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Kingdom star Stephen Fry is regarded as a national treasure. But, as he tells E Jane Dickson, he could easily have been American…
Stephen Fry on…playing Peter Kingdom
"I'm way beyond thinking that acting is all about disguising yourself and being the opposite of what you are. When you're given a character to play - particularly in film or television - you merely find those parts of you that are not that character and get rid of them.
"It's like what Michelangelo said when he was doing David - there was a block of marble and David was already in there - you just have to know the right bits of marble to take away. There are bits of me that are impatient and sarcastic - I'm quite Basil Fawlty-ish when I lose my temper - but those are the bits I drop away when I'm playing Peter Kingdom.
"I could easily play a part in which all the eccentric, weird parts of me are kept and all the benevolent, sweet parts dropped and people would still say, 'Oh, that's just Stephen being Stephen.' They said it of General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth. They said it of Jeeves. And that's fine.
"The point is, Peter Kingdom suits me. If the hero of a show is a spot welder from Huddersfield, why have me in the part? I might go to Huddersfield and learn the accent and do it very creditably but, in the end, it's a waste of what I can do more naturally. In the same way, why have Bob Hoskins as the Duke of Buccleuch? It's not about being typecast, necessarily; it's just about being suitable."
…Kingdom's single status
"I have to be honest, and it's a difficult thing to say, because I don't want to suggest there's a precedent for this, or that it necessarily becomes impossible - because otherwise what the hell are we left with as actors? - but I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on-screen.
"Straight actors can play gay people and they're rather congratulated on it. People say, 'Ooh, how brave of you.' But no-one says of a gay actor, if you play a heterosexual person, 'How brave of you to kiss that woman, that must have been very difficult for you.' It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like. And why should it be difficult for a man to kiss another man? It's difficult to ride bareback backwards while unicycling, but to kiss someone isn't difficult. It's just part of the insanely irrational way that the human mind works."
…his documentaries about manic depression and Aids
"Without getting too sententious about it, if you have had the good fortune to have done the things I have done and to have had the experiences I have had, not to share them where they can be useful is just mean. The obvious case is coming out as a gay man, which I did when it was quite a rare thing to do.
"You think of the average person in the playground who's terrified of being beaten up, or the people who are not in a job like mine, where it doesn't really matter, and these people need to be reassured that they're not alone and they're not freaks. Ditto with manic depression. It just seemed so obvious and so right to talk about something that affects so many people and which for so long had been shrouded in silence."
…forthcoming project Stephen Fry - in America
"All we ever see in documentaries is either Hollywood freaks, militia freaks with their guns, or mad Bible Belt people saying all gays are evil, but that's simply not my experience of America. My experience is of a land of shattering physical beauty and variety, where people are quite astonishingly polite to each other. Yes, there's plenty in its foreign policy one can disagree with,
but given how important it is, culturally and politically - specially to us in Britain - it would be great to just see America without sneering at it."
"[The American psyche is] easiest to see in comedy, where characters, with the brilliant exception of Larry David, are always in some way likeable or admirable and get the better of everyone else. The American comic hero is the man with the biggest d**k in the room, whereas the British comic hero is usually the man with the smallest d**k in the room. In drama, it's not quite the same. I'm a huge fan of House - and I'd say that if I'd never met Hugh Laurie - but this is a character who's quite unbelievably unpleasant. If, ten years ago, you'd gone to an American executive with that character, they'd have laughed you out of court. But now, the standard of American television, not just in terms of quality but in terms of insight, authenticity and daring, has gone up enormously."
"I'm particularly interested in America because I was so nearly American myself. While my mother was pregnant with me, my father [a physicist] was offered a job at Princeton. If he had taken it, I would be physically the same person you see before you now, but with a very different accent and upbringing upon which I would be judged. And would people say that I was quintessentially American in the same way I'm said to be quintessentially English? Maybe I'm deluding myself that they mean it as a compliment."
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Read our blog Kingdom v Doc Martin - or take a look at our full Kingdom guide.
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