Stephen Mangan Quotes

Comedy is a very personal thing, and some people will find it funny, some people won‘t.

I watch films. I play the guitar: me and some mates – I wouldn’t dignify it with the term band – get together and play.

I was in a lot of school plays, and it became the thing I did.

I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary – a good combination for a teacher.

I learnt a lot about how to negotiate the camera: everyone had told me an actor doesn’t really need to do anything on screen, but I realised that wasn’t true. If you do nothing, it’s boring.

My childhood was very gregarious, and I was usually surrounded by close family.

I enter myself in races. I did a triathlon, and I have done a marathon a couple of times.

My mother was gentle and warm. She was the sort of person you could really open up to. I was the eldest and her only boy, so I guess I was treated differently. She did bring me up as a Catholic, and at one time I was an altar boy, but I lost my faith, as did my father, when my mother died at 45.

I thought the best route to being the great actor I wanted to be was to play the great classical parts.

When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law – in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.

There’s always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I’ve always had a keen eye for pretension.

Theatre‘s a much less faddish, more sensible world than TV or film.

My upbringing is so fundamentally different to my parents’. It must be strange to look at your child who not only speaks with a different accent but has a totally different view of the world.

If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a moody folk singer, sitting on stools and being very depressing.

I didn’t know any actors growing up. My dad was a builder, and we didn’t know any arty types.

I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.

I can watch anything from 1970s West Coast rock to 1990s electro-funk – I don’t care.