Steve Coogan
Steve Coogan
Stephen John "Steve" Coogan is an English actor, stand-up comedian, impressionist, writer, and producer. He began his career in the 1980s, working as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and providing voiceovers for television advertisements. In the early 1990s, he began creating original comic characters, leading him to win the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In 1999, he co-founded the production company Baby Cow Productions...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 October 1965
CityMiddleton, England
I think we all have a slightly gay gene inside us, don't we? It might be 0.00001 per cent as mine is, or one per cent as yours is.
The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.
The truth is somewhere in the middle of funny and serious.
People regurgitate the same old cliches and it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy of something that's vaguely interesting.
It's like aversion therapy. You keep doing scenes over and over again with three women in the bed with you, and we had to do them all in one week. Three girls would step out and another three girls would step into the bed.It sounds like a fantasy but by the end of it, I just wanted to go for a hike on my own in the north of England, in the hills. Because it became a sort of "be careful what you wish for" kinda thing.
I think I'm good with actors. I like directing actors. I also like to show up and just do an acting gig. Where I'm just a hired gun, I don't have to have an opinion on anything.I never got involved in all this stuff because I wanted to control stuff; I got involved in writing and producing because I wasn't getting interesting acting gigs. In a way I'm grateful that I didn't get interesting roles, because it made me pull my finger out and do some work.
If things don't come easy to you, you have to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Two thousand years ago, the Holy family had a ramble from Nazareth to Bethlehem - in much the same way as I'm having a ramble from Norwich to Swaffham. Although I'm not comparing myself to Jesus - I don't want to get bogged down in that whole controversy again.
People come up to me in supermarkets and demand humour. And the less amusing I am, the more they piss themselves. So I say, "I'm doing my shopping, mate, OK?" and the guy will be on the floor in hysterics. Quite odd. Eventually I do have to say something funny so I usually go for something pathetic like, "It's a nice place to shop but I wouldn't like to live here!" and they roar again. Wet themselves. I'm lucky though that I am not massively famous, I can get the Tube without much bother. Must be awful being the Beckhams.
Actually the best thing I did was to get thrown out by my wife. She's living with a fitness instructor. He drinks that yellow stuff in tins. He's an idiot.
I don't like big feet. It reminds me of gammon.
If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.