It's been a warning to always be prepared ever since. 'We've had a spate of Hollywood stars doing shows in the West End and not getting great reviews, although I should say I haven't seen any of the plays. But they must get out there and think, 'Oh s--t, I didn't train for this'. Instead they just assumed they could do it. And you can't if you haven't put in the work.'
He has no patience with actors, particularly younger ones, who have a flakier relationship to commitment. 'I'd come down on anyone at work who isn't prepared. I'd be so p---ed off. When someone doesn't know their lines, I find that unforgivable.' To some extent he sees this in his 18-year-old daughter. 'Me and my wife [the actress Kate Magowan] are constantly telling her: 'In our day, you just had to get on with it.' But then I'm from the power-through generation. And I learned that from my dad.'