“It’s not easy, sitting for a portrait, seeing somebody else’s personal response to you,” says Stephen Mangan. “Just look at President Trump this week.” He chuckles. “He was upset by the cover of Time magazine because the photo was taken from below and his sort-of-chin folds into the neck of his shirt…”
Although the picture was used to illustrated a positive story about the President’s role in engineering the ceasefire in Gaza – headlined “His Triumph” – the President took to Truth Social to complain that the “super bad” image “‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one”.
Mangan’s amused. The 57-year-old actor, presenter and children’s author has repeatedly called out Trump’s policies on X, and once joked that his greatest fear is “being trapped in a lift with Donald Trump”. But, in his role as presenter of Sky’s addictive Portrait Artist of the Year, which is back on our tellies for its 12th series this month, he finds a rare point of human connection with the US President.
“I don’t like having my photograph taken,” he admits. “A lot of actors don’t, because we don’t know what to do with ourselves.” He shudders and makes a face at the thought of “standing there, trying not to look simpering or smug or upset or, you know, ugly. Models fascinate me. They spend all day posing for photographs. Not my idea of fun.”
He’s talking today via video call from the book-lined study of the north London house he shares with his wife (the actor Louise Delamere) and their three sons, aged nine to 18, who “don’t watch anything I am in, although they were impressed that a clip of me calling out Nigel Farage” – on Have I Got News for You in 2014 – “had gone viral on TikTok”. I last saw Mangan earlier in the year at the filming of the final of this year’s Portrait Artist of the Year (which he cheekily refers to by modifying its acronym, PAOTY to “POUTY”) as he crept in respectful silence around the competition’s finalists during the three hours in which they were allotted to create their portraits of Succession star Brian Cox.
While the 79-year-old Scottish actor dozed in an armchair on stage and various versions of his face came into focus on the easels, I felt the frisson in the crowd whenever Mangan materialised before the cameras. “He’s ‘over there’, Gwynne,” older women whispered to each other. “Stephen’s so lovely,” one retired teacher told me. “I might have a bit of a crush…” “Me too,” confessed another woman behind us. “He’s just so kind and clever and he’s got lovely hair like my old cocker spaniel…”
“I don’t know how to deal with that!” flusters Mangan – flailing for his water bottle – when I suggest he’s become the sex symbol of cosy, suppertime British TV. “That’s going on my CV! Okay, well… uh… well, they’re… I’m not really aware…” He rallies and points out that anybody who’s made the effort to come along to the live event is “part of the home crowd” so “won’t include anybody who’s physically sick at the sight of me”.
Like so many of our national treasures, Mangan is a Cambridge student turned Rada graduate who first found national fame in TV comedy. His 2001 breakthrough role was playing Adrian Mole in the six-part TV adaptation of Sue Townsend’s The Cappuccino Years (with classic self deprecation, he told Desert Island Discs listeners that the late Townsend, who was losing her sight at the time of casting, was relieved to hear he wasn’t too good looking for the part. “That was the moment I knew I would never play Bond.”). From 2004-06 he was the buttock-clenchingly arrogant anaesthetist Guy Secretan in the brilliantly eccentric medical sitcom Green Wing (which is really worth rewatching – my teenage kids loved it) and then the kitchen salesman (Dan Moody) who tries to lure Steve Coogan into a threesome in I’m Alan Partridge. He says people still shout, “Dan! Dan!”, at him in the street.
Like others in the national treasure set, he’s gone on to be one of the clever-but-loveable professorial faces of cuddly British TV. He says that if you’d told him when he was back at Rada, brushing up on his Shakespeare, that he’d end up fronting game shows and live weekend TV, then he wouldn’t have believed you. But – like Cambridge pals Mel and Sue – he’s hungry for it all. He’s hosted Have I Got News For You and Pointless. He presents The Fortune Hotel – ITV’s spin on The Traitors – in which people compete to conceal the whereabouts of the £250,000 prize money from each other. He tells me he can’t resist the chance to compete in quiz shows. “I’ve done them all. Mastermind, Fifteen to One, The Weakest Link, Richard Osman’s House of Games. Can’t say no. It’s all too much fun.”
But Mangan isn’t the privileged posh boy he knows most people think he is. He’s actually the son of an Irish builder, who really grafted to send smart Stephen to a boarding school that he hated. He was bullied and, last year, told me that he made the fatal mistake of reacting to his bullies, inevitably exacerbating the problem. I think he had the last laugh sending up the world’s entitled bullies – both as Guy Secretan and on Have I Got News For You – having stored up the absurd details of their behaviour.
I also suspect he learned to be frank and unfiltered about human vulnerability after his mother died of bowel cancer (aged just 45) while he was studying law at university. He took time out to care for her. Today he tells me that his tendency to say yes to as many opportunities as possible is “partly, for sure” a consequence of that early bereavement. “The thought was implanted, quite young, that we don’t live for ever. You don’t know when something unpleasant is going to happen.”
In person, he often conveys a relatable mix of mild overwhelm and boyish enthusiasm: yes please, oh no, what next?! While shooting The Fortune Hotel, he tells me he asked production staff not to tell him which contestants had the money, because he has no poker face and is “terrified” of letting the truth slip out. In a couple of recent dramas, these characteristics have fed into roles in which he’s played middle-aged men struggling to manage deception or complexity in their romantic lives. He was a cheating barrister in TV’s The Split and – in Unicorn on stage earlier this year – a married man dragged hang-dog into a throuple.
“I also did a show called Bliss about a guy having two families,” he says. “I think the brain-filling stress of that [people juggling multiple romances] is, for some people, preferable to being alone with their thoughts.” He shakes his head in bafflement. “I am more interested in trying to empty my life of stress. There is so much going on anyway.” He pauses. “But maybe I am like those people filling my life with work and stuff. Like all self-employed people, I worry about the day when the phone doesn’t ring, the email doesn’t come in. I probably work seven days a week.” But he points out that alternating between presenting, acting and writing (his new children’s book about a St Bernard – Barrie Saves Christmas – is out now) helps keep him “constantly reinvigorated”.
A change is as good as a rest? “Yeah! And there are some people who might say that getting paid to watch people paint on POUTY isn’t actually work,” he laughs. Watching him on the set, I could see how much he admired the unique skill of each artist. Although he can write and act and play the piano (by ear? “Yeah, I’m one of those people…”) Mangan cannot draw. His sister Anita illustrates his children’s books, and he says “it would always have been her pictures on the family fridge when we were kids, I’d have been out doing sport or in the corner reading”.
On screen, he stands in for viewers at home, astonished by the way layers build from abstract lines, shapes and splodges into emotional takes on living humans. “When a head suddenly appears, that is miraculous – unfathomable – to me,” he says. “Especially when that happens in the four hours we give contestants on the show. I’m envious of the artists’ absorption.”
While he squirms for all involved “in situations where the portrait goes wrong” he is also fascinated by the way people handle the discomfort with the cameras zooming in on their faces. “The sitter might be very upset by the portrait but the rules of decorum mean they have to say: ‘Thank you very much – you’ve really captured something about me…’” He dissolves into a giggle – possibly recalling some of the unflattering portraits of Richard Madeley in season 11. “But on other occasions, sitters are moved to tears because a painting captures something that a photograph can’t.”
He notes that while celebrity sitters are used to all eyes being on them, they’re less used to the idea that the attention switched very quickly from them to the images evolving on the easels. “Some people understand that,” he says. “Other people are uncomfortable and want to be the focus.”
Although he recently read James Cameron’s assertion that, within five years, AI will make human actors redundant, Mangan believes our “quirks, mistakes” and unique, unpredictable preoccupations mean computer-generated characters will never engage our interest in the same way. “All art, whether it’s a painting or a tattoo or a TV drama, or a stage play or a painting or even a game show like Fortune Hotel, is about people trying to express themselves and work each other out.” He shrugs. “We’re all just trying to get a handle on ourselves and each other.”
‘Portrait Artist of the Year’ continues on Wednesday at 8pm on Sky Arts
