The king of uneasy comedy Trailer: Philomena - Featurette A woman searches for her adult son who was taken away from her decades ago when she was forced to live in a convent. PT3M1S http://www.smh.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2z15j 620 349 December 9, 2013 Steve Coogan is the very incarnation of comic discomfort. You imagine that, under those Pringle jumpers, Coogan's best-known creation, Alan Partridge, is probably itching with an allergy to wool; his pompous mediocrity certainly makes the audience squirm. But it isn't just Partridge. Even the real-life characters Coogan has played - Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson in 24-Hour Party People and pornographer Paul Raymond in The Look of Love - are compelling but reliably odious. "I think, even if you act a part you have not written, it is inevitable that you are going to bring a part of yourself to everything you do," Coogan says. I've never done something where I have reinvented myself so completely that I become, as it were, someone else. "As it were": how Alan Partridge does that sound? Talking to Steve Coogan is like getting lost in a hall of mirrors, although it has nothing on The Trip. In The Trip, which was made both as a sitcom and in a condensed version as a film, Coogan plays a character also called Steve Coogan. We follow this meta-fictional self, who is high-handed, childishly competitive and slimily lecherous, as he argues his way around the Lake District with his perpetually aggrieved meta-friend Rob Brydon. Much of it is banter, but the various set-pieces deliberately refer back to scandalous tabloid stories about the real-life Coogan that have come out over the years: the sordid dalliances with cocaine and strippers, the memorable episode on a bed made of bank notes, the liaison with Courtney Love, the snark about his colleagues that sometimes erupts in interviews. So how much of this is really him? He's not going to reveal that; perhaps it's impossible to know. Comedy isn't a confessional, he says, but it is cathartic. "The way I play myself in The Trip is to find the negative aspects of myself and to turn the volume up on them," he says. Anything about myself that I think is good - any aspect of my personality I think is well-adjusted and sound - I suppress, because it's trying to conceal the negativity that makes for good comedy. But whether this is him or not, why play that character under your own name? Go on, he seems to be saying: I make you uncomfortable, don't I? Well, join the gang. Steve Coogan has departed from creations such as Alan Partridge. In his new film, Philomena - which he also wrote and produced - Coogan plays another real-life role as Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC journalist and Labour spin-doctor who helps an elderly Irish woman track down the son she was forced to give up 50 years earlier. Judi Dench plays Philomena Lee. She is, of course, quite brilliant, but Coogan holds his own beside her. "I suppose Sixsmith is the most sympathetic character I've portrayed," he says. He's cynical, but he doesn't behave especially badly. Like many people, he wears his cynicism as a kind of armour to protect him in some way from the world. At heart you can tell he's a decent man. Philomena, by his own admission, is Coogan's pet project. It is clearly not a comedy, although it has many more hilarious moments than you might expect. Philomena Lee fell pregnant at 17 and was sent to a convent, where she worked for four years and was allowed to see her child for an hour a day. Then the child was "sold" - Coogan's word - to a visiting American couple with plenty of cash to "donate" - the nuns' word - in return. Coogan read an extract from Sixsmith's book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, in a magazine and optioned the book immediately. That was in 2009. "I was looking for something to get my teeth into," he says. I thought well, this has made me angry and made me sad and it chimed with me and if this moves me, it might move other people. Around the time he read about Philomena Lee, he had begun to worry about his contribution to the world. Sardonic comedy didn't add much to the sum total of human happiness. It wasn't even sufficient to ensure his own, but he seemed to be stuck with it. "When you're successful in one area it sort of stymies and frustrates you being able to do other things," he says after Philomena has its triumphant launch at the Venice Film Festival. You become boxed in. You do funny stuff: that is what you do, so just keep doing that. I like comedy but I'm not obsessed with it - and I get tired of comedy sometimes even though I like laughing. And had I not written it and produced this film, I would not have been offered this part. I would have been at the end of a very long list. Coogan didn't set out to play Sixsmith; in fact, he thought he might direct. As he worked on the script, however - with the help of experienced dramatist Jeff Pope - he realised the Sixsmith character was becoming increasingly like him. Coogan was once a Catholic; he was one of seven children whose mother would also take in foster children from the Catholic Rescue Society. The whole family would go to church every Sunday; many of them still do. Sixsmith was an Anglican, but Coogan turned him into another lapsed Catholic whose cynicism - Coogan's own, he says, with the volume turned up as usual - runs aground on the rock of Philomena's naive but unshakeable faith. "It's a conversation you have with yourself," Coogan says. You know, I wrote Martin's dialogue but I also wrote Philomena's dialogue. It was important to me that I didn't do this rather, you know, self-righteously glib, liberal attack on people of simple faith. That, to me, is too easy. You know, you need to have self-doubt even as an atheist; people who don't have self-doubt I think lack humanity. Philomena is an angry film, but it is the embattled anger of the insider; Coogan rages against the church's "lack of contrition" about the wrongs done to Philomena and girls like her. When they adopt a kind of siege mentality of rebuttal and denial it doesn't actually help them at all and it shocks me that they can't see that. It is the most unspiritual way to respond, frankly. There speaks a northern lad: he's not afraid of a righteous stoush. Even as he plays with his own tabloid reputation, Coogan has led the charge against the newspapers that created it, appearing before the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking and bitterly condemning celebrities he regards as too cowardly to stand up for themselves. "I don't think anyone has a right to know about your personal life just because you have a profile," he says, sounding as prickly as one of Partridge's jumpers. If he uses his life in his work, that's his business; he even gives that meta-fiction a kind of moral underpinning. I think we live in a world where people, especially people in public life, are I think rather stupidly preoccupied with trying to present some perfect version of themselves without flaws. I don't feel I have to do that. Right now, he and Jeff Pope are working together again on a screenplay about Coogan's Mancunian childhood that he expects to finish with the invention of Alan Partridge. It is worth noting that in between all this, there has been another Partridge film, Alpha Papa, which, despite mixed reviews, has been a roaring success in Coogan's home country. He enjoys spiting people he imagines are eager to see him fail, although he freely admits that Alpha Papa was a rush job after the care lavished on Philomena; he was often writing scenes in between takes. "I'm northern lower middle class," he tells a British interviewer, to whom such precisely tuned categories no doubt vibrate tellingly. I've still got a huge chip on my shoulder. Chips, peas, mushy peas. And a boat of gravy on the side. Perhaps this is what it takes to be as funny as Steve Coogan: a constant sense of being slighted, spun into comic gold. It can't be comfortable. Philomena opens on Thursday.