Britcom King Makes His Starring Debut in Ghost Town

It’s the first weekend of the Toronto Film Festival, and everything is in full swing. Celebrities are being ushered in and out of rooms, each containing a new handful of caffeine-sated journalists praying that the batteries in their tape recorders will make it through the rest of the afternoon. By the time comedian Ricky Gervais, creator and star of the hit Britcoms The Office and Extras, makes it to my room, everyone is a bit on the giddy side.

Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town

Gervais and Greg Kinnear, his co-star in the new comedy Ghost Town, are laughing at a question someone asked in the room they’ve just left. It seems one scribe wanted to know why Gervais chose to wear such silly-looking teeth for his role as a dentist who can speak to ghosts. She was informed that they are in fact his real teeth, not the worst ever seen on an island that Shane McGowan calls home, but still a bit on the vampiric side by Hollywood’s standard of gleaming uniformity.

“She said, ‘Really?’” Gervais giggles. “Yes, what, do you think I’d turn up to a press meet with these stupid things in?”

Taking their chairs, our guests offer the usual polite “How’re you doing?”s. As we’ve just finished speaking to the film’s director David Koepp and his co-writer John Kamps, I quip, “We’re worn out by now—we’re too tired to talk to you.”

“Really?” Gervais says. “Wanna call it a day? Do it tomorrow?”

“No, we’ll just doze and you guys can talk to our tape recorders,” I say, referring to Gervais’ reputation for always being on. “Do people always expect you to be hilarious every time you open your mouth? That must be pretty intimidating.”

“No. You’re pretty intimidating, though,” Gervais ripostes, noting that my body language perhaps does not indicate rapt attention. “Look interested, come on!”

Justly chastened (I was sitting with my elbows on the table and my head on my hand), I straighten my spine and try to arrange my facial expression into one more proper to the occasion, that of speaking to one of the funniest comedians currently plying that trade.

The Office and its American remake of course were worldwide hits, though for my money Gervais’ Extras, which ran for two seasons on HBO, was the most consistently hilarious TV comedy since Curb Your Enthusiasm. Still better known in England, where he’s been honing his comic persona since the mid-1990s on radio, television, and podcasts, Gervais stands to break through to mainstream US in a big way with Ghost Town, a pleasing mix of comedy and sentimental romance.

Bertram Pincus, DDS has plenty of the snarky wit standard to Gervais’ other characters. A loner who never got over a bad romance in his youth, he enjoys the fact that the dental trade is one that renders his patients non-communicative. Proximate humans like his office mate Dr. Prashar (Aasif Mandvi) or his neighbor Gwen (Tea Leoni) are mere obstacles to be avoided—surreptitiously if possible, rudely if necessary—in his daily shuffle between work and apartment.

Pincus’s isolation ends when a distracted surgeon (a scene-stealing cameo by Saturday Night Live cast member and Rochester native Kristen Wiig) leaves him with the hugely unwanted ability to see and speak to ghosts who walk the streets of Manhattan. More to the point, they can also speak to him, and pester him incessantly to help tie up loose ends they left when they died. Most persistent of these is Frank Herlihy (Kinnear), a philandering husband trying to make amends to the wife he left behind—Pincus’s neighbor Gwen.

Aside from guest appearances in movies like For Your Consideration, Stardust, and A Night at the Museum, Gervais has previously only appeared in projects that he has also devised and written. He made an exception for Ghost Town, he says, because it was “The best script I’ve read in five years. And it was very me, it was very what I do. Usually you read the script and it’s arbitrary, 50 other people could do it. But with this I thought, I’m the best person for the job here.

“And it was very collaborative—[writer-director] David Koepp let me change things, character points, and he let us ad lib. The first day of shooting, a scene with me and Greg in the bar, we were just all over the place. We were laughing, David was laughing and ruining takes, and after two hours he said, ‘You think we could do just one take that’s in the script?’”

Known for his ability to improvise, Gervais says that there are limits to making up your dialogue on the spot. “In the cold light of day the lines in the script are great, and the movie is 90 percent what’s on the page. But it’s that other little 10 percent that brings it to life, where you can see the chemistry and the actors enjoying themselves. People pick it up subliminally—it’s not about the lines and where you stand, it’s about noticing certain little tics and things. Everything we do is—

“I can tell you’re bored,” he interrupts himself, looking at me. As Kinnear cracks up, I assure them that I could not be more fascinated, and struggle for a facial expression that conveys this as the conversation moves to the closing shot of the movie, which Gervais came up with.

“What we wanted to do,” he explains, “was end with something iconic and different. One of my favorite endings for a film is The Apartment, when [Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine] are sitting there and she just says, ‘Shut up and deal.’ We came up with something like that, which is so much classier [than the standard fade-out kiss].”

Did Gervais, used to being the creator of his projects, have any stipulations about agreeing to star in the film? “No nudity is certainly a rule,” he says, pointing to his unflatteringly snug black t-shirt and asserting “you do not want to see this. What were the other rules? Trying not to ruin too many takes by breaking up.”

Kinnear says, “The hardest part about working with Ricky is that if it’s funny and it’s happening and cooking, he just can’t help laughing.

Gervais agrees. “If something’s funny, I’ll laugh. Even if I’ve written the line I’ll laugh. And the other thing I told the director is that I’m not a real actor. It’s their fault they’ve spent the money, they can’t have it back.”

Amongst his accolades (two Golden Globes, an Emmy, numerous British Academy Television Awards and British Comedy Awards), Gervais is noted by the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloaded podcast of all time. An outgrowth of the radio shows he did in the 1990s with his partner Stephen Merchant (you’ll recognize him in Ghost Town as the naked ghost), they’ve been running irregularly since 2001. In recent years the shows have become dominated by the show’s former producer Karl Pilkington, an endless font of bizarre theories and ruminations that Gervais and Merchant plumb.

“The secret of the podcast,” Gervais admits, “is, find yourself an idiotic shaven chimp, and that’s Karl Pilkington. I don’t even know why we still call it The Ricky Gervais Show. Me and Steve Merchant feel like we’re some sort of Victorian discoverers who have found the missing link and we’re taking him out to the world—‘Look at this, prod it and it talks!’ And when it talks. it talks gold. He’s amazing, I’ve never met anything like him. Karl Pilkington is the funniest person I’ve ever met, genuinely. People say, ‘Is he real?’ And my answer is always the same: If he’s not real, he keeps it up 24 hours a day.”

Regular listeners of the podcasts may be struck by a similarity to the plot of Ghost Town, in which Pincus’s troubles begin when he dies during a colonoscopy. “I didn’t write that,” Gervais avers. “We did a podcast with Karl and he was explaining the rules of death, like he thinks this is gospel, he says when you die and go to heaven you’re in the exact clothes and position you were in at the point of death. And I said, what if you were having a rectal examination, and as the doctor is up there you both died? I’d hate that, just going around heaven with a doctor behind you!”

Four new half-hour podcasts are available this week, and Gervais swears there will be no more, just as there will be no more episodes of The Office or Extras. Referring to the tendency of some shows to wear out their welcome, he says, “I like to know when it’s the end. Myself and Steven have always had one eye on the legacy, we like the fact that, okay, that’s it now, that’s finite, and that’s forever. There’s something cleaner about that. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

Just like those shows, this interview comes to an end, and I struggle to return my spine to its normal curvature and relax my face from the rictus into which it has been contorted. As Gervais’ people start to shuffle him on to the next room, he pauses to tell me, “I was only teasing, by the way—I was worried that I made you feel bad!”

Well, why shouldn’t I get a chance to mess with him, too? I pout and say, “Oh, I feel bad!”

He tucks his fangs away for a moment and looks genuinely hurt. “No, I was just teasing you. Aww…”

Kinnear leads him away, reminding him of the number one rule of comedy: “Never explain, never apologize.”