“I really love Dublin,” declares Jack Whitehall, and for once he actually means it. “Seriously, I love being here,” he laughs. “I mean you spend your whole life,
whenever you go to a city, telling people that it’s your favourite city and that the audiences are great – and quite often you’re lying – but with Dublin, it’s true. It’s a great place to play.”
Usually he’s here on stand-up duties, but this afternoon the 27-year-old English comedian, TV presenter and actor is sitting in the cocktail bar of the Conrad Hotel doing a day of press to promote his forthcoming film, The Bad Education Movie.
A big screen adaptation of the hit BBC TV comedy series, the £3million budget film sees Whitehall – who, even with the beard, somehow looks remarkably baby-faced – reprise his role as Alfie Wickers, arguably the worst teacher ever to (dis)grace the British educational system.
Starring alongside Harry Enfield, Jeremy Irvine, Joanna Scanlan and Iain Glen, it’s Whitehall’s first-ever big screen role, and he’s understandably nervous about how it will be received.
“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” he confesses. “It really is terrifying because it’s just an unknown. I’ve never done it before and the stakes seem higher. It’s also one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done and the thing I’m most proud of. I’m really proud of where we got to with it. It would be weird not to be really anxious about it.”
Was there much difference filming for the big rather than the small screen?
“Yeah, you get a bit more time and you get a lot more money, but it feels like there’s even more pressure. But, it’s exciting – every moment of it is exciting. We’ve scaled it all up. The most important thing was to make it feel like it wasn’t just an extended episode of the TV show, to make it feel like a real film. So we were very ambitious in what we wrote.
“I love action films, that’s what I grew up watching, and so we borrow quite heavily from the action film genre. There are lots of nods to Die Hard and Predator – all of the films that I liked as a teenager. So, we were pretty ambitious in our scope, which makes it quite hard to film.”
He co-wrote the screenplay with writing partner Freddy Syborn. Although, given that Whitehall is famously dyslexic, Syborn presumably did all the typing.
“Yeah, exactly!” he laughs. “I sort of walk around the room dictating stuff, and he writes it. He’s incredible smart and brilliant, and I, grammatically... well I write like a serial killer. So we have quite a good dynamic together as writing partners and he is one of my oldest mates. I was at school with him when I was 13 and we’ve written together since then.”
Another former schoolmate is actor Robert Pattinson. In his stand- up routines, Whitehall often plays up his envy of the Twilight star. Even so, he was almost tempted to offer him a role in Bad Education.
“There’s a part in it he would have been perfect for, but I felt a bit bad sending a script to him after all of the things I’ve said – even though they’d all been in jest. We have in the script, my scourge from school, Atticus Hoye, who’s a figure I’ve talked a lot about in the series – he plays the boy who bullies me in school and we finally get to see him in the movie. He’s played by Jeremy Irvine from War Horse. Jeremy’s really funny, he’s very good. He hadn’t done much comedy before, but in this he plays ‘the Great Gatsby of Cornwall’, as he’s described in the script, a real shit. He’s very good.”
Pattison got his big break playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. As it happens, the teenage Whitehall had himself once auditioned for the title role in that series. He winces slightly when it’s suggested that he would have made a good Harry Potter.
“Yeah, I may have been,” he shrugs. “But I think Radcliffe was probably the right choice on that occasion.
It was a weird experience though – my mom dressing me up to look like Harry and sending me out to the audition, which I completely buggered up because I hadn’t read the book. That was a slight problem, slightly frowned upon.”
What was Whitehall like in school?
“I think there are lots of aspects of all the kids in Bad Education in me, really,” he muses.“I was always dicking around and giving teachers backchat like Mitchell. Then there was the awkwardness of Joe and then definitely the flamboyant stuff that Stephen maybe represents in terms of my dramatic leanings – which is a euphemism you can interpret in whichever way you wish to. I never really fit in – I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was good at. So it was quite near to the end of school when I found out that it was definitely comedy, and that writing was my passion, and I became my own person.”
Although he comes from a showbiz family – his father, Michael, was an agent with the likes of Judi Dench and Colin Firth on his books, while his mother, Hilary Amanda Jane, was an actress – he says that his parents never wanted him to become an actor.
“Yeah, well my dad didn’t want me to be an actor.My dad was an agent and he looked after loads of actors. People only pick out the famous ones, but there were vast numbers of actors he looked after constantly out of work, doing bar jobs to supplement their lives. And my mum had been a struggling actor but had never gotten a break. She loved it, and was so passionate about it, but just could not get any work. So they’d seen that side of the industry and didn’t want that for me. They were very vocal in telling me not to become an actor and to go to university instead.”
Even so, acting was very much in his orbit growing up. His godfather was Richard Griffiths, best known for playing Uncle Monty in Withnail & I.
“He was amazing,” he recalls. “I love Withnail and he’s a hero and I loved him so dearly. If he’d still been alive I definitely would have written him a part in this, so it’s a shame he died when he did. He was a great influence on me. He used to write me these amazing letters. He wrote tomelikehewasanadult–sohe’d tell me about eloping with women and put in some pocket money for if my parents were horrible. He’d write these all to a two-year-old child that my dad would then read out to me. He was a really funny, great guy.”
The Bad Education Movie sees the hapless Alfie Wickers taking his pupils on a school trip to Cornwall to celebrate the completion of their GCSEs. Needless to say, nothing goes according to plan.
With the locals largely portrayed as dangerously inbred troglodytes, does he think the film is likely to cause offence on the Cornish peninsula?
“I don’t know. I think they’re good at laughing at themselves and they sort of embrace and celebrate their eccentricities. So hopefully they see that and our supervillian in the film, Ian Glen, the character is smart and Cornish and really villainous. I think the major Cornish character in the film is a good portrayal of a Cornish man. I think they’ll be happy. Everyone over here says it would be the equivalent of a school trip to the west of Ireland. Maybe in Bad Education 2 they could go to Connemara.”