Stephen Mangan is sitting having a cup of tea at a hotel in central London. He looks somewhat tired. He has bags under his eyes. He runs his hands through his copious amounts of thick black hair, no doubt inherited from his Irish parents. He finds it hard to hold eye contact or, at first, to make any eye contact at all. But, really, there is nothing to worry about because, once we get going, Stephen Mangan is really rather wonderful.
He is interesting, intelligent and honest, able to talk about things that many people would find difficult. For, although he is a successful actor noted for his roles in TV comedies such as Green Wing,Episodes (with Tamsin Greig and Matt LeBlanc), and as being the voice of Postman Pat, the most significant thing that has happened to him was the loss of his parents. His father passed away during the filming of the second series of Green Wing nearly a decade ago. He was 63 and died of a brain tumour. “That was pretty depressing,” says Mangan. “He went from being this big bloke, an Irish builder who put up petrol stations all over London, to this tiny frail figure of a man.”
Mangan’s mother had died of colonic cancer two decades earlier when she was only 45 years old. Mangan was 21. He hadn’t even left university by then — he read law at Cambridge — and yet took time off to look after her.
“I watched my mother die and she was far too young. She was two years younger than I am now. I still can’t make any sense of it. All I know is something happens in that moment between life and death. She was there and then . . . she wasn’t and, now I am 47 years old, I keenly feel how young she was.”
He says he understands why people look to the supernatural to get some sign about their deceased loved ones.
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“I get it but I don’t believe in it,” he says. “I don’t think that if a bird hops on to the window sill when someone dies they are the spirit of the dead person. However, I do understand why people want to know where their loved ones go. It is hard to believe you will never see them again. I think this is why people go to psychics or have some sort of spiritual belief even though it’s irrational.”
This tension between the belief in “the other world” versus rationality is what lies at the centre of his new TV drama, Houdini and Doyle. In it Mangan plays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of arch rationalist Sherlock Holmes. “Yet it turns out Doyle himself totally believed in the paranormal,” says Mangan.
The premise of it all is that Houdini (played by American actor Michael Weston) and Doyle, who actually met in real life, get together to help Scotland Yard solve crimes. “It’s a sort of an Edwardian X-Files,” he says.
Mangan was drawn to acting because “it’s all just stories — none of us knows the truth about anything. But stories are good. They are what we tell ourselves to keep fear at bay, to make sense of our lives, to see things as we want to see them so everything is skewed really.”
He auditioned for Rada only ten days after his mother died. “It made me realise I wanted to act,” he says. “There’s no point in doing things you don’t want to do when maybe our lives will be shorter than we would wish.”
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Yet, he says, there is something almost “fantastical” about his life. “I am aware it feels unreal sometimes but I realised after my parents died that they have become stories. My children never met my mother so now I can see I am turning her into a myth. Does it matter? The stories we tell ourselves are about what we need on an emotional level so I tell them stories about my life just in case . . .”
“In case what?” I ask cautiously (after all, no one wants to think they will not be around to see their children grow up).
“In case I peg out early. I have check-ups regularly, just to make sure.”
He and his wife, the actress Louise Delamere, 46, have two boys, Harry, aged 8, and Frank, 5.
“When I am not working all I do is go to playgrounds or football matches,” he says. “I don’t cook. We don’t eat out.” Instead, the family get ready-made food, good-quality takeaways or pasta and sauces — or his wife cooks.
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Would he like to have more time for himself and his wife?
“Actually, we are about to have another baby in about two weeks,” he says, looking slightly embarrassed.
“What?” I say.
“Look, it’s a late gift, a kind of wonderful accident. The baby was a surprise. I am going to be an older dad and I am not sure how I feel about it. Of course, I am basically delighted but it does mean various things — I thought we were getting towards the end of pushing children on swings, but we are back there again. But it’s a gift, of course it is.”
Yet the birth of Harry didn’t go easily. “No, he was taken away from us when he was first born because there were [health] difficulties and it all happened very quickly and I felt rather powerless, but it was fine in the end.”
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Is he worried about this next birth?
“No. We have had the checks. I think it’s all fine, fingers crossed and touch wood, so says the arch pragmatist,” he says laughing.
After two boys, does he mind what sex the child is?
“Not at all although sometimes I think I’d like a girl. I think boys tend to leave and disappear on their parents whereas girls are better with their parents as they get older.”
So, he wants someone to look after him?
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“Absolutely!” he says, beaming. “Of course I worry about not being there to see the baby grow up but I worry about that anyway with regards to my other children. But I have tests regularly to make sure I’m OK and that the cancer my mother had isn’t in me and so far, so good. I don’t want to be morbid about life. ”
Mangan himself was one of three. He has two younger siblings, both sisters, but, when he was 13, he decided to leave home. He applied to boarding school — Haileybury in Hertfordshire, alma mater of Clement Attlee, Alan Ayckbourn and Christopher Nolan — and then, having won a scholarship, packed his bags and left.
“It was entirely my own decision,” he says. “I felt so claustrophobic at home. There was my mother and sisters and my dad was out working and I was the only male in the house and I couldn’t bear it. Also, I was a high achiever. I felt a pressure to get things right, probably self-inflicted really.”
He says his mother cried for a month after he left.
“She was beside herself,” he says. “I was the apple of her eye and she doted on me.”
He points out that, in many ways, he has lived an entirely different life to his parents. “My mother grew up in extreme poverty. She and my dad came here [from Ireland] when they were 14 years old but it really was a foreign country to them.”
However, he actually hated boarding school.
“It was terrible. It was very English and I was small and mouthy and I really got picked on. It is psychologically damaging to a child. I’ll never send my kids to boarding school — I think it’s plain wrong.”
More than that, as he points out, it meant that he barely saw his mother.
“I felt I didn’t know her. I’d barely been at home and I lost huge chunks of time with her that I’ll never get back.”
I wonder what the upshot of all this trauma has been? I imagine he is resilient, self-sufficient and able to feel a sense of autonomy even when he is on his own. Yet maybe, somewhere along the line, he is mistrustful of life itself?
“I think there are things I mistrust,” he says carefully. The biggest change for him was that he had a crisis of faith after his mother died.
“I’d been brought up a Catholic. I was an altar boy but I grew to turn against it. Why is God always good when horrible things happen? People told me that he ‘moves in mysterious ways’ but I think it’s a sop. It’s just not for me.”
Yet it is clear he does spend time wrestling with the knotty questions that humanity has to deal with.
“We are at a difficult period in history now. It’s why we are all searching for some sort of meaning and the answer is elusive at best.”
But then he says he thinks we should stop dwelling on all the sad and tragic stuff.
“I love doing tragic roles in theatre,” he says. “When I left Rada I thought I would spend my life in tights doing Shakespeare but now I do TV and I love it and it feels more optimistic somehow.”
He rarely does anything that takes him for a long time out of the UK.
“Houdini and Doyle was shot in the UK even though it is for Fox [an American company]. The first series of Episodes was similarly shot in the UK.” He says the production crew had to put fake palm trees everywhere.
“Matt LeBlanc’s Malibu house is actually in Mill Hill,” he says.
Episodes is now about to start shooting its final series but Mangan says the best thing is that he and LeBlanc are now great friends. “He is just a lot of fun and a nice guy. He works hard when he chooses to work. The rest of the time he hangs out on his ranch messing about with his cars. He has six Porsches and all these motorbikes.”
LeBlanc has even challenged Mangan to come on to Top Gear, which LeBlanc will be co-hosting with Chris Evans.
Will he take up the challenge? He laughs. “Ah well . . . I’ll need some lessons,” he says, “but, then again, the world is rapidly changing and I might as well enjoy things why I can. I spend so much time wondering where my grandfather and mother are and I have a longing to believe in something else, something beyond. I underestimated my emotions about these things because there was a longing for it not to be the end. But it was . . . so embrace life, that’s what I say.”
Houdini and Doyle starts on March 13 on ITV and ITV Encore at 10.15pm, and continues on ITV Encore from March 17 at 9pm
Stephen Mangan’s perfect weekend
Pilates or personal trainer?
Personal trainer
City break or ski trip?
Ski trip
Twitter or telephone?
Twitter
Local pub or Michelin-starred restaurant?
Michelin-starred restaurant
Warhol or Monet?
Monet
Tiger Dad or free-range parenting?
Free-range parenting
Top Gear or Scandi box set?
Scandi box set
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
. . . watching a film