Interrogating Peter Capaldi, Who is (Actually, Disconcertingly) Very Nice

It is surprising to talk to Peter Capaldi and hear him refrain from yelling wildly specific, increasingly horrifying oaths at you.

It is in no way surprising that people who run into the 65-year old Scottish actor want him to do just that.

“People come and ask me to swear at them and tell 'em to fuck off,” Capaldi says via Zoom. Dressed in a black suit jacket and white shirt buttoned to the top, he smiles a smile that does not, in fact, seem full of coiled malice, but instead looks quite genuine: “Which is nice.”

Though his 40-plus year career in film and television has seen him play all sorts of folks —most of them a little odd, spectacularly coiffed and more than a little chatty—Capaldi is best known for two roles.

He played the absolutely demonic Malcolm Tucker, profanity-driven communications director and hilariously merciless political enforcer for the Prime Minister in the BBC series The Thick of It and its terrific 2009 spin-off movie, In the Loop. (Both the series and the film were created by Armando Iannucci, who went on to savage U.S. politicos with Veep; Iannucci's writing staff included Succession creator Jesse Armstrong.)

And from 2013 to 2017, Capaldi played the twelfth incarnation of the chaotic, immortal Time Lord Doctor Who, making a mark on the British sci-fi franchise which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023.

In Criminal Record, an eight-episode series whose third installment premiered this week on AppleTV+, Capaldi plays a completely different kind of fellow from the above: a sullen, angry cop, and a secret-keeping, interior one at that.

Co-produced by Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins (Vera, Shetland) and written by BAFTA nominee Paul Rutman (The Virgin Queen), Criminal Record stars Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegarty, a gaunt detective with decades of sketchy law enforcement under his belt and a whole mess of secrets he'd prefer to keep locked away.

When an anonymous domestic violence call comes into a London police station—a panicked woman accusing her partner of a murder long thought solved—it puts Hegarty up against the young and hungry detective June Lenker (Cush Jumbo of The Good Wife and The Good Fight fame), whose view of The Job is radically different from the hostile Hagerty’s. Framed by the 2011 London riots and more recent scandals that have rocked the city’s Metropolitan Police Service, Criminal Record is a blend of noir thriller and canny drama, focusing on race and crime in 21st century Britain.

Capaldi usually plays characters who speak their mind vigorously and often, whose words and actions are a direct link to the audience’s understanding of the story. In some ways, Hegarty lets you know exactly what he’s about: when interviewed by Lenker, he refers to the Black man he jailed as “a poor man’s OJ.”

On the other hand, he is also a mighty unreliable narrator, when he is compelled to share at all. “[Hegarty] hides all the time,” Capaldi says. “He hides how he feels and he hides what's happening. In screen acting, people say that when you're in front of the camera, you’ve got to do nothing. But you can't really do nothing, you have to have something going on. We cannot reveal to the audience Hegarty’s true self. We can’t wink and nudge. I'm not really used to playing that kind of character.”

With his wife producing, Capaldi got into the development process early. “She was also looking for something for Cush Jumbo at the same time,” he says, “so the material was able to be developed with [both of] us in mind. It's very unusual to be involved so early on, and also very unusual for writers, I guess, to know exactly who they're writing for.”

Capaldi is brilliant here, cold and angry and defensive in a dangerous way, especially in the scenes with Cush, which bring the intensity of two professionals—one earnest and increasingly pissed off, one cynical and skilled in manipulation—who are both trying to decide if they are enemies or allies while trying to get over on one another in different ways. It’s a tension that lasts until literally the last scene of the last episode.

“Cush and I both decided, without really discussing it, to not really rehearse,” Capaldi says, “We stuck to the lines but we didn't really know how we were going to deliver them. So we just went at each other and our responses were completely in the moment.”

Capaldi’s career is that of a journeyman character actor whose singular charisma and look has increasingly put him in leading roles in the past 20 years -- like Christopher Walken, if a part calls for a Peter Capaldi kind of guy, he’s kind of your only option. So it’s fascinating to see him cast against type in Criminal Record. A long-standing Hey, it's that guy! actor whose screen presence is stickier than most; he says he’s been recognized in America ever since his first role in Local Hero at age 23 but only found a truly wide audience with Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker. (Though like Tucker and the Doctor, Hegarty is full of rage, sublimated though it may be.)

“The Thick of It is old now, but there's a contemporaneous quality about Malcolm Tucker that makes people think he’s still around,” Capaldi says. “I meet people working in politics or whatever who feel that that show is some kind of balm for them.”

Doctor Who, on the other hand, is both a British institution and a property thought dead and buried in the 1990s, only to come roaring back to life and find a new audience starting in 2005. “That show goes on and expands and people get into it and it sort of never fades away,” Capaldi says. “I’m still Doctor Who, even though I haven't done it for a long time.”

And like many a Brit of his generation, Capaldi sang in a post-punk band, a quartet with the rather unfortunate name of the Dreamboys (Craig Ferguson was their drummer for a spell).

“Worst name in the world,” he says, “Might as well have been called the Chippendales. We thought we were Caligari-esque, Kafkaesque, strange, nightmarish. Not with that name.” (That said, any tune from their self-released EP -- “Béla Lugosi's Birthdáy” b/w “Outér Limits” and “Shàlle We Dànce” -- would fit right in on a compilation of goth-pop deep cuts.) For Capaldi, being in a band wasn't just about making music: “You would evoke a worldview, and then you could dress accordingly and it was wonderful. But the more and more effort we put in, the less and less distance we'd go.”

The DIY vibe, in turn, influenced Capaldi’s work as an actor. “I was very uncomfortable around actors for a long time because they might as well have been smoking pipes, wearing cravats and talking about Shakespeare,” he says. He never went to drama school so he had no idea how to approach a script or how to get from point A to B in a scene.

“But the cauldron of chaotic creativity that is being in a band is how I like to work,” he continues. “Like being in a band, in acting, you have to be able to say, ‘I don't know what it is, but I can feel something going on over here. I'll try something in that direction. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn't.’ I think that's all very musical.”

Originally Appeared on GQ