On his way to the central London office where we're conducting our interview, Stephen Mangan was accosted by a man in a van. The chirpy chappy rolled down the window and yelled “Dan, Dan, Dan... Daaan!!!"
“I have Dan shouted at me on an almost daily basis,” laughs the tousled-haired actor. “I love that. I was at a gig once – 2,000 people were there and everyone in the audience turned toward where I was sitting and started shouting ‘Dan!’”
Why are complete strangers yelling a three-letter word at Mangan, respected TV and theatre mainstay? Chances are you already know the answer – however, for the benefit of the half dozen readers in the dark it's in reference to his portrayal in a classic episode of I’m Alan Partridge of wife-swapping kitchen store owner Dan Moody (“You’re looking for a kitchen, I can get you a kitchen, let’s talk.”) In a cruel and instantly iconic scene, Partridge spies Dan across a carpark and yells ‘Dan, Dan... Dan!!’ until literally purple in the face.
“I love it,” says Mangan. “It was one of the funniest programmes ever made. To be in it was a joy - let alone to appear in such a well-remembered moment. I’ve given talks at universities and 1,500 people are shouting ‘Dan’ at me. It’s funny – not a day goes by without someone in a car or a shop shouting ‘Dan’ in my direction.
Mangan is one of those actors. You may vaguely recognise the name – you’ll certainly recognise his face. But he isn’t quite famous, which suits him to the ground.
“One of my best mates is Andrew Lincoln, who's in The Walking Dead,” he says. “Shooting the show takes up ten months of his year. I like my freedom. It suits me to have a number of projects on the go. It’s fun moving between different things”
“Daaaaan!” aside he is probably best known for Episodes, the gently wry comedy in which he stars alongside Tamsin Greig and Matt LeBlanc, aka Joey from Friends (and, er, Joey).
“It’s watched around the world, mostly on account of Matt Le Blanc,” says Mangan. “But it’s only nine episodes per season and it doesn’t even get made every year. It’s a perfect fit for me. I can go and do it and then I have my freedom. I like to mix and match – pursuing many different projects agrees with me.”
This interview is to plug a forthcoming Sky Arts re-staging of Birthday, a slyly acerbic 2012 play by Joe Penhall in which Mangan portrayed a man giving birth. If your first response is to roll your eyes and groan, that’s okay – Mangan understands that the premise is redolent of something from a bad ‘90s movie (actually, it was the premise of a bad ‘90s movie: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Junior).
“It does sort of sound like the worst idea in the world,” nods Mangan. “A comedy about a man giving birth – so, lots of jokes about stretch marks and what have you.”
And, yes there are elements of broad farce. But, alongside the throwaway chuckles, Birthday has surprisingly serious things to say about the power dynamic within relationships, class in Britain and the decline of the National Health Service.
“It will take lot of people by surprise. You hear ‘Stephen Mangan is pregnant’ and think, well... lots of silly jokes. There are laughs. It is also quite dark, a real examination of what goes through people’s minds during those few hours leading up to birth and the days afterwards.
“It is an incredible process,” he continues. “Anyone who has gone through it (Mangan has two sons, aged seven and four) will know it really changes you. It can be difficult for the man, too. You're sitting there watching your wife and you're powerless. She's doing all the work. The thing is, we tend not to talk about it. Even women don’treally talk about it to other women... about what it’s like to give birth.”
He speaks from some experience.
“With my first child it was a really difficult birth. You're there, witnessing the person you love most in the world go through something pretty horrific. You are powerless. In my case, I was sent out of the room for 45 minutes.
My wife was saying ‘will you stop looking at me!’ To which I responded: ‘where else am I supposed to look?’ It’s extraordinary – my youngest is four and already it feels like another lifetime.”
Birthday premiered at the Royal Court in London three years ago. However, with the UK capital in the grip of Olympics mania, its impact was rather drowned out.
“I got a bit lost in Olympics fever,” he says. "I was determined to revisit it. I find it remarkable that no woman has ever written a play about what childbirth is like from the mother’s point of view. We’ve had lots about trying to conceive and lots about being a new parent. And yet, childbirth remains unexplored territory.”
Mangan (46) studied law at Cambridge, having attended a private school in North London. Not surprisingly he is often taken to be supremely middle class. In fact, his parents were migrants from Mayo and he grew up in relative poverty in the one-time Irish enclave of Kilburn in London.
Music was his chief interest in school – he played in a prog band called Aragon, whose discography includes a fantastically-named concept album The Wizard’s Dream. After obtaining a degree in law, he considered a career as a solicitor. However, the early death of his mother from cancer led him to reconsider what he wanted from life (“Her doctor couldn’t look us in the eye when he told us she had cancer. I became her carer. I drove her to her radiotherapy appointments, cooked for her and did the laundry”).
Resolving to seize the moment and, corny as it sounds, follow his dream, he auditioned for RADA several weeks after his mother’s funeral and was soon a jobbing theatre thesp, moving into TV as Adrian Mole in the 2001 adaptation of Adrian Mole The Cappuccino Years. He was also a memorably disheveled Dirk Gently in the BBC retelling of Douglas Adams’ supernatural novels.
“My mum and dad are from two little villages about 20 minutes south of Belmullet, just looking across from Achill,” he says of his origins. “I would spend my summers as a kid in Mayo. In those days you had to drive up to Liverpool, get the ferry to Dublin and then go on an epic two and a half day journey. Coming from North London, it felt as if you were going to the other side of the planet.
“People think I’m Jewish, with the dark curly hair, and that I have very posh English parents. That obviously isn’t the case at all. Looking at it with my acting head, it’s a very useful thing. I have almost an outsider’s view of being English. I'm incredibly proud to be from that part of the world. I take my boys over whenever I can.”