“A lot of people look at me and see someone gentle,” says actor Paul Ready. “And I am quite gentle in real life. But if you take that gentleness and reframe it, then it becomes quite terrifying and people don’t see that coming.”
Ready is best known for his role in Motherland, the hit comedy series which offered a bracingly unvarnished portrait of the stresses of parenthood. He was the sweet-natured Kevin, the only stay-at-home dad in a gaggle of middle-class London mums. Kevin’s efforts to interest his off-screen wife in sex recalled the tragicomic trials of Niles Crane in Frasier.
It is Kevin, Ready says, that strangers want to talk about when they approach him for a chat. He is delighted people have so much love for the show, though he adds: “I’ve always been interested in playing lots of different characters. [Starting out] what I feared was being stuck playing within a certain genre and certain characters … If I was ever typecast, I would stop. I think I’d do something else.”
All of which is why Ready, who is 49 and cut his acting teeth in the theatre, relishes the opportunity to play creeps and crazies when it arises. His breakout TV role in 2013 was Lee in the sci-fi series Utopia, a bequiffed hitman who delights in torturing people and gouges a man’s eye out with a spoon. He credits director Marc Munden for “seeing the gentleness in me and going: ‘Let’s see what happens when he plays the psychopath’. That opened doors for me.”
