“I felt like a dick”: the years of his career Steve Coogan wished he hadn’t wasted
If you’re ever watching TV or a movie and you feel like you can hear the faintly decreasing noise of an ‘Ahaaaaaaaa’, then it may well be the sound of Steve Coogan finally escaping the shadow of Alan Partridge.
I say this with due deference, because Partridge is one of the finest comic creations in entertainment history, for more than thirty years now Coogan has expertly moulded him through different stages and ages, through live shows, radio shows, a movie, podcasts, TV shows done as documentaries and as light entertainment, and they’ve never dipped in standard; if anything ‘peak-Partridge’ came with the Mid Morning Matters shorts on Sky in the 2010s.
But over the past fifteen years or so Coogan has shown what an incredible talent he is outside of the world of Linton Travel Taverns and Lynne the PA. He is a prolific writer and actor that takes on different projects with a formidable range of genres, not afraid to take on roles that other people wouldn’t go within a mile of.
This period of Coogan really showing what he’s capable of probably began with his drama Philomena in 2013 which he co-wrote and starred in alongside Judi Dench, the film going on to win four Academy Award nominations including ‘Best Original Screenplay’ and three Golden Globe Award nominations.
But Coogan had been at the point of almost universal acclaim before, certainly in the UK, which opened up doors to Hollywood and a short-lived initial career in movies during which he just never seemed to convince. It wasn’t through lack of opportunity, though; between 2004 and 2008, he starred in several big-budget films with some of the best-known names in the business, most famously alongside Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Around the World in 80 Days, and with Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum.
Of that time, Coogan told The Guardian: “I went to America and did mediocre parts in mediocre films. I never did it because I wanted to. I did it because I was told that this is what I was supposed to do. And I didn’t feel comfortable. I felt like a dick.”
And during that period, when Coogan came back to do more Partridge, or to start his superb culinary/comedy/drama show with Rob Brydon called The Trip, he seemed far more at home and much more in a comfort zone. But Coogan evidently isn’t one to do that for long, and although he will still dip into Hollywood occasionally, the majority of his best work in recent years has been on these shores.
His performance as twisted 1970s TV presenter Jimmy Saville in The Reckoning was quite jaw-dropping, in a role that scarce few actors would ever have considered, and he was rightly nominated for a BAFTA for it. He’s also combined his talent for mimicry and acting with the highly acclaimed Stan & Ollie in 2018, and continued his career-parallel with his comedy hero Peter Sellers with a national theatre tour of Dr Strangelove.
Coogan has plenty more to come too, he is an intriguing add to the fourth season of the stylish whodunnit drama The White Lotus on HBO, he’s in the middle of filming a fifth season of The Trip with Brydon, and he’s about to lead a new Netflix series called Legends, telling the true story of a group of British customs officials in the early 1990s tasked with infiltrating drug dealing gangs.
