Terry Mynott interview
Series 2 of Channel 4 sitcom The Mimic is finally here. Terry Mynott returns as Martin Hurdle, the seemingly unremarkable man who actually conceals uncanny ability to do impressions. BCG chats to the star here...
Hi Terry. Series 1 of The Mimic started quietly but word of mouth about how good it was soon spread. Would it be fair to describe it as a 'sleeper hit'?
I would totally agree with you. I think the wonderful thing about that is that The Mimic wasn't solely reliant on when it went out. Because we live in this new 'watch what you want' world, I'm still getting the odd tweet here and there, for example someone who went on a cruise to Canada and it was playing in their little room, and from someone who has just discovered it on 4oD. People are watching it all the time - it's really crazy.
I must admit I thought only a certain age bracket would get it, but I'm still blown away by all the different age groups that come up and say they loved it.
What do you think it is about the show that makes people love it?
I think because it's not in your face, it's very gentle. It's more about implied comedy, it doesn't rely on huge setups. Half the time you're brewing a laugh up, before the gag has even happened. So I think it's a little bit more like real life, in a way that your friends sometimes say the weirdest shit to you, and not everything goes to plan, you know?
Since the show took off, have you been spotted in the street?
Yeah, although they do get mixed up with Derek. I had a woman at Debenhams the other day that said 'oh I think you're brilliant... with all your learning disabilities as well'. She was so mixed up and so I just went 'oh, thank you very much'. Then, just as I walked off, she went 'my husband thinks you're adorable'. I walked off going 'I dunno, was that a proposition for a ménage à trois?'
Rewinding a bit... how did you first discover your talents for mimicry?
I guess because I'm so heavily dyslectic, I became obsessed with voices.
I didn't read, and I kind of grew up in the 80s when TV was just truly horrendous. The greatest thing that ever happened to us was Neighbours and Home & Away... because it just used to end and then it was 'boring news'. So what I'd do - because I grew up in the middle of nowhere - is I'd just go out in the fields and walk about recreating what I'd seen earlier on that day.
It just became like an entertainment form; I never really did it for anybody - I'd just be walking around doing Star Wars stuff to myself. But you can imagine, I was 9 or 8, so they weren't spot on Alec Guinness impersonations... it was just me out in a field acting out shit really.
We're terrible at doing voices. Is it something you can learn, or do you need to have a natural ability for it?
You have to have control over your vocal chords to be able to manipulate them enough to be able to change shape.
Really it's all smoke and mirrors though, all you're doing is copying speech patterns. If you listen to your favourite foreign song where you don't know the words, you still like the song because the beat and pattern the words create is beautiful.
I guess I can pick up on somebody's intonation and the pattern that they follow. If you look at David Attenborough, and you don't take any actual English words, you just use the 'Do Do Doo Duuoo. Dur Duo Doo Do, Do Do' pattern, do you know what I mean? Everybody has a pattern and everybody voice is pretty much their fingerprint.
Series 2 features some new voices, like Game Of Thrones. What was the process for adding them to the show?
It's a double-edge sword because we didn't' want this to be the 'Terry Mynott Does His Best Impersonations Show'... we want it to be about Martin and what he would have been doing.
In Series 2, he's lost his job so he's watching a load of boxsets. We can't really make up the stuff he's been watching to fit the voices I can do, therefore I ended up having to go off and learn some new ones.
Making The Mimic is a long process, because I have to go off and work the voices. And, the way Matt [creator Matt Morgan] writes is that all the impersonations are done here at John Noel's offices and down the studio. He'll give me some parameters about how this scene is going to go, and then will let me just do the impersonation. He'll record it and go off and write it down and then we'll meet about a month later and do it again till we've sort of chiselled stuff out.
So I started in July [2013], and since then I've been pretty much in my garage tweaking my motorbike and trying to do Breaking Bad impersonations and stuff like hat. Although, by default, I had to watch them all of course, and so I became obsessed with Breaking Bad, I really did.
It sounds like a nice excuse to watch TV and not feel guilty, as you can call it 'research'?
I loved it!
You never really want to do a dead on impersonation either. A long time ago when I did [Channel 4 sketch show] VIP I found I would just create a character, like my version of Brian Cox which I did on it. It doesn't sound like him, it sounds like a horrendous amalgamation of a huge ego - which I'm sure he isn't. I fall in love with creating a sort of character out of it, and making them say stuff they wouldn't say, or do something they wouldn't normally do.
Talking of VIP, have you since met anyone in real life that you portrayed on that show?
Yeah, I met Charlie Brooker. Matt dropped me in it!
I'm so shy, I struggle - my small talk is extremely small - and Matt was just leaving some Channel 4 do and he taps Charlie Brooker on the shoulder and says "see that bloke over there? He takes the piss out of you!"... and then he ran down the stairs and left me in front of him. But, do you know what, he was absolutely beautiful about it, even though I died inside. He went straight into the over-the-top mad character that I had made and joked 'I don't talk anything like that'. He was brilliant about it.
It's interesting you mention you're shy... a shy actor?
I think you'll find, if you look at most actors, we all are a bit. We're all kind of putting on shades. Once I'm in front of a camera, it's fun and it's great - the best thing in the world to be doing - but until that's on I'm very much just me and, you know, I've always just been a shy kid really.
Series 1 ended with Martin hiding in the toilet and avoiding his big TV break. What can we expect from Series 2 then?
Jean's robotic legs and Martin's ability to walk through walls is what really stands out in this new series. No! Ha ha. Wouldn't it be great to get a second series and just go truly bonkers on everything though! I don't want to reveal much about the new episodes, but we very much wanted to keep it real.
We wanted to make it very much a show about and around Martin's universe; somewhere which is very much one step forward and two steps back. He's still trying to find his feet and just struggling with existing really.
It must have been great meeting up with the cast and crew again to make more?
Yeah, very much so. It's the most amazing thing to be on set. We've all been working with each other for so long, and we've all had a chance to craft this together. We did two tasters and one pilot before we ever did the show, so we had time to weed out what we thought we were going to do.
We have great affection for each other because, when we first started, it literally was just me in a car doing the Terry Wogan thing, but we've all come up together... we've made something we're all really happy with.
Neil Maskell, who plays newsagent Neil, looks hard to act against, in that his facial expressions look like they could trigger laughing at any moment...
Oh, yeah! Oh God! He changes it up, he's so versatile and he's such a good actor and you know he'll just do something and you're not prepared for it. Neil is the first one I did anything with, and my affections for that man...!
He's so generous, he's not one of those guys that will say if he thinks you're performance is bonkers, but if you asked him anything - and I have turned to him a lot to try and help me be a better actor - he is very helpful. He's very calm too.
Talking of laughing when you're not supposed to... Dustin Demri-Burns [from Cardinal Burns] has some scenes in this series and I was not prepared for him on set. We did a take with him and he was just so funny I could barely get through it. As we got towards the end of the day I think the crew were getting a bit pissed off with us fucking it up, they really wanted us to nail it and get this shot done...
Dustin's line in it was 'well, let's see what the police think about it' and - as he said it - a fly flew past his face, did a loop the loop around his nose, and landed on him... he's got such a comedy face that he went boss-eyed looking at it and I laughed so hard that I panged an abdominal muscle!
Nice. Presumably you're be up for a Series 3, after the fun of making Series 2?
Yeah, sure! I think there's some more juice to be squeezed out of that orange!
The Mimic returns to Channel 4 on Wednesday 16th July at 10pm.