In a taxi with...Martin Freeman (original) (raw)

Updated: 15:00 EDT, 17 July 2010

The versatile actor – and thoroughly modern Dr Watson – talks Victorian tailoring and the upside of playing bad boys

We pick up Martin Freeman from his Hertfordshire country house, to where the actor moved two years ago to escape fans of The Office ringing his doorbell in North London at all hours to say hello to his alter ego Tim Canterbury.

Although he’s resigned to the fact that ‘people will always shout “Tim” at me in the street’, Martin couldn’t be more of a contrast to that suburban everyman persona. He’s a splendidly dandified sight in a velvet-collared plaid Crombie overcoat: ‘I would wear a full-length cape if I could get away with it – I do love a good swirl in a fog,’ he declares dramatically. ‘And I nearly bought a Prussian pillbox hat because I wanted to look like Great Uncle Bulgaria from the Wombles, much to my wife’s dismay. But she’s an actor too, so she knows all about these strange urges.’

Ironically, Martin couldn’t indulge his passion for Victorian tailoring for his latest part as Dr Watson in the new adaptation Sherlock, since it’s a modern-day reworking of Conan Doyle’s detective stories by Doctor Who writers (and Holmes fanatics) Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss. But he did get to do a lot of rooftop chases in Soho alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes. ‘I loved all that action stuff,’ says Martin, a former teenage member of the British national squash squad after overcoming asthma and a hip disorder. There’s been a sense of catch-up for him ever since.

‘I would wear a full-length cape if I could get away with it – I do love a good swirl in a fog’

Born in Aldershot, Martin is the son of a naval officer father who died when Martin was ten. His mother, Philomena, had always wanted to be an actress, but marriage, five children and then early widowhood got in the way, so he’s fulfilling her dream.

Now 38, the versatile Martin has worked almost nonstop since leaving Central drama school nearly two decades ago, on everything from Ali G Indahouse and the remake of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Fellow Office star Patrick Baladi, who played David Brent’s boss Neil, was in the same college year.

‘Patrick is good at looking as if he has just stepped off a yacht, whereas intensity is the story of my life,’ says Martin, so memorable as Machiavellian political intriguer Lord Shaftesbury in BBC1’s Charles II: The Power and the Passion in 2003. As for nudity, he was cast as a porn star’s embarrassed stand-in for Love Actually, a lusty Rembrandt in Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching and as a wife-swapper in the forthcoming romcom Swinging With the Finkels.

His darkest role was in Channel 4’s Men Only in 2000 as a member of a gang who rape a nurse. ‘But I will always be grateful to that job, because I met my wife [Married Single Other star Amanda Abbington, 36] in the cast and we fell in love,’ he adds, explaining that actors like to compensate for the heaviness of certain parts by creating a friendly atmosphere off set. When he made the midlife-crisis film The Good Night in 2006 as the unhappy husband of Gwyneth Paltrow and lover of Penélope Cruz, he bonded with Cruz by teaching her Cockney rhyming slang and British swear-words ‘in the back of my car on set – and she was up for a laugh’.

But the biggest laugh of his career, he says, remains The Office, a BBC2 classic of observational comedy. ‘I loved everything about that job, and it made a massive difference to our careers,’ says Martin.

His home life seems equally sorted: a son and a daughter whose names he prefers not to reveal and two long-haired dachshunds called Archie and Jodie to complete the domestic bliss. ‘Amanda has calmed me down in the way that love does,’ says this self-styled grump, who admits he channels ‘the rage in me’ into acting. ‘Name anything – high-definition TV, computer obsolescence – and I’m pretty much annoyed by it. But I’m working on that, because if you’re being paid more than anyone in your family ever earned to do something that you love, then you really should be nice…’

The three-part drama Sherlock will begin on BBC1 next Sunday at 9pm