Stephen Mangan interview: ‘I refuse to be ashamed of my private education’
“I felt observed all the time at school, like I was on Big Brother” – Clara Molden for The Daily Telegraph
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say a month in the Caribbean wasn’t part of the appeal,” says Stephen Mangan when I ask what lured the actor into presenting ITV’s new game show The Fortune Hotel. “We hired the whole resort on Grenada – complete with a 100 m swimming pool – for the whole shoot. And I’ve never done so much filming on yachts and beaches. The sunsets were just incredible and …” You got to dress like the Man from Del Monte? “Yes! I got all the linen suits.”
More scruffily and sweetly shambolic than he often appears on screen (from the womanising surgeon of Green Wing to the Machiavellian barrister of The Split), 55-year-old Mangan meets me in one of ITV’s glass-walled meeting rooms with a huge sigh of relief. He’s been lost inside the building; I’ve been lost on the outside of it. Neither of us, we conclude, would fare well in the escape-room-style challenges contestants face in The Fortune Hotel.
The show’s premise will be familiar to viewers of modern game shows such as The Traitors or the Brian Cox-fronted 007: Race to a Million. ITV has invited 10 teams of two (including couples, best friends, parents and children) to a secure location, in which they compete for a briefcase containing £250,000 – all 10 couples have a briefcase, but only one contains the money. While The Traitors host Claudia Winkleman relishes every second of that show’s skulduggery, Mangan is more uncomfortable with the betrayals he witnesses in the bar of the Fortune Hotel.
Mangan hosts new ITV game show The Fortune Hotel – Matt Frost/ITV
“I’m no Jerry Springer,” he sighs, raking his fingers through his salt and pepper curls. “I don’t like confrontation. And when you spend a month in the same hotel, you become friends with people and you get to hear why they want that money. I think we all became friends, but obviously the game meant the contestants had to lie to each other, so there was a fascinating friction. Every time there was a big dramatic moment, I was torn between empathy for the people blowing life-changing amounts of cash and my awareness that it was great telly.”
Most viewers might assume – as I did – that the suave Mangan came from the kind of background that would allow him to look down on regular folk scrabbling for a mere quarter of a million. But he’s the son of an Irish builder. Both his parents left school and emigrated from Ireland to the UK in search of a brighter future. They met in Kilburn, London, and worked hard to ensure that Stephen and his sisters “had a better chance in life than they did, because they were both very bright and they lived vicariously through us. I’ve never been asked to play an Irish character and I’d love to do that”.
He’s aware he’s “very lucky” to have landed a scholarship to a public school that led him on to Cambridge then Rada. “But I refuse to feel ashamed about that education,” he tells me. “I’m acutely aware that only a tiny percentage of people will get that level of education, so we need to find a way to set up the system to give all the brightest kids access to it.”
Mangan recalls how much he hated boarding at school, partly because it took him away from his mother, who died of bowel cancer aged 45, when he was 21. He took time out from his law degree to care for her. “As a parent of three kids now – 16, 13 and eight – I’m intensely aware that you don’t get that time back.” But he also feels that losing his mother gave him “the courage to walk away from law and go for acting”.
He recalls youthful afternoons with his friend, the late Paul Ritter, where they dreamt only of “doing matinees in Darlington” and sharing digs. “I had an idea that the only way to become a good actor was to do the classic parts. I did Hamlet in Norwich [as Laertes]. I stood in the wings in Glasgow, Salisbury … I went around the world doing Much Ado About Nothing.” He shakes his curls. “I turned down TV roles, Merchant Ivory films. Today things are different and producers need a film or TV name to get a theatre show off the ground.”
Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd in Dirk Gently – Des Willie/BBC
Mangan learnt his love of theatre from his mum, who took him to matinees. The passion was nurtured by a teacher who cast him in plays including Oliver! and Beauty and the Beast (he was Beauty). “I felt observed all the time at school, like I was on Big Brother, in a way that wasn’t healthy for me,” he says. He didn’t handle the bullying well. “I made that classic mistake of kids who are picked on,” he nods. “I reacted when it hurt, I made it interesting for them to provoke me.”
But he also credits his time at school for inspiring the multi-hyphenate career that he now enjoys as game show and arts programme host; television, radio, film and theatre actor; and children’s author (his latest book, The Day I Fell Down the Toilet, was published last month).
His innate sensitivity – one of the things that makes him such an engaging host of shows such as Landscape Artist of the Year – is one reason he didn’t make it as an actor in Los Angeles. “Early in my career I was often told to ‘Go West, young man and seek your fortune’,” he laughs. But he found LA “not nice, too hard to get a handle on, there’s always a feeling that things are happening elsewhere, and the level of bulls–t is just too uncomfortable”. He sighs and acknowledges that there’s bulls–t in all aspects of showbusiness: “But I’d compare LA to a womaniser telling every woman that she’s the woman of his dreams. Death by encouragement is how I’ve come to think of it.”
What was the biggest bulls–t line he got sold out there? “Oh, I had a manager say to me: ‘I’m your biggest fan. I’ve seen everything you’ve ever done, Simon.’” The line could have been lifted straight from the comedy Episodes, in which Mangan starred as an English sitcom writer struggling to maintain his dignity in the face of LA fakery. “David Crane co-created that show as a shot against network television and, as the co-creator of Friends, he really knows what he’s talking about.”
The Green Wing was credited with making Mangan’s name – Channel 4
Episodes also starred Friends’s Matt LeBlanc as the tone-deaf celebrity cast in the fictional sitcom, and Mangan tells me that LeBlanc was “great to work with” because he “didn’t have any pretentions. My idea of doing five years of theatre to become a better actor is not his thing. He knew it was a job. He wanted to get paid well and he did pretty successfully at it. He works very hard and doesn’t take himself too seriously.”
Mangan knew that staying in LA wasn’t an option for him: “To succeed there you have to tell everybody you’re the greatest thing ever or you won’t get the work. I find people who can do that very impressive, but it’s not for me. And you can’t explain to a big-shot American agent why you really want to do a little radio comedy …”
But Mangan is genuinely giddy when he tells me about his role in new Radio 4 sitcom The Island. “The idea is that all the Desert Island Discs guests have really been sent to an island together. These celebrities have all brought their luxury items, so there are piles or rotting pianos and coffee machines everywhere. It’s all gone very Lord of the Flies. The leader is Sandi Toksvig – everyone’s terrified of her – and Hugh Bonneville has gone rogue and has been ostracised. He’s flailing around in a lake with his top off trying to catch salmon.”
The Fortune Hotel doesn’t go all Lord of the Flies, but there are certainly moments of high emotion. Mangan grins then shrugs. “I felt for everybody who lost on the show. I cried four or five times watching it back and I don’t usually cry at TV. But I didn’t expect what happened. People behave very differently when money is at stake.” What would Mangan do if he got a briefcase containing £250,000? “Oh, easy,” he laughs. “I’d buy a stone cottage on the Irish coast and stare, open-mouthed at the sea.”
The Fortune Hotel begins on ITV1 and ITVX on May 13
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