The actor and director on his fears for a British institution, the day he stopped being vegetarian and why he’s a fast eater
I’m going to disappoint you with my terribly proletarian tastes. If I was to be hanged in the morning, which is quite possible, I would have beans on toast. Because I love that and I have that on a Sunday very regularly because it just makes me happy. I’ve tried to be much more adventurous over the years, but I’m basically working-class, proletarian filth and it’s very hard to eradicate some of those things.
I was a vegetarian for 15 years and I stopped about 2000, a year after The League of Gentlemen was first on TV. Even though things had got so much better for vegetarians, I remember sitting somewhere in Soho and looking at this menu and there were three things I could eat. And I just thought: “Fuck it!” So I had some chicken and it was incredibly bland and I thought: “I’ve blown it, I’ve wasted 15 years of proper abstinence for this bland chicken!” Then the next day I had a bacon sandwich and everything was all right.
