Interview: Mackenzie Crook

There's only one moment in my conversation with Mackenzie Crook, between rehearsals for his new theatre role in 'The Recruiting Officer' when he relaxes and looks comfortable. It's when he's singing the praises of current co-star Mark Gatiss, and Gatiss bustles opportunely into the costume room, says 'I concur, I concur', and bustles out again, leaving jollity in his wake.

Crook himsely is extraordinarily tall, thin and shy. In his jeans and a military jacket - complete with long fingers, haunted look and lank copper-coloured curtains of hair - he could still pass for the art student he aspired to be during his boyhood at a Kent grammar school.

He's slow to open up but when he does, a thoughtful, gentle person emerges - without a trace of the exhibitionism or brittle professional persona that many performers bring to interviews, oddly semi-private conversations in the public domain. 'When it came to a higher education I couldn't get in to art school,' he explains. 'It was a blow. A real blow. I'd never considered anything else, really.'

Today, quality imprint Faber and Faber has helped Crook fulfil that youthful ambition by publishing 'The Windvale Sprites', a children's book which he wrote and rather beautifully illustrated - partly during down time from his long stints playing Ginger in British new-writing mega-hit 'Jerusalem'.

'I'd wanted to do it for a long time,' he says. 'But having children gaven me the kick that I needed to actually do it, albeit nine years after I became a father. My daughter is too young for it but my son loved it. I wanted to write something that I would have loved to have read when I was a kid and my son is a little clone of me, so I don't think anyone will enjoy the book as much as he enjoyed it.'

These days, Crook lives with his two children in Peter Sellers's old house in Muswell Hill, taking his family to his own patch of woodland in Essex, 'to learn to love the natural world like I did and to camp out'. As a child in Kent, Crook loved fishing, cycling and wildlife. It wasn't until he was 16 that he joined a local youth theatre - often a magnet for creatives and misfits - and loved it. 'I wasn't friendly with anyone at school,' he recalls, 'but that gang from youth theatre, they're still my closest friends.'

Theatre led to 'character stand-up on the cabaret circuit'… a way to break into acting - which in fact took ten years.' Before that successful audition for Ricky Gervais as Gareth in 'The Office', he supported himself via numerous temp jobs, working at Pizza Hut for a couple of years though never - as has been reported - at a chicken factory. 'I don't even know what a chicken factory is,' he exclaims. 'Though the worst job I ever did was in a hospital kitchen where there was an incident with chickens.' I inquire further and his expression turns positively gothic.

'It was like the kitchens of hell, just dire, horrible. There were trays and trays of chicken carcasses coming back after they'd been left and this strange hunchback man would scrape up these carcasses into a garbage disposal crusher. And whenever he saw a juicy morsel he would reach in, lift it out and, arggh, gobble it up.'

The way Crook tells this, it's a piece of gross dead-end comedy that could have come straight from 'Jerusalem' on which he worked, off and on, for three years. 'The last night was very charged,' he recalls. Crook shared a dressing room throughout with unorthodox legend Mark Rylance. 'Coming from TV and film I had a lot to learn about stage craft,' he says, 'and I've learned so much from Mark. In life as well as theatre. He's an extraordinary man as well as actor. He's taught me to be less cynical about a whole lot of things.'

After the success of 'The Office' Crook could, he reckons, 'have spent the rest of my life doing those weirdo loser-type Garethy parts: I still get offered them.' Instead he decided to challenge himself, playing the depressive romantic Konstantin in Ian Rickson's farewell production at the Royal Court, Chekhov's 'The Seagull'.

He'll be swaggering even further off-type in Josie Rourke's inaugural drama at the Donmar, in which he plays to the crowd as Sergeant Kite. 'He reads like a big man,' says Crook, 'very confident, bullish, bullying and full of himself. I thought: Wow, that doesn't sound like me. It's taken a lot to strip the inhibitions away and really go for it.'

Compared to film and TV, theatre is modestly paid. But when I ask Crook if he made enough out of 'The Office' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean' to do what he likes, he laughs so much that he very nearly relaxes. 'I will still get a royalties cheque from repeats of “The Office” or DVD sales,' he says, 'but we weren't given a great deal on “Pirates of the Caribbean” so I don't see an awful lot of money from that. So no. I'm not in any position to retire and do things for the love of it. But I want to better myself as an actor, which you do by doing things like this. I'm not bothered particularly about making money. And I love my job. As long as I have enough money to feed my family then I couldn't be happier.'