You're welcome to watch the whole episode whenever you like, but here's a moment that really stayed with me.

It's four years since my wife of 38 years died.

And I understand it rationally that I'll never see, touch, talk to her ever again.

But emotionally, my brain cannot compute that I will never, that she's gone.

So it's sort of reconfigured.

And I just instinctively started writing to her every night.

That is the hardest bit to get used to.

Do you think you can ever recover from loss?

People are finding what they love in all sorts of places across the production, I guess.

Agreed.

My only real regret, especially this zeitgeist moment of the Me Too movement, is that...

After all this bleating about there not being sufficient female directors in film or they're being recognised, that Marielle Heller, the director of this film that I'm in, has not been nominated for either the Golden Globe or the Oscars.

or a BAFTA, whereas almost, well, not almost, every single other nominee is male.

And it begs the question that, yep, the screenplays have been nominated in all these awards that she had a part in writing as well, but how do you have a leading actor, Melissa McCarthy and myself, get nominated in all these things, but...

They didn't happen in isolation.

But how did you even conceive of this as a career when you were growing up in an area where it's not an option?

Why do you think that is?

Because it's about a family.

and what people do in families behind closed doors and in front of other people, that is universal.

That people fight and have big ruckuses.

And in this situation, they're a family of four, the grown up children are still living with them, which already is unusual.

And they each individually invite other people down for the weekend without telling each other who they've invited.

And then smorgasbord-like, they just help themselves to whoever they fancy for a snog, a shag, or whatever.

Oh, my God.

Was it a fun role to play?

It was because it's a real rakes progress in the 18th century.

And if you're cast to play, I play a Welsh working class upstart who marries into the English aristocracy, played by Clare Foy, who famously played the Queen in the first series of The Crown.

And they have this extraordinary across-class attraction for one another.

She forsakes everything that she's used to, and he upwardly mobiles into a world that he's aspired to, and then gambles, whores, and drinks his way through all of their fortune, and yet they still stay together.

So it's...

Everything is extreme.

What inspired it?

Was it a fun role to play?

It was because it's a real rakes progress in the 18th century.

And if you're cast to play, I play a Welsh working class upstart who marries into the English aristocracy, played by Clare Foy, who famously played the Queen in the first series of The Crown.

And they have this extraordinary across-class attraction for one another.

She forsakes everything that she's used to, and he upwardly mobiles into a world that he's aspired to, and then gambles, whores, and drinks his way through all of their fortune, and yet they still stay together.

So it's a...

Everything is extreme.

What inspired it?

I just know I'd get all of it wrong and he'd hate all of it.

This is just a big excuse to say I'm never inviting him to my house because I can't be bothered.

I'm going to get my passport.

I want to know 25%, which is what I've got.

OK. No.

Yeah,

completely.

Because until you have the screenplay, there is nothing else to go on.

So it's absolutely the blueprint that gives you absolutely everything.

And then as soon as the other people are cast around the character that you're playing, that also informs a huge amount.

of what the world is that the director, right in this case, Peter Glantz, is creating.

So how do you avoid that with a character like Chauncey? But at the same time, you have these incredible scenes where you're really giving it your all.

Well, he is a man of enormous appetite and enormous extremes.

So t- give us the setup of what's happening with your character, who is coming to visit, and why have they been thrown into completely ecstatic disarray as a result of a letter that they receive?

They receive a letter saying that, uh, in the middle of this, uh, pox meltdown, whatever, uh, quarantine, that the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire would like to come and stay in their house for, um, a few days.

So they don't really have enough money to afford looking after these aristocrats, but they pawn every last jewel that they have in order to pay for it, do the house up, get the best food and chefs they can possibly muster.

And inevitably, you know what's gonna happen.

Um, the people who say they're going to come may not come, and in the midst of that, this character Chauncey's alcoholism and gout and the other thing, stuff happening on his arm, gangrene sets in after a, a duel in which he's wounded, so his arm has to be lopped off on the day that the Devonshires are about to arrive and have dinner.

... uh, you, you and Claire Foy clearly not only get on very well in the film, but your characters do love each other, and you go like hell-for-leather into chaos.

Yeah, against all odds, uh, these, these characters, uh, fall in love with each other.

Uh, she's an aristocrat who marries a lowly Welsh upstart.

years

old, I fell mad crush on an American girl called Betsy Clapp with a double P.

And I tried to make perfume out of rose and... like we do like we do yeah yeah we all have and they're just turned into sink bombs and then 40 years later i actually made perfume and it sells at two big stores in london i did not

Have you ever worked with actors or actresses that have done that?

Yeah, I worked at Daniel Day-Lewis.

I had a tiny part in Age of Innocence in 1991 that Scorsese directed.

And on the first day, Daniel was incredibly friendly because he was the exact same age.

And we knew a whole lot of people in common.

So tell me, what, what did she mean by that?

She, I think more than anything, she said, "I know that you will be sad, but every single one of us, including you two, are going to die." So without saying it, what is built into that little phrase is, "Don't have any guilt about feeling joy or happiness after I'm gone." And that has been an amazing thing, not to feel guilt of thinking, "My goodness, this Christmas pudding tastes fantastic.

Oh, but Joan's not here." No, but it still tastes fantastic.

Um-Yeah, to-

Mm

... that you can be just squashed by anything.

Um, and you can't imagine that your life can ever normalize again.

And people always say, you know, "Time will heal," or, "Time will tell," or all these cliches they come out with.

[chuckles]

... and I felt something very cold on the back of my neck, and it was a gun, and he was at the other end of it.

A revolver, and he fired, and I ducked in time because he was so drunk.

And then he chased me around the garden, and I thought that I found a good hiding place, and he, he had the presence of mind to switch the garden lights on and the swimming pool, and then found me, and then came up and said, "I'm going to blow your brains out." And I said, "Do it.

Just get it over and done with right now." So the pistol was right next to my forehead.

But because he was so unsteady, when he pulled the trigger, it missed.

So I, you know, collapsed on the ground and then ran, and I went to stay with my Scottish piano teacher called Bunny Barnes, who was my great mentor and real...

Oh.

Tell me about, because how did you work after Jonah died? Because I just think going back to work would be very difficult.

Well, because my job is I'm on location filming for so much.

I'm so used to being on my own or away from home that that was very familiar and that The most difficult part, as always, as I'm sure you know, is what I call the steering wheel stuff, that at the end of the day, downloading everything, saying what was Davina like? What is her hair color? Do you think she dyes her hair? How much facial surgery has she had? What were her boots like? How long did it take you to get to the East End? Four years.

All of that stuff that you just talk about during the day, or your observation of it, not being able to tell the other person anymore, I found, I thought, wow, this is like a sort of grand canyon of, you know, it's a bottomless hole.

And in exactly the same way that I started keeping a diary when I was 10 and have continued to do so, I then, I now write to Joan every night.

And I have no, you know, woolly spiritual delusion that she's hearing this or that I'm going to get a response.

But I know in writing to her, it somehow makes, it keeps the connection going because I know what her response would be.

I mean, I don't need it.

[chuckles]

...

I put on my confidence pants, which are the p- the bell bottoms that I had my last year of school in nineteen seventy-five, and the platform shoes that I wore then to my school leavers dance.

So, and I've, you know, I've kept them because I'm a hoarder, I think it sounds a pejorative term, but, um, I find it hard to throw things away that I love.

So I thought, well, as this is clothing and you'd probably be [chuckles] asking about stuff in the past at some point, I'd wear this.

So the bottom half of me is nineteen seventy-five, and the top half of me is [chuckles] approaching seventy-five.

Mm.

-and I found this out from...

Then I must be delighted with your career.

And I think because Paul and I were both trained and worked in the theater beforehand, you're completely used to the playwright is God in the theater, and you don't...

Unless it's an improvised piece, you do everything to the letter And full stop.

So that didn't feel like a big change when, when we, you know, when, when you do a movie.

What a piece of work is a man.

Whereas I think I've worked with many American actors who haven't had that theater training background, and learning the lines and sometimes being very specific about the dialogue is much more freewheeling and open-ended, that, that you don't...

That thing of having to stick to it is, is not the same discipline.

The thing that really startled me is that when he said action, all the crew would be turned away so none of the actors would catch anyone's eyes or anything, and it was just a mark of respect for him as a director.