Ben Miller on career risks, comedy and being a ‘flawed dad’

The actor, writer and comedian talks about juggling family with career and how he avoids being typecast.

Ben Miller (Ben Miller/PA)

Actor, writer and comedian Ben Miller has taken risks for much of his working life, firstly ditching academic studies to pursue comedy and then leaving a hit TV series in its prime.

“I like taking risks creatively,” says the man whose career has gone from being one half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, which spawned several TV series with his pal Alexander Armstrong, to Rowan Atkinson’s sidekick Bough in the Johnny English movies and the patriarch Lord Featherington in the period drama series Bridgerton.

Miller, the son of teachers, quit his Cambridge PhD in physics to pursue a comedy and acting career, went on to enjoy small and big screen success and then, just as he was raising his profile further as DI Richard Poole in the hit BBC series Death In Paradise, he decided to quit after two series. But that was a practical decision rather than a tactical one, he explains. His wife, film producer Jessica Parker, had just given birth to their son, Harrison.

“I really loved the show, but it was practically difficult because we’d just had Harrison. When I started the first series, Jess discovered she was pregnant and then Harrison was born in-between series one and two and it was just too much. But that was the only thing I’ve ever quit not for artistic reasons. We had a three-month-old baby and I was on the other side of the world for seven months, which was a lot for us to deal with.”

Today, Miller, 56, laughs at the notion of being a risk taker. “It’s funny, because I don’t really think of myself in that way, cutting and running.

“I don’t have a problem quitting something if I don’t think it’s working. When I used to do stand-up comedy, there used to be some stand-up comedians who, if it was going badly, would stick it out for the whole routine. That used to amaze me because if I ever got heckled, I used to say, ‘Thank you very much, goodnight!’ I’d just go home.”

In between acting jobs, he’s been writing children’s books and has just penned his sixth, The Night We Got Stuck In A Story, featuring his own children, Lana, seven, and Harrison, 10, as the two main characters, who find a hollow tree which becomes the magical conduit for a fantasy world which they explore. There are all sorts of threads – spiders, a unicorn, wildlife, and the threat that the tree will be cut down for development.

“I love to have a moral to the story,” he explains. “I love to sneak science into my stories, so there is a lot of biology in this one. I like to feel that children have learned from it. It’s the idea that all life is a web and that for all species to thrive, every species needs to thrive.”

He had plenty of time to write during the pandemic, when he and his family were holed up in a villa in Morocco. They had been on holiday there when lockdown happened and weren’t able to return for four months.

“It was brilliant. We absolutely loved it,” he enthuses. “It was like something out of a film when we came to get our car at Gatwick. They didn’t charge us for the four months our car had been in the short stay car park.

“I found it weirdly relaxing because I’d spent the whole of my life thinking, ‘When am I going to get my next job?’ and for once there wasn’t a thing I could do. It wasn’t my responsibility.”

His regular home is in rural Gloucestershire where he lives with Parker and their children. (He also has a son Jackson, 16, from his first marriage.)

Does he consider himself a good parent?

“I’m a flawed dad. My parenting is like anybody else’s. I find it difficult to really be present with my kids and spend proper time with them and play with them. That’s an effort I have to make.

“Parenting is really hard. You’ve got these two responsibilities: an overall view to try and keep the show on the road, which your kids are hopefully not aware of; and then you have your own responsibility which is not to miss out on their childhood. Balancing the two things I find really difficult.”

It seems that juggling fatherhood with work has steered his career path along a winding route.

“I just don’t work very much,” he says simply. “I take my time over things. I work very intensely for very short periods of time. That will probably change at some point, but I try to not work too much.

“Writing has always been my main thing – I started as a comedy writer, then I got bits of acting work which I love doing. Acting is quite a hard thing to combine with parenting because you are often away. Writing is a joy because I’m at home.”

His children don’t watch him on TV but he’ll try his stories out on them before taking the books further. He’s had to ditch a lot of material they didn’t enjoy, he chuckles.

“Kids are completely uninterested – that’s what so great about it. Now the kids are in my books, they don’t seem to think anything of it. But I think that’s healthy and normal.”

But the main reason for him changing direction so often in his career is the yearning to learn something with every new project he takes on.

“I love acting and the kind of jobs I’ve had to do are the ones where I wasn’t sure I could do them. I’m slightly wary of doing something that I’ve done before, which is a double-edged sword because the down-side is that people don’t know who you are.

“The upside, which beats that into an enormous cocked hat, is that you don’t get typecast into one thing. You get to play lots of different parts.”

He and Armstrong recently worked together on a comedy podcast called Timeghost, playing expert cultural commentators. Does he envisage the return of Armstrong and Miller?

“That would be amazing,” he says, laughing loudly. “Never say never. There’s no immediate plans to do that, but I love working with Alexander. He’s the funniest man on the planet, so any excuse. But they aren’t really making sketch shows at the moment. It’s a bit out of fashion.

“I do miss it. There’s nothing quite like the excitement of writing sketches and then trying them out. It’s high risk and such a fun way to spend your time, just trying to think of silly ideas.”

Miller’s comedy inspiration comes from Monty Python and Morecambe and Wise. Of the comedy greats he has worked with, Rowan Atkinson stands out.

“I don’t know how to describe how amazing he is. The two Johnny English films I made with Rowan are two of the things I am most proud of and the most grateful that I’ve been able to be part of. He is just so patient about getting it right. And he’s very open-minded.”

He loves the freedom he has rediscovered working on Professor T, the ITV crime drama.

“You have an agreed plan and a script but you have complete freedom to change things and move things around. If something’s not working, we can decide to go in a completely different direction.

“Bridgerton was almost like the opposite – where every single beat, every single look has been decided beforehand and you are striving to fulfil someone else’s vision. That produced a brilliant show. But it’s that risk-taking thing. I just love being able to change things on the day.”

“Another challenging role,” he agrees, laughing. “Typecast as ever.”

He says he misses live performing with Armstrong, but makes up for it with the events he does at schools – he’s embarking on a tour of schools this month – which can be incredibly anarchic, he enthuses.

Next up, he’ll be starring in a second season of Professor T, as the eponymous genius Cambridge University criminologist with OCD and an overbearing mother, who helps police in solving crimes.

Then later in the autumn he’ll be playing a zombie in a movie called The Loneliest Boy In The World.

The Night We Got Stuck In A Story by Ben Miller is published by Simon & Schuster on September 15, priced £12.99.