Is Rob Brydon the most contented man in showbiz? Judging by the impression he is giving right now – and you will remember that Brydon is terrific at impressions – you’d have to conclude that, yes, he very much is.
“I was at the National Television Awards last night,” he says, where he and longtime friend Ruth Jones collected Best Comedy for the 2024 Christmas special of Gavin and Stacey, “and some of the winners, my God, you could see it meant everything to them! You’d think they’d just been told they’d got the all-clear from a terrible disease!” He pulls a face of pure bemusement, eyes popping. “You’ve only won an award!”
When Brydon was a younger man, he may have craved such gawdy recognition himself. But no more.
“No. Now, I’m far more aware of what suits my lifestyle best, which is my family, who I love.” He is married to his second wife, Clare, with whom he has two sons, 17 and 14. (He has three grown-up children from his first marriage.) “I’m about to go off and film the next series of The Trip for four weeks” – the exquisitely observed Sky One travelogue series in which he stars alongside Steve Coogan – “and I’m not looking forward to being away from them, even though I’ll be in the company of the esteemed Mr Coogan.”
Clearly, then, he has happened upon an enviable work-life balance? He nods eagerly. “Yes! See, this is my thing: we are all alive, right? And we’re all going to die. And so what do we want? We want to be happy! Wouldn’t you agree?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “And so my next question is: what is it that makes you happy? For me, it isn’t being on a film set with whoever, enjoyable as that is, it’s family, friends. You do the work, yes, of course you do, but then you relax with those friends, with a glass of rosé, talking…”
He sits back, and places both hands behind his head. “Do you know what I mean?” he asks.
Rob Brydon has recently turned 60. A quarter of a century since he first appeared on our screens – during which time he has done television, film, stand-up and podcasts, and countless voiceovers for TV adverts (Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, P&O Ferries) – he says that he is keen, now, to branch out. “I thought I’d do some different things, say yes to the kind of things I once said no to.”
As a consequence, he has just hosted Destination X, the smash hit BBC game/travel show that dared pose the question, “What would happen if you mixed The Traitors with Race Around the World?,” and then proceeded to answer it over 10 surprisingly gripping episodes. He has been offered many TV quiz shows in the past, and declined the vast majority of them. But this one sounded fun.
“I watched the Belgian original version, which had a very dark, depressing bus, and a host who rode around on a motorbike,” he says. “So we made a few little alterations. I was thrilled with it, because so many people seemed to enjoy it. They liked playing along, and they liked watching it with all the family. Doing something your kids want to watch with you? That’s worth its weight in gold.”
He’s fronting another sort-of travel show for the Beeb this month, one that features his name above the title – Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Tour – in which he travels America’s deep south to find out quite why country music is now so globally popular.
“It’s huge, country music, and I’d no idea!” he says, sitting within BBC’s Broadcasting House on a stormy, overcast day, a bag of popcorn open in front of him. He admits that he didn’t know much about country music beforehand – Elvis is his preferred passion – and only agreed to front it when the BBC explained that: “It could be a sort of voyage of discovery for both me and the viewers.”
The show is very easy on the eye and always genial, Brydon fine travelling company, but while he meanders through these lower states, fishing, tasting moonshine with bartenders and singing songs, an elephant lurks in the room. It is difficult today to look at anything American without considering either its politics, its President, or its increasingly fractured ideology. But aside from one shot of a “Jesus Is My Lord, Trump Is My President” bumper sticker here, the subject is deliberately avoided.
“Well,” he says now, “I’m not your guy for politics. To be honest I did think we would see far more Trump T-shirts and posters, more flags. But we didn’t. It struck me that life is much clearer there; there’s not a lot of navel-gazing. You go out to work, and you come home to your family, who you love. You go to your church for God, who you also love. It’s all kind of clear.”
Like he said, not your guy for politics. Nevertheless, the show actually does the US a timely favour by reminding people that, terrifying political discord aside, your average American can still seem nice and approachable, and mostly sane – just like everyone else.
“I was struck,” Brydon says, “by how friendly they were. Their levels of courtesy were almost Jane Austen: ‘Thank you.’ ‘No, thank you.’ There was a curious sort of formality to the people that I rather liked.”
Brydon is a rare performer in the world of entertainment in that he seems to be able to appeal, almost in equal measure, to everyone. His early work was dark and edgy – Marion and Geoff, his masterpiece of comedic pathos about a lonely divorcee trying to make the best of things during the worst of times; and the brilliantly unsettling Human Remains alongside Julia Davis – before he veered towards more mainstream fare with the panel show Would I Lie to You?, and, of course, Gavin and Stacey, where his performance as Uncle Bryn stole every scene he was in. The Hollywood actor Margot Robbie liked Bryn so much, he says, “that she got me cast in Barbie. Which was nice.” (Brydon played Sugar Daddy Ken in the Greta Gerwig blockbuster, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo.)
But perhaps his best performance to date has also been the one that seems closest to home. In The Trip, he and Steve Coogan play thinly disguised versions of themselves, poking fun at one another in upmarket restaurants throughout Europe. (The new series, due in 2026, will take them to Scandinavia.) When not duelling over which of them does the best Michael Caine impersonation – or Al Pacino, or Richard Burton, or Anthony Hopkins (there are a lot of impersonations) – Coogan slyly mocks his friend for his broad, and occasionally cheesy, appeal. I tell Brydon that I love this aspect of the show. It’s like ear-wigging on a conversation not meant for us.
“Actually,” he counters, “I don’t like that [element]. I prefer it when things are more affectionate between us, simply because that’s far closer to the reality of our relationship.” Really? “Yes! Me and Steve had lunch yesterday, and there was no crackle of hostility at all, just laughter. We talked about which health supplements we’re currently taking.”
But it is those moments where they do butt heads – alpha versus beta – that makes it such compelling viewing.
“That’s not Steve’s doing,” Brydon says. “It’s Michael [Winterbottom]. Michael, I think, wants the conflict.”
Nevertheless, he will admit that he and Coogan are “massively different. I’ve said this before, and it’s true: Steve. Has. An. Opinion. He’s one of the most opinionated people I’ve ever met. He’d have an opinion about this fabric…” Here, Brydon scratches at the chair next to him, and as he does so slips effortlessly into Coogan’s voice. “‘Th-the cotton count is too high. It should be more of a nylon composite.’ He’d look at the wall and say: ‘Th-this is matte; it sh-should be gloss.’ That’s him. That’s the detail [he puts] into his work. It’s beautiful, and it’s exhausting. But he is wonderful, wonderful company because of that.”
I ask him whether he ever craves what Coogan had with the 2013 film Philomena, a role to confound audience expectation, and which, in the process, bagged Coogan an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay?
A sharp intake of breath. “No! No. I just don’t have that hunger, that appetite. I mean, I’d love it if somebody saw me and went, ‘There’s this great guy who could do this role,’ but we actors mostly tend to be offered versions of the sort of roles we’ve done before. Since Barbie, for example, I’ve turned down similar-sized roles in films of that ilk, simply because I thought, ‘What’s the point? I’ve already done it.’”
Instead, he’d much rather be at home, with friends and family, drinking rosé, content in his place in the world.
“Part of being comfortable in your own skin is knowing who you are,” he says. “I think it’s adolescent to resist that, to try to be someone else.” He smiles. “I’m perfectly happy being me.”
‘Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Tour’ screens on BBC2 from 5 October
