After a very hard landing into fame in the 00s, he decided to take a softer approach – and hit on a winning formula for classic comedy. The star talks about his fantastical new show Small Prophets, his obsession with middle-age and being ‘weird-looking’
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n Small Prophets, BBC Two’s new six-parter, Mackenzie Crook plays Gordon, the manager of a massive DIY store. Sometimes it feels as if we’re falling through time, because it’s like watching Gareth, Crook’s breakthrough part in The Office, a quarter of a century on. “Pedantic and jobsworthy, he could be Gareth grown up, just with more disappointment, without the West Country accent,” says Crook. “I wrote Gordon as a monster, but by the end, I was actually quite fond of him.”
In person, Crook has a jumpy, modest energy. When he was young, on screen it used to look like nerves, but now looks more like curiosity. He has a surprising number of tattoos, but maybe I should stop being surprised when people have those.
Gordon isn’t the hero of Small Prophets; he’s not even the antihero. This is the story of Michael, played by Pearce Quigley, in a performance so comically, subtly heartbreaking you can rarely figure out what you’re melancholy about. Fiftyish, bearded, a twitcher and a hoarder, he works in the DIY store and visits his dad, Brian (a lovely performance from Michael Palin), every afternoon. Michael has a huge tragedy in the recent past – his girlfriend Clea disappeared without trace seven years before – but he would never make a song and dance about it.
