He is one of Britain’s best-loved actors, but there’s a lot less of Timothy Spall to love these days. His dramatic weight loss over the past three years has changed Spall’s life – personally, professionally and philosophically. But how did the stout thespian, renowned for his physical presence and jowly passion in movies like Secrets And Lies and Mr Turner, actually do it?
‘Lots of walking and watching what I put in my gob,’ Spall explains with typical bluntness. ‘It’s the scoff less diet. Simple science says that if you eat more than you burn, you put on weight. If you eat less, it comes off. But keeping it off isn’t easy. You have to be vigilant. Sticking with it is a massive pain in the a***, but the benefits far outweigh the a***ache.’
Avoiding alcohol has also been key. ‘Booze is riddled with sugar and it doesn’t fill you up,’ he says. ‘If you have a bottle of wine with your dinner, it’s like having two dinners.’
His dramatic weight loss over the past three years has changed Timothy Spall’s life – personally, professionally and philosophically
His current tipple of choice is Diet Coke. He doesn’t ‘follow any programme’ but eats small portions, avoids sugar and fried food and is ‘careful about calories’. Since he trimmed down, it’s honed his hangdog features and given him a leaner frame on which to hang his beloved ‘togs’.
‘I’m 61 and I now have the same chest and waist measurements I had when I was 23,’ he says. ‘It’s liberated me within my profession – I’m open to far more roles. I don’t think I’d have played Ian Paisley [The Journey] or David Irving [Denial],’ he says of the two films he made in 2016. ‘It has opened a lot of doors.’
Spall is almost superstitious in his reluctance to put a precise figure on how much weight he’s lost, but it could be close to four stone – a quarter of his previous weight. Such was the drastic change, some assumed that Spall was ill, but he is in robust health. ‘I feel very well. I have medicals for the films I do, and I seem to scrape through without any bribery. This new healthy lifestyle has meant everything is ticking over very nicely at the moment.’
Spall is almost superstitious in his reluctance to put a precise figure on how much weight he’s lost, but it could be close to four stone
Earlier, he enjoyed ‘a beautiful fish fillet cooked on a skillet’. Now Spall has set the early evening aside to chat about his latest film, Finding Your Feet, in which he stars alongside Imelda Staunton. The charming movie taps into the ‘grey-pound’ success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which employed more mature actors, played to older audiences and raked in more than £100 million.
In his hotel room overlooking Manchester Cathedral, Spall puts on the kettle and mulls over the Marigold effect. ‘You don’t have to turn 50 now and go all “shawl and bonnet”, as my nan liked to say,’ he laughs. ‘It’s no longer deemed unseemly for people to explore new horizons in later life and find love again if they have lost it. Mercifully, the film isn’t an exploration of their sex lives, but it does look at the older generation not writing themselves off from new opportunities.’
In Finding Your Feet we meet inspiring characters like Joanna Lumley’s Jackie, who is grey-haired, fuller-figured, smart and attractive. ‘She looks great!’ growls Spall of her distinctly non-Ab Fab appearance.
Spall himself plays Charlie, a lovable rogue beset by inner torment – and few actors do haunted like he does. ‘Don’t say that,’ he cries. ‘I’ll start overdoing it.’
The storyline also features some dance sequences that reveal Spall to be quite the nifty mover. ‘My dance moves are heavily indebted to Suggs from Madness in his prime,’ he deadpans. ‘With a touch of Baryshnikov.’
Just don’t expect to see Spall on Strictly Come Dancing. ‘Not my cup of tea at all,’ he grunts. ‘I’m more likely to go hang-gliding.’
Spall became a household name in the Eighties with his portrayal of Brummie electrician Barry Spencer Taylor in the comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Yet the show’s huge success had a bizarre effect on his career. ‘It arrested it for a while, which was odd,’ he says. ‘Being suddenly very famous and unemployed was not a good feeling. There was a period when people assumed I was that character and it was a problem. I had three kids and no work.’
Spall with Imelda Staunton in Finding Your Feet. ‘It’s no longer deemed unseemly for people to explore new horizons in later life,’ says Spall
Spall’s children, Pascale, Rafe and Sadie, are now grown up and he is a grandfather. Rafe, 34, has become a celebrated actor in his own right. Could he ever be better than his old man? ‘He probably is already,’ says Spall. ‘He’s a very fine actor, handsome too – he got his good looks from his mother, obviously. He’s my boy, I’m brimful of pride.’
Spall is in Salford with Vanessa Redgrave for his next film, Mrs Lowry & Son, in which he plays the great northern painter L S Lowry. He has done his homework, studying industrial Lancashire life, and has even viewed the little-known erotic pictures the artist left behind after his death in 1976. ‘I’ve seen them all,’ Spall says approvingly. ‘They’re open to interpretation of course, but he was a very inventive man.’
Spall learned to paint in 2012 in preparation for playing J M W Turner in Mike Leigh’s award-winning Mr Turner, and he still keeps his hand in, ‘although there is very little painting in the Lowry film, funnily enough’.
Lowry snubbed five honours in his lifetime, notably the offer of a knighthood in 1968. Spall had no such problem, accepting an OBE from the Queen in 2000.
‘We didn’t speak for long,’ Spall recalls drily of his meeting with Her Majesty. ‘She had a lot of people to do that day.’ He adds that a knighthood, although unlikely, ‘would be a nice thing for my mum to see. She’s 88 now’.
Spall is one of four boys, raised in working-class Battersea, south London, by his mother Sylvia, a hairdresser, and father Joe, a postal worker. Now, as a garlanded artiste, he lives in a £1.5 million apartment in central London. Spall wonders what class that makes him now.
‘Without sounding too highfalutin, I suppose I’m artist class,’ he muses. ‘But I brought up my kids in south-east London and they all went to local schools. The only difference was that when they came home, there would often be someone famous sitting in the living room.’
His role as Peter ‘Wormtail’ Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films elevated Spall to global stardom. ‘It’s one of the smallest parts I’ve ever played and the one I’m most known for all over the world,’ he marvels. ‘I still don’t feel famous – I’ve never not felt part of the ordinary world – so it constantly surprises me when people stop me in Sainsbury’s.’
The actor almost left the ordinary world in 1996, when he suffered acute myeloid leukaemia and ‘peeked over the precipice’. ‘It was ghastly, a very difficult time,’ he remembers. ‘My greatest fear wasn’t death itself, but leaving my wife and young children alone.’
His wife, Shane (‘my Rock of Gibraltar’), nursed him through those dark days, and later appeared as his long-suffering galley-maid in their popular documentary series Timothy Spall: All At Sea, in which the couple cautiously conquered the high seas in their Dutch barge The Princess Matilda.
‘I think people liked it because we didn’t tell fibs or have any back-up boats,’ Spall says of their maritime adventure. ‘But we wouldn’t do it again. It’s a dangerous business.’
Does Shane approve of her newly streamlined husband?
‘She’s more than delighted to put up with me however I am,’ he chuckles. I tell him we all are – he’s still a national treasure, just one with a much smaller chest.
‘Finding Your Feet’ is in cinemas on Feb 23