For a long time it looked like England would never be ready to acquire a taste for Gervais. He was born in the provincial town of Reading and studied philosophy at University College London. Subsequently it took him a few years to progress from the job of receptionist to events manager at UCL’s student union. (For a look at what he was up to circa 1984, check out YouTube for the video by New Wave band Seona Dancing. The lead singer is none other than Gervais, wearing heavy makeup and tight pants. “I wanted to be a pop star, but I failed,” he says wistfully.) His first break came in 1997 with a programming job on Radio XFM, where he met his chief collaborator, Stephen Merchant. Later he earned a spot doing comedy skits on The 11 O’Clock Show. Gervais attributes his slow start to a lack of early ambition. “It wasn’t that I was a late developer,” he says. “I was just a late trier.”
By 2005, when his second series, Extras, was on HBO, Gervais’s status was such that he could lure guest stars like Orlando Bloom, Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet, who memorably made obscene gestures while dressed as a nun. Winslet recalls that she first met Gervais when she asked him to sign a photograph as a gift for her husband, Sam Mendes. “Ricky has no idea what a brilliant actor and writer he is,” she says. “I get more compliments for that Extras episode than I do for most things I’ve done.”
Today Gervais, 46, is one of the few British comedians whose appeal doesn’t drown halfway across the Atlantic. He acknowledges a few small but key differences between American and British humor: “I think that the English are probably a bit darker, and we enjoy losers more,” he says. But he emphasizes that regional differences matter more than national ones. “I can sell out 5,000-seaters in New York and L.A., and probably couldn’t do an art center in Kansas,” he says. While anticipating his U.S. tour dates (he’ll play the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Kodak in L.A.), Gervais points out that it’s far easier to score with a stand-up routine than with a weekly sitcom. “Audiences are pretty easily pleased,” he says. “They want to laugh, and they have come out because they like you anyway.”
At the time of our interview Gervais is a few weeks away from the first day of shooting on his film debut, This Side of the Truth, which he cowrote and codirected with Matthew Robinson. Set in a world in which nobody knows how to lie, the story shows what happens when one man starts fibbing to get ahead. Gervais is not admitting to any major jitters. His main concern is the danger of being saddled with too much power. “You have to be careful what you say [on a set], because it will be done,” he explains. “You say, ‘Maybe we could get a big toadstool.’ Then you come in, and they’ve built you a big toadstool.”
