They say you shouldn’t confuse actors or writers with their characters. However, the line between fact and fiction seems so decidedly blurred in Simon Amstell’s case, that I almost feel like I know him before we meet in a bar at London’s trendy Soho House, to talk about his latest project.
Take the painfully funny (sometimes just painful) sitcom Grandma’s House, which he co-wrote. In it, Amstell starred as Simon Amstell. Like the real Simon Amstell, he was a former host of the comedy music quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, with a reputation for snarky irreverence towards his guests. “Simon Amstell” was also Jewish, gay, vegan, and a child of divorce. It was meta to the max.
Now, cut to 2019, and his second feature film as writer-director (his first for the cinema, after the BBC mockumentary Carnage), the funny and romantic Benjamin. The eponymous protagonist, played by Colin Morgan, is also a filmmaker on his second movie, and ticks some of the same biographical boxes as Amstell’s Grandma’s House character.
While “Simon Amstell” was stuck in a rut with his hilariously dysfunctional family, Benjamin is preparing to premiere his pretentiously titled new film, No Self (a nod to a stand-up show Amstell performed in 2007), at the London Film Festival. He’s also falling in love with a young French music student, Noah (Phenix Brossard), and neurotically struggling with questions of identity and his inability to connect deeply with people.
Sitcom and film are both highly personal at their core. When Amstell wrote the former, “I was really trying to figure out what was wrong with me in relation to my family,” he says. “Why was it so difficult to just have a fun day with everyone? Why are some of those relationships so awkward or difficult?”
By writing the sitcom, and undergoing two years of psychotherapy, he worked it out: he had “no sense of acceptance.”
“Really, that show was about acceptance,” he reflects. “I was trying to fix or change everyone. Once I stopped doing that, once I turned up to a family event not expecting everyone to be any different to how they were last time, it was much easier.”
That side of his life resolved, he embarked on Benjamin, to “understand what was wrong with me in my twenties.” Why, in particular, did he always “end up in the same kind of relationships, over and over again? Why did I keep going for the same young man, with different names and bodies?” The realisation this time was that he “wasn’t used to intimacy.”
In the film, his thinly-veiled surrogate, Benjamin, “starts very stiff and defended, and slowly Noah, this beautiful French musician, dissolves all his walls.” Amstell says he hopes I will find something better than his “terrible mixing of metaphors”, but I think he’s doing fine.
“So, through the writing,” he continues, suddenly piercing the air with a loud, high-pitch laugh, “at the same time as Benjamin is developing some self awareness about his problem, I developed some self awareness about my problems.”
At one point in the film, Benjamin has an uncharacteristic moment of total abandonment while eating magic mushrooms in a wood with Noah. Dancing around, he “lets go of all the stuff in his head that’s keeping him trapped and alone,” says Amstell.
By now it should come as no surprise to learn that he is talking from personal experience. The first time he tried the psychedelic fungus, he felt “so happy, so free of all my anxiety,” he says. “I thought, ‘Ooh my God, I could feel like this! This feeling is possible!’” For someone who had been diagnosed with clinical depression, it was a valuable insight.
“It didn’t mean that I had to take magic mushrooms every day,” he laughs, “but it meant that I knew it was available. It wasn’t that it gave me something; it was like it opened something that was already there.”
Amstell had an even more profound experience when he imbibed ayahuasca, in the Peruvian rain forest. The hallucinogenic herbal drink is claimed to have medicinal properties, . “An old school friend of mine told me about it,” he recalls. “He looked very joyful, and about 10 years old, and I thought, ‘My goodness!’ I was in therapy, so I went. Over a week, and four ceremonies, I felt like I got to the root of this personality that was created in order to survive.”
The potion made him feel connected to the planet in a way he’d never felt before (the experience would lead to his pro-veganism film Carnage). “I think I used to feel like I’m just one individual who has to get somewhere,” he says, “and now I feel kind of held and at home.” Before it, he was “numb, unable to feel anything . . . I came out of that week feeling strong, reset, and ready to live and do stuff.”
Without his Peruvian adventure (and his traditional therapy), Benjamin, the character and film, possibly wouldn’t have existed. “I don’t feel as much of his anxiety, I don’t feel as much of his depression any more,” says Amstell, “so I was able to write it and see how ridiculous he is. If I was still in that depression, it would be really hard to write about it, certainly with any humour.”
Despite all the gloom, Amstell, 39 insists he had a happy childhood. He grew up in Gants Hill, the eldest of four children. His father ran a courier and minicab firm, while his mum dreamed of singing. There were bar mitvahs, he says, but they weren’t a very religious family.
When Amstell was 13, his parents divorced (“I remember feeling like, ‘Oh thank goodness these people aren’t going to be married anymore’”), and he became obsessed with the idea of getting on the telly. “I had this drive to do something, and nothing would get in the way of it,” he says.
For him, television was more than just about entertainment: he’d started to realise he liked boys, “and in the time and place where I was living, that was not possible. That was really scary.” When he watched TV, “there was joy and laughter and, I guess, it was a place where there was diversity and a feeling that people being different was not just tolerated or accepted, but celebrated. So I thought, ‘If I can get into television, I think I’ll be alright.’”
To get there he repressed his feelings and “focused entirely on becoming funny and getting an audience. So that is what I was used to,” he muses. “I was used to putting on a performance in order to be loved. And it took me a long time to get used to not having to do anything but be there with another human being.”
About two years ago, his mother told him that a newspaper (“it might have been the JC”) had reported that a local school, he thinks Kantor King Solomon High, was having an LGBT awareness day. When he heard this, “I started crying,” he says, “just because of the idea that there might have been some care for people who fancy people who were the same gender as them.”
When he was at school such an event would have been prohibited under Section 28. Today, he’s thankful that he went to a Jewish primary school and a mixed secondary school, because “I got to see that life up to joining the secondary school had been quite insular. And that’s quite scary. If you are somebody who is going to at some point be revealed as not like everyone else, then to be in an insular community is a problem. Of course, it would have been nice to have had an LGBT awareness day, but that wasn’t on the cards.”
Benjamin’s world couldn’t be more different. People are straight, gay, fluid, and nobody cares. It is a wonderful picture of diversity and acceptance. Is this his reality?
“Yeah, exactly! What I have written is my reality. And, yeah, it’s a vastly different reality to anything I could’ve imagined when I was growing up. And I’m really thrilled!”
He did his first stand-up gig at 13, and at 18 had a stint as a presenter on Nickleodeon (he was fired for being “mean and sarcastic to children”, he has said), followed by his memorably playful run as an interviewer on Popworld, at 21, and, eventually, his acclaimed turn as the wickedly cheeky host of Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Then, it was all about fame, even as he ripped apart the famous, and the not so famous. Now, unlike Benjamin, he no longer feels the need to try and make himself “appear special” in the hope of being loved by strangers.
“Where I am, I think, in my actual life now, I’m more interested in doing something for the joy of doing it rather than getting somewhere in order to feel safe. Does that make sense?”
Benjamin is released on March 15
