“I’m a very small part of Gavin & Stacey,” says Mathew Horne. He’s wrong, of course. He’s Gavin. He’s first up, up top, – the upstanding, often put-upon straight man at the centre of the beloved sitcom. And he has been for almost two decades. In 2007, the show shuffled onto our screens modestly, bowing on BBC Three to less than a million viewers and spinning us the story of a lovestruck pair of twenty-somethings: Gavin from Essex, Stacey from South Wales. The sitcom found its footing almost immediately, its cult status achieved without any time spent in the underappreciated, under-watched wilderness. By its third series, the show had been bumped up to BBC One, and was pulling in eight million viewers every week.
After a decade off the air, a one-off special in 2019 saw the show make a triumphant – if fleeting – return, with more than 17 million fans tuning in on Christmas Day. Gavin & Stacey became the most-viewed entertainment programme in a decade, and the most-viewed comedy show in 17 years. Later this month, a final episode will air on Christmas Day, with Horne positioned pride of place among the returning cast. The BBC are betting big once again, awarding the sitcom the prime-time 9PM slot on 25 December. You’d think that, after the last Christmas special shattered records, another would have always been expected; a sure thing. But no, says the actor.
“It was really, really uncertain,” Horne says of all television produced post-pandemic. “Sociologically, everybody was in flux. But in my industry specifically, I don’t know if anybody knew whether or not there’d be any television programmes made anymore. People were very, very nervous about investing in television. There was that whole thing from the Tories – ‘Your next career could be in cyber’ – all that stuff threw into question the arts as a whole.
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“So making the finale of Gavin & Stacey I don’t think was a priority for anybody,” he adds. Thankfully, the call came from James Corden, the sitcom’s co-creator, in January. This was the first Horne heard of a new special, despite the cast – which also includes Ruth Jones, Joanna Page, Rob Brydon, Alison Steadman and Larry Lamb – maintaining their own “very busy” WhatsApp group. And yet, by September, Horne was slipping back into Gavin’s iconic Fred Perry polo shirt, a costume he first pulled on almost 20 years ago. Outside of soap operas and legacy film sequels, he says, it’s extraordinarily rare for an actor to have such an opportunity.
“It’s a gift,” Horne says, of living with Gavin since 2007. “An absolute gift, and a real blessing. I feel so lucky with it, because take that example of a soap opera – you could end up playing a not very nice person for 20 years. And that’s not as rewarding, obviously, as playing a character in a show that has meant, and does mean, and will continue to mean an awful lot to a large number of people. I’ve been an actor for 23 years, and this has been 18 years of it. And that tells you all you need to know, in terms of the data.”
“I see acting as problem solving. And the solution is normally laughter…”
But Horne, who is now 46, is more than Gavin. Born in Nottinghamshire, he’s been acting since his school days, and has been a firm fixture of the British comedy scene for years. He starred alongside Jack Whitehall in another BBC Three sitcom success story, Bad Education. He and Corden made a couple of films together. Last year, he led Noises Off at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He’s also frequently collaborated – on screen and stage – with Catherine Tate, who Horne first met shortly after graduating from the University of Manchester.
“I revered her because of her ability as an actor. It was astonishing. I recognised, I think, something in Catherine that I’d only ever really seen before in Steve Coogan.” (Coincidentally, Coogan’s Baby Cow Productions produces Gavin & Stacey). “So I just used my time with Catherine as an opportunity to be around her, and learn from her. It just so happened that we had good chemistry, and she’s a very loyal person – so she stuck with me.”
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Like Brydon and Steadman, Tate is another titan of British comedy. But when working with such industry legends, Horne says, you have to be careful not to lavish them with adoration on set – even if you may want to. “I obviously grew up with these people,” he laughs, “so you can’t put that aside. You can’t put it into a box – it’s a very visceral, emotional response. But there are ways you can process it with dignity! And there’s work to be done, so if you go in with a load of baggage of reverence, putting people on pedestals, then it’s going to affect your personal relationship with them, and it’s going to affect the work.”
The day before I speak to Horne, Ryan Reynolds caused a stir when, after being paired with Andrew Garfield for Variety’s annual ‘Actors on Actors’, he felt the need to defend the art of comedy acting in a tweet. “Comedy is also very difficult,” Reynolds had written, “but has an added dimension in that it’s meant to look and feel effortless. You intentionally hide the stitching and unstitching.” Does Horne agree?
“I’ve been an actor for 23 years, and this has been 18 years of it…”
“I suppose maybe what he was talking about was truth and authenticity,” says the actor, “and that’s where the effortlessness may come in, because telling the truth is effortless. It’s lying that takes a lot of work. It’s a really interesting one. But comedy has always been, for me, about finding the truth. And the truth is often based in quite a lot of tragedy. You can’t have one without the other. For me, I resonate with that because in the work I’m doing at the moment, there’s a lot of tragedy around me.”
That work would be Shakespeare. Horne is currently performing in Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane alongside Sigourney Weaver. He plays Trinculo, the King’s jester. “I adore it,” he says of his stage work. “It’s what keeps me going.” He also admits that one particular scene has been giving him a hard time, but he’s just managed to crack it. “And that is so exhilarating. Because I see acting, in many ways, as problem solving. And I find that challenge, and also the reward of solving that problem, and the solution is normally laughter.”
Laughter, though, has been Horne’s bread and butter for years. It’s his go-to, his strongest suit – it’s where he almost always holds the upper hand. There have, of course, been dramatic roles – a sumptuous Agatha Christie adaptation here, some Molière on stage there – but comedy is his career’s throughline; the thread which strings together his life’s work. He and Corden even once had a short-lived sketch show, a project Corden deemed “a mistake” shortly after it aired. But Horne doesn’t have time for such regrets.
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“I’m sure that if I sat down and thought about it,” he considers, “I could trawl my past and recognise and acknowledge mistakes I’ve made in both my working life and my personal life. But, in some ways, it’s a futile exercise, because nobody can change that.
“What we can change,” he continues, “is today, and the future. And I’d like to think that I exercise enough open-mindedness and forward, progressive thinking as to make the necessary changes without self-flagellating too much. And I just think it’s a blessing that we live in a more open and awake world and I’d like to think that I can learn from that and be evermore inclusive of other people. There will always be comedy. Comedy is highly subjective, and we need to as human beings include everybody in that.”
Impactful; insightful. A wonderful place to end. But, before we sign off, I have one more question. Several years ago, Horne was invited to act in a couple of revivals and recreations of British comedy classics, including Dad’s Army and Are You Being Served?. With Gavin & Stacey now firmly ensconced in the pantheon of British sitcoms, does Horne expect to see another actor take on the rebooted, remade role of Gavin in years to come?
“That is quite something!” he laughs. “Maybe there is a little boy out there – right now – going to school, who will be playing me in a few decades time. That would be fun. It’ll be something for my son to watch!”
For more from the world of television, read our interview with Slow Horses actor Kadiff Kirwan...
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