Miles Jupp: ‘I really must try and formulate some opinions on stuff…’
MIles Jupp – film and TV actor, writer, comedian and panel show favourite – will be appearing at the Key Theatre on Wednesday, 11 June. FELICITY EVANS caught up with him to talk about vicars, memory loss – and Michael Caine…
How are you finding touring this time around? You’ve got a lot on your plate: many creative projects, plus a young family…
It’s surprising how tiring I’ve found it, to be honest. I’ve never really needed a post-lunch nap before, but it’s been a great discovery – I might try and keep doing it.
I think it could be quite good for your image, having a lunchtime nap!
Yes! It just suits me. But there is a thing about getting older, realising who you are. It’s a not a reason to despair at being young, but you sort of look at yourself even six, seven years ago and what you thought about stuff and conclude: ‘Oh my word, what was I thinking?’ Once you have a family and things like that, your priorities change. It’s not that you were always wrong when you were younger… no, actually, you probably were!
I know the brain certainly changes. I often feel as though I’ve had large sections of my memory wiped…
Yes, it’s extraordinary! But weird, long-term stuff though… I mean I keep losing things, but bizarrely last night I did an hour-long show, just me talking, and I hadn’t done that routine for four years – and I could hear long, quite complicated sentences just flying out of my mouth, that had obviously been sitting in a bit of my brain all that time. It’s why I can get an MOT and lose the certificate on the way home but remember things like that – huge sentences that are taking up large amounts of my thought power.
‘The idea of thinking a thing then just going out onto a stage and saying it, it’s great to be able to operate in a totally unfiltered way’
Your stand-up routine a few years ago was based far more on you as a ‘character’ – it wasn’t the real you – but you’ve moved away from that now…
Occasionally I might lapse back into that ‘voice’, if I’m on a panel show and don’t have an opinion on a particular subject – it happens all the time actually, if I have to answer a question about The X-Factor or something, it’s a default response to simply say: ‘I’m awfully sorry, I don’t know what anyone’s talking about,’ but after a while you think, ‘I really must try and formulate some opinions on stuff.’ Not necessarily The X-Factor, but I got to the point where I thought that if I was going to go the bother of standing on a stage talking about things, under my own name, it might as well be things I actually think. Luckily now I’m getting to do lots of… [cont]