The Split star Stephen Mangan on being considered a sex symbol: “I find that hard to believe”

When he turns up punctually at a London private members’ club without anyone in tow – how refreshing, how unusual – all crumpled linen and damp curls in the heat, we settle into a reassuringly amicable interview for 90 minutes, covering everything from prejudice to loss to class to religion – with some quite uncontrollable laughter, too (he is very funny).

To the casual Mangan observer, the 57-year-old actor (add presenter, game show host, children’s author) can come across as a bit of a posho because of the way he speaks, his public-school background (Haileybury, where he boarded from 13), thence to Cambridge graduating with a law degree before pivoting to his first love, drama. After Rada, he toured the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company doing the classics and later moved on to a successful career in television and book writing. But dig just a little deeper and it’s a very different story.

He is the only son, with two younger sisters (Anita and Lisa), of James and Mary, both born in County Mayo of large Catholic families: his father one of nine, his mother one of seven (Mangan has 52 first cousins). They came from impoverished backgrounds – “It wasn’t Angela’s Ashes,” he has said, “but not a million miles from it” – and both left school at 14 before emigrating to north London, at a time of extreme “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” prejudice. Mary was a barmaid and James a builder, and they met in the Camden pub where she worked.

It was Mangan, a bright boy (he won a scholarship), who wanted to board at Haileybury. His parents were perplexed and resistant, and for his first two years there he was bullied. When he got into Cambridge, he was the first person in his family to go to university.

Whatever impression this condensed biography may convey, Mangan speaks so beautifully to confound it – with a kind forbearance to me, and extreme tenderness towards his family. For instance, no, he wasn’t bullied because of what his parents did and who they were. It was mainly because of the way he responded to the taunting and his size – he’s six foot now but was a late developer. At 13, when he went away to board, Mangan says he was tiny. “So I was an easy target and I was also quite… chatty. Not very savvy about how to deal with things.” Did he cry? “Yeah.” Does he cry easily? “Yeah.”

I introduce the subject of those classic books with outsiders wanting to be part of the insiders’ circle, from The Great Gatsby and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but there’s nothing useful to draw on from them to understand why Mangan wanted to go to boarding school. “No, there was no feeling of ‘I’m going to the seat of power’ or ‘I’m going to where the posh people are.’ ”

He says it was more “the idea – that I would go off to this unknown place and it would be exciting and full of adventures, like a quest – with playing fields, a theatre, music rooms…” Also it would be his way of marking a territory: “My parents were very bright but uneducated so it was going to be my thing. I was going off to do something of which they had no experience – so I could own it and be in charge of it.”

We move on to the second season of The Fortune Hotel, which is the reason we’re here. In the show, ten pairs of people arrive at a £500-a-night hotel in the Caribbean, all competing against one another with daily challenges, to go home with the jackpot of £250,000. Each night one duo ends up with the dreaded Check Out ticket, which they try to palm off in a suitcase switcheroo that takes place over cocktails in the Lady Luck Bar, with one pair getting the cash in the case. Among the pairs are couples, best friends and family members – all very different types and backgrounds.

The reason for the popularity of these shows, Mangan says, is “because we all have a front and a mask and a way of trying to protect ourselves and especially if you’re playing a game like this, your personality is really important because you want people to like you. It’s fascinating how effortlessly some people project likeability or trustworthiness and other people are just naturally hilarious.”

What would he do with £250,000? “Well, the boring answer is that I’d use it to help pay off the mortgage.”

He lives in the same narrow terraced house in Primrose Hill he bought more than 30 years ago, with a tiny patch of garden – partly because he wanted to live in this attractive area of London but also it’s convenient for meetings and theatre work in Soho and the West End. Joan Bakewell, his co-presenter on the Sky Arts shows Landscape Artist and Artist of the Year for the past seven years now, is a close neighbour.

His sister Anita lives half an hour away in Muswell Hill and is an illustrator who has worked on all seven of his children’s books; they’re now on their eighth – the heroes of the first three were named after Mangan and Delamere’s three sons, Jack (nine), Frank (14) and Harry (17).

He leaves painting and drawing to others, although he does appreciate art. His wife has the stronger aesthetic sense of the two of them; she is more interested in colour and abstract work while he leans towards the figurative. “Even though both of us like to have a nice environment, we just haven’t mastered the art of feng shui, Marie Kondo glittering, clear surfaces… We don’t live in a vast house. We’re incredibly busy with three boys and everything is just piles of homework and football boots and endless stacks of books and, you know, stuff everywhere.”

First appearing on the public radar in 2001 as the ageing Adrian Mole, Mangan was deemed by the writer Sue Townsend, as being acceptably unhandsome (admittedly, for his fans, her sight was going). Then there was the enjoyably loathsome, arrogant Swiss sleazeball anaesthetist Guy Secretan on the cult television sitcom Green Wing. (Who can forget his John Travolta Stayin’ Alive moves?)

Two years earlier in 2002 he was Dan Moody on I’m Alan Partridge, and he, tryingly, still gets “Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan!” shouted at him in the street, after the increasingly desperate call of Partridge in the car park to get his new friend’s attention. “Yeah, it’s become an iconic bit of television… it’s odd how these things follow you around.”

Episodes had the actor reunited with his Green Wing co-star Tamsin Greig, playing husband-and-wife comedy-writing team Sean and Beverly Lincoln, sent to Hollywood to make an American version of their successful British series, this time starring Matt LeBlanc. It ran for five seasons from 2011 to 2017 and, although the first series in particular was filmed in England, what Mangan saw of his industry in LA didn’t appeal to him.

Next, he was co-starring opposite Nicola Walker in Abi Morgan’s divorce-lawyer drama, The Split, that ended its three seasons in 2022, with a reprise last December in Barcelona. And the on-again, off-again TV couple have just finished a West End run of Unicorn, the Mike Bartlett play about the travails of a throuple.

He was approached to present shows before he worked with Sky Arts, “but when I was first asked I said, ‘No thanks, I’m an actor – I don’t want to present. I’ve done Have I Got News for You, but that’s as far as I want it to go.’ I did a news quizzy thing on Channel 4 but I didn’t really like the idea of ‘Hello, and welcome to…’ ” He puts on a breezy host’s persona.

When he left Rada, he says, “Even going into musical theatre was like a big statement. If you did a West End musical, it was ‘Oh, no, you’re in a whole different branch of theatre now. By all means go off and do Mamma Mia!, but you won’t be allowed back.’ ” He adds, putting on a precious actorly voice, “You certainly don’t do a commercial if you want to be a proper actor.”

In his case, he had no discernible qualms about boosting his repertory theatre work with filming advertisements. Now, he presents shows because it’s fun, doesn’t take up a huge amount of time and “it helps pay the mortgage and gives you greater choice in your acting work – such as if you want to go to the Donmar Warehouse [as he did in Private Lives a few years back] and earn not very much money for three months in a play.”

He would love to be offered a part as an Irishman but it has never happened. His wife had elocution lessons when she was growing up to iron out her Scouse vowels “with Michael Sheen, weirdly” (she also comes from a large Catholic family), but Mangan never had an Irish accent. Can you do one, I ask? “No! I’m not doing one now!” Why not? “Because I’m shy.”

His parents had quite gentle accents, he says. His dear mother, Mary, who died of colon cancer when she was only 45, would have been 80 three weeks prior to our interview, and the family held a big birthday lunch in her honour. He noticed a huge variety in the strength of the accents in her surviving brothers and sisters.

Mangan was brought up Catholic and was an altar boy, but watching his mother die, when he returned home to care for her after coming down from Cambridge, was a brutal and permanent wrenching away of his faith. “To watch this very healthy, vibrant woman – she didn’t smoke or drink and even then she was into good food and eating well – go downhill that quickly…

“It knocked religion out of me. It was just too hard to watch someone wither away in front of your eyes and believe that there’s a purpose and an afterlife and that somehow this is all good and part of some great plan and that you’re in the hands of a benign God. I just don’t buy it.”

Mangan’s father, James, also died of cancer (a brain tumour) when he was 62, in 2005 and The Green Wing filming shut down while the actor went home to care for him. “All those experiences bring home to you this is going to happen to you as well,” he says. “It’s something we all know intellectually but to feel it viscerally, emotionally, is another thing.”

It’s touching to hear him talk about his mum, with her very Celtic red hair and freckles (he looks more like his father) – how she used to take him to the theatre from an early age and what a great reader she was, how much she loved music and going to the cinema – “all those things she instilled in me but in her, it was very much all the things she hadn’t had access to growing up. I think she was keenly aware of her own lack of education and she would’ve loved to have had a decent one. She got married so young, she had children so young and there was never a question of going back to college – that just wasn’t on the cards.”

I tell him about how an Irish nurse opened the window soon after my mother died in her hospice bed because she believed it helped to release the soul. “Oh, it’s very poetic and of course we all cling to those things to give us comfort and why not? I don’t claim to be right. That’s just what I believe. Or don’t believe. But what remains is love,” he says in a conscious echo of the famous ending of the Philip Larkin poem. “And all that love that was given to me by my parents is still there and I’m hopefully passing it on.”

The more he is on our television screens, the greater the number of requests he receives for selfies when he’s out and about. He often mocks his looks but doesn’t he realise he’s considered to be a bit of a sex symbol? “I find that hard to believe. I don’t know what to say. You should look at the cover of Radio Times when I played Adrian Mole and tell me if that guy’s a sex symbol.”

You do go on and on about your wonky face! “But that’s indisputable. I’m the donkey from Shrek, remember!” (He often jokes that he’s been likened to this cartoon character.) He says, more seriously, that he’d never considered his looks to be something that he has to offer. “I don’t think people are going to throw up when they look at me, but I also don’t think they’re going to swoon. I’ve never, ever seen myself as a leading man in that respect.”

I roll my eyes and he says that he doesn’t want to come across as coy. “What? Little old sexy me?” Well, actually, Stephen, I’m afraid to say, “Yes.”

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