cocky of the north

The laddie from The Lakes is known as a gobby upstart with a taste for the grim things in life. But these days John Simm is a down-to- earth guy who just happens to reckon he's one of Britain's best actors

JOHN Simm is sitting in a tiny room in a television studio with his head buried in a newspaper, pondering the break-up of British rock music's first couple. Realising he is no longer alone, the actor shakes his head, tosses the tabloid to the other side of the table and asks nicely for a drink of water.

There is more to be concerned with than Noel Gallagher's split from Meg Matthews. Simm is suffering from a hangover and a bad experience with a car hire company. After his publicist brings him a cup of carbonated water, which rather impressively runs on tap in Channel 4's staff kitchen, Simm explains how his day started badly. "They thought I was a parcel - they sent a parcel van," he says incredulously.

And what a parcel. The fine-boned actor with looks that waver between mousy and startlingly attractive, depending on the light, is officially one of the Britpack's edgy contingency, along with Daniel Craig and Ian Hart. Simm made his name as Danny Kavanagh in BBC1 drama The Lakes, won critical acclaim in the film Wonderland, and last year brought British club culture to its feet in the rave movie Human Traffic. Anyone who has seen him in any of these productions can't fail to recognise that this boy has talent. His name might not roll off the tongue of the television-watching public, but Simm is one of Britain's best actors - and he knows it.

After sorting out the mix-up with the hired car and travelling from his north London home to Channel 4's headquarters, he is almost ready to talk about his next TV outing. In a northern accent given a gravelly edge by the after-effects of alcohol, he talks about Never, Never, the two-part drama written by Tony Marchant, creator of Kid In The Corner and the television adaptation of Great Expectations. Simm plays a money lender on a London housing estate; the type who relies on charm and a briefcase full of fake gold jewellery, rather than a baseball bat, to do business. The twist is that the character's sudden and violent fall from grace leaves him living among those whose misery he once profited from. The grim, occasionally humorous socio-drama is right up Simm's street.

"I saw a review once which said, 'If you want someone to play a young man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, give it to John Simm'," says the actor, shrugging his shoulders. "So I went off and did Human Traffic and danced around and grinned. It was an acting challenge, smiling a lot." After a short-lived rebellion as the dance fiend Jip, whose biggest problem is a bout of impotence, Simm is back where he belongs, playing a character at the edge of society, flitting between darkness and light, bad and good. "It doesn't glamorise anything," he says. It's just dirty and real, which is what attracts me to a script."

The actor still insists The Lakes' Danny was his perfect role: "I read the scripts, all six of them, walked in and didn't take my coat off. I was just like, 'Have to get that part'." He relished playing the drifter and compulsive gambler who wreaked havoc in a small village after getting a local girl pregnant.

While he waits for another Danny to come along, though, Never, Never is enough to scratch his itch for good, solid drama rooted in reality. During eight weeks' filming on a council estate near Swiss Cottage in London, he realised just how authentic it was when he saw the real-life version of his on-screen character skulking around the estate. The drama's wardrobe department had done Simm proud - the money lender dressed almost identically and had the same love-hate relationship with his clientele, offering gold-plated luxury and fistfuls of cash, and charging the earth for them. Simm admits he felt strange invading his erritory, and was careful not to confront him.

"It was really weird cause I saw him walking round the estate selling things, with his leather jacket and his mobile phone," he says. "I didn't speak to him, but someone told him about me. I ran into him once having an animated conversation in a toilet, but I just ducked and went back to my Winny."

Simm might joke about finding shelter in the relative comfort of his caravan during the shoot, but he has seen a slice of real life in his time. Sounding self-conscious, and wary of playing the "grim oop north" card, he explains that he and his younger twin sisters lived with their mother on a Lancashire council estate after his parents divorced. The domestic turmoil was difficult to cope with at 14 years old, and Simm found solace in music, touring working men's pubs in a harmony duo with his father. He still uses music as an escape route, playing guitar in a rock band called Magic Alex and citing a gig with Echo And The Bunnymen as one of their proudest moments.

Two years after his parents' divorce, Simm left home to go to drama college in Blackpool and at 18, moved to London to kick-start his career, playing a murderer in Jimmy McGovern's acclaimed television series Cracker. He never went back home. "It was a bad time," he says of his family break-up. "We went to live with my mum on this council estate and it was horrible. That's part of the reason I left to become an actor. It was a bad age and I was, like, the man of the house. I was really angry and argued a lot. Then I went away and they got back together." He snorts at the irony of his parents' remarriage after his departure, joking that they had divorced merely as a character building exercise for their children.

The experience could have left Simm wary of commitment, and although he is seeing an actress now, he says he hasn't been lucky in relationships. "It's hard being an actor and being in a relationship," he says. "I was going out with someone for five years and The Lakes saw an end to that. It totally ruined it, but there was nothing I could do about it, I was just away for so long. You can't really expect anyone to wait around and understand that."

He gestures towards the discarded newspaper and the story of Gallagher's split with Matthews. "It's everywhere, I mean look," he says. "She was a shop girl in London when he met her and she's dumped him for being too dull. He's a lovely guy, he just doesn't want to go out and do drugs any more. He's grown up."

Simm can sympathise with Noel Gallagher, who, if the press is to be believed, has finished with rock 'n' roll hell-raising. The actor feels the pressure of living up to a media-induced facade that just doesn't tally with reality. He has been portrayed as arrogant in the press, partly because he speaks his mind - he strongly criticised The Lakes' creators for losing the plot in the second series - and partly because he cultivates the image of cocky northerner. And then there is the old device of playing up to the ladsy image. This isn't the first time he has been interviewed with a hangover. "I always come across as really cocky," he says. "But it's all a front. I got carried away with the Britpop thing - everyone was being cocky. You've got to be a bit confident, but I'm not really like that."

The super-confident image was consolidated with one comment that has returned to haunt him since. "I went to the premiere of High Fidelity and I was asked what I thought of John Cusack when I came out. I said, 'Yeah, he was great, but I could have done it better'. And they used it; they've used it every time they've advertised it, every time there is a clip from it. I was like, 'You should just keep your f**king mouth shut'. I mean, I was joking really."

As it turns out, Simm prefers the quiet life to indulging in London's celebrity circuit. He insists he was out the night before for the first time in weeks - to see Johnny Marr's new band - and prefers to read or tinker with his PlayStation at home to a night on the town.

"It's all just a front," he says, convincingly. "I haven't got a massive ego. I hate talking about my work." He shakes his head and almost spits the rest of this monologue, just in case there is any ambiguity. "I hate hanging about with actors, I hate the theatre crowd. I don't like celebrities and I don't want to be a celebrity. I just think it's all bollocks, all that. I go to the odd premier party and every time I do I just think, Jesus Christ."

To illustrate his horror of all things celebrity, he tells of how he went to the premier of the sci-fi movie X-Men and was shocked when Vanessa Feltz, the disgraced queen of British confessional television, got a bigger cheer from the crowd than the film's star Patrick Stewart. "They just went mad when she got out the car," he says with obvious disgust. "I thought Robert De Niro had just walked out. I went out and said, 'Who's that?' F**king Vanessa Feltz. The whole cult of celebrity in this country frightens me."

Finding himself on a roll, he continues. "Another thing that got to me was the headline in the Sun the day they got the cure for f**king cancer. They had unlocked the key of human existence, the biggest scientific discovery ever, and the headline was something like, 'Les back with Amanda'."

Simm admits that while the media's obsession with throwaway fame disturbs him, he can be as much a victim of it as the next person - or in the case of Big Brother, the next ten million. Talking days before the Channel 4 docusoap reaches its climax, Simm is intrigued to learn of a monitor in the next room where staff can watch Anna, Darren, Craig et al 24 hours a day. Simm might be fascinated by the phenomenon, but that doesn't stop him being angry about it.

"People are becoming stars for nothing," he says. "People can't be that stupid, but they are. It's really sad, quite depressing. I watched one episode of Big Brother and thought everyone was stupid on it. Then I saw the one where Nick got evicted and I thought that was incredible TV, especially as an actor.

"You will never get a close-up of someone's face going through those emotions for real, ever again. As he was being kicked out, he did a dry click as he tried to swallow and his pupils were dilated. It was all those emotions for real. He was trying to do nothing, and that's what I try to do on telly."

While Nick Bateman got his five minutes of fame, Simm is after something far more enduring. As one of Britain's more sought after young actors, he is in the fortunate position of being able to pick and choose between scripts, and while it hasn't made a Hollywood star of him yet, the work just keeps rolling in. This month, he will begin shooting a movie with Matthew Modine in Canada and New York. Penned by Colin Bateman, who wrote Divorcing Jack, The Big Apple will star Modine as the American president and Simm as his kidnapper. "I'm not a baddie in it, though," he says. "I kidnap him because I want to see this girl and it's all a mistake."

Simm is careful not to oversell the movie as the one to propel him into the big time. If his past record is anything to go by, it will earn him critical acclaim, and narrowly miss making him a star in the Ewan McGregor league. If what he says is true, though, Simm doesn't give an Obi Wan Kenobi about that.

"In my game plan when I was younger, I was in Hollywood before I was 26, and it didn't happen. I'm kind of more realistic about it now and I'm fine where I am. I like the way people think of me. They think I'm a good actor and I don't do sh*t for the sake of money." He says he is unconcerned about carving himself a reputation in America. "I'm not going to try to sell myself to them," he says. "I've got the Noel Gallagher philosophy about Americans, I don't care what they think about me. If I get invited over there and they say, 'Will you do this film for all this money?', I'll say 'Of course I'll do Flintstones 5', but I'm not that bothered."

Simm is willing to take his chances, relying on his gut instinct to tell him what is quality work, rather than agonising over where it will register in the ratings battle. He is quite used to just missing the boat. The Lakes failed to convince viewers with its second series; Human Traffic didn't live up to the hype of being the next Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels; and Wonderland's director Michael Winterbottom shunned his usual big budget projects for an arthouse film. "It's always my luck that it never goes, 'Wow'" says Simm.

He motions to a poster of Channel 4's gay drama success Queer As Folk and smiles wryly. "I read that script, and the next thing you know, it's the biggest thing that's ever happened." So why did he reject it, while his friend Craig Kelly took a role? "I think I got to page four and there was someone fisting someone else. I said, 'My father would never look at me again if I do that'. When things like Lock, Stock take off, you just think, 'Oh man'. They just go bang and for some reason they're massive, but that's okay. I just want to do good stuff. I'm not going to sell my arse."

And with that, all talked out, Simm politely makes his excuses and leaves to find Channel 4's fizzy water source - and its round-the- clock Big Brother monitor.

Never, Never is on Channel 4, 9pm, November 5 & 6

Copyright 2000
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