Peter Capaldi: ‘I was relieved the Tories lost. But it’s not that simple’

The Glasgow-born actor started out playing easy-going buffoons. Then along came ‘The Thick of It’. He talks to Craig McLean about how the Tories killed political satire, the divisive nature of the culture wars, why he found ‘Doctor Who’ fandom difficult, and what it’s like to be cast as malevolent characters

‘Doctor Who was a demanding job. It takes its toll’ (Getty)

Recently, whenever Peter Capaldi has been shown rough footage of himself acting in scenes, he’s done a double-take. “I’m horrified,” he says. “I go: who is that old, weird, gaunt guy with the white hair? Oh, it’s me. That’s what I’ve become. But that’s OK,” adds the 66-year-old with a shrug. “I always loved Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. Playing those villains, all those horror movie types, is great fun.”

Capaldi has certainly made a speciality out of sulphurous ne’er-do-wells with something of the night about them. On Friday, the crepuscular character actor who was more Doctor What? than Doctor Who returned to our screens in Prime Video’s twisty, time-bendy, supernatural thriller The Devil’s Hour as Gideon Shepherd, a mysterious criminal with a biblical name who may or may not be a serial killer. Meanwhile, details are scant on who or what he’s playing in the upcoming series of Black Mirror, but it’s a reasonable bet it’s a role with a whiff of the devil. Capaldi is happy with his run of malevolent characters – broadly. “I used to do voiceovers for Anchor butter. One day they said to me: ‘Could you try and sound a little less sinister?’ I thought: ‘I don’t know what’s happened, I’ve suddenly gone sinister.’ But sinister is good. I’ve always been a great fan of the sinister.”

Leaning in close over our lunchtime minestrone, eyes bulging, Scottish brogue bewitching, the Glasgow-born actor and Oscar-winning director is head-to-toe in black at a tiny table in a private members’ club in central London. Conversation turns to Criminal Record, this year’s low-key hit for Apple TV+ that is about to begin production on its second series. Capaldi plays an old-school copper with old-school values. You know, a bit of casual misogyny here, a bit of institutional racism there. All of which, naturally, rubbed up his counterpart, played by Cush Jumbo, an exemplar of “woke” modern policing. In a knotty drama developed by Capaldi’s producer wife Elaine Collins, the fact that DCI Daniel Hegarty was a barely likeable character was part of the attraction.

“Absolutely,” he affirms. “But also that he was complicated. That he wasn’t so simple to understand. We wanted to engage the audience in some sympathy for him. And understand that people are complex. He’s not black and white. But, yeah, in essence his role was to carry that darkness. That was appealing.”

Capaldi and Collins are both executive producers on Criminal Record. But he defers to his wife of 33 years – they met in 1983 on a touring theatrical production in Scotland but have long been based in north London – as “the boss, the creator”. While employed at the BBC, Collins developed Vera and Shetland – cosier police procedurals for sure. “Eventually she left, and went out on her own, and was keen to do a show that was maybe a bit harder.”

By “harder”, does he mean challenging woke sensibilities? “Well, I don’t know what woke sensibilities are. It’s trying to tell a story that’s interesting, arresting and makes people think – and is responsible. I’ve got the general picture [of what woke is]. It’s used all over the place. I don’t think half the people who use it know [what it means]. It’s just another word. This constant polarisation is not useful. It’s another tool to keep people apart.”

When I ask whether that’s what cancel culture is partly about, too, he professes confusion. “I don’t know – seriously. There have been points where there has been definite political motivation to cause [division]. To place people on the other side of the fence to each other. And it was contingent – it was more useful to the Tory party to have these wars than to try and find out what could bring people together.”

What he means is: it’s easier to foment a culture war than it is to tackle the problem of, say, social exclusion. “Yes. It’s all complicated, and simplifying it to black and white doesn’t help anyone.”

Capaldi leaning into the sinister in ‘The Devil’s Hour’ (Amazon)

Now in late middle age, and a grandfather of two, Capaldi admits to feeling a bit surprised at the way his career has turned out. “When I started off, I was an easygoing buffoon – a gangly youth in a Bill Forsyth gentle comedy,” he says of his breakout role opposite Burt Lancaster in the great Scottish director’s beloved Local Hero (1983). “But The Thick of It changed everything for me.”

Armando Iannucci’s excoriating political satire, which ran for four series between 2005 and 2012, rebranded Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker: the sweary spin doctor extraordinaire, a machiavellian operative who simultaneously oozed no-f’s-given superiority and radiated all-the-f’s rage. It exposed the inner machinations of government as both farcical and toxic. But this workplace comedy now feels very much of its time. Because surely post-get-Brexit-done, post-Parytgate and post-Liz-the-lettuce, politics today is beyond satire?

“We all felt that. I’m constantly asked by the press if I would do a new one,” he says of a show that won him a Bafta in 2010. “But [under the Tories] things were just too serious. The corruption was too deep. We’d be letting them off the hook by being funny.”

David Tennant told me that, after ‘Doctor Who’, I wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without people knowing me

Capaldi was raised in a working-class household in Glasgow and it’s not hard to divine his political sensibilities. But while he’s “glad, obviously” that the Tories lost the election, he insists that he’s “not politically engaged”. Why not? “I was forced to be politically engaged," he answers, presumably a reference to the demands placed on him by Iannucci’s typically nuanced scripts. “I’m not interested in it. In fact I hate it. I don’t want to spend my life thinking about all this stuff. Of course I was relieved the Tories lost. But it’s not that simple, is it?” He pauses and twitches a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Sorry, I sound mournful, don’t I?”

It’s that mournful demeanour that made him find some elements of his three-series run as the Time Lord difficult. He recalls talking to his predecessor-but-one, David Tennant, before his casting was announced in August 2013. “David said: ‘Is this true, you’re going to be the Doctor? Well, let’s go have a talk.’ It might have been here actually,” says Capaldi, gesturing round this clamorous room beloved of film and telly folk. “And he said to me: ‘What will change is your visibility. You won’t be able to walk down the street without people knowing who you are.’ I was like: ‘OK, we’ll see how that goes…’”

Capaldi ultimately found having to be nice to fans all the time “a bit of a stress… My [personal] character leans more to the melancholic and cynical. The daily good-heartedness of it all is quite a leap for me. But that’s what I was paid to do. But that’s exhausting… And that’s one of the things I’m glad to have left behind: I’m not responsible for the endless cheerfulness [of] little kids.”

He’s watched Ncuti Gatwa, yet another Scottish Time Lord, as the 15th Doctor and pronounces him “fantastic. I met him and thought he was lovely.” Add in the fact that original reboot showrunner Russell T Davies is back, and that Disney – and their money – are partners on the show, and it all makes for a show that, on paper at least, should feel very different. But as a corollary of that, some viewers feel that the world’s longest-running sci-fi show, a cornerstone of British culture, has been Disney-fied. Does he agree?

“I think that the show is... whatever those who love it want it to be,” he replies, carefully. “I come from [seeing] it in 1963. So even the show, when I came into it, was different from the show I remember. And I loved the show that I remember. I loved the show that we did, but it was different.”

Can he, though, imagine being in Gatwa’s shoes, as the brand ambassador for this new Doctor Who, one with demanding American audiences (and producers) to please?

“It must be tough,” he concedes. “That’s one of the hardest things about the job. Apart from the day-to-day business of delivering those lines, and you’ve got to have lots of ideas and energy, there’s always a knock at the door at lunchtime: ‘Can you come and talk to these visitors we’ve got onset?’ ‘Can you look at these new toys?’ ‘Can you sign these things?’ ‘Can you go to this meeting with so-and-so who’s selling this in South Korea?’ There’s always a [request]. It’s a big brand. So it’s quite a demanding job. It takes its toll.”

Capaldi as the Time Lord (BBC)

Capaldi also experienced the demands of geek fandom and blockbuster IP during his brief foray into the superhero world, with his role in James Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad. He found filming alongside an all-star Hollywood cast on huge sets in Atlanta, Georgia a blast; the endless promotion less so.

Still, the three-month shoot allowed him plenty of him to reconnect with his first passion: music. In the long hours in his Suicide Squad trailer, Capaldi wrote a bunch of songs that were eventually released as an album, 2021’s St Christopher.

It was a debut that was a long time coming. While at Glasgow School of Art in the early Eighties, Capaldi was in a band, The Dreamboys. “Bizarro punk” was Capaldi’s estimation at the time. Or “showbiz Bauhaus” according to their drummer Craig Ferguson, who went on to become a stand-up comic, actor and American chatshow titan (James Corden inherited his chair on The Late Late Show).

What kind of frontman was Capaldi? “I was OK,” he demurs. “I’m sure I jumped about a lot. You’d have to ask somebody else, really.”

So I do. “Oh, spectacular!” Ferguson tells me. “My girlfriend at the time was in another band and she said: ‘Your band are rubbish, but you’ve got a really good actor as the frontman.’ Peter was very charismatic – he still is – and onstage had that ineffable presence I’ve seen in a few people. Your eye goes to him. He was a star player from the word go.”

Capaldi has since completed a second album, Sweet Illusions. It’s a robustly melodic set, with Capaldi’s voice a cross between Leonard Cohen and The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. Quelle surprise, the songs have a touch of midnight, too. “All the songs hanker back to that time,” he says of early Eighties, glad-to-be-grey Glasgow. “To an eternal, dark, synthesiser, guitar-y kind of vibe. Because I’m picking up where I left off.”

The first single is out now. It’s called “Bin Night”, a lullaby that’s a tribute to his infant grandchildren, to the “ticking clock” of his own mortality and to the domestic concerns of a Muswell Hill grandpa.

“I love bin night. It’s the one night when I can control the chaos of the world. The one night when I can restore some order to the entropy. Everything goes out on bin night.”

Even if Peter Capaldi’s borough, like my neighbouring borough, only takes recycling weekly but waste is fortnightly and garden refuse God knows when?

He splutters and straightens up. “They might only take one of them. But then I’ll just take the other one back in. That’s my rules. Bin night is my rules.”

‘The Devil’s Hour’ is on Prime Video from 18 October. The single ‘Bin Night’ is out now, and the album ‘Sweet Illusion’ is released on Last Night From Glasgow in March 2025