Oliver Chris: trust me I'm a doctor

Oliver Chris, by his own admission, has a “gob the size of Watford”. It means he says what he thinks – sometimes for the best, other times not so. As a student at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, for example, his mouth made him unpopular with teachers.

He was, he admits, a “difficult student” – or, to be more explicit: “a little shit” (even though he’s actually 6’ 4”).

So what was his problem exactly?

“I am passionate and need to understand stuff and won’t shut up,” he explains. “I refused to compromise. And sometimes that was to my own detriment. Sometimes it caused me problems and I should have shut up. But there were times at drama school I got frustrated.”

He pauses, adding: “Apparently they must have forgiven me, as my picture is on the staff room wall.”

For darts practice, I suggest?

“That is probably what it is,” he says, laughing, demonstrating that, while he may have a big mouth, he can

have a joke at his own expense. It’s an admirable quality. Yes, Chris may be a tad cocky (he certainly has the gift of the gab), but you have to wonder how much of this might be bravado.

Because, in actual fact, Chris says that he is remarkably thin-skinned. It’s exactly the opposite of what an actor should be, you might say.

“But I take everything extremely personally,” Chris explains. “They say you need to be thick-skinned as an actor, but I am not at all. I am massively thin-skinned, but I’m also a masochist, so it kind of works for me.”

To this end, he takes rejection badly. But which actor doesn’t? The whole audition process, Chris says, is one that costs him “a lot emotionally and personally”.

“You are putting yourself before people who are effectively deciding who if they are going to discard you or give you validation,” he says. “That is hard for anybody, and I think anyone who doesn’t take it personally…”

He trails off, adding: “Well, I wish I had some of what they have.”

It’s hard to think of Chris suffering much rejection, however.

Since landing a part in The Office in 2001 (“That was a fairly strong and lucky and fortunate start,” he admits), Chris has gone on to enjoy a 13-year career in TV series such as Green Wing and plays including One Man, Two Guvnors with the National Theatre. To outsiders, then, it would seem that Chris’ career has been fairly steady. The truth, however, is there have been many times he believed his career had all but dried up.

“After Green Wing, which people loved, things did fade away quite a lot,” he says. “I made a few TV shows, which I thought were good, but they didn’t chime with people, and then I had to fight tooth and nail to get myself back.”

It was a 2010 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, alongside Judi Dench, that helped him do this. Since then he has appeared on TV in series such as Bluestone 42 and with the National in the aforementioned One Man, Two Guvnors, appearing alongside James Corden in both London and on Broadway.

Chris describes the experience of One Man, Two Guvnors – in which he played Stanley Stubbers – as an “insanely beautiful” one. But he refuses to go back and watch it with other actors in the role.

“I love the fact it’s still going and there are a whole load of other Stanleys out there,” he says. “To have originated it fills me with such pride. Going back to see it – I don’t know if that would increase that feeling or diminish it. That’s a gamble I don’t want to take.”

For now, Chris is back on television screens in ITV’s Breathless – a medical drama set in the 1960s that also stars Jack Davenport and Joanna Page. Medicine, according to ITV, “becomes the perfect stage to play out the shifting and complex moral codes of early 1960s society”.

Chris plays a gynaecologist called Richard Truscott – a man who “oozes boyish confidence and charm”.

He was auditioned for the part after returning from Los Angeles, where he had been for pilot season – when US studios cast and shoot pilots that could become full series. Being in LA was, by all accounts, a challenging experience.

“It was a difficult environment in which to succeed,” he says. “Some of my friends out there, who did better than me, got fired after the first read throughs or their pilots didn’t get picked up. The rewards are potentially large, but it’s a cold, hard, faceless factory.”

He adds: “I was really ready to come back to auditions in this country, where maybe the immediacy, and the pressure, and the speed is not on so much.”

On his return, Breathless was one of those first auditions. It was, he says, “amazing to be back in the bosom of London creativity”.

“I’d never read anything like Breathless,” Chris adds. “It was different, and challenging, and it does not treat its audience like idiots. It’s morally complicated and dramatically subtle.”

Richard Truscott, he says, is “sexist and arrogant” on the surface, but adds: “He also has this vulnerability. He’s a product of his time and he deals with his insecurities by putting on a show. Really though he’s just lost and trying to make his way in the world.”

The part, he adds, is a slightly different one for him. Normally, he says, the roles he has landed require him to “yell jokes to as many people as possible”.

“So to play something a lot more subtle, more nuanced, and a variation of one of those roles I play, was an opportunity to be relished,” he adds.

Landing the part, Chris continues, made him exceptionally happy. It’s a feeling that he gets every time he lands a role.

“That sense of elation when you get a job is enormous,” he says. “It’s a wonderful feeling and I hope I never get complacent.”

So is he choosy about what parts he does and doesn’t accept?

“I am not choosy at all,” he says. “I may have turned down one job in my entire career. I have been really lucky – I get put into the mix for some amazing stuff. I rarely get offered it, but when I do I really go for it.”

Actors, he suggests, even those with the level of success he enjoys, can’t afford to be too picky. The business of performing he adds is “terrifying” and doesn’t get discussed enough.

“I met a friend the other day and a couple of years ago she was being groomed for stardom,” he says. “Then she just faded away, and no one knows why. You could list 1,000 actors and say, ‘What happened to that guy?’. People come up and then fade away, and to try and stay working is bloody difficult.”

He adds: “It’s an addiction. A wonderful thing, but an addiction. I’ve spent 13 years fighting tooth and claw – that is the only way I can describe it. It’s that total obsession and determination to carve out opportunities. And I just try not to look down.”

Breathless continues on Thursday evenings on ITV at 9pm