PLUME: What other kinds of outlets do you have similar to painting? Does acting make you happy in the same way that painting does?

FROST: Um… yeah, I think it does, even though I say to myself, “Ooh, I hate acting” because I don’t like the nervous bit. You know, because I still get terribly nervous. But now, as a person, I know that that feeling inside is perfectly normal. And, you know, I know that it’s normal and I know how to deal with it.

PLUME: Are you nervous about being able to get the performance out of yourself, or what other people think of your performance?

FROST: No… I think I know the performance is there but I’m terrified about learning lines and getting the lines wrong. That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t want to let anyone down.

PLUME: So it’s not really so much the art as just the practical side of it.

FROST: Yeah. Yeah.

PLUME: Do you think that’s almost a sort of working class approach to it, to be worried about the practical, providing the lines part of the job?

FROST: Well, I mean, I think my performance has always been quite instinctive and kinda from my heart, and as you say it’s the practical side of things, you know, I want to get it right, I don’t want to f*** up because I know that inside me is… when I start f***ing the lines up, then I start really panicking, and that makes you forget the lines even more, you know – it’s a Catch-22 when you get like that.

PLUME: Obviously, Simon kind of pulled you kicking and screaming into the whole acting thing…

FROST: Yeah.

PLUME: In any way does that come from a sense of not wanting to disappoint Simon?

FROST: Yeah, yeah, very much so because, you know, he gave me this amazing opportunity, I mean I – that was the thing about being a waiter, I was just a waiter and it was fine and then he said, “Do you want to come and do Spaced?” And I think even up until the day before we started filming, I was thinking, “This is not going to happen. You know, there’s no way this is going to happen.” And then it did. And, you know, at that point then, I was, you know, I had to work – I had to think on my feet and pretend to be an actor almost in the first series of Spaced. I think it was only in the second series that I actually started thinking about acting and thinking I was an actor and I could act and, you know… I couldn’t let him down at all – but also, I couldn’t let myself down at that point. I didn’t want anyone – I thought it was a real opportunity and I could have f***ed it up royally.

PLUME: Are there any points where you thought you almost did?

FROST: Um, yeah, I think there’s a time in the first series… I think it was referred to as “Black Monday,” and. I just couldn’t get a scene right. And we tried to do this one scene for about two and a half hours, and I just fucked the whole day up, really. And it was awful. I just couldn’t get it. And I ate lunch alone that day.

PLUME: Your choice or theirs?

FROST: I think partly mine and partly theirs. They were quite angry with me.

PLUME: Do you remember what the scene was?

FROST: Yes… Tim was talking to Sophie, his girlfriend, and she goes into the shop and he turns around and I’m standing there. And he’s missed me becoming a sergeant again because he was having sex with his girlfriend. And I just couldn’t get it out. I couldn’t get it out. And it was awful. And I kinda promised myself I wouldn’t ever get into that situation again. And touch wood at that moment, I haven’t.

PLUME: So what was your reaction when Simon even proposed this to you – saying, you know, “I want to bring you into this”? Did you believe him?

FROST: Yeah… yeah.

PLUME: But did you believe he could actually pull it off?

FROST: Well, yeah, I always do.

PLUME: Meaning being able to bring you in and selling other people on you….

FROST: I think it was quite a big job, you know? Because I wasn’t an actor and no one knew me, so I think it was a case of just blagging it until… you know, until it was too late and I was there and I had to do it. I had no other alternative. But you know, I mean… it was all right in the end, you know? But I did that thing after Series 1, where I’d been a waiter for eight years or whatever and not earning very much money and then all of a sudden this person gives me a massive check for doing Spaced and it was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing!” But it went… I think I did the lot in eight weeks.

PLUME: So when Spaced is over, did you think, “Well, that’s over, it was a great experience,” or did you actually think, “You know, I could pursue this…” ?

FROST: Um… no, I kinda thought perhaps I could pursue it a little bit. Because as I said, I spent that whole money in eight weeks and I had to go back to being a waiter again. And so there was that awful kind of time when Spaced had come out and it was very popular and successful and I was still serving burritos and chimichangas and it was… it embarrassed me, you know, I felt embarrassed that… I dunno, that I had done this TV show and I’m still… you know, “You can see Mike from Spaced serving burritos three times a week.” You know?

PLUME: And did people recognize you?

FROST: Yeah, people would say, “You’re Mike from Spaced!” I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, here’s your bill.”

PLUME: “Tip heavy.”

FROST: “If you liked the show, tip heavy. Thanks for nothing!”

PLUME: “Here, I’ll sign your menu.”

FROST: Yeah, exactly.

PLUME: Did you go out on other auditions at that time or were you kind of in a wait-and-see as far as another series of Spaced?

FROST: I needed to get an agent, I didn’t have an agent or anything, even, you know, through the whole first series. Simon’s agent looked after me. I needed to get an agent and stuff like that. I think it was only after the second series finished that things picked up and I actually started to think, well, this – I could make a living out of this, doing something that I enjoy. And over the last few years I’ve been given or have acquired a set of tools that will help me in this job. As well as my own kind of natural – not natural ability, that makes me sound like a c**t – but you know what I mean? I had something.

PLUME: You had a talent and a skillset that you could utilize.

FROST: Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, through doing Shaun of the Dead and through doing Spaced and stuff like that, it kind of… you know, I learned on the job. I was like an apprentice.

PLUME: How different would you say the experience for the second series of Spaced was from the first?

FROST: I don’t think it was much different at all. I think I was more confident and I wasn’t… I think you could see I wasn’t pretending I was a man pretending to be an actor. I actually felt like an actor, you know? But I mean, for the process of doing it, it was exactly the same. Even doing Shaun of the Dead I thought that was the same process, because Edgar does things and Nyra, who’s our producer, does things in a certain way and it’s gonna be eight or ten weeks of just f***ing intense pain but at the end of the day you’re going to have an amazing product and a great show, you know? Touch wood, hopefully.

PLUME: But there was definitely a confidence increase when you got into that second series.

FROST: Yeah, because I knew I could do it. I’d proved I could do it. It wasn’t any different.

PLUME: Did you stop feeling like, you know, “Well, they’re going to find me out one of these days.”

FROST: No. No. No, not really. I mean, when we did Shaun of the Dead, speaking to Bill Nighy, he still has that feeling now.

PLUME: And one day they will find him out.

FROST: Yeah, of course they will.

PLUME: Give it a couple years…

FROST: He’s a charlatan, for Christ’s sake.

PLUME: A couple dozen more projects, eventually, everyone will see him for what he is.

FROST: (Laughs) They’ll get him. But personally, what was happening to me… I didn’t really have a girlfriend… I wasn’t a big hit with the ladies, I have to admit. But rave culture was big in Britain at that time, and so I think a lot of my kinda spare time before doing, you know, Shaun of the Dead was spent just clubbing, all the time.

PLUME: Just thoroughly enjoying freedom at that point?

FROST: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because, I mean, London was just swinging, it was kicking off in London at that time. And everything was just amazing and fresh and new, and new kind of music and ecstasy was big and it was, you know, it was just a really amazing time. And even though I was only a waiter and didn’t want to do anything, those seven or eight years I spent were such an amazing… they were just amazing, you know? The things I saw in that time from a human point of view were just… just such excesses, do you know what I mean?

PLUME: Right. So what were you like on that club scene? Obviously, Jessica’s talked about wearing her fairy outfit to the clubs…

FROST: Ah, I was a monster. I used to wear a sarong. I used to go clubbing in a sarong, that’s the kind of club we used to go to. But, you know, I was a bit of a… you know, I had that – well, I was saying earlier before I went to the kibbutz, it kind of re-emerged in the 90s, in the rave days, you know, as just, you know, a bit of a… what we call em here is a bit of a pill-head. A bit of a pill-head. And, you know, you just go out all weekend from Friday night and you don’t get back until Sunday night. And that’s what you worked for. And that was literally everyone I knew was like that.

PLUME: Is that the kind of thing that’s difficult to maintain for a long period of time?

FROST: Eh, yeah. Exactly. I mean, unless you go on to things like crack and heroin, I think – and I didn’t, and I never wanted to. I never thought about that at all – you just get older and you grow out of it and every single person that I knew and I know in that scene is now quite successful and fairly wealthy and, you know, they just grew out of it.

PLUME: Many have started families, I’m assuming?

FROST: Yeah, yeah… yeah, I just-It was weird. We used to go to a club called Sunny Side Up and it used to run from 8am on Sunday morning up until midnight, and so we’d come out of there at five or six in the afternoon and I’d probably just have like a sarong on, and a vest, and Elvis glasses. And… you know, when you’d get on the subway, when you’d get on the tube, you could literally clear the whole car: people would think, “F***ing hell,” and they would just get off and sit in a different car. And it was lovely, you could just sit in the whole car yourself.

PLUME: So there are perks to everything.

FROST: Yeah, exactly, just cause you’re a kind of tubby gurning lunatic, doesn’t mean that you can’t, you know, get your own train compartment.

PLUME: So you almost miss those days, don’t you?

FROST: Well… yes and no. I mean… no, no, not really. I much prefer the person I am now, right now today. I just… unfortunately, my family life kinda took a downturn about three, three and a half years ago. And it completely… it completely changed me. Well, my brother died three years ago, and then last year my sister died, and then in January this year my mum died.

PLUME: So was it a bit of a wake up call, in reprioritizing things?

FROST: Well, yeah, I mean…you just… you know what, up until the point my brother died three years ago, I was a kid, I was a child and I was a f***ing idiot. But then, the moment I got that phone call, literally the moment I got that phone call, I became a man. And there were bigger things in life and it wasn’t all about going out and getting f***ed up and not wanting to do a day’s work and, you know… there were other things that occurred to me at that point and… god, you know, I think the reason my mum died was she… I mean, I don’t have any children yet. Do you have kids?

PLUME: No, no.

FROST: But I mean, I can only imagine what it must be like to lose two of your children…

PLUME: In that quick a succession.

FROST: Yeah, I don’t think… I just don’t think you get over that. And it’s… you know… and also, it’s frightening. I’m thirty-three years old and you think, “F***ing hell, am I going to be forty?” I’m sure I am, because I’m not… you know, I don’t really drink, I don’t smoke now, I don’t smoke marijuana much anymore… he says, coming back off a dirty weekend in Amsterdam. But, you know, everything in moderation.

PLUME: But you’re definitely not the person you were ten years ago.

FROST: No, no, not at all. I mean, my apartment is beautiful and designer and I’ve got original paintings and photographs that I’ve took of San Francisco and… you know, I’m like a proper person.

Continued below…

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