Thank God I Took that script out of the bin - by Andrew Billen - 20 February 2007

When John Simm was first offered the lead in Life on Mars, he thought the role was ‘stupid’. But the show has gone from cult hit to mainstream success

When John Simm received the screenplay for the pilot of Life on Mars he read the first third of it and dumped it in the bin. He had got to where his potential character, the Manchester detective Sam Tyler, has a car crash and wakes up in 1973.

“I went, ‘Er, what?’, and went back to see if I’d missed something. Then my agent rang and said, ‘Did you finish reading that thing?’ I said, ‘No way. I’m not doing that’. He said, ‘Why?’ ‘It’s just stupid. I’ve put it in the bin’. He said, ‘Take it out of the bin and finish it because it’s not stupid. It’s all right actually’. So I did, and thank God I did. I’m so glad.”

Glad he should be, although he seems even gladder that its punishing shooting schedule is over. It is very much not his kind of thing. His kind of thing is quality television of the grim, does-you-good kind: Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Never Never (about a council-estate loan shark) and Sex Traffic (about the trade in Eastern European women). He prefers one-offs to series and, really, films to television. But like the BBC thriller State of Play, in which he also starred, Life on Mars is one of those hits that accelerate from cult to mainstream and give populism a good name along the way. It has made Simm one of Britain’s hottest young actors.

I tell him that I realised Life on Mars was going to be superior stuff when Tyler noticed something distantly familiar on a Seventies pavement and asked aloud: “Whatever happened to white dog shit?” “I can tell you if you like,” Simm offers. Go on then, I say. “OK. White dog shit disappeared because they used to put something in the dog food, some chalky thing, and they don’t put it in any more.” Was it to neutralise the smell? “Don’t know. But I’ve said that line twice. I said that line first in The Lakes. Jimmy McGovern wrote that line.” So it was a theft, was it? “I don’t know if it was a theft. It’s just a very valid question.”

Simm happily swaps this trivia with me at a very happy moment in his life. His wife, the actress Kate Magowan, has days ago given birth to their second child, a daughter called Molly, and they have just returned from hospital. I expect him to cancel but, despite sleep deprivation, he insists on going ahead and we meet at lunchtime in a pub near their home in Crouch End, North London. As an actor he tends to play clenched fists of resentment, but today he looks relaxed and touchingly young in his jumper and overcoat, a Manchester United lapel badge suggesting that he is still in touch with his inner soccer-sticker collector. Despite a reputation as a taciturn and awkward interviewee, he is engaging and frank to the point of self-mockery.

Maybe I should thank Molly’s arrival for his good mood, or perhaps, there are two John Simms. In fact, I am sure there are at least two. At almost every stage of his 36 years he seems to have led dual lives. If you were a profile writer, you might even draw a comparison between Simm and Tyler, the copper he plays, simultaneously living very different lives.

He grew up in Nelson, a mill town near Burnley, Lancashire, where he lived with his twin sisters in a council home with an outside loo whose chill he can still recall. He has no complaints about his childhood but it was clearly not opulent, and Nelson, Simm says, is a depressing little town to visit these days. When he was 11 his parents separated for five years and his life divided for the first time. Weekdays he spent at home with his mother; the weekends, however, belonged to his father, Ron, who also led two lives, one as a welder and the other as a club performer. Father and son became an act, Us 2, in which they sang Everly Brothers and Beatles songs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. “Nobody at school knew I did it. It was very strange.” A double life? “It was a strange life really, because I never had any Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve or any weekends. It makes you grow up, and certainly opens your eyes to a lot of things.”

Although Simm has only relatively recently given up his musical career – his band Magic Alex is, alas, no more – it was acting that truly caught his teenage imagination. An inspirational teacher, Brian Wellock, who sadly died at Christmas, put it to Simm that if he wanted to become a professional actor, he would have to get out of Nelson. “He pulled some strings and got me into college in Blackpool. He’s the reason I became an actor really.”

At college he studied musical theatre and learnt enough to know he did not like it. “But it was great actually, losing my virginity and getting drunk and just having a laugh.” The “angst”, as he puts it, started when, at the age of 18, he came to study at the Drama Centre London. Most of the students were southern, middle class, better off and better read. “I was,” he says, “a fish out of water.” Instead of pretending to be one of them, he became determined to keep his norther-ness. This was an era of Mancunian hegemony – United in the Premiership, baggy dance music in the clubs – and he was proud of it. “I really resisted trying to lose my accent. I tried to learn RP as a regional accent and to keep my own, although it’s very watered down now, that’s inevitable.” By day, he learnt drama theory, read the classics and immersed himself in the Method school; by night, in the clubs and pubs, he was something more like the lad he had been in Lancashire.

It was the northern Simm they wanted when it came to casting a psychotic teenager in Cracker in 1995 and who two years later won the starring role in The Lakes, another Jimmy McGovern creation. His cocky Scouser, Danny Kavanagh, stranded in Wordsworth country, was embraced by the nation. He should have revelled in the instant stardom. Instead in his hotel in Ullswater he felt as trapped as Danny.

“I started to go a bit mad, a bit bonkers. I was smoking too much dope and that didn’t help. You know, I was stir crazy, but it was good for the part. It was great for the part. Fantastic! And it was wonderful, that first series. And I do mean the first series, because I’m not sure about the second.”

McGovern, he says, later apologised to him for the weakness of the second’s frantic plot and admitted that he should have written more of the episodes. It is obvious that Simm holds the work he does up to the highest standards. A look through his CV reveals the odd disappointment, but no crowd-pleasing or cynical choices. The writers that recur are the best in the business: McGovern, Tony Marchant, Paul Abbott, Abi Morgan. There are rumours that he will appear in the next round of Doctor Who, which would mean that Russell T. Davies gets added to the list.

Yet hard as he worked, he worked just as hard having fun, carving for himself a reputation as one of the great clubbers of the Nineties, a good-time guy who even dated a Spice Girl (Emma Bunton). “I sort of went a bit bonkers in the 1990s and got carried away with it all. I just hid behind this haze of clubbing, clubbing and just hedonism. I just went a bit crazy.” Why? “I don’t know. I guess everybody does a little bit. And I had a great time. I was in a band and we toured and it was rock’n’ roll. I had a great time.”

So it wasn’t My Drugs Hell? “No. I mean, there were certain times when it was My Drugs Hell but, on the whole, it was way-hey. Strangely enough, Human Traffic stopped it. I couldn’t go out after that.” This was the 1999 film in which he played Jip, a pill-popping raver. “Everybody who goes clubbing has seen Human Traffic and if they see you in a club, and you’re from Human Traffic, everyone’s wasted anyway and they start shouting lines at you. After a while it ruins the evening. I’d get recognised all the time, at any club. Suddenly you’re surrounded. So I decided I’d give it up.”

Not long afterwards he met Kate, and not long after that Ryan was born. He says his friends still party “full-on”, but more rarely now, and they stay in. But Justin Ker-rigan’s film had a second unexpected consequence: it cured him, he claims, of his ambition. “In my twenties I thought I was going to be like Tom Cruise. I thought I was going to be massively famous. I thought that it would be like what happened to Ewan McGregor. I wanted all or nothing. And I’m still a bit kind of, you know, a bit pissed off that it didn’t happen. I was in Human Traffic instead of Trainspotting. I got the wrong film. My ambition kind of went. I don’t know when, but it went.”

After the success of State of Play in 2003 he went to Hollywood and had a few meetings, but in the end could not stomach touting himself around. “That’s probably when I knew my ambition had gone, because I thought I’d done too much to be now starting from scratch and queueing up with a hundred other people with a script outside a door and going in cold, nobody knows who I am, and auditioning.”

But has he really buried his dream of Hollywood? When Universal bought the rights to turn the BBC’s State of Play into a film, they cast Brad Pitt in Simm’s role, the journalist Cal McCaffrey. Simm made a joke to a reporter about Pitt’s suitability. He says the remark was taken far too seriously. He admires Pitt, yet admits that he is unlikely to see the movie. “I’d probably sit there squirming and thinking, ‘Ah, that’s my part’. There’s a little bit of me, obviously, that’s going to be a bit like that. But hey, you know, Brad Pitt’s fantastic.”

During our time together, Simm says one of the most honest things I have ever heard from an interviewee. “I don’t actually enjoy working.

I enjoy it when something comes out and I watch it on TV, but the actual process of it is just work to me now. My guiltiest pleasure is idleness. I love doing nothing. If I could, I’d just do nothing. If I could I’d retire tomorrow, if I had enough money, I’d just stop.”

But here I return to the theme of his conflicting personalities. For not much later he is enthusing about The Yellow House, a Channel 4 film in which he plays Van Gogh and how it’s Withnail and I except that it is set in 19th-century Arles. And then he is telling me how he has elected to star in a play, Elling, at the Bush Theatre in London in April. It turns out that, for all his excitement about little Ryan and tiny Molly, all his love of idleness, he is actually going to be working rather hard for the next few months.

And Life on Mars? “That’s done now. Never again.” The final episode will be, he insists, the final episode, and will resolve everything. “I give everything I can to every part I play. I really try, but it’s a very tough job, Life on Mars. I’m in every single scene and it is quite hard work, for six months, being away from home when you have a family. And this time, in their wisdom, they gave us less money to make a hit show. I don’t know how they work that out. I guess they get a result even though we have to work that little bit harder. As if it weren’t hard enough the first time.”

It is odd talking to the star of a show who is less of a fan of it than you and everyone else you know. Even Sheila Hancock came up to him to say how much her late husband, John Thaw, who was Jack Regan in The Sweeney, which Life on Mars parodies, would have adored it. I’m sure that Simm is absolutely sincere when he says that he is glad to be shot of it, but I am also sure that a chunk of him would feel pretty bruised if Tom Cruise ended up as Sam Tyler in a movie version. John Simm knows exactly which scripts to keep in the bin and which, if retrieved, may yet make him the star that some important part of him still wants to be.

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