Greg Wise on joining Strictly Come Dancing: ‘I demand that knickers are thrown at me!’

Actor Greg Wise, 55, is best known for his roles in The Crown, Cranford and Sense and Sensibility - Clara Molden/Landmark Hotel
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Greg Wise is used to being the bad guy. He has twirled his metaphorical moustache as a distant father in the BBC’s adaptation of Sadie Jones’s coming-of-age tragedy The Outcast, as an arrogant magistrate in Cranford and, of course, as archetypal cad John Willoughby in Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility – on the set of which he met his wife of 18 years, Emma Thompson. But for the next few weeks, he will be ceding that role to Craig Revel Horwood, as he takes his place among the contestants on the 19th series of Strictly Come Dancing. As of next week, he will also be writing a weekly Strictly column in the Daily Telegraph.

Whatever Horwood may say about him, though, Wise maintains he’s heard worse. “The only piece of advice I ever give about being an actor is to say you can’t do it unless you can take rejection. The last time I read a review was by accident after Madame Bovary [in 2000], when I’d had my bum out, s*****g in the woods: ‘Normally when I see Greg Wise, I want to slap him in the face. This time, I want to kick him in the arse.’ Craig being mean is all part of the panto, isn’t it?”

Looking markedly younger than his 55 years when we meet at Marylebone’s Landmark London hotel, Wise is in charming, self-deprecating and impressively relaxed form. Tanned and lean in a slim-fitting Prada suit and a tight white T-shirt, he has kept in shape at a family bolthole on the banks of Loch Eck in Argyll, Scotland, far from their north London home.

“Em’s been filming all year,” he explains. “So I took myself off for three months of ditch-digging, forestry, going up and down hills with chainsaws and generally being active. I want to try and be as physical and supple as possible on Strictly. The missus is big into yoga and pilates and I’ve always scoffed about it but now I’m [doing it too] and I’m really enjoying it.”

When Wise was first approached to do Strictly, he turned it down flat. “Then I told the wife and she said I had to go for it. I had a big job lined up, a three-picture deal that would have been quite nicely paid, thank you very much. I asked if I could do Strictly next year instead and they said no. So here we are.”

Strictly Come Dancing will return for its 19th series with a launch show on 18 September on BBC One - Ray Burmiston/BBC Studios
Strictly Come Dancing will return for its 19th series with a launch show on 18 September on BBC One - Ray Burmiston/BBC Studios

Where Wise seems wryly amused by it all, Thompson, he says, is “thrilled – more excited than I am.” She and their children – Gaia (21) and Tindy (33) – will be cheering him on, either in person or at home. “Em’s looking forward to having a relaxing autumn, with the little beacons every Saturday night of either watching it on the telly with a pile of chums or coming up to Elstree.”

Gaia, he says, is “probably thrilled but, you know, too cool for school”. Tindy, the Rwandan refugee they adopted in 2003, is now a human-rights lawyer and “more bemused than anything – he says I have an African bum, so I might have to use that in a routine.”

Wise’s real motivation, however, is his sister, who died of cancer in 2016. “Clare was the big disco diva. She was cremated in a glitterball coffin, so I’d like to do something with ‘Dancing Queen’ because that was her funeral song. Maybe as a waltz?”

The waltzing started early when, aged five or six, the siblings would put on a Johann Strauss LP and perform for their parents and their parents’ friends. “Terrible, precocious little people,” Wise shudders, shaking his head.

Close from childhood, together they kept their heads down in the face of what he describes as the “reasonably tricky dynamic” of their parents’ marriage. Growing up in Northumberland, Wise followed his mother and father into architecture, studying in Edinburgh before the Damascene experience of performing at the city’s Bedlam Theatre saw him enrol at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

His sister has never been far from his thoughts. Wise became her live-in carer for her final months, and has been more conscious of her than ever in recent months when a family member had a cancer scare which, fortunately, proved a false alarm. And then Strictly called.

“It just stopped me in my tracks and made me think, actually, this has to be done. Clare would have loved Strictly and given me a lot of grief – she will be there somewhere, just above my head, shouting: ‘Get it right, concentrate!’”

Wise is taking part in Strictly to honour his late sister - Ray Burmiston/BBC Studios
Wise is taking part in Strictly to honour his late sister - Ray Burmiston/BBC Studios

Throughout our conversation, Wise insists that he can’t dance, at all. That’s not actually true: he puts his decent tango in the 1980s jukebox movie Walking on Sunshine down to generous editing, while Sense and Sensibility was “just walking around the room, bowing to people”. He’s also “terrifically accident-prone”.

But surely he and Thompson – who loves to dance “until her feet bleed” – must have had a first dance at their wedding? He looks stumped, then briefly terrified. “I played guitar with Richard [Lumsden, then-husband of Thompson’s sister Sophie] but yeah, we will have danced. Probably. There was only 12 of us there, I can’t bloody remember. Er, of course! It was to ‘I Will Always Love You’ by, um, the Buzzcocks [sic].” He laughs and throws his hands up. “Let’s just say we danced beautifully.”

Before the pandemic, Thompson would throw “Pointless Parties” every February. There would be three sure things: a good turnout, a crack cover band and Wise standing outside, talking to friends rather than dancing.

He can take some comfort from their friend, Bill Bailey. Neither Wise nor Thompson watch television – he tells me he hasn’t watched TV since about 1985 – but making an exception for last year’s champion proved revelatory. “I realised Strictly was an act of service for the nation. You could see everyone investing so much in it because it was at such a bleak time. This year could be similar because things are still weird and people are anxious and unsure, so having this bit of joyful escapism is the most wonderful thing. It’s about possibility and it’s about just going for it.”

And go for it he will. “We’re having conversations about whether a 55-year-old man should shave his chest,” he says. “I did it when I played a sex magician [Aleister Crowley acolyte Alfred Miller in the Paramount series Strange Angel] and it felt really weird. Do you want a little bit of white hair poking through a sparkly t-shirt? I don’t know.”

Does he have any concerns about objectification? In a recent interview, the Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington said the way he was referred to as “sexy” or “a hunk” was “incredibly demeaning”.

“I’ve been objectified since I started!” Wise says, cheerily. “With this, you’ve got to go the whole hog. I’m demanding knickers are thrown at me! All the time.” Even if they’re your wife’s? “Especially if they’re Em’s.”

Wise's breakout role was as the tousle-locked heartthrob John Willoughby in 1995's Sense and Sensibility - Alamy Stock Photo
Wise's breakout role was as the tousle-locked heartthrob John Willoughby in 1995's Sense and Sensibility - Alamy Stock Photo

He also has a cunning plan to defuse any Strictly-level hysteria. “I’m going on social media for the first time, starting an Instagram account. I won’t read anything, obviously, but I’ll post stuff. We’ve had madness in the past – we got together in madness 26 years ago [when Thompson’s marriage to Kenneth Branagh had recently broken up]. I escaped to the bush in Queensland, in the middle of nowhere, and was papped! You can’t hide, so just be polite. Get on with it. Give them a smile.”

Wise hasn’t always been so comfortable with attention. Spooked by his Austen-powered profile, he engaged in “a gentle bit of career suicide” with the head of Sony Pictures. “I found myself in Hollywood, this new pretty thing being asked, what do you want to do now? I said, I don’t want to work in America. I came back, bought a house and spent a year borrowing money, pouring concrete, laying bricks and doing woodwork. Absolutely not the thing to do after you’ve just made your first hit film, but [it was] absolutely right for me at the time. I’ve always been like that. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a career. I haven’t ever had ambition.”

Well, perhaps. But bagging a spot on prime-time Saturday night telly feels remarkably canny. “I just want to keep being intrigued,” he says with a hint of that dashing scoundrel. “This will be, if nothing else, intriguing. Look, we can be hit by that bus at any time, so what do I really want to be doing now? I’m fit, hale and hearty, full of vim. So this is a great time to do some dancing.”

Strictly Come Dancing launches on BBC One at 7.45pm on Saturday 18 September. The live shows start on Saturday 25 September. Greg Wise’s first column will appear on Friday September 24. He was photographed at The Landmark London