#absurdia

For most actors, no matter how talented or versatile, the onset of middle age normally brings with it typecasting and the death of professional adventure. For Peter Capaldi, it has brought him the role of a lifetime.

His dazzling portrayal of Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed, apoplectic spin doctor in Armando Iannucci's political sitcom The Thick of It, has raised Capaldi's game in a way he didn't think was possible in his mid-forties.

"I'd got to the stage where I was doing nice parts in Midsomer Murders and Waking the Dead," he explains, "but nobody was asking me to do anything different or difficult.

"The whole process of making The Thick of It was completely different from anything I'd experienced before. I suddenly found myself in a working environment where everything was dangerous and scary."

In most TV drama or comedy, the position of the camera determines the blocking of the scenes. In The Thick of It there is no blocking, the cameramen simply follow the actors around.

"We don't rehearse, so nobody really gets the hang of what's going on, giving it that chaotic feel. We can go off in a different direction both physically and verbally; which is both tough and incredibly liberating. We've done takes of 45 minutes long."

Capaldi suspects Iannucci deliberately creates a "pressurised, neurotic, wrong-footing atmosphere" to keep the actors on their toes and help them become their characters.

Does he find Tucker's rage and bile easy to access? "Easier than I thought," he smiles. "I think it must have something to do with my age, but obviously it is my job as an actor to bring it all to the boil. It would be boring if he was shouting at people all the time, so I try to make him cunning, to give him quieter, pressure cooker moments. I prefer it when he is hatching some mad Machiavellian strategy to extricate himself from another impossible situation.

"I can't praise the writers too highly. The actors all found it difficult to improvise at first, because the scripts were so brilliant. Also, if you're going to improvise, it has to be funny and in character, otherwise it doesn't work. But the adrenaline carries you along. It's a powerhouse once we get going.

Coincidentally, only four years before The Thick of It arrived on the scene, Capaldi was involved with another New Labour satire, Feelgood, by Alastair Beaton, in which Henry Goodman played a Tucker-like spin doctor, clearly modelled on Alastair Campbell, while Capaldi was his cowering speech writer.

That was Capaldi's last foray on to the London stage, clearly not his natural habitat. Now he is returning in Absurdia, a trio of one-act comedies at the Donmar Warehouse, consisting of two old ones by NF Simpson and a new one by Michael Frayn. Why bother, I ask, when his work in TV is going so well?

"You do it for the challenge, the stretch," he replies. "Generally in TV, you are employed to do what you are known for doing best. Here I'm doing things I've never done before, a lot of mime and movement. The Frayn play is about staging a farce in the middle of the desert, generated entirely in the imaginations of the two characters, with no props. I've never done mime before, so it remains to be seen if it works."

A former art student who cites the Pythons as a major influence, Capaldi has dabbled rather successfully in 'absurdia' of his own. Twelve years ago, he picked up an Oscar in the Best Short Film category for Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, with Richard E. Grant as Kafka, which Capaldi wrote and directed. Once nominated, he suddenly found himself propelled into an alien world of Hollywood development deals and heavy duty schmoozing.

"The truth is, I went to Hollywood after the film was nominated and didn't know what to do when I got there," he says. "I was an actor, not a director, so it was all very strange and scary. The money men were hardly going to give me $80 million to play with, because they could see I wasn't anywhere near experienced enough."

He did, however, manage to sell a feature-length screenplay even before the Oscars took place. But the fact that he wasn't interested in becoming a director of blockbusters cramped his style as a bright young hopeful. He just wanted somebody to give him half a million to go away and do his own thing.

"I went to art school, so my whole creative ethos is about expressing myself in images. I didn't make a little film in order to make bigger ones. I just like the idea of making little films in which i can express myself."

For some years now he has been trying to get his third project as writer-director off the ground (the second, Strictly Sinatra, was a disappointment). It is called The Great Pretender and it has four parts for Ewan McGregor. While Capaldi doesn't see any problem persuading his fellow Scot to do it - he says he is already committed 100% - there are money problems to sort out.

"I know it will be really easy to make and we're all ready to go," he says wistfully. "But the problem with making your own films is that you end up spending all your time trying to blag the money. I'm really not interested in that side of it at all, but unfortunately I have to do it in order to get the thing made. I loved Kafka, looking through the camera and seeing this little world we were creating take shape, but I don't think it will ever be like that again because of the size and nature of the project and the number of friends I had working on it."

Taking his cue from the style of The Thick of It, Capaldi has written what he describes as a "pseudo documentary" biography of a fictional celebrity for TV which he hopes will go into production later this year.

While he is proactive when it comes to writing and generating his own projects, Capaldi the actor is content to sit back and wait for the phone to ring. "I don't know any actors who decide what roles they want to play and then go chasing after them," he says, when I suggest that The Thick of It might have given him more clout to pick and choose his roles. "My knowledge of the theatre isn't broad enough to be able to say, I'd like to play such and such a role.

"I agreed to do Absurdia because I liked the material and I'm a great admirer of Douglas Hodge, the director. You have to be nuts about the play you're doing because the theatre pays so badly and it takes up six months of your life.

"The worse thing is going into a job where, two weeks into rehearsals, you realise the director you thought was wonderful is crap. You're stuck with a sadistic egomaniac, you realise the whole thing is going to be a disaster, and there is nothing you can do about it."

He doesn't say so, but I get the strong impression he doesn't have those Tuckeresque feelings about Hodge and Absurdia.