Peter Serafinowicz as Brian Butterfield

Peter, people may know you from Spaced, Sean Of The Dead and Guardians of the Galaxy but I imagine you must have started out very young given the apparent ease with which  you do impressions… 

Since I could talk, I would just copy people, I just enjoy doing it and I really appreciate it when I meet another mimic as I'm constantly dazzled by other people as well. I love the craft of it and how people achieve certain things. I was a skinny, lanky kid and I couldn't stick up for myself, I got bullied a bit and it was always by kids who were not in my year so I was the funny slightly weird one.  For me, it was always like a natural reaction, copying people and making fun.

Your beginnings with impressions soon developed into a varied career, but what do you enjoy doing the best, TV, film, directing, writing?

All of those things are enjoyable! Writing for me is the one I’ve had the most difficulty with, that’s what I need to conquer, and I suspect that when I do, it will be the one I actually end up enjoying the most.  I’m fortunate that I can make a living by doing things that I enjoy, I sing in the (Call of Now) show, I rap in the show and in that moment, I’m thinking “Peter; people are paying money to see you sing and hear you rap, you’re a rapper!” (laughs) it’s cool.  When you are doing stuff that is good, the material is good, the people you work with are good, that’s all you want to be doing. I’m lucky to be doing that, whatever it is.

You are in The Gentleman, still in Netflix’s Top 10 and your character is a gangster, how was it being in the show and playing that kind of role?

I’m from Liverpool, so my natural accent is from there, but it was never as strong as my character in The Gentleman. Those types of extreme accents are crafted over time to be as aggressive and threatening as possible, I just find all that fascinating. I’ve always wanted to play one of these people who basically terrorised me when I was growing up in Liverpool.  But what an amazing experience it was working with Guy Ritchie, I’ve never worked with him before, but he gets into filming right away, he reads the scene, he does all the characters, he looks again at the lines and it’s like you can see the thought cloud above his head editing the scene. He’s so collaborative and fun. In that scene [in episode one], it is a big, broad comedy mixed with menace so there’s the risk of this falling flat, to have somebody in a chicken suit!  People said to me, did you find that hilarious doing that? And I really didn't at all, I thought I'm just gonna trust Guy and really go for it and if if I'm gonna be too big, then he can get me to tone it down.

You’ve taken your character, Brian Butterfield, on tour. We first met Brian on your sketch show on BBC Two, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, but where did character come from?

There was an advert on TV about 20 years ago with this guy selling insurance, “Have you been injured in an accident?”, and the first Brian sketch was almost a direct parody of this guy. I thought it was the actual owner of the company who made the advert himself,  he’s in this office that looks really untidy and the whole thing had an unprofessional air to it. So, me and James, my brother, wrote the Brian Butterfield sketch taking that initial inspiration and making Brian full of enthusiasm and ideas, but these ideas are ridiculous but there’s something in them. He’s in his mid 60’s and full of youthful vigour and relentless energy.  It turned out the guy in the original advert was an actor and by the time we did the Christmas special, I found out the actor had seen the Butterfield sketch and was a bit upset. I wasn’t very well known back then and on the first day of filming on The Peter Serafinowicz show, some of the crew didn’t know who I was and some of the first things we shot were the Brian Butterfield sketches and they all thought that I [Peter] was this old guy as the prothetics looked so real and it was only the next day when I came in that they all realised!

Doing a whole live show as Brian is quite a bit different from short TV sketches, how are you finding it?

I tend to walk a lot but doing the Brian show, it is a workout itself because obviously you're in a huge suit for two hours a night. Richard, my tour manager, got in touch with me about month or maybe even six weeks or so before our first tour as he wanted to check I was mentally prepared for it because I've never done it before. It's a pain to go to the gym and to try and be fit and eat healthily when you are filming away all the time so when preparing for a role, I always see it as an opportunity to start a little mini boost to feel good and rejuvenate yourself. During the early performances on the first tour, my suit was so densely packed with this duvet kind of stuff I was sweating so much that prosthetics on my face were just flapping off and not only was it dangerous, it was also just annoying to have people laughing at this, which is funny, but they're laughing at the wrong thing!  The suit is designed by Barry Gower who designed all the prosthetic make up for Game Of Thrones, he’s a genius, but it takes two makeup artists around an hour to get me ready.

The performance at the Theatre Royal on the 16th of June is an extra date for your tour. Are you looking forward to coming to our fine city?

I think I should let Brian answer that question - he says he's "thrilled to be bringing my CALL OF NOW tour to Norwich Royal Theatre. In the words of the famous Norwichonian Delia Smith “Let’s be having you come to see my show!"