Stephen Merchant has always been obsessed by the idea of the ordinary man “thrust into extraordinary circumstance”. Since he was a kid in Bristol, the son of a plumber and a nursery nurse, those were the kinds of films he sought out and the stories he wrote, about normal people who experience something that “jolts them out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. He’s talking to me from his office in Nichols Canyon, LA, in a house once owned by Ellen DeGeneres, where he lives with his partner of seven years, actor Mircea Monroe. It’s early morning there, the white light offering shadows of shifting leaves, and he wears a black baseball cap and speaks thoughtfully without pause. Is he, I ask, that ordinary man? “Well, possibly,” he says, slowly. “Maybe. Yeah.”
Merchant’s early career is perhaps better known than the success that followed. He met Ricky Gervais when he got a job as his assistant on the radio station XFM and the two went on to write and direct The Office in 2001, quietly changing expectations of British comedy for ever. Then there was some acting, a lot of very popular radio and standup. In his 2011 show, Hello Ladies, which later became a sitcom, he talked about his height: “6ft 7in is too big… Growing up I spent as much time as possible in the distance.”
In 2019, he wrote and directed the feature film Fighting With My Family, a wrestling comedy starring Florence Pugh, and in 2022 played serial killer Stephen Port in the shocking BBC drama Four Lives. Today, we’re meeting to talk about the third series of The Outlaws, a comedy thriller about a disparate group of offenders on community service, which he stars in and co-wrote with film-maker and ex-convict Elgin James. It’s about normal people who experience something that jolts them out of their lives.
For Merchant, the route to his extraordinary circumstances felt “like that frog in the pan of water. It slowly heats up and you don’t realise you’re being boiled alive. It wasn’t like I was an X-factor contestant.” Was there a moment when he realised his life was changing? “I guess there were sort of staging posts along the way,” he says. “Like, you do your first interview for the Guardian, and they spelt my name wrong. I think that was ‘Stephen Mitchell’?” Then there’s an award show. “Then you’re on, like, Graham Norton, and that all seems very exciting.” Then you’re having a meeting in Hollywood, dating a string of beautiful actresses, moving to LA. “And each of the stages seem preposterous in a new way.” Where does it culminate? “I guess, going to Stonehenge with Christopher Walken [a co-star on The Outlaws] on a day trip? Christopher’s a very quiet man. A reflective man. He didn’t say a lot for about an hour, then eventually, as the sun was setting, he said: ‘The bluestones have healing properties.’ It was all very surreal. And yet at the same time, weirdly ordinary.” That was one point where: “You’re just like, OK, now I’m boiled.”
As the temperature has increased, so has his wealth. The Mirror has reported that, at 49, Merchant is the UK’s highest earning comedian with a net worth of £26.6m. “I’m not going to question it, but the numbers are always wildly off. Obviously things have changed for me dramatically. But the thing that hasn’t changed is the enjoyment of the work. I find it very nutritious intellectually.” He enjoys it to the point where friends have accused him of being a workaholic. “Although, I always think that term’s very pejorative, the suggestion is I should be doing something else, more important or worthy.”
Recently, he’s been going back to standup, waiting around in the back room of a pub to perform 20 minutes of material. “You know, I don’t particularly want to leave the house at 8pm and drive, and park, and hide around in the back and get nervous, and go out on stage, and some of it doesn’t land and you drive home slightly embarrassed.” And yet something is pushing him to do so. “It’s not like I’m craving the adulation of an audience. I think it’s just… the conundrum of standup. The building of that puzzle?” It’s hard and exposing, and as well as the impulse to get the laugh, there’s also something about the challenge of it for him – “the climbing Everest of it” – that is pleasurable. He saw a documentary recently about Jerry Seinfeld, and chuckles at the memory of a heckler calling up at him: “Have you done this before?”
Last month, Seinfeld joined comics like Ricky Gervais and John Cleese in condemning “cancel culture”, blaming the apparent death of TV comedy on “the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. (Cleese was a childhood hero: “He went to school in Bristol and he was a tall person who was funny, so at some point I was like, well, if you need tall people who are funny from the West Country, I’ll give it a go?”)
Merchant approaches the subject of cancel culture cautiously, as if walking barefoot on stones. “Well,” he says, “it seems to me that there’s always been policing of comedy, of there being… guardrails. I think the difference is that it used to feel like it was the Right that was policing it. It feels like it’s the Left that’s doing it now, and it’s allowed the Right to become the arbiters of free speech. Which does feel like quite a significant shift.”
There are, he adds, carefully: “Sensitivities that seem out of all proportion with the joke. I’ve noticed it in standup, how you’re more cautious because you don’t want to spend weeks on Twitter trying to justify a joke you were just experimenting with. Because putting out the fires is exhausting. But” – and perhaps this is where he differs from Gervais – “I’m also aware that sensitivities shift over time and that people are allowed to criticise and query things, and we do look back at old comedy and think we wouldn’t do that any more.” He takes a breath. “I have no objection to the sands shifting. I think that makes sense and I’m loth to become a kind of ‘old man of comedy’, railing against the younger generation. But you do feel like there’s a sensitivity to the words before they’ve even heard the joke or the context. And that is inevitably a straitjacket of sorts – it quashes experimentation.”
What riles comedians today, he says, is that they grew up feeling nothing was sacred. “And that’s easy for me to say as a white, heterosexual middle-class bloke, but it used to feel like the things you weren’t allowed to joke about were the very things you should. So for the older generation like me, you do feel a bit like there was a freedom there. And that it was your own conscience and judgment that meant you were the arbiter of your own taste. And that didn’t mean people weren’t offended or that you didn’t make mistakes. But now it does feel like there’s a danger, that there’s a prescriptive list of things you can joke about. Everything else is off limits, which is a hard thing to navigate when you’re trying to be creative.”
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The influence of The Office – its naturalism, its lack of a laughter track, and an enduring American offshoot – is still felt. And while Merchant has carved out a wildly successful, but relatively low-key career in the US, Gervais has got louder and has leant into culture wars, his Netflix specials condemned by LGBTQ groups. I wonder what role Gervais plays in Merchant’s life today? They’re always going to be linked in people’s minds, he says: “As a collaborator he couldn’t have been better. We did a lot of really good work and maybe we will again. But we’ve been doing our own thing for quite a while now.” He wouldn’t revisit old projects. “That feels dangerous. But also one of the things I’ve been enjoying with The Outlaws is working with other writers who are from different backgrounds to me, or younger, a different perspective in order to try to keep one foot in the real world.”
This was a world he was last part of in the early 2000s, an odd time for comedy. I read a quote from Merchant a few years ago, about telling Russell Brand that he was a cult leader who would poison the Kool-Aid, then take the last sip. “I guess that’s borne out to some degree. There was always something kind of messianic about him, a sort of worship by his fanbase. I also accused him of being a man who appears to have read the back of a lot of books.”
The new series of The Outlaws begins with a body: the group are thrown abruptly into the centre of a criminal web and must fight for their lives while also spreading manure to their exacting community payback officer’s satisfaction. As with The Office, where a group of ordinary people were made extraordinary by the arrival of a documentary crew, so are Merchant’s offenders, by the arrival of a corpse. “Again it’s those ‘lives of quiet desperation’.” He says, thoughtfully: “I think there’s probably a part of me that was always scared of getting trapped in some life I didn’t want, and waking up at 50 and going, ‘What have I done?’ or ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Is this the person I wanted to be?’”
It’s this concern, a worry since childhood, that has fed his work ever since. “I haven’t done anything that features aliens or superheroes, not because I don’t enjoy those things, but because it feels as if there’s a lot of interesting people down in the pub without having to have them land from outer space.” His character in The Outlaws is a painfully awkward lawyer “who made one significant mistake that has put a fire under him. And even though he’s anxious about everything, he’ll get to 70 and go, ‘Remember when I was a drug dealer that time?’ Like, he’ll have a story to tell. And there’s value in that.”
What sort of life was Merchant scared of? “A job that I just drifted into, that wasn’t an ambition, just something to pay the bills. And I’m not trying to demonise those things. But I was anxious about waking up in the morning and dreading going to work, just looking forward to the weekend.” His brow furrows. “It makes me sound very condescending but – I had seen it among certain people I knew growing up. And there seemed to be this sort of disquiet in them, this frustration. I’m aware it’s a very privileged position to be in, but I’m lucky that I’ve avoided that.”
Merchant’s avoidance has taken him through comedy and into drama. He hadn’t heard of Stephen Port, who killed four gay men between June 2014 and September 2015, before he took the role in Four Lives. He played Port with a sinister and exquisite creepiness, allowing the story – of major police failings – to play out around him. “It was the first time I had done a project where I felt a responsibility to the truth and to the families. And I felt an anxiety about that, about doing a good job, and not having an audience giggle because they associate me with comedy.” He chose not to meet Port. “I did hear though that the real guy was disappointed that they’d cast me. Apparently he’d wanted Eddie Redmayne.” He shrugs apologetically.
The process of making the drama changed him. “We are in a culture in which the police are portrayed in a particular way. There’s always one lone detective who solves it, who keeps diligently working away until they crack the case. And Port’s case was a reminder that those people are quite rare, if they exist at all. The police force is inevitably a big bureaucracy where people aren’t talking to each other. And I don’t know if it’s institutionalised homophobia or incompetence or if it’s just a lack of joined up thinking, it could be all of those things. I’m loth to just demonise the police because I don’t know if it’s as clearcut as that.” The families, he says quietly, must have felt like they were drowning.
That project was maybe an extreme example of what Merchant describes, in assumed quote marks as, “A very eclectic career” – standup, writing, producing, directing, comedic acting and dramatic acting. “If I had chosen just one thing to do, people might have a very clear idea of who I am. But because I’ve done a lot of different things, people will perhaps recognise my name and they might enjoy something I’ve done, but they wouldn’t necessarily be aware of all the other stuff.” He thinks. “This is a bit absurd to say, given that apparently I’m the most successful man ever in comedy in Britain. But I think sometimes I feel a little under-appreciated, in a weird way.” People are surprised when he tells them he’s directed a film, or played a murderer – they think of him still as Gervais’s sidekick.
“There’s probably a part of me that’s like, ‘I’ve done a lot of stuff. I do it quite well. I’ve been doing it a long time.’” He looks slightly embarrassed now, and I suggest that maybe the self-deprecating characters he writes for himself, the awkward lanky fools he likes to play, might compound that feeling. “Yes, I’ve realised that people assume that’s also me. The talkshow persona where I’m telling a story about how I’m an idiot. Yes, why didn’t I give myself a role as a sort of James Bond type suave secret agent instead of playing the putz? I am aware of that as a failing, or as a mistake.” He worries sometimes that by doing a bit of everything, “There’s a danger of not doing anything.” But then he leans back and nods. “But I think, as long as I make it into the Bafta in memoriam section when I die, I’ll be happy.” He grins. “That’ll be enough.”
The Outlaws starts on BBC One and iPlayer on 30 May
Styling by Tiffani Moreno; photographer’s assistant Jesse Belvin; grooming by Katie Evans using Kate Hollinshead, Chantecaille Skincare and Unite Haircare; shot at Studio 60, LA