Timothy Spall: A bloke for all seasons

When Timothy Spall plays losers and twerps, he can make us care about them. It's welcome proof that, in a world of Jude Laws, good looks are very far from everything.

Timothy Spall looks like a bulldog in a wig. He has pleading saucer eyes and fleshy jowls. His mouth is a sparrow's bottom; his teeth are splinters. His mousy hair is a tad too long. Yet on screen his lopsided features guarantee an honesty and emotional rawness.

He wouldn't have it any other way. "Everyone wants to see good-looking young folk," he says in his rasping Sarf London accent. "But the majority of us aren't action heroes. I play people the way they are rather than the way they want to be, and show how the ordinary can become extraordinary."

He's 44, and an unofficial muse to Mike Leigh and Stephen Poliakoff. This year saw his first retrospective at the Cambridge Film Festival. Last year he was awarded an OBE. "Yeah, I was chuffed about those. It was a bit of a laugh. I'd be lying if I didn't say it made me feel very venerable for about five minutes."

We're sitting in a hotel bar in the shadow of Big Ben. Noon has just struck and Spall is clutching a half of lager. He's wearing black trousers and a black shirt open almost to the waist revealing some pale chest hairs. He confesses to a hangover. "I was out in Soho last night being a self-conscious Bohemian. I bumped into an old friend from Rada. I wanted to throw in the towel but instead it got wrapped round my neck. Hur. Hur. Hur."

From boring Barry in Auf Wiedersehen Pet to restaurateur Aubrey in Leigh's Life is Sweet ("duck in chocolate sauce, anyone?") Spall's success has come from playing losers. He's like Eddie the Eagle, Scott of the Antarctic, the England football team. It's one of the reasons the British love him.

Yet the real Spall, you realise instantly, is very far from the downtrodden "gits in cardies" he portrays. The man radiates conviviality. A few years ago one snobbish interviewer accused him of burping and farting and being "almost deliberately oikish". Certainly I too detect a quiet belch but my impression is one of slightly chaotic joie de vivre. Not only is Spall charming, he's interesting too, with that rare ability to be both eloquent and unpretentious when he discusses his craft.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Spall gives the impression that he enjoys interviews. "I suppose the work should speak for itself but everyone's interested in other people's lives. And somehow actors' lives should be charmed. I live in Forest Hill [unglamorous corner of south-east London] and the other day some little girls in a shop said 'What are you doing here? Why don't you live somewhere else?' I said 'Like where?' and they thought for a minute and said 'Bromley?' "

He's interrupted by James Nesbitt, the Irish actor from Cold Feet. Both men are here to promote Lucky Break, the new film by Peter Cattaneo. Tonight is the première. They shake hands effusively. "All right, mate? Hur. Hur. You know I can't make it tonight? Yeah I know, it's bollocks. I've got a night shoot. Yeah for Mike Leigh. My sixth film for him. See ya later, mate." He turns to me grinning: "Lovely bloke."

The film is about a group of prisoners who put on a musical to aid their escape. In a cast that reads like a Who's Who of British movies, Spall gives a vintage performance as a man used by friends as an unwitting drugs mule. He's bullied by the screws and senses that his girlfriend is losing interest. In a comedy, he's a reminder that prisons are not usually funny places.

In Intimacy, his other film currently on release, the other stars have notoriously graphic sex. Spall plays a good-natured cuckold. "I don't get my clothes off you'll be glad to hear." But doesn't he ever wish it was him rolling around in the buff? "Nah. There's nothing like all those lights to make your willy shrivel. Know what I mean? But I don't want to play romantic leads – although a few character leads would be nice. I'm just not built for them, and to tell the truth I don't have much interest in them."

It's not just that Spall is the master of conveying pathos. He also has a boundless curiosity, a fascination for the mundane. "I'm so intrigued by other people. Recently I got into this long conversation with a bloke in a bar who sold water filters. He thought I was taking the piss, but I was genuinely interested. I think that's why I'm drawn to pariahs – it's the fact that everyone has a story to tell. I want the audience to think 'What a twerp', but then to think 'But I understand why he's like that.' "

Spall is without doubt a dazzling conversationalist, peppering his anecdotes with literary and historical references. It's a tendency that the same snob who interviewed him felt was at odds with Spall's childhood, on a council estate in Battersea, the third of four sons of a postal clerk and a hairdresser.

"I didn't have much of an education – my school wasn't bad, but it wasn't academic. In a sense I do feel a bit uneducated but I have been educated by my job. A lot of people are put off Shakespeare because they associate it with doing their homework on a Sunday night, but I didn't have those preconceptions. I was in the RSC by the time I was 21, so I had the opportunity to do Shakespeare and Chekhov and Brecht and to learn about them and the political and artistic movements of the time."

Originally, Spall planned either to go to art school or join the army. "I was Corporal Spall in the cadets, drilling and stripping guns down and I enjoyed it, although I don't think it had anything to do with a desire to shoot people and defend the realm, more to do with the fact that there's a certain theatricality in being a soldier." He approached a careers officer who told him to lose weight. "I thought 'You cheeky bastard.' But in fact being fat saved me." Instead, a teacher impressed by his performance in the Wizard of Oz at school did something unheard of: advised a pupil to go to drama school. "It was all I needed to hear."

On his first day at Rada he was mistaken for the window cleaner. Soon, however, he was winning all the prizes. A piece of graffiti read: "Spall's a fat git." Someone else added: "Yes, but he's working for the RSC and you're not." In 1983, his promising career went stellar with Auf Wiedersehen Pet. "That put the kibosh on my anonymity. The day after the first episode I was sitting in the pub and some bloke came up and said 'What are you looking so miserable for with all that money?' The next thing I knew I was being mobbed in Tesco.

"A lot of people say it was that show that made me, but in fact it nearly broke me. After the second series I was out of work for nearly a year. I think people assumed I couldn't do anything else."

Slowly, work began to trickle back. There were roles in Frank Stubbs Promotes and Outside Edge – both above-average sitcoms but not meaty enough to prevent Spall from feeling slightly jaded.

Then in 1996 came his breakthrough role as Maurice, the high-street photographer in Secrets and Lies. It was a masterly performance that made flesh of Henry Thoreau's words about the mass of men leading "lives of quiet desperation". "Ironically, there was nothing grotesque about Maurice. He was just an ordinary, decent bloke and my favourite part as well as the one that did the most for me."

The night before Spall was due to go to Cannes to promote the film he was diagnosed with leukaemia. "Yeah, that was a bit of a bungee jump into hell." He chortles nervously and avoids eye contact. Then he stares at me directly. "But you do tend to think a bit more about things when you've nearly pegged it. It certainly made me a better actor. A bit of suffering. It makes the cut of your cloth more textured.

"Of course, I still have my frivolous and ridiculous moments but something like that does make you a bit more serious. Terrible things happen to you and you know you are better when you can engage with the ordinariness of life again. Work, life, pettiness cure you. But at the same time nothing will ever be the same again."

Does he believe in God? "Deep in my heart I think there's something. It's the power of good. The power of love. Love can't be an invention just to make people shag. There's something more than that really."

Spall met Shane 20 years ago and married her four months later. They have three children. She has a reputation as being his fiercest defender. When someone once made a joke about Spall's accent at an award ceremony, she followed the offender on stage and called him an unprintable name. When he was in hospital, "annoying himself" with his cheery façade, she regulated the visitors. "It's easy when you're ill. You're the star of the movie. It's worse for the people watching you copping it."

When he received the all clear, nearly a year later, he discovered that Secrets and Lies had "worked its magic" for him. His next role in Our Mutual Friend won a Bafta nomination. It was followed by parts in Ken Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost, Chicken Run, Leigh's Topsy-Turvy and Poliakoff's Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers. After the next Leigh film, he's booked for a revival of Auf Wiedersehen Pet. "I was a bit worried it would be a cynical attempt at exhumation, but the script's wonderful and all the original cast is in it so it would have been churlish to refuse."

In an image-obsessed industry, Spall had long accepted that he would never make it in Hollywood. "I'd always said I was never going to go there unless I was asked. It didn't appeal to me, the idea of shuffling around and presenting myself like some kind of starlet, especially at my advanced age. I associated the place with things that were overblown and overrated."

Recently, however, both sides have started to soften. He has a part in Rock Star, soon to be released, starring Jennifer Aniston and Mark Wahlberg. "I couldn't help be excited about it. On the second night I was driving down Sunset Strip into the sunset and thinking 'Jesus Christ. I'm in 'ollywood!' And Mark and Jennifer were both delightful and very serious. They really knew their stuff. Mark watched Life is Sweet in his trailer and his bodyguard Kip greeted me by starting to do my big shouting speech from Secrets and Lies. He said Mark had made him learn it as an audition speech. I realised it's not pure luck that these people are where they are. They do their homework."

Recently, he did a cameo in Vanilla Sky, the film on which Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz famously met. Spall claims to know nothing about the nature of their relationship. "But Tom Cruise. What a nice fella." As Spall says this, his eyes narrow and his teeth flash. It's an uncanny take off of Cruise's vulpine grin. He's not even aware of what he's doing. But for a moment, I swear, Timothy Spall is the most handsome man in the world. If he ever were to be offered that romantic lead, he could pull it off in style.

'Lucky Break' is released on Friday 24th August.