Author: UncaScroogeMcD

-by Ken Plume

Ricky Gervais, along with Stephen Merchant (our interview with whom you can read HERE), is the co-creator of both the original British and American versions of The Office and now two series of the BBC/HBO hit Extras – not to mention co-host of the most downloaded podcast in history.

He’s written an episode of The Simpsons, performed a pair of sold-out stand-up tours (both of which have been released on DVD in the UK as Animals and Politics, with the upcoming Fame tour completing the trifecta), co-starred in the recent big screen outings A Night At The Museum and For Your Consideration, written a pair of Flanimals books for children, and won more awards than you can shake a stick at

In Extras, Gervais stars as jobbing actor Andy Melman. The second series will begin airing on HBO this Sunday, January 14th, at 10pm, and the first series is now available on DVD.

I’ve spoken with Gervais a few times in the past, and from the comfort of my own chair, this is our latest tete-a-tete…

Warning – there are some spoilers ahead.

QUICK STOP: Hello?

RICKY GERVAIS: Is that Ken, then?

QS: Yes, this is.

GERVAIS: Hello, it’s Ricky Gervais.

QS: Ah, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you again.

GERVAIS: Oh, am I… have I called you again by mistake?

QS: No, we’ve spoken many times in the past.

GERVAIS: I recognize your voice, and I just did an interview, and I suddenly thought, “That voice is so familiar,” that I just called a guy back that I just did an interview with.

QS: Or my voice is just so incredibly generic that it sounds like everyman.

GERVAIS: All Americans sound the same to me.

QS: I can understand that way of thinking.

GERVAIS: No, it’s not true. I thought I just called the wrong number.  It’s very early, but is it okay if we do it a bit earlier?

QS: That is perfectly fine.

GERVAIS: When did I speak to you last?

QS: I think we spoke toward the end of 2005.

GERVAIS: Right, right.

QS: And then we had spoken a year prior to that.

GERVAIS: Right, wow.

QS: So at this point you’re an open book to me.

GERVAIS: I know. I don’t think I’ve got anything new. Nothing’s happened!

QS: Surely there must be something new.

GERVAIS: Yeah. If not, I can just make it up and make it out that life’s a bit more glamorous than it is.

QS: And I hear all Americans are gullible, so I should believe everything.

GERVAIS: Really?  I never said that.

QS: No, but I believe that others have characterized us as such…

GERVAIS: English people think that Americans don’t have irony, and I point out that stupid people think that, because Americans do irony easily as well if not better than we do with things like The Simpsons and Larry Sanders and Arrested Development.   It’s just a ludicrous myth.  I think it’s the most popular received bit of false knowledge.  Whenever I talk to someone, they go, “The American Office is doing well, isn’t it?  Strange, because they don’t get sarcasm, do they?”  I go, “Yeah, yeah, I think they do get sarcasm.”  Like it’s some sort of genetic trait that the gene pool in America just left off the gene for sarcasm.  How would that work? (laughing)

QS: Well, surely it’s an environmental switch – with all the fast food we eat, it must have somehow turned it off.

GERVAIS: Although I do understand that over 50% of Americans believe in angels.  And that more Americans believe in ESP than evolution.

QS: Yeah, but it’d be interesting to compare the number that believe in angels with the number that believe in God.  Because I think some people just believe in angels with no religious attachment whatsoever.

GERVAIS: (laughing) What do they think they are, then?  They’re Darwinians. They’re people that sort of jumped out of trees.

QS: I would love to know what the Venn diagram is for belief in angels and belief in ghosts.

GERVAIS: I love that when two people argue, they go, “Oh, don’t be stupid. There’s no such thing as ghosts,” – But they do believe in the afterlife. There’s not ghosts – there’s angels and you go to heaven.  You don’t walk around on earth dead, you live in heaven dead.

QS: Yeah, they built some new apartment blocks, it’s great.

GERVAIS: Yeah, (laughing), exactly!!

QS: Heaven is on a big boom right now.

GERVAIS: (laughing) People are dying to get in.

QS: I hear there’s a list. That’s all purgatory is, it’s the waiting list.

GERVAIS: Yeah.  “Oh, dear. You won’t be noisy, will you?”  “No.”  “No musicians.”

QS: Can you imagine what the co-op board is like for that?

GERVAIS: Unbelievable.

QS: “Do you have an instrument?”  “No.”  “Would you like one?”

GERVAIS: That’s not good, because it is forever.

QS: “We’re putting our bliss order in – how much do you want?”

GERVAIS: (laughing)

QS: Well, I have to say, I remain shocked that you still haven’t gotten your DVDs released over in the States.

GERVAIS: I don’t know.  People can get them, but I don’t want to release them in America because I think there’s little bits and pieces that Americans might not get. Not many. I try to do everything as universal as possible. I don’t talk about things that happened in the news that week, and I try not to do too many parochial cultural references.

QS: The discs are widely pirated…

GERVAIS: Yes, I know, but you say widely pirated – it’s probably a few Anglophiles dotted around mainly in New York and L.A., I’d suspect.  But I could be wrong.  I’d want to do it properly, really.  I’m doing a gig in America in May, and I may conflate the best of those and mostly new stuff.  I don’t want people to just get second hand goods.  And also, the more you improve, you want them to see the latest thing.  It’s there for them to get, but I think to package it up and release it as new, I think it’s giving them a 90% product just because of the things… if I was doing live work in America, I would change or leave out or…

QS: Which is completely different than the Eddie Izzard model, which is, “I will sell you everything I have ever recorded…”

GERVAIS: Mm.  Well, I can’t comment on…

QS: Can’t or won’t?

GERVAIS: (laughing) I think it’s best if I don’t comment on that.

QS: It’s great.  It’s like viewing family photos of Eddie. You can buy every phase.

GERVAIS: (laughing)

QS: He’s almost like the Bowie of comedy. “Oh, that’s his Ziggy phase…”

GERVAIS: Yeah.  Luckily, I haven’t changed my haircut for 10 years.

QS: It’s just all a matter of consistency, is what you’ve been going for.

GERVAIS: If you did a flicker book of all my pictures, the hair would stay the same, but the cheeks would just widen.

QS: That’s going to make for the easiest compilation tape ever made. You can really just combine all your stand-ups in to one uber-standup.

GERVAIS: I’ll just do a virtual one.  So I never change. And then I can just edit it to audio and just cut from one to the other and have a cartoon. That’s a great idea!

QS: Did you see what Jimmy Carr is doing?

GERVAIS: What’s that?

QS: He’s doing a gig in Second Life – the online virtual reality community…

GERVAIS: I’m not… I don’t live there.

QS: It’s basically where people walk around with these computer generated avatars and live this weird second life within this online community.   And he’s actually doing a gig online, virtually. So there’ll be a computer representation of Jimmy while he’s doing this gig live at a secret location in London.

GERVAIS: Oh, so he’s gonna do it, and it’s his audio feed?

QS: That’s going to be matched up with this digital representation of him.

GERVAIS: Right, okay.  But that’s just… okay.

QS: So it’s basically like listening to a CD with a really creepy Jimmy graphic.

GERVAIS: But that’s just like a webcast then really, but within a cartoon.

QS: Exactly, yes.

GERVAIS: And so will people… okay.  This is for nerds, surely.

QS: I can think of no other audience.

GERVAIS: (laughing) And nor can I.

QS: But he seems really keen on it.

GERVAIS: I can think of no other audience.  A Venn diagram – It’d just be one circle with the word “nerd” written in it.

QS: Yes.  “Who actually believes in angels?  And Jimmy Carr?”

GERVAIS: (laughing) That’s hilarious.

QS: I did want to ask you about your appearance at Comedy Central’s Night of Too Many Stars charity event in New York – it was the only time I had seen what I perceived as you being nervous in performance…

GERVAIS: Oh, tell me about it.  I hadn’t gigged. I’d never done that stuff before.  I followed Jerry Seinfeld. And it was the first time I’d ever played America.  So I think your perception is spot on.

QS: You picked a hell of a gig to do that!

GERVAIS: It’s mad, isn’t it?  You’re meant to frighten yourself once a day. So I did a couple of months worth in that four and a half minutes.

QS: I’ll bet you wished you believed in angels then.

GERVAIS: I know. They were… yeah.

QS: But you seemed to get comfortable about halfway through it, and go with the rhythm.

GERVAIS: Yeah.  I just think that… do you know what, though?  You say that it’s a hell of a gig, but actually, the audience on those things are very, very generous. If they’d have paid $50 to see me, and I wasn’t ready, then that’s despicable – but when they know that everyone’s thrown in and sort of doing it, they’re actually a very very generous crowd. And for me, a bigger crowd is better than a small crowd. I’d rather play to five thousand people than five.

QS: When you mentioned Jerry Seinfeld preceding you, do you still feel intimidated around performers like that?

GERVAIS: No, I heard he said he couldn’t follow me.  He insisted he went on first.

QS: What a prick.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Oh god…

QS: I’ll bet they were all throwing themselves in front of you.

GERVAIS: Yeah. I didn’t get to meet him, either.  I think he was in and out. He’s sort of as good as it gets in terms of quality, size, fame, and adoration.  And so yeah, I was watching him backstage, and I was laughing, because he’s brilliant, and I was going, “Oh, I wish I’d already been on!” (laughing)

QS: How surreal was it to have Steve Carell, in character, doing a piece?

GERVAIS: Oh, he’s great.  I love Steve Carell. He’s got a likeable face.  So has Jerry Seinfeld. I think that’s the secret to film comedy, having a likeable face. If people like you, you’re already halfway there.

QS: What was that really odd experiment they did in the UK a few months back, where they determined what the ultimate comedy face would look like?

GERVAIS:  And it came out me.  Now the thing about that is, I looked at the list of all the comedy greats they got in to come to me, and at least 50% of them were fat, round-faced blokes.

QS: And one of them was Jo Brand.

GERVAIS: And one of them was Dawn French! So when they say, “the perfect comedian is Ricky Gervais, he’s got a round face and so many features,” well that’s because you’ve been using round-faced women! (laughing)

QS: And yet they said nothing about perfectly round heads.

GERVAIS: Karl Pilkington…

QS: I had a nice conversation about Karl with Steve Merchant yesterday.

GERVAIS: I was with Karl last night.  He came round.  His girlfriend said to him, “Tell them your theory.”  He went, “Well, all it is was I was thinking, right, how did we make that quantum leap from chimpanzee to humans?”  I went, “I’ll stop you there. It’s not a quantum leap.  We actually share more genetic material with chimpanzees than chimpanzees do with gorillas.”  He went, “Well okay, then how’d you get to that?” I said, “Well it’s not a quantum leap.  It’s a gradual process.”  He’s going, “No, no.”  I went, “Well, what’s your theory?”  He went, “Well, I was thinking, how did we get that brain?”  I went, “Well, it evolved.”  He went, “No. That brain… what if we got that from aliens?”  I went, “What are you talking about?”  He went, “Well, what if there was some… like, a brain in space?”  And I said, “What the fuck does that mean?  How will it live in space?”  He went, “It can.”  I went, “Well, it can’t.  It can’t without…” He went, “Yeah, well, somehow it can.”  I went, “Well, that’s not a theory. To go, ‘somehow it can’ – that’s not a theory.”

QS: Or it’s the most profound leap, almost quantum leap, in logic you can make.

GERVAIS: It’s amazing.  He says that often – he just says, “and something happens.”  He had that idea for the watch that counts down and tells you how long you’ve got left.  And I went, “How would it work?”  He went, “You just wear it on your wrist.”  I went, “No, that’s not how it works, that’s where you wear it.  How does it work?”  He went, “It just does.”  I went, “Well, that’s no idea at all then, Karl.”  Imagine him going to the patent office with that one…

QS: Is it like Schrödinger’s Karl?  Does he exist if no one observes him?

GERVAIS: Well, some people think that he is an invention.

QS: I had this argument with John Hodgman, who I put in contact with you for that New York Times piece a few months back.  We’ve had this running argument about the truth of Karl…

GERVAIS: Well, all I’ll say is this – if he’s putting it on, he puts it on 24 hours a day. He’s incredible.  He’s absolutely incredible.

QS: Have you spoken to anyone who’s encountered him during his childhood, or did he just arrived fully formed?

GERVAIS: No.  I think I knew one person who knew him when he was about 14, and he just said he had hair then. That was the big difference.

QS: Karl made quite an impression on people, then.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Oh, god!

QS: “I remember him, he had hair.”

GERVAIS: “He had hair!” But no, it’s a joy because he’s always got something to say. He’s always got an opinion on… we did the Christmas podcast, which went live on Christmas day, and we were just talking about stuff.  We were talking about the three wise men.  On the podcast he talks about the three wise men giving him gifts. And he was going, “The trouble is, for the one who brought gold, what did he get him next year?  He said, ‘Have some myrrh, and then you can get something better next year.’”  And afterwards we were talking about the gifts, and he said, “Were those presents for his birthday or Christmas?”  Which is an amazing question. And I said, “Well, his birthday, because Christmas wasn’t invented yet, was it?”

QS: It’s a weird sort of logic line that he dances…

GERVAIS: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.  He’s incredible.  But the Christmas podcast is one of my favorites because it’s… I don’t know, it’s sort of looking back, and there’s some closure to it, because we decided it’s going to be the last one for a while, and it’s quite sweet in a way.  It’s quite sweet when you give him a chance to talk. (laughing)…

QS: It’s almost become this thing where it’s like when the aunts show up at Christmas day, and they bring the child out to perform.  Like, “Did you see the cute thing that he said today?  Say the cute thing that you said!”

GERVAIS: I do feel that I’m like Anthony Hopkins in The Elephant Man.  That I’m taking this oddity around.  Oh, talking of that – that’s his favorite film. And you know the bit where John Merrick is displayed to all the surgeons at the Royal College by the screen and he’s naked, and he goes, “See the deformation of the skull and the spinal column and the limbs.”  And he says, “The genitals are unaffected.”  Right?  And Karl went, “Think of that – the one thing you would want like an elephant, and he got the head.” (laughing)

QS: Has anyone ever given Karl an IQ test?

GERVAIS: That’s a very… that’s incredible that you should say that, because Karl’s doing a thing for Channel Four. It’s called a Comedy Lab.  It was the first thing me & Steve did, a Comedy Lab, and he’s got his own Comedy Lab where you get some money and you make a half hour thing, and he’s making this documentary about whether knowledge is bad for you.  He’s got that theory…

QS: Right….

GERVAIS: So I did an introduction where I said it’s ludicrous, because he’s always grumpy.  I’ve never seen him happy. And he’s stupid, so I don’t know what point he’s trying to make. And he took a Mensa test yesterday.

QS: He did?

GERVAIS: Yeah. And it was incredible, because he was talking to us last night about it, and he was going, “It was really weird.  The first one was easy, and then it kicked in, and I didn’t know what was going on. They were asking this stuff like, ‘If Jack and Janet got married what would be baby be called?’”  And I went, “What?” And there was no question like that.  He just couldn’t even remember the questions.  And he went, “Oh, that was doing me head in.”  He said, “At one point, I looked over, and one woman had finished and she was doing Soduku in her own time.”   (laughing)

QS:  It almost makes you think he was wondering, “God, if I could get this done, I could have play time in the field…”

GERVAIS: Well, exactly. Except there was an 11 year old kid there who didn’t look like he was having too much trouble.  I predicted he’d do quite well on it, but I was wrong. Because I thought… I said, “Well, one, they are obviously class biased. There’s lots of stuff, word play and things about the English language and word recognition. So the only true one is like shape recognition, in a way, and maths, If you can understand the question. And I thought he’d do quite well.  In fact, I said, “Well, he’s got a good brain – he’s just never used it.”  But apparently he’s got three percent, if he’s lucky! (laughing)  But I’m going to open the envelope with him for the documentary, so he doesn’t know. It’s in a couple of weeks time.  But that’s so strange you said that.

QS: But there’s a difference between a standard IQ test and a Mensa test…

GERVAIS: Well, of course.  The Mensa test is for nerds who want to prove something…

QS: It’s an ego test more than anything else.

GERVAIS: Well, of course it’s an ego test – and also, you can get good at them. You can learn the tricks and all this sort of stuff.  I don’t know why he’d want to say, “I’ve got an IQ of 180,” or whatever.  I’m sure there are purer I.Q. tests… because obviously Karl, I think, is a very intelligent person.  He sees the world differently. He’s very creative. He’s very, very funny.  But he has a problem with simple concepts.  He cannot understand the monkey-typewriter thing. I was going, “Listen, it’s not to be taken literally. It’s a model of the nature of infinity.  No one’s gonna sit a monkey down with a typewriter.”  I was going, “It’s like this: there are many even numbers as even and odd numbers put together.  There’s no understanding of that other than infinity means forever. So anything can happen.”  He went, “Well, I don’t even know what that means.”  I went, “What?”   Have you heard his discussion about monkeys and typewriters?

QS: Yes I have…

GERVAIS: Have you seen it on the Politics DVD?

QS: Yes…

GERVAIS: It’s phenomenal when he says, “I’ve never seen anything published by a monkey,” as proof it would never happen.

QS: He’s never read The Guardian.

GERVAIS: (laughing)  He doesn’t quite understand the concept.  I think he doesn’t understand the concept of infinity.  You have to concentrate when someone says infinity, and all that entails. And I just think…

QS: I view Karl more as a far too concrete thinker as opposed to… he wants to put it in concrete terms, this view of infinity… like the alien brain thing.

GERVAIS: I don’t know, you see.  I think sometimes he’s got a real fluidity to his thought, and he’s not constrained by it.  Because if you tell him something, the question he asks, you couldn’t predict. It wouldn’t come up if you asked a hundred children. The question he asks is never the one that you think anyone would ask, and it’s always hilarious.  For example, I told him about a story in the paper that I thought he’d be interested in.  It was a chimpanzee, an adolescent chimpanzee, that had a fight with its father in the zoo, and it had escaped. It had an argument and escaped. The point was, he’s an adolescent – not a human being.  Karl said, “What was the argument about?”  See, there’s no way you’d be thinking that when I told you it. There’s no way that you were thinking… because you were already thinking about, “What’s the connotations, what’s the higher level, what are we talking about here?” There’s no way you’d think, “Was it about the remote control or you’ve got to go to bed early?”  Whereas he thought… he just… he personifies things too readily.

QS: But it goes back to trying to make things concrete and identifiable as things  that exist within his world.

GERVAIS: I… well, yes, I suppose…I suppose he does then. Yeah, he has to…

QS: Sort of like a kid with a blow pipe shooting down balloons or something.  He’s got to find a way to ground things within his domain.

GERVAIS: Yes, to make sense in his world. But he quite happily dismisses things. You can be telling him something, and if he doesn’t like it, it won’t get in. He doesn’t go, “What do you mean?” – He thinks, “That’s not for me. I don’t get it.  It’s too vacuum packed.  It doesn’t matter.  Forget it.” And he’ll shut off. I’ll lose him.  I’ll lose him halfway through the first sentence.

QS: How do you know when you’re losing him?  Do you see the light go off in his eyes?

GERVAIS: Yeah, he looks bored. I know he’s thinking of something else.  He’s thinking of another word I’d said, and he’s gone off on a tangent. I can see it happen. I can actually see it happen. I’d love to be able to download a flow chart of the word that I lost him at and what he was thinking of.  Sometimes I say, “What are you thinking of?”  And I’m right.  It’s like Homer Simpson.  It’s like Homer Simpson.  We were talking to him once about bringing back a mammoth to life, right?

QS: Right…

GERVAIS: And I thought he’s be interested in that. And he went, “Really?”  And he was too interested. And I went, “Yeah.”  He went, “A man moth.”  I went, “Not a man moth! What do you mean a man moth?”  He went, “Well I thought…” I said, “What were you thinking of when you thought it was a man moth?”  He said, “I thought it was a moth with a bloke’s head bumping into a lamp.”

QS: So he went the extra step of putting the man moth within a natural context.

GERVAIS: Yeah. And, he can download his thoughts. You might be right.  So he can actually… so he doesn’t have nebulous concepts or symbolism doesn’t matter… he doesn’t understand metaphor and analogy.

QS: Has anyone given him a Rorschach test?

GERVAIS: Well, that would be amazing.  Because I think he’d say, “It looks like someone spilled some ink.”  I think you might be right, actually.

QS: I would be fascinated if someone actually gave him a Rorschach test, and  what his instantaneous response would be. I think you’re right, as well.

GERVAIS: He’ll never be hypnotized. That’s dangerous. He’ll never… I mean it’s incredible what he will and won’t do.  But I’ve never met someone who’s so fascinating to talk… down to.  I never met anyone who made me feel so clever!

QS: What would Karl as a child have been like?

GERVAIS: I think he was a very intelligent kid.  I think one of those inquisitive, always working, always thinking, wanting to make stuff, wanting to take things apart kinds.  I think that shows quite a natural intelligence. And I imagine he was like that.  I still think he’s intelligent.  I still think he’s a very, very original thinker.  I think he’s got a real grasp of certain things, but I think you’re right; the more practical something is, the better he is at it.  If you said, “Here’s the thing – this is the best way to do it,” I think he’d always be in the top half of the class.  I really do think you’re right, actually.  I think the more concrete and the more literal… and the more… see, here’s the thing.  If it’s actually applicable to a real situation, he’ll do better. There’s a psychological test to prove that.  You know the one where they say, “You’ve got some playing cards. There’s four playing cards. Some have blue backs, some have red backs, some are even numbers, some are odd numbers. Even numbers have blue backs.”  And it’s, “What cards do you have to turn over to test the theory?” And so, you go, “Well, if you’re just testing that theory, you’d want to test a red card because you’d want to see if that theory was true, and you want to check the backs of even numbers. You don’t have to check the blue ones, because it’s not saying that have to be blue, etc.  But that’s quite a… people don’t score very high on that, right?  But when you say, “Everyone in this bar has to be over 21 to drink alcohol, what do you test?”  Well, you test the people under 21, what they’re drinking, and you test alcoholic drinks. You don’t need to test the soft drinks, and you don’t need to test… and people get that a lot easier, because it’s applicable to a real life rule.

QS: It’s a known context.

GERVAIS: Exactly. So I think you’re right.  I think Karl would do those really well.  He’d score high. Well, that’s why they teach kids… “If you have three potatoes and I took one away, how many would you have?”  Because there’s a fantastic experiment they did with chimpanzees. So they’d have beads, okay?  A big pile of beads and a small pile of beads.  And the chimp learned that when he chose the small pile of beads, he got a grape. So what one do you want?  Small pile.  Great.  Brilliant at it. When they did it with grapes, he couldn’t not choose the big pile.  Even though he didn’t get any, he’d slap his head and go mad, and they’d give him the choice again, he always chose the big pile and missed out on the rewards.  Because it was overwhelming.  The reality was bigger than the concept. Oh my god, that’s what I should do with Karl!  I should do it with money, with beads, and then do it with real money.

QS: Oh, please tell me you’ll do that.

GERVAIS: (laughing) No even I know he’d get that one right.

QS: Oh, come on.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Oh god!

QS: You’ve got a DVD for Fame coming up soon.  You gotta have some kind of bonus feature on it with Karl again…

GERVAIS: I’m going to tell Karl, I’m going to say, “I met a journalist who thinks you’re even more stupid than I do.”

QS: Give him my number.

GERVAIS: I’d love you to speak to him.

QS: Are you surprised that he’s become sort of a cult figure? It’s almost like a modern Kilroy. 

GERVAIS: I’ve worked my hardest to make sure it happens, and I haven’t stopped yet. In fact, in the latest podcast, the Christmas podcast, I say to people, “Get a picture of Karl Pilkington, and put it up in your window. If you go in a shop, put a big one up.” I want him to be so famous, so people see him on the street and say, “Look at your stupid round, bald head.” And he just went, “Ah, that’ll be good then.”

QS: Has Karl ever been to the United States?

GERVAIS: Yes, he went to L.A. as a holiday, and he went to Ripley’s three times.

QS: What, did he not take it all in on the first trip?

GERVAIS: No, he just wanted to see the two headed goat three times, I think.

QS: And, of course, there’s nothing else in L.A. to do…

GERVAIS: Yeah, I know! (laughing) Yeah!  You’re only in a place where it’s 80 degrees every day. And you go into Ripley’s to see some things in jars!

QS: You should tell him there’s a Ripley’s near Dollywood, too.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Yes, he is a phenomenon.

QS: It’s almost a shame that you don’t take a tour of Karl Pilkington’s America.  Put him in a car or team him up with someone…

GERVAIS: I can just have a Karl Camp.  I would watch a TV show that was just Karl walking around. It’d be amazing.

QS: Do you think Karl leads some kind of secret life, or has some sort of secret desire that no one knows about?

GERVAIS: Uh…

QS: Would anything surprise you at this point?

GERVAIS: No.  No, I don’t believe that. I spoke to him the other day.  He said, “I got up, and then I was washing up, and then I noticed there was no milk.  So I went to the shop.” He went, “I had a conversation with a woman in the corner shop and everything. I came back, I had my breakfast, walked past a mirror…”  He had a cotton bud still in his ear.  And he went, “So why didn’t she tell me I had a cotton bud in my ear?”  I said, “What, you’re angry with someone who didn’t tell you you had a cotton bud stuck in your ear?  Surely that’s your responsibility, Karl.”  I said, “Well, what did you do that you’re halfway through, something else got your attention, and you didn’t even bother pulling it out before you did whatever… how can you do that?  How can you forget there’s a cotton bud in your ear?” Unbelievable.

QS: It’s like profound ignorance.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Yeah it is, yeah.

QS: It’s not lack of an intelligence, it’s just profound ignorance.

GERVAIS: Yeah, it’s incredible.  But again, his take on the story, the reason he was telling me that story was how stupid the woman in the shop was for not telling him.

QS: Does Karl believe in angels?  He believes in aliens, obviously – they bring monkey brains.

GERVAIS: He believes in aliens. He think’s it’s possible… but you know what, though?  Believing in aliens is not the same as believing in ESP and God and ghosts and that, because at least… my concession to Karl is that it’s possible.  It’s possible with aliens.  I just say it’s improbable.

QS: That they’re seeding monkey brains to create human brains…

GERVAIS: (laughing) Yeah!  It’s so insane.  “Well how did they survive?”  “They just did.”  I’d love him to write a book on science.

QS: I would just love to know what happens when the brains land.

GERVAIS: Yeah, how do they get in there?

QS: Are these empty headed humans walking around going, “Oh, this’ll fit.”

GERVAIS: Yeah, that’s it – he said they got in somehow. They got in “somehow.”  Yeah, I’m sure they did, Karl.

QS: It’d be great to actually have him teach a science course.

GERVAIS: It’s be amazing, wouldn’t it?

QS: Sit him down with a book and give him a lesson plan that a teacher would have during the year, and say, “Okay, now you instruct the class.”

GERVAIS: Him and Stephen Hawking, in discussion.

QS: Why hasn’t anyone arranged that yet?

GERVAIS: I don’t know.

QS: Stephen would probably do it.

GERVAIS: You’ve got a lot of clout, haven’t you?

QS: Oh, yeah, sure.

GERVAIS: Doesn’t he live over there?  Where is Stephen Hawking? Oh, he lives in England, doesn’t he?

QS: Well, he divides his time.

GERVAIS: I know Matt Groening could get him.

QS: You set the two of them down.  If you could meet Larry David, you could easily have Karl meet Stephen Hawking.

GERVAIS: So I did a show, and Stephen Hawking came on to present an award I was getting…

QS: This was the British Comedy Awards…

GERVAIS: That’s right, yeah.  Stephen Hawking was there, and it took a little bit of time for him to do the thing.

QS: Who knew he’d go long?

GERVAIS: (laughing) Well, Karl said he’s got to get broadband.(laughing)

QS: It was an awkward joy to see Matt Groening standing there, desperately trying not to look at his watch.

GERVAIS: Well, I mentioned it.  I went up and said, “You know, he may be a genius, but he’s got to have it ready.”

QS: I noticed even in his moment of triumph, you had to make Steve’s British Comedy Award all about you…

GERVAIS: How do you know so much about England?

QS: The beauty of the internet age.

GERVAIS: Oh wow.

QS: So, watching shows like Jonathan Ross all the time. I’m surprised Jonathan never made a go in the U.S. …

GERVAIS: Yeah, I had to get in the fact that it’s such a chavvy program, isn’t it?  It really is.

QS: It’s like a more erudite, intelligent Graham Norton.

GERVAIS: Jesus, that’s… oh my god, that’s damning.  Being less intelligent and erudite than the British Comedy Awards.  Jesus Christ.  That’d be the worst thing you could ever say about someone, I think.

QS: The weird thing about the British Comedy Awards, is I love seeing the portion when the award goes to an American.  Groening will call out the provincial nature of the British comedy scene, and I forgot who called it out last year, by saying, “Who are you people?”

GERVAIS: Oh, Matt Groening did a great line. “I’ve never been in a room with so many famous people I’ve never heard of.”  Classic.  Brilliant.  Because that’s how I see the perception of my peers.

QS: It’s almost like viewing this sort of Petri dish of entertainment.  “Who are Ant & Dec? Oh, Okay.”

GERVAIS: The thing is for me I think it’s easy to become famous in England.  The leveler is, can you cut it, can you make it global, can you do a product that travels…

QS: All you have to do is make it onto the new edition of Big Brother and you’re famous in the UK.

GERVAIS: Yeah, exactly. It’s easy to become famous, isn’t it?

QS: As long as you’re on shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats…

GERVAIS: Oh my gosh, shivers down my spine that you’ve heard of all these things.

QS: That’s what I say about trying to introduce the US audience to various shows.  I’m surprised you’ve never been on a show like QI, which would seem like a good venue for you…

GERVAIS: I like it. I do like that show.  But the reason I don’t do it is because I think… well one I don’t want to pop up on telly too much unless I actually have to.  I did the British Comedy Awards because they told me Stephen had won.  The truth is, I could have stayed here for it, but I thought, “Any excuse to get out of the country…” (laughing)

QS: I love how you’re treating it like a small town…

GERVAIS: I do.

QS: It’s like, “I’ve got to get to the big city.”

GERVAIS: I lived in Redding, and I had to make it to London, but now I feel…

QS: “This country, it’s a bit too provincial for me…”

GERVAIS: (laughing) Exactly, yeah.  England’s about as big as Maine, isn’t it?

QS: “I hear there’s something across water that’s really big and inviting. It’s fast.”

GERVAIS: But you know, some people don’t think that way.  The ones that do, they sort of go to America and try and make it.   But they’re trying to make on their own terms, as opposed to just coming out with a product that’s universal.  It’s very strange… but then again, we’ve got a different attitude, really.  Americans are brought up to believe they can become the president of the United States, and we’re told, “Don’t be so silly. Get a load of you.”

QS: Do you think that, in the UK, the audiences don’t dispose of entertainers as quickly?  It seems in the US we seem to cycle through entertainers very quickly and forget about them, whereas in the UK, it seems like people can have much longer careers…

GERVAIS: That’s strange, because I think the opposite.  I think that entertainers here have a shelf life of a couple of years, and then if they hang around there’s no excitement about them, they just hang on.

QS: It seems you can make a career out of just appearing on panel shows in the UK.

GERVAIS: Absolutely… absolutely, yeah.  There’s no distinction… I see things that, when they come on, they’re the biggest thing for a year.  And it changes every single year. Then they come up with something not as good as the first thing they did, then they do the other thing they did again, and they do another special, and they go, “Oh, we’re back…” but we’ve moved on now.  It usually happens to people that will sort of do anything, and try and widen the demographic. Particularly with comedy, as soon as you get seven year olds liking your comedy, I just think we’re doing something wrong.

QS: Obviously you’ve followed that model of moving on as quickly as you can and not dwelling… Steve mentioned that Extras is pretty much sealed at this point, right?

GERVAIS: Yeah, we’re not gonna do another one.  Yeah. We’re gonna move on.

QS: And the podcast is on moratorium.

GERVAIS: I think the podcast… we’ll definitely come back with another couple of specials of podcast but we’ll leave it a while. There’d be no reason to stop that, because it’s not like we’ve got global saturation with podcast. It’s still very cult, and it’s still very nice, and we still enjoy it. We might do another couple over the next year or we might do ten over the next two years.  Who knows?  But we’re gonna leave it for a while. Extras, I think, is almost certainly complete now.  Although there is talk of a possible US remake.

QS: Really?

GERVAIS: Yeah, that’s the best of both worlds for me. You do your piece, it’s totally yours, and you put everything you’ve got into that project.  Exhaust yourself, exhaust the pile, and then someone else takes that and runs with it, and that’s great. It’s brilliant. I love the American Office. I love what they’ve done with it.  I love how they keep me involved as, like, an honorary member of the team. It’s all their work after the initial few months and that initial episode and the one we wrote, it’s been all theirs.  It’s a joy. It’s great.  It lives on. It’s like reincarnation.

QS: So, you do believe in angels.

GERVAIS: Steve Carell is an angel.  That’s what my bank manager said.

QS: Or he’s a ghost.

GERVAIS: (laughing)

QS: Does the UK Office exist within the same universe as the U.S. Office?  Is there a Slough office across the ocean in that universe?

GERVAIS: Well, that was what we tried to do. When they sat down and Ben Silverman met me, he just had a coffee with me.  I’d never heard of him. He just said, “I love the show. I’d love to remake it.”  I never thought it would be remade, and everything that had ever gone before The Office since about 1975 has been an abysmal failure.  I think the last two successful things were All in the Family and Sanford and Son, wasn’t it?

QS: Yeah…

GERVAIS: Just abysmal…

QS: They tried Men Behaving Badly here in the U.S. and that failed.

GERVAIS: Coupling… all these things, you know?  And so I thought, “Yeah, fine.”  I kept to a distance, but I did realize that we were asked to direct it. They wanted me to even be in it at one point, and I said, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would I do that?”  So I knew it had to be by Americans for Americans.  It was the right thing to do, and they seemed to be doing everything right.  So no, it’s great.

QS: Do you ever see Steve Carell bumping into David Brent at a paper convention at some point?

GERVAIS: You know what?  Again, I’m never gonna say never, and if I ever did bring David Brent back, it would be a tiny little in-joke in the American Office. I wanted him to be watching Extras.  I want him to be watching Extras and for him to go, “I like this guy.”  And I want Steve Carell to go, “Meh. He’s not so good.”  Or maybe he could go, “Yeah, I don’t like this version. They should do an American version. I’d be good at that.”

QS: What I find interesting, is can you think of any instance… I was wracking my brain, besides game shows, to think of any instances of a US show translated to the UK.

GERVAIS: Uh… Jesus.  I just think we think, “What’s the point?”  I mean, I don’t know why Americans have to have a remake anyway.

QS: Well remember, we’re the ones who remade Fawlty Towers with Cloris Leachman.

GERVAIS: They’ve had a couple of goes at that, haven’t they?

QS: Yeah.  One was with John Larroquette, from Night Court.

GERVAIS: I’d love to see an English 24.  It would be a lot slower, and go, “Look, we’ve got plenty of time, don’t worry about it.”

QS: Isn’t that essentially MI-5?

GERVAIS: Yeah. It’s funny, ’cause I was speaking to Joel Surnow.  I went down there, I just did a little thing for the gag reel.  I’d spoke to him. His phone cut out.  He called me back.  My phone cut out. I phoned him back and I said, “This doesn’t happen in fucking 24, does it?”

QS: Well, just wait til you see the end of this season. I hear hour 23 is all just him walking around going, “Can you hear me now?”

GERVAIS: (laughing) Right!  “Look – text me.”

QS: “No, I’m not going through a tunnel. Do you have a landline?”

GERVAIS: “So annoying.”

QS: If you had the desire or ability to want to remake a US show, is there any that you love enough that you would say, “I’d like to have a go at that kind of comedy?”

GERVAIS: It would have to be one that no one’s ever heard of over here and never would, because I’d just think, “What’s the point?”  Why remake a great show, and why remake a bad show?  I don’t know, really.

QS: With that logic there would be no U.S. Office.

GERVAIS: No, but it’s a bit different that we accept everything American, whereas Americans, I think they accept everything American, too.

QS: Well, see, we’re exactly alike.

GERVAIS: Is it true that 90% of Americans don’t have passports?

QS: I believe that is absolutely true.

GERVAIS: That’s amazing.  That’s amazing. But you know what?  America is pretty much the world.

QS: The way I look at that is, you can almost understand it, based on the size of the country…

GERVAIS: Well, exactly. You don’t really need to go… what do you need…

QS: And trust me, if you go to Texas, it is like another country.

GERVAIS: Well, exactly. And people in England go abroad because they want to get a bit of sun, or they want a different climate. They don’t want to particularly meet Spanish people.  We’re the worst. We go abroad and we just point and talk louder.  There’s no… we learn “beer” in four different languages.  That’s really it.

QS: We’re the ones walking around with the books trying to be multicultural and failing miserably, with the Canadian flags on our back.

GERVAIS: (laughing) Yeah.

QS: Because we may be fat, but we’re not stupid.

GERVAIS: Are Americans more hated than English people now in the world, do you think?

QS: I think that the tenor of conversation if you identify yourself as American is different, yes.

GERVAIS: Wow. All I can say is thank god for the French. (laughing)

QS: The only thing worse than the French are the French Canadians.

GERVAIS: I’m half French Canadian, so I’m in trouble there.

QS:  Well it’s only half, so you’ve somehow diluted it out. No, the pure French Canadians are the ones that manage to take the ego of the French and multiply it.

GERVAIS: And put it in a much bigger country! (laughing)

QS: Literally, it’s a sad little world to enter into. Have you ever been back to Quebec?

GERVAIS: No, I’ve only been to Vancouver for three days, with Mr. Stiller.  This sums up my first Hollywood film… They flew me and my girlfriend over.  First class. Put us up in the best hotel in Vancouver. Went to the set.  There, I’m in this huge trailer. Ridiculous.  Shawn Levy comes over and goes, “Hi folks!  Great to have you here.  Is everything okay?  Is your trailer okay?”  I went, “Oh my god. The trailer’s bigger than my hotel room.” He said, “Do you want a bigger hotel room?”  I could get used to that sort of treatment. That’s the problem, isn’t it?  I went, “No, it’s huge!  No, they’re brilliant! They’re great!”

QS: That’s a problem I could get used to.

GERVAIS: That’s the problem with us English. We walk into a trailer and we go, “Oh my god, all this for me? I’m embarrassed. This is terrible.”

QS: The great difference, if you go to France as an English speaker, is they’ll look down at you because they don’t deign to learn English.

GERVAIS: Well, why should they?

QS: The French Canadians, though – they know English, and they refuse to speak it.

GERVAIS: They did learn it, that’s the difference.  English people didn’t even learn it – we just think “No, no – they can learn it. (laughing)

QS: Has Karl been abroad? He’s been to Spain before…

GERVAIS: No, he’s been abroad, yeah.

QS: How does Karl act? Is he one of the loud talkers or does he just kind of exist?

GERVAIS: I can’t imagine Karl acting differently in any situation. I honestly can’t. It wouldn’t matter if he was in space. He’d go, “Huh?”

QS: But for someone who is so profoundly uninterested in learning new things, what does he get out of it…

GERVAIS: He’s not, though. He’s fascinated with the things he’s fascinated with, and that’s it. He can’t get enough of insects, and he can’t get enough of aliens, and he’s fascinated with theories and…

QS: Do cultures intrigue him?

GERVAIS: He’s not interested in any form of anything artistic or cultural.  He thinks it’s ridiculous.

QS: So a trip through the Louvre would be lost on him.

GERVAIS:  I think I could get him into anything.  I think I could get him into something. I’d just have to find the right angle.  I feel like I’m in one of those schmaltzy films about teachers who turn ’round inner city kids by talking to them in rap.

QS: You realize that you’ve just about remade Pygmalion.

GERVAIS: I’ve thought about that.

QS: My Fair Karl.

GERVAIS: I’ve thought about that.  Yeah, Pilkmalion. I’ve actually thought that would be amazing to do.  But what could I pass him off as?

QS: I don’t know. Have you tried putting hair on him?

GERVAIS: I wouldn’t pass him off… it wouldn’t be a class thing. I’d pass him off as a great thinker.

QS: You know what the thing is, though?

GERVAIS: He already is.

QS: I think he’s so eccentric that he could very easily be passed off as, like, a college professor.

GERVAIS: I think I’d have to have him talk about… no, it’d have to be something hard. It’s have to be something like…

QS: Like String Theory?

GERVAIS: No, not that, he could get caught out straight away. That would be impossible. He’d actually have to learn.

QS: What about insect behavior?

GERVAIS: What about philosophy?  Where we teach him to say, “I don’t have a formal philosophy. Don’t give me Plato, don’t give me Kant, there’s all flaws in that.”  And then they’d just say, “Well, what do you think about so and so?”  He goes, “What do you mean, exactly?”

QS: Or, “That is the question.”

GERVAIS: He’d put it back to them, like, “Right, ask that question again as if you’re asking a 10 year old child without a brain.”  So it’d look like he was teaching them to ask the question correctly.

QS: Oh, that’d be brilliant.

GERVAIS: That’s what he’d have to say.  He’d give them a get-out – “Now, ask that question again. Now, you’re coming from a very educated middle class point of view there. Now, ask that question again like you’re talking to a retarded ten year old.”

QS: “Have you really thought this through?”

GERVAIS: (laughing) Make them look like an idiot. Just make them always feel like the idiot.

QS: I think you could pull that off.

GERVAIS: It would always leave on a poignant matter…

QS: But the thing is, if you took Karl, taught him that, and took him to like an American college where they hadn’t heard of him on the podcast or anything, you could sit him down in front of a philosophy class and it would work…

GERVAIS: Give him a fake CV the night before.  Make up an award that he’s been given for things he’s doing… make up some amazing quotes…

QS: “He’s a fellow from so-and-so university in the UK.  We brought him over here to give a lecture to the class.”

GERVAIS: And it’s called Free Your Mind.  I love it.

QS: I think you can pull that off.

GERVAIS: I really would like Karl to talk to you. I mean, for the sake of it.

QS: I would love to do a nice big feature on him.

GERVAIS: I’ll tell him.  In fact, I’ll make him.

QS: And like I said, get him out in front of the US audience a bit more.

GERVAIS: He won’t do that. I want to bring him on stage and just ask him questions, and he was going, “No, no.”  He went, “Ridiculous.”

QS: Now, if you bring him in front of that U.S. philosophy class…

GERVAIS: That would be so much fun.  Maybe as a DVD extra.

QS: There are plenty of colleges in the U.S. to bring him to.  Bring him to a nice Midwestern one.

GERVAIS: Okay!

-by Ken Plume

As co-creator of both the original British and American versions of The Office and now two series of the BBC/HBO hit Extras – not to mention co-host of the most downloaded podcast in history – you’d think more people would know the name Stephen Merchant.

Considering his collaborator on all of those projects is a rather larger-than-life chap named Ricky Gervais, you’d be forgiven for overlooking the other half of this remarkable comedic double act – even if Merchant does clock in at an impressive 17 feet tall (or maybe it’s only 6’7 – still, a veritable giant).

A BAFTA and Emmy Award-winner, Merchant has also recently won a British Comedy Award for his on-camera roll as the endearingly clueless agent of jobbing actor Andy Melman (Gervais), Darren Lamb, in Extras.

Speaking of Extras, the second series will begin airing on HBO this Sunday, January 14th, at 10pm, and the first series is now available on DVD. Merchant is also launching a music show on BBC 6 Music starting on the 14th, running Sundays from 3-5pm.

I recently sat down at my desk, phone in hand, and had a chat with Stephen about The Office, Extras, working with Ricky Gervais, podcasts, and the enigma that is Karl Pilkington. Warning – there are some spoilers ahead.

QS: Hello?

MERCHANT: Hello, is Kenneth available?

QS: This is he.

MERCHANT: It’s Steve Merchant calling.

QS: It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you.

MERCHANT: Thank you very much, and you…

QS: Would you prefer Stephen, or Mr. Merchant, or award-winning actor Mr. Stephen Merchant?

MERCHANT: I would obviously prefer all of those. I think Steve’s fine.

QS: Or I can change it up as we go along.

MERCHANT: If you wouldn’t mind, that would be good, yeah… just to get progressive.  So in the end it’s just Sir or Lord.

QS: I could do that.

MERCHANT: Lord Merchant.

QS: Actually sounds pretty good…

MERCHANT: Mm.  If I do more charity work I’m hoping I’ll get there eventually

QS: If Jonathan Ross can get an OBE…

MERCHANT: Exactly.

QS: I think anything is possible.

MERCHANT: Exactly, for goodness sake.

QS: Congratulations on the British Comedy Award.

MERCHANT: Yes, I am officially the best comic actor in Britain for a year.

QS: Is there a changeover ceremony where last year’s best comic actor has to actually give you some kind of cup or something?

MERCHANT: No, it’s rather ignoble. You just go there, and if perhaps you’re nominated again, you just find out there and then if you’ve won again.

QS: Or that somehow your talent has waned through the year…

MERCHANT: Exactly.  Exactly.  I always remember Jerry Seinfeld making a gag about the fact that he was nominated for playing himself in Seinfeld and he won one year, and the following year he didn’t win, and he made a joke about how he had obviously not played himself as convincingly that year as he had the previous year.

QS: So, is that a concern that you have now?

MERCHANT: Well, obviously, once you’ve won a major award like that you very much want to… you don’t want to let it slip.  You don’t want to let the crown slip.  So I shall have to work very hard this year to be even funnier.  But I have no real intention of doing anything this year in which I perform so my moment’s gone, I think, already.

QS: Or theoretically you could maintain the standard, having nothing to compare it against…

MERCHANT: Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

QS: It’s unfortunate that, even in your moment of triumph, Ricky could snatch it away and make it about him.

MERCHANT: Well, that was a little bit of a joke.  I would hate for you to think there was any real animosity between us.

QS:  No, clearly it was set up… but still, even then…

MERCHANT: They just gave it to me so they could get him on the show, I think.

QS: Isn’t that the only reason they give it to anyone related to him?

MERCHANT: I think so.  They turned up, so I got it.

QS: I was shocked recently to see Ricky nervous on camera – the first I’d ever seen him nervous on anything…

MERCHANT: Was he nervous on that?

QS: No, I was watching the Night of Too Many Stars special they did here in the U.S. …

MERCHANT: Oh okay, yeah.

QS: … where he did a portion of the Politics show. The only time I’ve seen him nervous was in front of an American audience doing stand-up…

MERCHANT: Really?  No, I didn’t see that, but I don’t know. I guess he’s stepping into unfamiliar territory there.

QS: I tried to convince him a year and a half ago that he should really get his DVDs out in the States and do the stand-up, since people were bootlegging it over here anyway.

MERCHANT: Yeah, yeah, yeah…

QS: Was the response to the second series of Extras a surprise to you?

MERCHANT: Do you mean for me personally as an actor?

QS: Both as an actor and obviously as a writer of the show.  I watched the episodes as they aired a few months back, and it seems like there was a different tone to how people greeted it compared to series one. It seems like people were unsure about how they should respond to the first series, because they were judging it directly against The Office as a comedy piece.

MERCHANT: Yeah, sure.

QS: And it seemed that with the second series, Extras was able to stand on its own.

MERCHANT: I think so, yeah. And consequently I think some people enjoyed it and others said it wasn’t for them.  Personally I was very pleased with it. I thought we did a lot of funny stuff in that second series.  I had, personally, a great response from people as well.  It was a very conscious decision for us to try not to emulate The Office inasmuch as we didn’t want to chase the same kind of pathos and the same emotional investment.  We wanted to just have a slightly fluffier, slightly sillier show. And I think for that we sort of succeeded, and I think some people still criticize us for not being as emotionally rich, but that wasn’t really our intention.  Our intention was just to have some fun scenes and… yeah, so I was very pleased.

QS: Is there any point where you were… I wouldn’t say concerned, but disappointed in the reaction that Extras was getting, particularly in regards to the tone of the show?

MERCHANT: I wouldn’t say disappointed. I think generally the people that enjoyed it understood exactly what we were trying to do, really, which was just to write some funny comedy.  But I think we made it difficult with The Office, in that we had given people maybe a little bit more than they were expecting from a sitcom. That we were giving them a world which they could entirely invest in and a kind of emotional journey. Which is something we very consciously decided not to do with Extras. We just felt we would be judged against ourselves, and why not just give ourselves a bit of time off and just have fun.  And bizarrely, we were still judged against ourselves by some people for failing to give them what we’d given them in The Office. And it was like, “Well, we’re not trying to give it to you again.” And I always find that slightly frustrating because you sort of feel like, you know, “Judge the show on its own terms.”  Did it make you laugh?  If not, fair enough.  But please don’t judge it compared with either what we’ve done in the past or what someone else has done, because it seems to defeat the object, really.  But that’s just the nature of the beast.  My feeling is just to keep making shows and then hopefully you can have a bit of a body of work which in years to come kind of stands on its own two feet, and is not judged chronologically – if you know what I mean.  People can just dip in and out of your oeuvre as they see fit.  That may seem rather grand, that, but the people I always admired were people with varied careers, with very eclectic stuff in their canon.

QS: It also seemed in the second series that you really came into your own as an actor, as well…

MERCHANT: Yeah, certainly we beefed up my role, and I really enjoyed that, and I had a lot of good feedback from that.  That’s something I enjoyed the most, was just getting to play a two dimensional character who looks an awful lot like me and speaks like me.  It’s not a great performance in the great works of comedy, but I was quite pleased with myself because I’m quite nervous as a performer.  I don’t remember lines very well.  I’m often sat down so that I can have the lines printed up around me or hidden under notebooks and stuff.  So I was quite pleased that I got away with it.

QS: But compared to how often Ricky will corpse on camera, you look profoundly professional…

MERCHANT: Yeah, the two of us together, sometimes we can barely get anything done.  A couple of instances he’d just barely get in the door before I’d be gone.  That’s a great… what a great way to spend the day. I know that we’re burning money fast and people are looking at their watches, but to us it’s so much fun. That’s kinda the reason we do it, I think, is because we just enjoy that.  One of the reasons I gave myself more of a role is just I really love acting opposite Ricky. I just think we’ve got a natural sort of… I hope a natural sense of each other’s timing and what each other’s gonna do. So that was great fun for me.

QS: Personally, I think you’re being incredibly self-critical to describe the part as such.  I think it was an amazing comic performance that you turned in during this past series…

MERCHANT: Thank you.  I appreciate that.

QS:  And I don’t think that, in particular, you could have pulled off the Robert De Niro scene if you didn’t have the chops to do so…

MERCHANT: Yeah. I think what it is is that I’ve got no… I sort of feel instinctively like I’m quite funny, but I’ve got no real objective opinion of it.  Do you know what I mean?  As I’m doing it I’ve got no sense of whether I’m doing it right or wrong or funny.  I’m very much dependant on Ricky to reassure me and tell me that it’s working.  Not because I’m insecure, I just have got no…

QS: No barometer for that?

MERCHANT: Yeah.  I cannot tell.  And even when we’re in the editing room, I look at my performance and I’m just not really sure what I’m doing.

QS: Is there any point or any scene where you did feel that, “Yes, this is funny…”?

MERCHANT: There were times where I’ll deliver a line in certain way, or at least I’ll feel, “Oh I know what I was trying to do there, and that seems closest to it.” But I’m very dependant on Ricky and the others to guide me on that.  I just… I don’t know what it is.  And that’s the thing that’s always frustrated me with Ricky; he’s got an amazing sense of always being able to watch himself performing, even as he’s doing it.  He’s able to direct himself in that way, and he’ll say, “Oh, that was a bit broad, let me go again.  I want to try something else.”  And I’m sort of getting there I think, but I do feel like I’m quite dependant on him to steer me along the right path.

QS:  I’ve always been curious, since you describe it so much as a footnote, but what was your stand-up career like?

MERCHANT: Well, I went through various phases. The one I was most comfortable with was this kind of conceit that I was a stand-up comedian who, in my own mind, was very successful and big and famous in my home town.  But that I was angry and frustrated with the rest of the world because they didn’t know who I was and they hadn’t yet seen my genius.  And so it sort of sprung from the idea of, “Could I do a routine in which I never actually did my act?” I was constantly promising an act but never arrived. It may sound more high concept than it probably was. So the idea was I’d come on and I would go, “I’ve got a great act for you. Simply brilliant.  I’m a little frustrated with the level of applause at the beginning there.  It was just not what I’m used to, so I wonder if we can just maybe do that again.  Just really light me up.” And then I come on again and I go, “Yes, okay.  But you – you sort of look like you’re being a bit negative.”  And so the whole conceit was, you know, I just got more and more angry with the audience that they weren’t a good enough audience, and I wasn’t doing it for their pleasure. It became funny – hopefully it became funnier… the longer I fail to get to my act, the funnier it became and eventually I run out of time and I never actually got to my act.

QS: Isn’t that essentially, in some ways, Darren Lamb?

MERCHANT: To a degree, yeah. To a degree.  Although Darren’s actually more pleasant than my character on stage was. I was quite mean spirited.  I was quite vindictive and spiteful.  I like him because he’s quite harmless.  He’s quite a nice bloke. He really seems to be quite optimistic about things. There’s something enormous fun to play a character who’s perennially optimistic about the world, even as he’s failing and things are falling down around him.

QS: It seems like you and Ricky have a tendency to write fish-out-of-water characters…

MERCHANT: Certainly people who are out of their depths.

QS:  Yeah, people who profoundly do not belong in the career path they’ve chosen.

MERCHANT: Yeah, absolutely.  And I think that’s party because we… it seems like that’s so truthful about so many people.  You endlessly meet people who quite clearly shouldn’t be in the lives that they’re leading.  I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer who constantly bemoans the fact that he’s a lawyer, and is constantly trying to get out from the business, as it were, and it’s like it keeps sucking him back in as though it were something from Carlito’s Way.  He’s just a man who… it’s really bizarre, and you think, well, you’ve got to work really quite hard to become a successful lawyer.  So he has this sort of double life where secretly he’s going clubbing and stuff and has to disguise and hide this from his other lawyer colleagues who think he’s very straight-laced.  It would be a wonderful character because he’s leading this weird double life.  That’s the nature of David Brent. He should never have really managed to get to that position in the office.  And once he’s there, he’s struggling to remain in that position because it’s just not who he is.

QS: In a lot of the characters it almost seems like they should have stayed in the level just below where they find themselves… sort of like a Peter Principle of comedy.

MERCHANT: Exactly. You’re exactly right. They just overreached a little bit.  Although in the case of Darren Lamb I think it’s that he decides one day he’d quite like to be an agent. It was sort of an arbitrary decision. And he’s had some cards printed. And as far as he’s concerned, that’s it. He’s off and running.  There’s a guy I went to school with and after our first series of The Office I bumped into him in the street back in my home town and he came up and he said, “I’m thinking of becoming a TV producer, Steve,” and I said, “Oh yeah,” and he went, “Yeah, yeah yeah. Do you need a producer for your show?”  I said, “Well no, I’ve got one already.”  He went, “Okay.” And this was a completely arbitrary decision. He’d been working as a caretaker the week before, and now he decided, “Well, maybe I’ll do TV producing.”

QS: But, really, I can think of no better prior career to move into producing from…

MERCHANT: Exactly, exactly!    Again, it’s that sort of… I don’t know, the perennial optimist who just thinks, “Yeah, I’ll give that a go.  Why not?”

QS: The perennial optimist is another recurring theme within the shows you’ve done.

MERCHANT: Yes. Yes.  Well, in…

QS: Particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t be optimists in a given situation.

MERCHANT: Yeah, quite. Yeah.  I think in the case of Extras it was much more… basically, we were doing variations on Laurel & Hardy.  An idiot leading slightly less of an idiot.  Or the other way around.  There’s something about Laurel & Hardy that constantly comes back to us when we’re working and writing.  Because they’re such a perfect comic creation that the world they inhabit, their relationship, what they aspire to – I mean, it’s just perfect. They’re two men – one of whom aspires to sort of be dignified and socially accepted, and he’s constantly thinking, “Okay, today’s gonna be my day.”  And somehow can’t seem to jettison this dead wood that he carries with him, who constantly drags him back down again. But it’s so warm and they’re so clearly utterly dependant on each other. It’s just a wonderful comic device, really.

QS: Why do you feel, in the face of all this evidence, that Andy would stay with Darren?

MERCHANT: Again, I think it’s because there’s a sort of… I think he’d feel guilty if he left. There’s a strange allegiance he has to him.  He’s somehow… he’s almost protecting him by keeping him close because if he cut him loose, he’s almost scared of what would happen to Darren. It’s like he’d flow off into the universe and something terrible would happen. I quite like that, that sense that he’s slightly protective of… that he never really kind of explodes until maybe the final episode.

QS: And then it pretty much resets itself.

MERCHANT: Yeah, and Darren pulls it out of the bag at the last minute, through his charmlessness…

QS: Was that always the intention for that arc of the second series, that there would be this redemption of Darren’s character?

MERCHANT: Well, you can say it’s a very loose arc.  But yeah, there’s just something nice about the way that… again, it was… my character’s not a villain. He’s just a bit hopeless, and wouldn’t it be sweet if he was able to sort of magically solve everything without having changed his ways.  Just through sheer good fortune and a novelty pen, he’s able to rescue another man’s career.

QS: How different is the writing process, if at all, between The Office and Extras?

MERCHANT: I think we possibly approached it slightly more from the idea of “what are some funny ideas about,” “what are funny things we’ve experienced,” and “what would be a funny idea.”  Whereas in The Office it tended to be a little bit more from the character first.  It would be, “Okay, what would it be like if David Brent did a job interview?”  Whereas sometimes with Extras we will approach, “you’ll never believe what happened to me”… there’s a degree of that in The Office, but yeah, sometimes we think of funny ideas and then we attach them to the show a little bit more, which is a slightly different way of working.  But essentially it’s the same, which is us sitting in a room, kinda throwing ideas around and brainstorming and improvising.  So it remains roughly the same.

QS: And in the ersatz mirror universe version of The Office that we saw in the second series of Extras, When the Whistle Blows, how close was that to any notes you might have actually gotten from the BBC for The Office?

MERCHANT: That was basically what would’ve happened if we’d made all the wrong decisions and not stuck to our guns. And we were very lucky.  I mean, Ricky was in his 40s or late 30s and he just thought, “Well, I’m not gonna compromise this idea I’ve got.” It was very much like the Seinfeld thing where he says, “I’m not going to compromise my artistic integrity.”  It really was that with the BBC.  It was, “Here’s our vision. I’m not desperate just to be on the TV – let’s do it my way or not.”  And they went, “Okay,” and we were slightly shocked.  But yeah, whereas obviously with Extras and When the Whistle Blows, it was very much, “What’s the worse thing that can happen all the way down the road for him?”  And also because he’s willing to accept it.  He could have walked away, but that’s very difficult.  It’s difficult to walk away when you’re given an opportunity.  So you compromise and it becomes agonizing.  So it’s not really born from experience, more from the, you know, there but for the grace of God go us, really.

QS: The knowledge of the way it could have gone.

MERCHANT: As you say, a kind of terrible parallel universe version.

QS: Is there any area that’s a taboo subject for comedy, for you? Anything that’s untouchable?

MERCHANT: Any subject is theoretically valid territory to explore in a comedy. It’s very much how you approach it.  And I think if you approach it… let’s say you approach the area of disability, but your intention is to laugh at disability rather than to laugh at attitudes and experiences surrounding disability – that, I think, is not something I’d feel comfortable with. Ricky and I are very careful to talk long and hard about whether we feel we’re exploiting a particular area for laughs, or whether we’re dealing with a subject in the appropriate way.  And people would say, “Oh, your comedy’s not politically correct.  It’s politically incorrect.” And we never think that’s the case.  We’re always very careful to approach these subjects from the right angle, if you know what I mean.  So I think generally, hopefully, there’s always an attitude in our work where you can sort of see what, as it were, the right view should be – or as far as we’re concerned – about a particular subject.  You see him rolling his eyes at the camera to let you know that David Brent made a fool of himself.

QS: It always struck me that you’re both doing this modern day comedy of manners…

MERCHANT: Well, exactly.  I think it’s not… it’s not an intention to shock – it’s that so many areas have been used in comedy and overused and diluted. They’re just not as comic anymore. And, to us, the things that make us laugh are social faux pas… are the fear of walking into a room and embarrassing yourself in front of a room of your peers. I mean, those are concerns which we both find funny and terrifying.  Years ago it was always, “Don’t embarrass yourself in front of the vicar, or in front of your boss.” And I think those still remain, but maybe the parameters have shifted slightly, so people are less worried about embarrassing themselves in front of the vicar. But maybe they are anxious about saying the wrong thing in front of a person of color.  So, to me, it’s the same old comic tricks, but just with a slightly different emphasis.  And those are very genuine anxieties. There’s an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm – I think it’s the first pilot, actually – where he walks past the black guy and he’s very… he sort of nods and says hi and everything.  And he says to his friend, “I feel this incredible burden to make it clear I’m not racist around black people.  I have to go out of my way to be friendly. To make it clear to them that I’m on their side.” And I think that’s a wonderfully truthful and honest thing about anxieties that so many white liberal people feel.

QS: That you’re perpetually walking in a cultural minefield…

MERCHANT: Yes, because you… what we’re not… people aren’t racists, necessarily, or they’ve no issue about disability, but they don’t necessarily know what the rules are… they don’t know what can they talk about, what can they joke about. Our producer is disabled on The Office.  So over time, because you’re very comfortable around his disability, you just joke about it and you make remarks about it just like people would about my height or about Ricky’s weight, or whatever.  But obviously to an outsider that may seem like, “Oh my goodness, they’re talking about areas which I wouldn’t be comfortable going into.”  So it’s very much about context and about who you know and how you know them and what that sort of shared cultural understanding is.  And those are the areas that we’re just fascinated by in comedy.  Where there are certain expected ways of behaving, and if you don’t quite understand those rules, or you break them by mistake, hopefully there’s some humor to be had.

QS: And obviously characters like David Brent and Andy Melman are really about overcompensation for their social mores…

MERCHANT: Exactly. Exactly.  I mean, there’s the instance where he sees the girl with cerebral palsy and he goes out of his way to pretend to be religious so as not to offend her religious sensibilities, because it’s something which is very important to her. There’s nothing wrong in a sense with pretending to be religious in order to not offend someone, but you’re suddenly being a hypocrite.  You’re lying to your own beliefs, and in doing that, you potentially come unstuck.  So, to us, that was a fairly… we’ve got a fairly sophisticated point.  It wasn’t about laughing at cerebral palsy, it was about laughing at the anxiety someone feels and the way they start to change their ways of behaving, even to the point of attending a prayer meeting and lying in an effort not to offend… and also to try and get off with a woman.  But I think that’s quite a sophisticated area to be exploring in comedy.  I’m quite proud of it.

QS: I think one of the great things about both The Office and Extras is it sort of expanded the arena, along with shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, of what comedy could accomplish in a social context.

MERCHANT: Yeah.

QS: As far as addressing, like you said, those sort of unspoken mores and thoughts and beliefs and the way people comport themselves in modern society.

MERCHANT: Exactly, exactly. And I think a lot of those shows where everyone is incredibly right on and politically sensitive, it’s not being very truthful about the way people are.  Andy Melman is not a bad man, but he doesn’t always know the right way to behave in certain circumstances. Or sometimes he does, and his friend puts him in it, or sometimes he says the wrong things behind closed doors that he would never say to someone to their face.  As we all sometimes do. And then of course he gets caught out.  So, to me, that’s just – that’s the way everyone acts. I just think that’s the way people behave.  You’re a liar if you never tell a naughty joke or say something a little inappropriate or gossip about someone. I just don’t believe people are like that.  Everyone’s something of a hypocrite, really.

QS: I thought it was a bit surprising and a bit disappointing, particularly in the response to the end of the Christmas specials for The Office, how disappointed a portion of the audience was in what they perceived as a happy ending for those characters…

MERCHANT: Right.

QS: My understanding was that, within the world that was created, as in real life, you can have good moments along with the painfully awkward or bad moments that lead up to it…

MERCHANT: Yes.

QS: It’s interesting how they perceived a lack of realism in what was… I mean, it is real. That sometimes things can happen the “right way”…

MERCHANT: Well, I think there’s a couple things that work, because it wasn’t like we gave them a fairy tale ending.  All that David Brent did was stand up, really, to a friend of his that he’d always idolized. I’d like to think that it was the… we’d loaded the significance of that friendship so that when he told his mate to fuck off, that had a huge impact. That suggested he’d grown up a little.  But that’s really not a big dramatic moment if you really stop to think about it, in most dramas or TV shows.  I think what we were lucky on with The Office was that everything was calibrated down a little. So, in a sense, him just saying that was the same as him striding in and punching him in the face. It had that much impact within that world. But, also, I think that we were never cynical.  Some of the things we enjoyed most about The Office were the moments that Tim and Dawn shared, or the moments where Tim’s kind of joking with Gareth and not at him. You know, those moments of affection.  We were never condescending to those characters.  We liked them and so why weren’t we gonna give them a little bit of Christmas cheer?  We liked those people, and in the end it’s a TV show, and I don’t think it betrayed anything.  So just give them those little rays of hope.

QS: Was the response surprising to you at all that people would perceive it as, “Oh, they went the Hollywood ending on it…”?

MERCHANT: Well, generally, I haven’t experienced it.  I think some people felt that, but I think generally more people have told me how much they loved it and cried.  When people tell me that they cried when Dawn came back in, that’s probably my single proudest moment from anything’s we’ve done, because I just think to have been able to manipulate an audience – and that’s what it is, in the end – to be able to manipulate them to the extent that they have a physical reaction I just think is… I’m just so deeply proud of that. I mean, laughter is one thing, but to move someone, I just think… and that’s part of the reason I think Ricky and I are keen to move into drama, because it’s so rewarding as a writer and director to get that feeling of manipulating an audience.  Manipulating sounds like you’re being kind of conniving, but…

QS: I know you described it as being a bit broader, and I know you just described Darren as being sort of a two dimensional character, but I think you did achieve moments like that in Extras, as well.

MERCHANT: Well, I think possibly by default, but it certainly wasn’t something that we were chasing, particularly.  We did want that occasional moment off affection, particularly between Andy and Maggie.  We wanted that sense that they were two people sort of adrift in the world and they only really had each other.

QS: Just the scene of Maggie’s breakdown in the apartment at the end of the first series…

MERCHANT: Yeah, yeah.

QS: I would say that it simply was not just a broad comedy that you two were doing…

MERCHANT: Well, thank you.  I think possibly we shied away from that a little in the second series kinda deliberately.  But yeah, I think there were moments of that, yeah.

QS: How different did you find it working in the American arena, writing the script for the US Office that aired a few months back?

MERCHANT: Well, we wrote the script quite a while ago, which we then handed to those guys and they pretty much did their work on it, because they had to fit it into the narrative arc.  So, actually, what you ended up seeing was far more their work really than ours.  But I love the whole process of American TV.  I love the way that you have… that someone comes up with an idea and then you sort of put it into this machine, and out the other end comes, hopefully, a work of art.  Some kind of work of art machine, which is incredible. And so it was exciting for us, I think, just to sort of put it in one end and see how it came out the other end with it.  And so, yeah, we were very pleased with the outcome.  We have such… well, I’m particularly a huge fan of the American version.  I just think they’re really doing something interesting and particularly brave, I think, on American network TV.

QS: Is there anything you think you’ve left unaccomplished, narratively, with the original version of The Office?

MERCHANT: No.  I’m very pleased with it.  I wouldn’t want to revisit it, and I feel that it’s there and it’s packaged up in a neat little bow.  But what I love with the American version is it’s like I’ve won a competition where I was able to ask talented people to… I’d given the constituent elements of a TV show, and they send it back to me, fully made, fully scripted, with comic actors, in an envelope, once a week, and it’s sort of brilliant in that respect.  So what I love about the American one is the way that they move our story on and they expand it into different areas, and I love the fact that Michael Scott’s got a bigger kind of emotional private life and things, which was not an area we really explored sufficiently. And I love seeing how the romantic strands work themselves out. I love seeing the whole thing have a longer life, if you like.  A longer life.

QS: Is your view that the Slough Office exists in the same universe as the Scranton Office?

MERCHANT: Well, I sort of feel like ours is preserved in amber now, like a fossil. It’s there, solidified, that final moment of them all having their photo taken is sort of trapped now in time. But yeah, if I had to, then it would be nice to think that they both existed in the same world.  And maybe the world of Extras, as well. Maybe it’s some strange weird universe.  Parallel universe.

QS: Do you have a feeling that you’ve sort of created a continuity, in some respects?

MERCHANT: Between the American and English version?

QS: I would just say within the work that you’ve done, thematically, do you feel that there are through lines you can look at, in the worlds that you’ve created so far, in those two series?

MERCHANT: Yeah, and I think certainly the plans we’ve got retain the same themes of frustrated ambition and lives of quiet desperation, and people aspiring to things and never achieving them.  Those, I think, are the thematic elements that interest us and which I suspect will continue to be in our work.  I just think there are some things that are perpetually interesting and perpetually heartbreaking.  I’m not particularly interested in things like Lord of the Rings because I don’t see why I need to enter another world with goblins and whatever else in order to have an adventure. I just think there’s enough adventure in this apartment block that I live.

QS:  What appeals to you at this point about pursuing more straightforward drama?

MERCHANT: I think it’s the emotional payoff for the audience. I think it’s the way that you can press more buttons than you can with comedy.  We did it to a degree in The Office, but I just think there’s a weight off your mind. You don’t have to feel like you’re chasing a laugh when you don’t want to. Still the slight frustration with a sitcom is you sort of are obliged to give the audience a certain comic kick every now and then, when sometimes it’s nice to just not do that.  And that’s why I think shows like The Sopranos – obviously everyone cites The Sopranos – but a number of shows like that which manage to be hysterically funny but also… I don’t know, just so much more rich and reward the viewer in ways I think it’s much harder to do in comedy.

QS:  And is developing a project like that within the television arena still your intended mode of expression, or are features a path you’re interested in?

MERCHANT:  Well, I love TV. I think at the moment, particularly, TV has really managed to make use of what is great about television. The serial episodic element.  The returning audience, being able to have a long stretch of episodes that builds up a world and then you can pay things off in a much more grand way.  Much more novelistic, I think, in some respects.  I think a TV show like The Wire is remarkable in the way that it doesn’t give you the rewards and the beats that you expect from TV. That it demands that you’re not really going to feel satisfied until the 22nd episode or the 12th episode or whatever it might be. And I think there’s nowhere else you can do that.  You can’t do that in films even, really, because you’re always slightly prohibited by the length of the film. Whereas with TV you can… I mean, Tony Soprano, as far as I’m concerned, he’s completely real and lives and exists and breathes and has a real life which I’m allowed to kind of eavesdrop on occasionally.

QS: And so how solidified are your plans for whatever these future dramatic exploits might be?

MERCHANT: Not particularly solidified yet.  More the sort of solid ambitions, but no actual concrete ideas, really.  We’re talking a good talk, but I’m not sure we are necessarily walking the walk.

QS: And to these rumors of another series of Extras?   How are things looking on that front?

MERCHANT: Probably not gonna happen at the moment. I don’t know where those rumors came from.

QS: Probably just a hope and belief that surely such a good series will be followed up with another…

MERCHANT: Well, possibly. I think we do get bored very easily and… that’s a terrible thing to say. There’s always that slight itchiness to move onto something else. Although, yeah, it’s a shame that I don’t get to… because I did enjoy playing that character, so that’s the one thing I’ll miss is putting on those bad sweaters.

QS: In the wake of that, have you seen an increase in acting offers? Obviously you have the cameo on 24 coming up…

MERCHANT: This is really not a cameo, this is an extra.  This is me walking on and… I’m not even walking on.  I’m sat behind a desk and someone hands me a computer disk and I type something. Really, people shouldn’t get excited by that.  That’s a bit part.

QS: How did that come about?

MERCHANT: That’s just because I happen to know Joel Surnow, the producer who created that show, because I met him at the Golden Globes, and we sort of stayed in touch.  So we went down to visit the set, and he just said, “Look, put this outfit on, and sit behind this desk.” And I was such a fan of the show I couldn’t believe my luck.

QS: Have you seen an increase in offers after Extras, where people are coming to you wanting to hire you as an actor?

MERCHANT: Not particularly, and that’s a constant frustration. I’m expecting the phones to be ablaze, but… I guess it’s Christmas time, maybe.

QS:  Now that they read this they’re going to feel completely bad about the fact that they haven’t just beaten down the door.

MERCHANT: Yes.

QS: “I knew he was waiting, we should have called.”

MERCHANT: I’m just sat here by the phone, so it’s just waiting for it to… I should say that what they see me do in Extras is pretty much the limits of my ability. I can do that with slightly different degrees of West Country accent.

QS: I would bet good money that you’re underestimating yourself.

MERCHANT: Well, possibly.

QS: I would even bet American money that you’re underestimating yourself.

MERCHANT: Well, yeah, I’m more than happy for someone to take you up on that.

QS: I’ll just bet Ricky on it.

MERCHANT: Yeah, great.

QS: What are the future plans for the podcast?

MERCHANT: That will probably be put on hold for a little while.  We’ve got one more coming out at Christmas, and then hopefully it will… we’ll maybe do occasional ones next year, but I think we’ve exhausted ourselves… or rather we’ve exhausted Karl this year.

QS: So what happens? Do you just put him back in storage after the run ends?

MERCHANT: Well, in a sense, we just have to let him go back out there and he has to go and play with some insects and dig up some worms and whatever it is he does with his time. And hopefully he’ll recharge his batteries and we can just present him to the world again.

QS: Is it difficult to call him back in and get him back into performing shape?

MERCHANT: Well he’s not really a performer… I mean, it’s not really a performance. It’s just him opening his mouth. That’s the remarkable thing about him. He’s a never-ending well of comic gems.

QS: Have you noticed a change in him over the past couple of years at all?

MERCHANT: Only a frustration at the level of attention. He doesn’t relish it. He doesn’t like it.  He finds it unnatural. That’s why Ricky’s constantly trying to persuade people to make him more famous, just to annoy him.

QS: He’s become, what, this figure of graffiti across the U.S.?

MERCHANT: I know… It’s amazing, isn’t it? Just amazing.  That really is the power of the internet. It’s making him into a kind of currency that people share.  I get asked more about Karl when I’m in the States than anything else. It’s extraordinary.

QS: He’s become the new Kilroy.

MERCHANT: Exactly.  Exactly, yeah. Whatever happened to Kilroy?  Kilroy was here, apparently.

QS:  It was stunning to see… Although anyone who makes a comment about eating a knob at night…

MERCHANT: Yes.

QS: …really kinda deserves the infamy that they achieve.

MERCHANT: Quite, absolutely, yeah.  But I think that will certainly be something that Ricky and I are most proud of when we look back on our lives.

QS: But what happens to him when your influence is gone?  Does he just sort of go back into limbo…

MERCHANT: This is what we’re all waiting to find out. Yeah, who knows?

QS: Is there a level with Karl?

MERCHANT: Is there a level with him?

QS: Yeah, as far as, what’s Karl’s natural level when you don’t observe him?  Kind of like Schrödinger’s Karl.

MERCHANT: Right.  If no one’s looking at him, what’s going on?  Probably not a great deal, actually.  It’s an interesting question.  I think he seems very happy in his own world. In my mind he’s… whenever we’re not there, he’s like… is it Linus? Is that the character in Peanuts who just sat in the sandpit playing with sand?  With his little towel?

QS: Yes, that’s Linus.

MERCHANT: In my mind Karl is just perpetually sat in a sand pit, just happily making sandcastles.  Occasionally being distracted by a wasp or a fly. That’s my default vision of Karl.

QS: So, really, there’s no kinetic motion.

MERCHANT: No.  It’s just happy in his own mind, in his own universe, like a young child would be.

QS: Just a man perpetually affected by outside forces.

MERCHANT: Yeah, just waiting for things to stimulate him.  Yeah.  Passing children throwing things at him.  A tennis ball bonks off his head and he considers that for a moment. And then he looks up at the sun and he realizes he can’t really look at the sun because it’ll burn his eyes so he looks away and that gives him a moment of thought which lasts an hour.

QS: It’s almost like watching a frozen picture of evolution.

MERCHANT: Yes.  Exactly. It’s frozen at the point… someone across the way has just invented fire, and Carl can just see something flickering in the distance and he’s wondering what it is, but not really gonna bother to wander over there and look.

QS: No.  Because a part of him doesn’t want to know.

MERCHANT: Exactly.

QS: Why bother with the natural order of things?

MERCHANT: Yeah, why bother. You’re messing with stuff. We don’t need fire.  We’ve got by fine without it.  It looks dangerous.

QS: Food is fine raw.

MERCHANT: Exactly.  We got by fine like that.  We don’t need fire to digest.

QS: It’s amazing to discover an archetype like that still in existence.

MERCHANT: And that’s why I think he captured people’s imaginations, because I think once they listen to one conversation with him, everyone knows how Karl’s going to react. They don’t know what he’s going say. They can never imagine the angle from which he’s going to approach something. But they sort of understand the way his mind is going to work. They know it’s not gonna be the obvious approach. And so he’s perfect in that respect.

QS: What’s the moment that perfectly encapsulates Karl for you?

MERCHANT: This is a quote I read that apparently he said on one of his shows. I don’t remember him saying it, but it’s on one of the websites and I assume it was real, which was, “What are those things in the film Gremlins called?”  And that just seems to capture it, really.  He’s got some of the facts, but he’s not really processed them.  There’s a sense of inquiry, there’s a sense of intrigue. He’s intrigued by these Gremlin things he’s heard about.

QS: It’s almost like a mental version of the film Groundhog Day.

MERCHANT: Yeah, exactly.

QS: It’s like there’s a reset button every day, and it’s the same Karl as yesterday that comes in.

MERCHANT: Exactly, exactly. (laughing) Nothing we taught him or spoke to him has gone in and stayed there.

QS: It makes you wonder where the arresting point was.  At what point did he stop and there’s a fully formed Karl?

MERCHANT: I think it was probably around the age of 15 or 16.  And then he just stopped.

QS: I really wonder what would happen if you two had never found him.

MERCHANT: Well, yeah.  Here we are. Exactly. I’m sure someone could write quite an interesting theory piece on that.

QS: I’m surprised that Ricky hasn’t.

MERCHANT: Yeah, absolutely.

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