From Auf Wiedersehen, Pet to Hollywood star – and nearly dying en route – his career has been a wild ride. He talks about how he’s ended up sparkling as the BBC’s new Sunday night crime-solver – and why he just wants to be brilliant
Some like it hot, and Timothy Spall is among them. “Can I have an extra-large skinny cappuccino, absolutely boiling?” he asks the server from his seat at a pavement cafe. “The largest and hottest you’ve got. Illegally hot.”
Once we are alone again, Spall returns to what he was in the middle of discussing: 18th-century coffee-houses. “What they served didn’t taste like coffee. It was repulsive. I looked it up.” His curiosity is innate and all-consuming. When he was 16 and starring in a school production of My Fair Lady, he took it upon himself to visit the tenements on Tottenham Court Road in London where his character would have lived. At an even younger age, he secretly imitated the stooped walk of a stranger he spotted in the street. Not to be cruel. “I just wanted to know what it was to walk like that. How it felt inside. I still find myself doing it now. I’ll see somebody moving a certain way and I’ll try and copy that to feel where it comes from. I suppose that’s why I do what I do.”