Ryan Sampson on creating the “unhinged” second season of ‘Mr Bigstuff’: “The series is a pretty intense ride”
Before speaking with Ryan Sampson, the creator and star of the Sky Original comedy Mr Bigstuff, Far Out was champing at the bit to ask him about one critical aspect of the show: Danny Dyer. As Lee, a bombastic wideboy geezer who hides his crippling insecurities and deep trauma beneath waves of cockney bluster, Dyer’s performance is both a foul-mouthed riot and unexpectedly emotionally affecting.
It’s no wonder that the actor, who had been somewhat lost in an EastEnders vortex for nearly a decade before Mr Bigstuff, won the Bafta award for ‘Male Performance in a Comedy Programme’ in March for his excellent turn in the show. Now, with its second season on the horizon, it was time for Sampson to reveal what it’s really like to work with the host of The Real Football Factories and Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family. Spoiler: it’s a blast.
“It’s intense and very fun,” Sampson answered, immediately grinning from ear to ear at the mention of Dyer’s name. “He’s a very high-energy man. When you’re with him, you just feel like, ‘I don’t know where this is going to end, but I’m going along with you right now’. It feels like you’re slightly in the zone where anything might happen. I mean, a night out with him can go absolutely anywhere.”
However, according to Sampson, who plays Dyer’s meek brother Glen in the show and writes every episode, when the Marching Powder star commits to a project, his inimitable joie de vivre isn’t only applicable to boozy nights out and larking around on set. Instead, he has an uncanny ability to instil a sense of purpose in every cast and crew member, leading to a genuine sense of pride and excitement in their work. Sampson recalled thinking, “Oh my God, we’re really doing it!” when Dyer had a particularly exuberant day on set, and smiled, “It’s an amazing energy that he’s got”.
Of course, despite Dyer’s boisterous, heartbreaking presence being a massive part of what makes Mr Bigstuff work, it’s by no means a one-man show. Sampson’s Glen is the perfect counterbalance to Lee’s bravado, and the show often seems to be a study in how two brothers can start on opposite ends of the masculinity spectrum, before events conspire to bring them closer to meeting in the middle.
In season one, Lee is seemingly on the run from some bad people, and blows into his placid carpet salesman brother’s life like a hurricane. As the two estranged siblings struggle to be part of each other’s worlds again, they both go on journeys of self-discovery. Lee reckons with how the death of their father, whom he based much of his overtly laddish personality on, messed him up badly, while Glen discovers he’s not as much of a pushover as everyone thinks, and also finds a sexual kink that brings him closer to fiancée Kirsty.
For Sampson, this exploration of the societal expectations of masculinity was a theme he always wanted to embed in Mr Bigstuff, which “starts off quite sitcom-y, and then gets progressively dramatic and heavy as the series goes along. I wanted to make something which drew you in by a very fun premise, and then you can use that narrative to take you to some quite dramatic places.”
As far as masculinity and gender go, Sampson mused, “We all feel like we need to fit into a sort of archetype. But it feels really interesting to me that in the last few years, the whole idea of nonbinary, for example, has become so prevalent. Of people going, ‘We need to redefine the idea of what it is to be any gender, whoever you are’.”
Sampson also wanted to interrogate the idea of Glen “struggling with erectile dysfunction” until he realises “he has a kink for Kirsty dominating him”. On the surface, this scenario is loaded with comic potential, and Mr Bigstuff does mine it for laughs, but crucially, Sampson never wanted the show to be laughing at Glen. “I’ve never seen a male character having that sort of experience in a TV show, and it not being the butt of the joke,” Sampson explained, “He is one of our central characters, and he has this thing going on in his life. I don’t know. It feels a little bit like an unexplored area.”
For Sampson, who has been a star in British comedy for years thanks to his roles in Plebs and Brassic, and even portrayed iconic funnyman Dudley Moore in two episodes of The Crown, writing comedy is all about finding the funniest vehicle with which to examine the topics that interest you.
“I like using big, properly funny jokes as a foil to get your messaging shimmering in the background,” he nodded. “I like comedy when it’s got an undertone of slight bittersweet sadness, loss and that sort of thing, because it makes the comedy funnier. I want to make stuff about normal, real people with what you could see as small, mundane lives who are forced to go on unexpectedly big adventures.”
One of the most exciting aspects of returning for a second season of Mr Bigstuff was that Sampson felt it was an opportunity to see how far he could take his characters. At the end of season one, Lee and Glen discover their father isn’t actually dead at all, but instead abandoned their family to live in Tenerife. So, season two becomes an “unhinged” quest for the brothers to find their deadbeat dad—a quest that becomes increasingly “outrageous, chaotic, and frenetic” as it goes along.
“It takes them to really weird places,” Sampson chuckled. However, because he laid the groundwork in season one, he knew he could push things as far as they could go into the absurd without breaking the show’s established reality.
As for whether Sampson feels any pressure with season two, now that Mr Bigstuff is a recognised entity with a Bafta under its belt, he took a beat before answering. “I mean, you feel the pressure of wanting to be able to maintain that and build on it,” he admitted, “but at the same time, you’re kind of validated by going, ‘Oh, it seems like my sense of humour is shared with other people’. So, I just need to lean into that and trust my instincts a bit.”
Indeed, in many ways, the show has been the ideal outlet for Sampson to find his voice as a writer, after years of acting being his primary concern. Over the course of making two seasons of the show, he has concluded, “As a writer, you can do all the courses and classes and read all the books, but ultimately it comes down to what your taste is and how honest you can be about what you find interesting or funny.”
Once he understood that the show could only improve the more he put his specific tastes into it, and realised that Sky was amenable to him doing that, he could express himself more fully. “I think I’ve been allowed to make it quite niche in that respect,” he mused, “and it’s getting progressively more specific and odd as the series goes along”.
Should season two go over as well as season one, it stands to reason there may be more Mr Bigstuff on Sampson’s horizon. While he wouldn’t be drawn on how long he foresees the show lasting, he did let slip that he sees the sweet spot in British comedy as somewhere between Plebs’ five seasons and Brassic’s seven. “I don’t really like open-ended series,” he explained, “I feel like part of telling a story is that you have a very specific ending in mind”.
In the future, the 39-year-old would love to keep creating his own material, and in an ideal world, this would enable him to “push gently towards things that are longer form and maybe have a bit more drama with comedy in it. That would be my ultimate kind of goal”.
As of now, though, Sampson is happy that Mr Bigstuff has been welcomed into the hearts of so many viewers, and that it seems to have won Dyer a modicum of respect within the industry and with audiences that he’s lacked over the years. “I don’t understand why he’s not more valued in this country,” Sampson declared. “In America, they value their homegrown working-class talent, right? You can be an icon, no matter where you’re from. I think he’s as big a homegrown talent as you can get. We don’t have many people like that, so I’m glad people are taking him more seriously now. Because it’s about time.”
Mr Bigstuff Series 2 launches on Sky and streaming service NOW on Thursday, July 24th.
