Brendan Coyle interview
Brendan Coyle talks about playing Terry in Starlings...
Could you tell us about Terry?
Terry is the father of the family and he's a new grandfather as well. He is an electrician by trade, as is his father: hence Starling & Sons, the family firm. Terry is an upbeat character. He's not the quirkiest or most comedic of the bunch, but he's a big-hearted fellow, he loves life, he has a great energy about him and he's extremely positive and open. That makes for a very funny character, because life just doesn't meet with his vision of how it should be. A lot of the time he feels like he's in this weird gallery. He is a devoted family man and it's a beautiful relationship he has with Jan, his wife, played by the brilliant Lesley Sharp.
After all the public acclaim for your role as Mr Bates in Downton Abbey you must have had plenty of offers. What attracted you to Starlings?
The same reason I chose Downton: it was the scripts. At the end of Downton, a few things came in on the same week, which is a really privileged position to be in: your imperative as an actor is to get employment, but your ideal is to have choice. And yes, I did have a couple of choices.
This was a real curve ball, a very different thing for me. I mean I had an option to go off and be grumpy in something else. But I thought, 'I can be grumpy in a hat... I can be grumpy in a cloak, or I can do Starlings!' So I auditioned like everybody else and I really took a shine to Matt [King] and Ali [MacPhail], our producer. I looked at their pedigree, and Tony Dow and Matt Lipsey, the directors, and I'm a big fan of Steve Coogan and Henry Normal and the stuff that Baby Cow do, so I thought, 'I'm in really, really safe hands here.' But in the end it just comes down to the same thing every time: it's always scripts. I read the first episode, I laughed, I was moved... and that's the litmus test. I thought, 'Bang! This is going to be really, really good.'
How would you describe Starlings - comedy, comedy drama, other...?
It's quite hard to nail. The only comedy I've done before was a thing called Paths to Freedom, and that was out-and-out spoof documentary stuff. It was a fantastic piece, a big smash in Ireland. But this is something very, very different. The comedy is very nuanced, and it demands a kind of comedic play and delivery. But it's rooted in a source of truth: it's a family, we're playing it for real.
How important is the setting in Matlock?
Well, it's a beautiful backdrop for one thing. I mean visually it's a real feast. We're surrounded by the Peak District, and even just a scene on a little football field would find us surrounded by hills and trains going through the forest above our heads. It means that the whole setting is distinctly not a city thing, while not being totally isolated. That gives it a sort of world, life and pace of its own.
What is Jan and Terry's relationship like?
We pretty much don't have fights or falling out at all. People have their struggles but there's no animosity in this. That's what I loved about it as well when I read it: it's not saccharine, but it is loving and it is big hearted, and it's not cynical. People do have their problems, be it with health or with their dreams or financially, or whatever it is, but it's dealt with in a really humane way. We don't even have swearing. I don't think it's conscious on the writers' part, but it's not in any way an angry or bitter piece.
There appears to be a bit of a Lark Rise to Candleford connection in the cast?
There is indeed. Johnny Dagleish who's playing my son, played my sort-of son in Lark Rise. I was his surrogate father to some extent or at least a sort of father figure to him. So I've worked with Johnny before, and I'm a real fan of his. And Rebecca Night as well, who's playing my daughter, came in and did an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, and stole it completely. So yes, there's a bit of a history there, a bit of a connection there. It all helps: this is a happy shoot, it's a good bunch of people.
It's been quite a year for you. First Downton and now the lead in a new comedy...
I had four days off between the end of shooting Downton Abbey series two and this, and we went pretty much straight to the second series of Downton from the first. And all the time it's gone a bit nuts. But I'm just cracking on: I'm doing pretty much the same work. It's just a lot more people kind of know who I am now, and a lot more people have seen Downton Abbey, and that's been a bit of a shift. But I think for all of us in Downton, we're still kind of digesting the success of it. It means coming to make Starlings is a nice contrast.
The cast have to play a believable family. How have they gelled?
This feels like a theatre company... and I came from theatre, I mean years and years and years in rep. I'll tell you what it is, there's something about actors, maybe of our generation like Lesley Sharp and Alan Williams - we found our feet in rep. So I just feel like I've slotted in here. We're a theatre company and we've found our feet together. It's the same on Downton but of course that's a very different kind of play. I've got to say, it doesn't always happen like this on a production. It's alchemy and you never know what the mix is going to be like. We've hit the ground running, we all get on, we all like each other, we take the piss out of each other - there's a familiarity and an ease and a kind of warm humour between us, which is really going to play on screen, we hope.