Stephen Merchant on The Outlaws season 2 and working with Ricky Gervais again

What I always find interesting is how quickly even actors as iconic as him quickly just become another work colleague.

You’re enthralled or you’re intimidated when you first encounter them, and by sort of day four, it’s just another person you’re working alongside and having a laugh with or stressing with. Or you’re sharing anecdotes about… in his case, he’d been flipping through the channels on his hotel TV and come across the TV show Naked Attraction, and was clearly baffled by full nudity was on British TV. Everyone’s kind of normalised at some point in the process.

Given that the second season of The Outlaws is now coming out, are there plans for a third season?

We’ve talked about the third series, and we’ve started thinking about stories for it with the writers. We just have to wait for the money people to sign off on that. All the ideas are in place for where we can go next.

One of the things that was most pleasing about the first series going out, particularly in terms of social media, was the way that the feedback I got was people that warmed to the characters, even characters who they perhaps wouldn’t necessarily like if they met them in real life, and they were still rooting for them or empathetic towards them.

That’s the most you can hope for in a way, that people engage with the characters. To have accumulated this cast, not only of good actors, but of characters that you enjoy writing for, to be able to bring them back and keep on throwing rocks at them as it were, turning that frog heat up, it’s pleasurable, because it’s hard to create a world from scratch and populate it and all the rest of it.

Over the past two years, many people bingewatched TV shows in the pandemic, so lots of people either returned to or discovered The Office UK and US for the first time. There’s a continued rivalry pitting them against each other. What are your thoughts on that debate of the UK version versus the US version?

Well, I’ve always thought of it more like a song that can have a great cover version, and be equally beloved as the original song. They both have their favourites, but they don’t cancel each other out. So for me, I love the American version, and I’m very proud to have had some involvement with it. I love the fact that it’s still a hugely viewed thing, and people are finding it and same is true of the British version.

So I don’t see them as rivals. I remember when the American version was first mooted, there were articles in the British press that were like, “How dare the Americans make this our beloved show? They’ll ruin it. How dare they?” And then when it aired, they were kind of like, “Yeah, it’s not as good, it’s rubbish. It’s American pandering.”

Then over time, it was like, “Wow, this American version, I think it might be better than the British.” And then it’s like, “the superior American version.” At some point, when Ricky and I are kind of regarded as national treasures, then it will come back to, “We’d like both of them.” As long as people are watching and enjoying it, it doesn’t bother me what the general consensus is on what’s better.

Speaking of Ricky, would you ever consider doing another project with him in the future? And if so, do what kind of project you would want to explore?

Yeah, but I think it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know what two middle aged white blokes like us are gonna come up with that people want to see now? I don’t know whether we had our moment as the unit.

I don’t know. I think maybe we’d end up as kind of grumpy old men characters. That would be that seems like the best fitted thing, two miserable on blokes whinging about the world seems like the best fit for us as we get older. I’d happily do another project, it’s just finding the right thing.

Looking at your career, on the whole, what have been some of the most surprising roles that you might have been offered in the past either roles that you accepted or decided to turn down?

Well, I’ve always gone with things that seem interesting at the time and what sets seemed fun. One that I’m proud of because I think it was kind of left field was playing a mutant in a Wolverine film, with my head shaved and four hours of prosthetics and makeup every day. That was challenging and interesting.

More recently I played this killer, Stephen Port, in the BBC drama called Four Lives. That was a real tough high dive for me, because not only is it a real person, and you’re dealing with a very sensitive, true life story, but also just the actual mechanics of trying to play a killer and trying to understand how they think, and kind of render that on screen.

As someone who began as a comedian and as a writer to have broadened myself as an actor into that kind of territory, I’m quite proud of that really, and hopefully I’ll continue to do it. I feel like I’ve done so many different things and I kind of haven’t picked a lane. I keep on jumping lanes, acting and directing and producing and writing and then back to acting, and then some stand up and then to do some DJing… maybe I should just pick a lane and try and be good at that.

You once spoke on The Russell Howard Hour show about your dream of doing this Star Wars project with the Rock where you’ve voiced him and he doesn’t know until he gets to the premiere. Speaking of the fact that you were in Marvel, is Star Wars a franchise that you would want to explore in the future?

It is a franchise I’d like to explore, not just as an actor, but as a writer, or as a director. I think it’d be great fun, because one of the things I like about both the Star Wars universe and also the Marvel Universe is it’s a very good way of sneaking in some older film genres that slightly go out of fashion.

So like, the Boba Fett TV show and the Mandalorian are Westerns in space. And Spider Man has got a John Hughes rom-com quality to it and, and they’ve done conspiracy thriller, Marvel films, like Captain America: Civil War was for that. Ant-Man is kind of like a heist movie. I like the fact that you can take genres that are slightly old fashioned and people will engage with them. That’s the thing that seems appealing to me. Like, let me do a Star Wars where it’s like film noir, but they’ve all got lightsabers.

So a film noir in Star Wars would be your pick if given the option?

Well, I mean, I don’t want my hands to be tied tied. So when Disney come calling, they’re like, “Well, you said it was film noir, that’s your only choice.” But something like, finding a little sub universe, a little sub world of the Star Wars universe and being able to do something interesting with it. That does seem creatively very exciting. And there are all those wonderful toys to play with, and special effects.

Going back to The Outlaws, what real-life anecdotes can you share that were incorporated into the show?

There’s a moment in the first episode where I kind of I embarrass myself talking to a girl and I get myself caught up in a chandelier that’s hanging above the table I’m stood at. People will say, well, that wouldn’t happen and I say well, things like that have happened to me that are far more unlikely or embarrassing.

I remember when I was at university, I was talking to this woman at a party. I thought it was going quite well and she said to me, “Steve, you’re on fire,” and I went, “Thanks very much.” And she went, “No, you are on fire.” My shirt caught a light on the candle that was on this table, and I was wearing this odd 70s retro-style acrylic shirt, and it just went up in flames. That kind of real world embarrassment has occurred to me and always inspires some of the comedy in my shows.

With season two, are there any certain episodes, moments or performances from the cast – without going into spoiler territory – that you’re most looking forward to viewers getting to see?

Well, I think everybody has their moment in this series. I’m very proud of that cast. I like the fact that all of our relationships deepen in the show. Each of us gets to have a moment of emotion or a moment of connection, or sentiment or whatever. Christopher has a monologue that I just think he delivers beautifully, and it’s very touching and very sweet and tender.

I’m very proud of the final episode of the series, which without giving too much away, has a kind of a heist-style to it. We were inspired by Ocean’s 11 and things like that. I hope people will enjoy it, because it was very complicated to work those ideas out. Everyone’s got to be doing something different and it’s all interconnected. I think it’s come off very well, I’m very pleased with it. So I like the fact that there’s a lot of different flavours.

Like I was saying about Disney and Marvel and Star Wars, we’ve tried to sneak in some of our favourite genres into this show. So we’ll have some crime stuff, and we’ll have a foot chase or a punch up or, in that case a heist and it’s nice to be able sneak something like that into what on the surface looks like a kind of suburban show set in Bristol.