Mathew Horne interview: 'I wore a dress for six months I never felt frustrated by it because it was a skill I felt I had down which came from those early stand-up years. For me it was about reacting to the overtly comedic character, which I always felt an important thing. It made them funnier. I didn't have any desire to be the clown. I knew I was doing a job. Gavin is an everyman reactor. He is the link between the people at home and the morons around him. The boot is now on the other foot. Horne has just tried his wig on for the first time, featuring a centre parting, French plaits and a bun at the back. "It's beautiful!" he suggests. The dress is in the pipeline. It won't be his first time, he says. I wore a dress as a child for six months and I wouldn't take it off. I was three. I've seen the pictures. The ambition to dress up for a living kicked in at 18 when he saw Steve Coogan's one-man show in 1997. I almost certainly won't achieve anything like what he's achieved, but seeing him live I could kind of see what he was doing and I wanted to do it myself. When, like many stand-ups and actors, he went to Manchester University to study drama and film (Benedict Cumberbatch was in his year), he even made Coogan the subject of his dissertation. Since Coogan became his executive producer on Gavin and Stacey, Horne has had "to turn that in a bit and be a bit more professional." The degree itself was "all theory-based and not quite what I wanted, hence the stand-up." He and Mackinnon saw it as a means to an end and, after four years, agreed to a velvet divorce. We achieved what we wanted to achieve, which was to get agents to be actors. It was incredibly intensive. We were gigging most nights. It is a long time to be doing that when you've not got much money and you're travelling to Croydon to get glasses thrown at you. Now 34, Horne accepts that the skills picked up by performing comedy live will be useful for the demanding technical business of delivering precision-tooled farce. But he returns to the stage also knowing that his last stage experience was of passing out in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane. In the last week of a West End run, he and Imelda Staunton both started suffering from the same virus in the same performance. A grand dame of the British theatre becoming ill is quite scary to watch. I became slightly overwhelmed by what was going on and I don't remember much else because I just went to black and hit the deck. I woke up to my other co-star, Simon Paisley Day, going, 'Is there a doctor in the house? It was quite terrifying, only because I couldn't quite quantify what had happened. His career has been subject to another kind of trauma. As the young male stars of the hugely popular Gavin and Stacey, Horne and Corden naturally chose to work together again. First came the sketch show, then in short order Lesbian Vampire Killers and their hosting of the Brits, and the papers swiftly moved into spiteful backlash mode. We weren't surprised by the reaction. We were surprised by the vehemence of it. It was a very new friendship and new chemistry between two comic actors and we embraced that a little bit too much, too soon. It was a question of myself and James being overexposed and an incredibly cynical press machine that set out to bring us down. He wouldn't dream of apologising for any of the actual product. In terms of the material and our performances there was nothing wrong with the sketch show at all. A sketch show by its very nature is hit and miss. As for Lesbian Vampire Killers: "For a shamelessly camp B movie it's very good. If you like funny, well-short B movies with hot girls in you'd probably quite enjoy it, actually. If it's to be reviewed against Vera Drake, it's appalling. It gets reviewed by somebody and then there's a piece calling it a flop. Now, it made its money back in two days, so literally it wasn't. But of course nobody reads statistics. Horne's career was never seriously derailed, while Corden has fully recovered thanks to One Man, Two Guvnors. Horne suspects Corden and his co-writer Ruth Jones may well be about to complete the circle with another Gavin and Stacey. I haven't heard anything official. I feel like enough time has passed now. As long as they have a good story, I'd love to get back with everyone and do it. Even if it means closing the lid on the dressing-up box. 'Charley's Aunt" previews at the Menier Chocolate Factory (020 7378 1713) from today