Steve Coogan is feeling Strangelove

“Write this down!” says Steve Coogan: he is only half joking. “I’m comfortable being a bit uncomfortable and I’m not comfortable being a bit too comfortable.” The line could be straight out of Alan Partridge, the tragicomic persona around whom Coogan has built a 30-year career. In this instance, however, the English actor, comedian, screenwriter and producer is talking about himself. Specifically, why he has not only taken on his first major West End role, but four of them. At the same time.

The original Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy about a nuclear standoff between America and the USSR, featured Peter Sellers playing a trio of characters: the very British Captain Mandrake, understated US President Muffley and the deranged ex-Nazi Dr Strangelove. Sellers agreed to a fourth role, the Texan B-52 commander Major TJ “King” Kong, but struggled to master the accent. Lacking the necessary agility following an on-set leg injury, Sellers relinquished the part.

Switching between these roles on celluloid was challenge enough for Sellers. How is Coogan, now 58, feeling about performing all four of them on stage? “It’s going to be very, very difficult,” he says of the production, which opens at the Noël Coward Theatre in October. “I was only doing three roles at first, but I thought, why don’t I try to do all four?”

Strangelove has been put together by the creative duo of director and writer Sean Foley and co-writer Armando Iannucci, under the close scrutiny of the Kubrick estate. Foley has promised a text that will have “fun with the dialogue” and be both “faithful and promiscuous” with the original script.

As projects go, Dr Strangelove is a cultural leviathan, but Coogan and Iannucci have rock-solid form. Thirty years ago in 1994, sports reporter Alan Partridge made his television debut on BBC2’s The Day Today. The show was a launchpad for both men’s careers, as well as those of Chris Morris, Patrick Marber, Doon Mackichan and Rebecca Front. Iannucci recalls seeing Coogan in action for the first time: “Everyone stood back to watch, because he was an amazing improviser. It was mesmerising. He absorbed any character you gave him, bringing them to life.”

Knowing Coogan

1997 I’m Alan Partridge

2002 24 Hour Party People

2004 Around the World in 80 Days

2006 Night at the Museum

So successful was Coogan’s take on the hapless sports presenter that he returned to BBC2 that same year as the star of a dedicated chat show, Knowing Me, Knowing You… With Alan Partridge. Coogan may have appeared to be an overnight success, but he maintains that achieving any kind of critical recognition actually took years. “My background is very odd, because I started out at drama school, then I was doing cheesy stuff like Sunday Night at the Palladium with Jimmy Tarbuck, where I wore shiny suits,” he says. “Those first few years, I was scrambling about like a headless chicken, unsure of what I wanted to do. But I knew that wasn’t it.”

Just as his career has transformed, so has his wardrobe. In recent years, and especially in his role as “himself” in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, Coogan has emerged as an unlikely style icon. For HTSI’s photoshoot, he wears a Dior suit, although he says his own style switches depending on whether he’s at home in the tranquillity of rural East Sussex, in Cumbria (where he also has a home) or in the city. “I don’t wear trainers when I come into London, or a T-shirt,” he says. “And skinny jeans on anyone over 40 is a cry for help.”

As Alan Partridge, Coogan dresses in safari jackets, Roger Moore-inspired blazers and, occasionally, cravats: the quintessential hallmarks of “sports casual”. For his own tailoring, he has distinctly different preferences. “[The social commentator] Peter York said a shirt should have good ‘architecture’ and I’m afraid he was right. I do like a jacket that fits well, and good tailoring,” he says. “Over-tailoring is just as bad. I loved Daniel Craig as Bond but those Tom Ford suits were too keenly cut. You wouldn’t be able to throw a punch without busting a seam.”

Coogan’s collaborators have been instrumental in his success, Iannucci being chief among them. “I had a raw talent, but when I started working with Armando, I knew that this was really good stuff,” he says. “It was pretty clear to me that this new thing I was part of was different and exciting. There was no one else I would rather work with. Armando was like a teacher, a sort of head prefect, and Patrick [Marber] was a mentor, who helped me aspire to reach beyond my comfort zone.”

It was Marber, for example, who first appreciated Alan Partridge’s potential. The playwright recalls: “It was quite a slog persuading Steve and Armando that Alan had long legs. I felt he could fit into a long English comic tradition; the opinionated petit-bourgeois male like Hancock, Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty. There was that, but mainly it was for personal pleasure. When Steve did Alan – on or off camera – it made me howl with laughter. I wanted to spend more time in that world.”

Coogan says there was a degree of unhealthy codependency with Marber. “I was directionless and would pick up the phone to ask him about everything. Patrick realised he didn’t want to be the man behind me and went off to write and direct for the National Theatre. It was like a mini-divorce. When I told him, ‘I feel like you’re leaving me,’ he answered, ‘Well, I am.’” Laughing about it now, Coogan admits the disentanglement was ultimately advantageous. The last time the two worked together was in 1996, when Coogan acted in the Marber-directed Blue Remembered Hills at the National Theatre.

2013 Philomena

2014 The Trip to Italy

2018 Stan & Ollie

2021 This Time with Alan Partridge

Despite his now-prolific output, Coogan has experienced lean periods in his career. “When I earned a lot of money and also stopped earning money, I had to hold my nerve,” he says. “I could have been one of those people who are always on panel shows being funny, and I turned down some lucrative work.” He remembers saying to his agent, “Should I just throw in the towel and be Murderer Number Six on Midsomer Murders?”

And he says he was given lots of advice “by idiots”, like: “‘You need to be in a big American comedy with [someone like] Vince Vaughn’. I learnt to ignore it and go with my instinct. I did The Other Guys with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. It was a perfectly serviceable funny film, but I remember thinking, what are you even doing here?” Some of these experiences are recounted in The Trip, the semi-autobiographical two-hander he made with actor Rob Brydon in which the duo travel around to different restaurants together, under the auspices of writing a travel piece. A magnificent evisceration of the male ego, the Hollywood system and ambition, paired with impeccable impressions and locations, the comedy ran to four series before culminating in Greece in 2020. 

Coogan has been more artistically satisfied by projects that he has been able to steer via his own Baby Cow production company. It was what enabled him to make Philomena. The film, about an Irish woman who had been forced to give up her baby, and the journalist who helped tell her story, was prompted when “I read the article in the newspaper about Philomena and Martin Sixsmith. The story moved me and I decided I would try to make it. In a way, I was spoiled, because everything happened perfectly. Less than five years after reading the article, I was at the Oscars in 2014 and in the Vatican, meeting the Pope with the real Philomena.”

The film was rewarded with commercial and critical recognition: “Philomena changed everything,” says Coogan. He continues to parlay this into projects, tracking between the light of Partridge and darker, weightier work such as playing Jimmy Saville in The Reckoning. He has just wrapped two more roles portraying real people – political interviewer Brian Walden, opposite Harriet Walter’s Margaret Thatcher, and football manager Mick McCarthy in a reimagining of Roy Keane’s World Cup walkout. He is also planning to direct a film. He has a couple of projects in mind, one of which “is about Donald Campbell, the fastest man on land and water, who died on Lake Coniston travelling at nearly 300 miles an hour”. 

Coogan was once the darling of the tabloid press for all the wrong reasons. “I’ve had my vices and peccadilloes – a long time ago now, thank God,” he reflects. “When I was young and ambitious, I was nerdy and a bit of a square, and I didn’t go out. Suddenly, when I became successful, I went off the rails a bit.” Instead, Coogan is becoming an elder statesman of comedy and relishing being a father to his grown-up daughter, Clare. He avoids social media, “because I would probably say something stupid and get cancelled – if I’ve got something to say, I put it in my work”, and fills his downtime with campaign work, from Hacked Off’s attempts to reform UK press self-regulation to protesting against pollution in Lake Windermere.

Hailing from a “lower-middle class background” in Middleton, north of Manchester, Coogan recently realised that “whatever the story, I always end up doing the same thing, trying to elevate lower-class people by attacking posh people, attempting to redress the balance”. To which end he’s currently developing “something about Charles II”, exiled from England for almost a decade after the Civil War. In his version, the King is humbled by ordinary people. “I don’t think that’s quite what happened,” he tells me. “But that’s the way I’m telling it!” 

Dr Strangelove runs at the Noël Coward Theatre from 8 October to 25 January, then at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from 5 to 22 February 2025. drstrangelove.com. Styling, Benjamin Canares. Grooming, Rhona Phipps. Photographer’s assistant, Madison Blair