Interview with Brendan Coyle (THE BRITISH COMEDY GUIDE)

Brendan Coyle talks about playing Terry in Starlings...

Could you tell us about Terry?

Terry is the father of the family and he's a new grandfather as well. He is an electrician by trade, as is his father: hence Starling & Sons, the family firm. Terry is an upbeat character. He's not the quirkiest or most comedic of the bunch, but he's a big-hearted fellow, he loves life, he has a great energy about him and he's extremely positive and open. That makes for a very funny character, because life just doesn't meet with his vision of how it should be. A lot of the time he feels like he's in this weird gallery. He is a devoted family man and it's a beautiful relationship he has with Jan, his wife, played by the brilliant Lesley Sharp.

After all the public acclaim for your role as Mr Bates in Downton Abbey you must have had plenty of offers. What attracted you to Starlings?

The same reason I chose Downton: it was the scripts. At the end of Downton, a few things came in on the same week, which is a really privileged position to be in: your imperative as an actor is to get employment, but your ideal is to have choice. And yes, I did have a couple of choices.

This was a real curve ball, a very different thing for me. I mean I had an option to go off and be grumpy in something else. But I thought, 'I can be grumpy in a hat... I can be grumpy in a cloak, or I can do Starlings!' So I auditioned like everybody else and I really took a shine to Matt [King] and Ali [MacPhail], our producer. I looked at their pedigree, and Tony Dow and Matt Lipsey, the directors, and I'm a big fan of Steve Coogan and Henry Normal and the stuff that Baby Cow do, so I thought, 'I'm in really, really safe hands here.' But in the end it just comes down to the same thing every time: it's always scripts. I read the first episode, I laughed, I was moved... and that's the litmus test. I thought, 'Bang! This is going to be really, really good.'

How would you describe Starlings - comedy, comedy drama, other...?

It's quite hard to nail. The only comedy I've done before was a thing called Paths to Freedom, and that was out-and-out spoof documentary stuff. It was a fantastic piece, a big smash in Ireland. But this is something very, very different. The comedy is very nuanced, and it demands a kind of comedic play and delivery. But it's rooted in a source of truth: it's a family, we're playing it for real.

How important is the setting in Matlock?

Well, it's a beautiful backdrop for one thing. I mean visually it's a real feast. We're surrounded by the Peak District, and even just a scene on a little football field would find us surrounded by hills and trains going through the forest above our heads. It means that the whole setting is distinctly not a city thing, while not being totally isolated. That gives it a sort of world, life and pace of its own.


READ THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW:  http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/starlings/interview/brendan_coyle/