If anyone asks Timothy Spall to describe what actors actually do, he often finds himself lost for words. “Partly because of the ineffable nature of it,” he says. “But also because, if you don’t watch out, you can end up sounding like a big pseud. Pretentious. You can overcomplicate it.”
It’s hard to imagine the avuncular, easygoing Spall popping up in Pseuds Corner. Perhaps this is why he is having so much fun playing the reclusive retired thespian John Chapel in theBBC’s crime caperDeath Valley, which returns for a second series on Sunday. Chapel played a fictional detective on TV, and so finds himself assisting Gwyneth Keyworth’s daffy copper each time a murder disrupts the calm of their rural Welsh life, which naturally happens with preposterous frequency. Chapel is prone to giving grandiloquent masterclasses on the art of acting, and Spall takes evident pleasure in his actorly affectation and plummy delivery, rolling vowels around like marbles.
“I do like to expose the weakness in a man,” he says casually. “We have in this country a wonderful ability to create characters that are both annoying and at the centre of things. Characters likeAlan Partridgeor David Brent.” Why does he think this is? “I dunno, but it goes back to Shakespeare’s mechanicals. Characters who are extremely conceited, and yet your heart breaks for them.”
Spall is, unsurprisingly, the best thing in the knowingly glibDeath Valley, despite comedy – even the off-centre humour on offer here – not really being his thing. “It’s not something I tend to do,” he says. Indeed,cosy crime– that pernicious species modelled onMidsomer Murdersand now all over the TV schedules like bindweed – is even less his thing.
“I don’t watch them,” he admits. “It’s not really my cup of tea.” It’s tempting to wonder whether he accepted the role of Chapel because he needed a bit of light relief after playing the tormented academic Peter Farquhar, allegedly murdered by his student Ben Field, in the BBC’s gruelling true crime dramaThe Sixth Commandment(he is unable to talk about this series sinceField’s conviction was recently quashedby the Court of Appeal, and a retrial has been ordered). “Well, just because things look like light relief on TV, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are any less difficult to do. It’s all hard as far as I’m concerned. Acting is not something that you learn once and then know how to do it.”
Instead, the 69-year-old Spall thrives on regarding each role as a bit of a challenge. A series of formidable parts – JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’sMr Turner(2014); Holocaust denier David Irving inDenial(2016); Ulster Unionist leader Ian Paisley inThe Journey(2016)– have pegged out his transition from quirky supporting character actor (including Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter franchise) to leading man. Does the weight of playing these more extreme characters ever take its toll? “Not really. Although not that I would know. There’s a very funny instance when my wife Shane [they married in 1981 and have three children, including the actorRafe Spall] and I were talking to a friend of an acquaintance, who asked me whether I ever took my work home with me. And I said absolutely not, and Shane said, ‘Absolutely’, at exactly the same time.”
He’s unacquainted with the concept of drama therapy – the support service increasingly deployed in theatre and film to help actors deal with the psychological toll of playing demanding parts. “Never heard of it,” he says breezily. “For me, the beauty of being another character is that I’m not using it as therapy. I don’t want to be pretentious here, but when you act, you put a ring around your character. It’s not about your emotions. But I can see how these new tools grow out of good intent.”
Naturally, much in the industry has changed since he graduated from Rada in 1978. Spall, who is liberal-minded by nature, tries his best to keep up with shifting attitudes. “I’ve got three children and eight grandchildren, so not a lot feels new to me,” he says. (Alongside Rafe, he and Shane also have two daughters, Pascale, a primary school teacher, and Mercedes, a textile designer). “I’ve grown up with it. And there’s no point being reactionary if you can help it. I know some people can be sensitive about pronouns, but I’ve never seen that as being an annoying thing.”
But he’s not a fan of everything. Take behaviour codes on set, for example. “I’ve been around a long time. And you think, ‘Are these new conversations about how to behave on set happening because someone cares, or because it’s now a legal requirement?’ I don’t like it when something pretends to be something it’s not.”
Has he ever witnessed bad behaviour in this environment? “I never saw anybody being abused – nothing like that. OK, maybe some of the language was a bit fruity. But I was never familiar with it. Although I’m not really in the world of casting couches. If I’d been an attractive young woman, then I might have had a different story.”
He’s suspicious too of the quickness to take offence. “I can’t abide this taste for outrage. It’s so easy these days to get annoyed about things, but it’s such an easy option to take. Obviously, there are people with serious axes to grind about serious issues, but you also get the sense that there is a taste for jumping on bandwagons, and a yearning for something destructive to happen.
“There is very little forgiveness and understanding and very little ability to see the full story. Because for a lot of people it’s too entertaining.” He is warming to his theme. “For those on the receiving end, they never get a hearing when the police, the judge and the hangman are all on social media. A lot of people have been destroyed.”
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Is he, I wonder, thinking ofScott Mills, the Radio 1 DJ who was recently sacked by the BBC over a historic sexual assault allegation, which he denied and which was not proceeded with by police? “Well, that’s a different thing. I’ve heard that this sort of thing [when public opinion isn’t involved] is called silent cancelling. And [Mills] is difficult to talk about because I don’t know anything about it. But that’s not really what I mean. I’m talking about the [public] taste for it.”
Spall frequently works with the BBC. Fifteen years ago, he presented three travel documentaries that followed him and Shane on a barge as they travelled around the British coastline. In 2024, he appeared inThe Mirror and the Light, the concluding instalment in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’sWolf Halltrilogy.
Before filming, the decision was made to cut severalWolf Hallscenes for budgetary reasons; more recently, it has been reported that a planned adaptation ofDouglas Stuart’s Booker-winning novelShuggie Bainis delayed because of a lack of available funding. Does Spall fear for the BBC’s ability to continue producing quality drama given the financial challenges it faces?
“It’s another shifting environment,” he says. “There’s definitely less budget. They are cutting back and back, and the budget for a BBC drama today is the same as the catering budget for something [on one of the streamers]. The BBC is our calling card, a totem that we used to dance around, and it set the model for the mix of documentaries and drama that the streamers all now follow. But because of the competition, it’s getting nipped and nipped. And you wonder for how long this can be sustained. Yet somehow it still comes up with great work.”
He wonders whether part of the problem lies in the BBC’s conflicted identity. “It’s independent, but also on some level answerable to government. It’s a bit like the Royal family – it’s both incredibly powerful and yet has no power at all. And, like the Royal family, we all have an opinion on it. But what I do know is that 50p a day brings you things like the BBC Symphony Orchestra.”
Spall is so easygoing that I find myself sometimes forgetting to ask him actual questions. His initial greeting is disarming: “Hi, I’m Tim,” he says, as though there is a real possibility I might not know who he is. He has the lazy Cockney drawl of someone who has just stepped out of a London boozer – not because he sounds drunk (he no longer drinks) but because he has never pretended to be anyone other than who he is: a working-class South Londoner whose mother was a hairdresser and father was a postman.
Much has been made of his unconventional looks – his crooked tooth, which he has never succumbed to correcting, his long, sloping jowls, which can give him the wounded appearance of a whipped dog. “You’ve played a lot of fat slobs, haven’t you?” Jonathan Ross once said to him. But it’s water off a duck’s back to Spall, who has carved out a vintage career from mining the hidden ambiguities beneath the most unlikely surfaces.
“Fate created me in such a way that I don’t fit the bill as an actor who has to represent a certain wish-fulfilment type,” he says. “Because the pressure of having to be that is enormous. Marlon Brando struggled with that all his life. It’s why he put on so much weight after he retired. Before that, he had the diet of the jockey.”
Spall, too, has lost a lot of weight after slimming down for a role in 2015’sThe Enfield Hauntings– and is very careful with what he eats. He is trim and sprightly, wearing a nifty waistcoat beneath his jacket, and with age seems to have grown into the unusual contours of his face. He joshes with the waitress over his cappuccino: “I’d like it skinny please, and scaldingly hot – illegally hot”. In another man, this would be flirty. With him, it simply sounds charming.
The question of how to live a good life preoccupies him a lot. He thinks deeply about contentious subjects such as assisted dying and the state of affairs in Trump’s America. Often, he realises he doesn’t know exactly what he thinks. “But what I find disconcerting is being made to feel nervous about not taking a side, and about sitting on the fence,” he says. “Or about being open-minded and seeing both sides. Some people find that offensive. And I don’t know where to go with that.” He reads an awful lot about morality. “I spend a lot of time wondering what it’s all about. Of course, you know I had a run-in, don’t you, when I was 39?”
This is Spall’s way of describing his near-death encounter with acute myeloid leukaemia, which left his life hanging in the balance for several appalling weeks. Since this episode, Spall has taken a serious interest in theology, behaviour and mysticism. “You ask yourself the big questions when something like that happens. I read a lot of Aldous Huxley, I loveThe Perennial Philosophy[Huxley’s 1945 comparative study of mysticism]. I want to know why we’re here and how best we should behave.” His encroaching years have only accelerated his interest. “Of course, at my age, you’re that much closer to not sticking around.”
He tends to take each role as it comes. “There is a word in the canon that keeps every actor humble,” he says. “And that word is ‘unemployment’.” Surely Spall is not plagued by this? He has worked consistently for decades. “Yes, but the reality is, after each job finishes, and if I don’t know what’s coming up next, I feel like I’m never going to work again. Even though logic tells me this is probably unlikely.” Talent and success, it seems, are no defence against pathological insecurity. “Oh no, never. With each job, it always feels like I’ve been rumbled.”
Death Valley is on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday, 17 May at 8.15pm
