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John Simm interview: 'Fights? Well, I do try to avoid them'
As his two new TV dramas go head-to-head, John Simm tells Chris Harvey why he’s ready to leave conflict behind
John Simm often used to be described as chippy. He had run-ins with “spiteful, trouble-causing” journalists, got annoyed when he was passed over for Bafta nominations, claimed he “can’t be arsed laughing at some producer’s gags just to get a job”. He even quit drama school, saying it was “all b------s”, before returning the same day.
But this intensity also fuelled a series of brilliant performances in hit television dramas from the mid-Nineties on, from The Lakes to State of Play to Life on Mars. If you wanted someone to do eye-to-eye conflict playing “an ordinary guy in a terrible situation who finds himself at loggerheads with someone”, Simm was your man.
He still is. But the actor sipping a cappuccino opposite me in a London hotel, half-bearded and wearing a T-shirt, seems decidedly unchippy – in fact, he’s altogether laid-back. Simm thinks his younger self sprang naturally from his Northern, working-class roots. “I used to use it as a tool or a badge,” he says. “I guess my life now is very different from when I was growing up. I’ve been here since I was 18 and I’m 48 this year. I’ve only got the odd vowel left now, I think.”
I don’t doubt that the intensity is still there, though, just below the surface. Simm has a naked, emotional honesty that’s striking, but he’s steering clear of shooting his mouth off. He’s been pretty much absent from British TV for the past three years, concentrating instead on theatre and US television.
He popped up briefly last year in Doctor Who to reprise his take on The Master. When I tell him he looked like he was having fun in the role, there’s just the hint that he’s sensitive to criticism in his response: “A really lovely way of putting it, thanks”.
This year, though, we’re getting the full Simm, beginning with two heavyweight dramas from playwrights a generation apart, both kicking off at exactly the same time on Monday night. He plays an MP for the first time in David Hare’s fast-paced, state-of-the-nation thriller Collateral, while in Trauma, from Doctor Foster writer Mike Bartlett, he’s a bereaved father obsessed with the belief that a surgeon’s mistake led to the death of his son. “The only drawback is that both of them write seven-page scenes,” says Simm, “which is brilliant for an actor but difficult to film.”
Like Doctor Foster before it, Trauma focuses on a deep interpersonal conflict. Simm’s Dan Bowker has just been made redundant when his teenage son is stabbed by a jealous youth after he flirts with a girl. Adrian Lester’s successful consultant surgeon assures him that his son will be fine, but he dies on the operating table, and Bowker begins a campaign of intimidation against the medic.
For Simm, whose own son, Ryan, is 16, the hospital scenes took a heavy emotional toll. He forced himself to imagine himself in the situation to give the scenes an authenticity. “I think you have to… to dredge up that kind of emotion… I don’t think you can pretend… I would get quite down and have to ring him just to hear his voice. “And he got that. He could have just been like, ‘Oh for God’s sake’, but he was like, ‘I’m fine, I’m at home, I’ll see you in a bit’. So I could think, ‘Great, OK, good’. It was really weird.”
Simm lives in north London with his wife, actress Kate Magowan, and their children, Ryan and Molly, who’s nearly 11. I ask him if he worries about knife crime, and the different levels of violence among young people today. “Constantly,” he says. “I mean, it’s terrifying. My son, you know, I think I’m going to be worried for life. I don’t think that is ever going to end.”
Fathers and sons: “It’s a complicated relationship,” says Simm, who lost his father in 2015. Simm was playing Lennie in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at the National Theatre when it happened. “Even though you’re expecting it in a way from being that big,” (he mimes being a tot with his hand), “when it happened it was like it had just come and mugged me, and it still continues to mug me out of nowhere, every time I see a guitar or listen to a song that we used to play.”
He and his father had been close; they had performed together as a double act in the working men’s clubs of Lancashire playing songs by the Beatles and the Eagles, among others, from the time Simm was 12, until he left for London. “He was heartbroken when I left him,” Simm says. “It took him a while to come around; he would be a bit grumpy about it and say, ‘He’s a good actor, isn’t he, the other guy’, winding me up.”
Simm says he heard his father speak to him after his death. “I only missed about four shows,” he says, “which is odd because I think they were expecting me to miss more. I remember ringing to see how the understudy was doing, and being in the middle of all this grief, and I could actually hear his voice say to me, ‘Get back on stage, that’s your part’. My mum couldn’t quite understand that decision, but it was really cathartic, because even though I was playing a horrible monster, it was an escape to go to Pinterland for two hours every day.”
Simm grew up the elder brother of identical twin sisters in Nelson, near Burnley – once known as Little Moscow, for its early socialist leanings. He once thought, improbably, about a career in musical theatre but abandoned it for straight acting at the Drama Centre, in north London, which taught method acting in a former Methodist chapel.
He began getting work almost immediately after graduating, and broke through playing a screwdriver-wielding teenager in Cracker, and a wild teen opposite Andrew Lincoln in the film Boston Kickout in 1995. A major role in Jimmy McGovern’s The Lakes followed in 1997, then another in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland (1999), as well as a well-remembered turn opposite Danny Dyer in cult rave-era film Human Traffic in the same year.
It put him in the position of being both a fully loved-up member of the ecstasy generation and one of the young and talented up-and-comers defining the Britpop era. “It feels very strange that it’s so long ago,” Simm says, although, he adds, “The Nineties for me carried on well into the 2000s. It’s all a bit blurry really.” Did the optimism of that era wear off with the drugs, as it had for the Sixties generation? “Yeah, of course, there was a comedown,” he says. “The New Labour thing was all a false dawn, and the music before Britpop – like Primal Scream and the Stone Roses – was better.”
His former co-star Andrew Lincoln, of course, later achieved global success in The Walking Dead. Had there been a sense that Simm, like Blur, had been just too English to crack America? “I don’t know. I don’t think I tried really to crack America, unlike Oasis and Blur. It just didn’t go that way for me. It doesn’t really matter, does it? Damon Albarn is a genius and if they don’t get that, then that is their problem."
During his break from British television after appearing in The Village in 2014, he did appear in two American shows: the ghostly Intruders in 2014 and two series of comedy crime drama The Catch, which turned up here on Sky Living.
Simm built his reputation being picky about scripts and writers. “If I don’t think the writing’s very good, I just can’t do it unless I’m allowed to change all the dialogue,” he says. “I still would like to think that I wouldn’t take something just because it was a big pay cheque, but artistically s---.”
Certainly Collateral feels like the sort of project Simm would have taken during his unbreakable run of hit shows. It starts with what appears to be a contract hit, and opens out into a drama about illegal immigration, people trafficking and gay vicars. The starry cast includes Carey Mulligan as a pole vaulter-turned-detective and Billie Piper as the spoilt mother of Simm’s child (played by his real-life daughter, Molly).
For once, Simm said yes without even reading the script. I ask if it reminds him of State of Play, Paul Abbott’s 2003 drama in which he played a journalist investigating the death of a political researcher. “Absolutely,” he says. “When I eventually read it, I thought that it was the best script I had read of its kind since then.”
Simm still has that ability to lock into a character who’s in deep conflict with another. In real life, does he avoid conflict or engage with it? “Erm, well I try to avoid it but will absolutely engage with it. There’s been loads of conflict but I do not look for it, it’s not like I go out and have a fight every week, I try and avoid ’em, of course.”
Not chippy, then, but ready.
Collateral and Trauma both begin on Monday at 9pm, on BBC Two and ITV respectively