Jim Broadbent: 'I love being someone else'

I defy anyone who interviews Jim Broadbent not to end up clawing at the walls half an hour in. The Oscar-winning British actor isn’t unfriendly or rude – just spectacularly hard work. His answers tend to be polite three-worders, accompanied by a courteous nod and a smile that says: “We both know that I’d rather not be doing this, but I’m trying my best. Honest.”

He is, and it’s possible that the problem is not so much his character as my expectations. If there’s one British actor I’d rather like to have over for tea, a man who would – surely – dispense paternal advice from the confines of a Fair Isle cardigan badly in need of a sweater-shave, it would be Broadbent.

Thanks to the roles he has played, the 61-year-old comes with certain adjectives attached: compassionate, funny, fumbling, sometimes even fun. He was Judi Dench’s tender husband turned carer in the biopic Iris, Bridget Jones’s genial father in the film version of the book, and the avuncular, put-upon Tom in Mike Leigh’s latest film, Another Year. The man with the agreeably crumpled face, sitting opposite me and nursing a cup of coffee in a Soho office should be bonhomie personified – yet he’s anything but.

We’re here to talk about another benign fictional character, Logan Mountstuart, currently being played with poignant understatement by the actor in the Channel 4 adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. Broadbent is perfectly cast as the latter-day Logan Mountstuart (the writer is portrayed in his younger years by Sam Claflin and Matthew Macfadyen), now retired and living in rural France, who looks back quizzically at his life, in which he has been swept along by many of the great events of the 20th century.

Did Broadbent enjoy the book? “Yeah,” he says quietly, “lovely book”. What was it he particularly liked? “I love a really good storyline.” Does he – and I’m aware that I’m pushing things here – feel that British drama is lacking good storylines? He pauses. “I think so,” he pauses again. “Yes, probably. I don’t know.”

I take a deep breath. What was it about Mounstuart’s character that drew him in? “Actually,” he admits with visible effort, “I’d read the script first so I was worried about reading the book, knowing how much screenplays tend to leave out. I like the character’s general attitude. He’s non-judgmental and doesn’t blame other people for the life he’s had. He’s got a very good heart but he’s not perfect.” He considers this awhile. “I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we’re also all capable of a sudden magnanimity.”

This burst of garrulousness (relatively speaking) is tantalising. It’s obvious that Broadbent is bright and perceptive – eloquent, even, once he gets going. Emboldened, I ask him to explain the thrill of acting, the shot you get from pretending to be someone else. “It’s sort of second nature,” he replies, bemused. “I do love trying to be someone quite other, though, and doing things that it would never occur to me to do. I would never have thought of playing John Bayley in Iris, for example, and when Peter Morgan suggested I play Lord Longford [in the 2006 TV drama, Longford], I thought that was a mad idea. But impersonating people, taking on all of their characteristics is…” he tails off, “well, enjoyable, I suppose.”

Broadbent is nothing if not versatile, ricocheting between big budget Hollywood films like Moulin Rouge, Gangs of New York, Indiana Jones IV and the Harry Potter movies, quirky British independents (Another Year marked his seventh collaboration with Mike Leigh) and small theatre productions. Woody Allen, (“one of the least neurotic directors I’ve ever worked with”) rang him up personally to offer him Bullets over Broadway.

But despite Hollywood’s constant courting, Broadbent has never contemplated moving to the US, preferring to live a quiet life in the Lincolnshire home he shares with Anastasia Lewis, his painter wife of 23 years.

“I like reflecting the culture I understand best,” he explains, “spotting the idiosyncrasies of British people and revealing them to an audience in a way that amuses is what I find fun.”

There’s logic behind that natural inclination toward British film too. “In Hollywood films everything is tidied up at the end,” he stutters, “with clean lines and clean character definitions. It’s sort of unsatisfying. You see some wonderful Hollywood films that just sell out in the last 10 minutes, which is so frustrating. Still, we have other problems, and one of them is trying to please American audiences with a sort of pastel version of those same films.”

On the subject of his craft and the roles he chooses to take on, Broadbent can be quite talkative. Question him on the reality of his daily life and his celebrity (or anti-celebrity) and he tends to clam up completely. “I don’t think I’m a celebrity in any way,” he shrugs. “The whole celebrity thing only becomes a problem if you put yourself out there and are then deemed to be suitable for gossip or tabloid interest.”

He is frequently recognised in the street, “but it’s never a problem.” It doesn’t even bother him when people mistake him for someone else, he assures me, someone they think they know. “That does happen: I was once asked whether I was in the Kent police force.”

There is something everyman-like about the son of two pacifists – a furniture maker and sculptor – from Wickenby, Lincolnshire. With both parents keen amateur dramatists, Broadbent grew up admiring great character actors like Paul Newman, Leonard Rossiter and Cary Grant. Unlike so many actors, however, he was never “the young show-off” at school.

This confirms what I’m beginning to suspect: that Broadbent may simply be quite shy. “It’s funny because I used to enjoy performing and would even force my way to the front, but in life, not so much. It’s a different thing somehow.” For the first time since we sat down together, I’m riveted. How can he explain that divide in his personality to a normal person? “I don’t really understand it myself,” he smiles, apologetic. “I’ve never been an extrovert in daily life.”

I remember an interview, given several years ago, in which Broadbent spoke briefly of a twin sister who died at birth. In it he questioned whether there was any truth to the idea that the bereaved twin can inherit another, contrasting set of characteristics. Does he believe that’s the case? “I just don’t know,” he says uneasily. “I think that notion was just something I mentioned… but you never quite know. They did say that I cried a lot in my first few weeks, because you haven’t got the little one there that you had tucked up against you for all that time.”

Not that there was anything tortured about his childhood years, he insists. “There was never a problem, but I was always aware of it — I always knew. What’s funny is that I never had any sort of grief. There are societies you can join and 'share your pain’ now, but what would you talk about? I suppose you could join one of those groups and all weep together,” he sighs.

But his loss occurred before the days of regressive therapy, and rather than brood on the past, Broadbent moved to London and got on with the business of becoming an actor. “I decided then that if it wasn’t working by the time I was 30, then I’d do something else. Luckily, everything was all right by then.” “All right” is putting it mildly. His award-winning talent shone through from the outset, and he is now that rare thing: an actor who has never been out of work.

Although he joined the Ugly Agency when he started out (“I never got a single job – maybe I wasn’t ugly enough”) he believes that it was in part his physique that allowed him to be viewed in so many different lights by casting directors. “I’ve been seen as frightening and gloomy and funny and light-hearted.” And literary, I volunteer, “but also as someone who has never read a book. I think I have quite a chameleon quality.”

The best supporting actor Oscar he won for Iris that sits “amongst other knick-knacks” on a shelf in his office didn’t change his life (“To win an Oscar in the first place you’ve obviously been doing all right”). He may have been offered a greater variety of roles since then, but “there are only a limited quantity of good scripts out there anyway.”

He is thankful, at least, for the peace of mind success has brought him. “It’s nice not to have to worry about your career and choices. And now that I’m established I don’t have to have any resentment towards other people doing better than me, or get into a state about status.”

Towards the end of our interview, we’re both reduced to a lot of effusive nodding. I no longer feel aggrieved that Broadbent isn’t what I expected and wanted him to be. That we feel duped when actors fail to be as charismatic as their on-screen personas is our problem, not theirs, and perhaps what makes this particular actor unique is that he pours every last drop of personality into the roles he plays. I felt bereaved when I reached the last page of Any Human Heart – as though I had lost someone who had become dear to me. As I shook Broadbent’s hand, I felt exactly the same way.

Any Human Heart is out on DVD and Blu-ray from 27th December, Universal Playback