“A pretty grim place”: Why does ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ define Peter Capaldi’s issues with the British film industry?
Nobody on TV screens does angry shouting at people quite as well as Peter Capaldi, which is why it was something of a shame to hear that he turned down appearing on Celebrity Traitors, for it would have been magnificent to see him in full-boiled screaming rage mode, excoriating someone like Jason Manford and reducing him to a puddle of apologetic tears in a Scottish castle.
Sadly, that’s not going to happen because Capaldi says he doesn’t want to get any more famous than he already is, which, seeing as he used to be The Doctor, is quite famous. Instead, he’s doing another series of the Apple TV show Criminal Record, which is not about the latest album from The 1975, but it is, in fact, about two detectives at opposite ends of their careers, and it got excellent reviews the first time round.
It’s already been almost ten years since Capaldi finished whizzing about the place in an old police box though, and even longer than that since he won his Bafta for his brilliantly furious performance as government Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of it, and for the best part of the last decade, he has seemingly been concentrating on making shorter appearances in stuff and, by proxy, making them better.
An example of this was definitely when he joined Franz Ferdinand on stage at Glastonbury, but he has also put in some fantastically grumpy turns in two of the Paddington movies, plus he was great in one of the episodes from the most recent season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, playing the troubled elderly video game designer Cameron Walker in ‘Plaything’.
Capaldi hasn’t made a movie in five years, however, since 2021’s war drama Benediction and a role in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, and the difference between those films, the worlds in which they were made, is not lost on the Scot.
He told The Independent, “The Hollywood image of the movie business is all about ambition and high achievers like James Cameron, but the British film industry is much more about men who wear cravats and work with model trains and hope another series of Thomas the Tank Engine will be commissioned. That’s really what the British film industry is like. When it rains on a Tuesday at a British film studio, and there is no Angelina Jolie movie to make, and even My Family has gone, it can be a pretty grim place. But I love all that!”
Luckily for Capaldi, if he doesn’t fancy those wet Tuesdays, he is the kind of person with several strings to his bow, sometimes literally; as a musician, he has released two studio albums, and he also directs projects. In fact, few are aware that he actually won an Academy Award long before the public was really aware of him, all the way back in 1993 for a short film called Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Richard E Grant.
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The 1980s film Steven Spielberg called his career’s most underrated: “I love the movie, I really do”
Capaldi wrote and directed the surreal short, which tells the story of the author Kafka’s struggle to write his 1915 masterpiece The Metamorphosis, and blended it with the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart.
He picked up the Oscar for ‘Best Live Action Short Film’ for the piece at the awards in 1995, after which he spent a decade playing minor and supporting roles in TV and movies like Rowan Atkinson’s Bean.
