Johnny Vegas interview

Johnny Vegas reprises his role as small-time drug dealer Moz in the stage adaptation of the BBC sitcom Ideal, opening at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London tonight. The comedian, born Michael Pennington also stars in the British indie film comedy Time Travel Is Dangerous.  And he voices Mr Twit in Netflix's animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Twits, out next week. Here, he talks to JAY RICHARDSON about whether he'll ever return to stand-up, ADHD, falling out with Vic Reeves, writing with Stewart Lee, Lucy Beaumont's chances in Celebrity Traitors and potentially bringing back the much-derided Sex Lives Of The Potato Men.

So, do you prefer being called Johnny or Michael?

I really don't mind. I've family that call me Johnny, bizarrely. Someone used to call me Jamichael because he couldn't make his mind up. Whatever puts you at ease. 

Why return to Ideal after all these years?

Moz is quite possibly my favourite of the many characters I've played. I loved that he was the straight guy who attracted all these strange people. And that he was forever beleaguered by this sense of what now, what next?! 

Since realising I've got ADHD, I can really relate to that. He's so brilliantly written by Graham [Duff]. He just wants to be left alone and relishes doing nothing. It's like a celebration of agoraphobia because we only ever see him leave the flat once in the entire series. Comedically, he's the least funny character, which is almost a relief. It's like being the drummer in a band.

Did Graham write Moz with you in mind?

No, it was a very different show originally. Graham was going to play the dealer and Steve Coogan was going to be the narrator. As if he were a police officer and they'd hidden a camera in a dealer's flat. 

Then I was approached, read the scripts and thought that there was nothing quite like it at the time. It was out of my comfort zone and that attracted me.

You've said that Moz's lifestyle resembled yours. What's it like playing him now, when you've moved on and he hasn't?

Other than finding a new love interest, he's still just stuck there, like the pyramids. Others have moved on. Somebody's been to prison, someone's come back. But his core group of clients keep returning. 

He's in a better place, a happy place. Obviously that can't last. Whenever life is good, it has to go bad. If you surround yourself with those kinds of people, things are never going to go to plan.

Despite running to seven series, do you feel the show was properly backed by the BBC?

Oh never. Stuart Murphy commissioned Ideal and Monkey Dust, which were groundbreaking. That's what BBC Three was set up for. But when he left the channel, we became this unadoptable child. We felt very unwanted and very unpromoted. And it was quite frustrating because we put our heart and soul into it. Yet through word of mouth we became a bigger and bigger show. And we were critically acclaimed. 

Why do you think it's still loved?

The genius of Graham's writing was the characters. It wasn't really about drugs like some shows that came out at the same time. It was about this cast of bizzarios who came together. 

Every time someone comes up to me to tell me that they're a massive fan of the show, I always stop, talk to them and say thank you. Because it was them that kept us going. The only time you see us outside the flat is when we thought we weren't getting recommissioned. 

Then we came back, rising from the ashes. Then, when Moz slid off the roof, I thought that was them killing me off, that they were going to bring in a new main character. 

It was one of those classic examples of public opinion prevailing. It was a well-liked show. We loved making it but you don't realise sometimes how blessed you are. I've never known a cast get on so well. 

Ben Crompton [who plays Colin] is a nightmare because he's just so funny. In the live show, he calls me a different name every time. He damned me with The Resurrected Big Daddy last night.

Is that the stand-up in him?

Yeah, I think so. He's one of the few actors I've ever loved who, when he said he was going to try stand-up, I thought: you should, you absolutely should. Because it's not for everyone. It's the arena of the unwell. And we're both equally unwell.

Can you see yourself properly returning to stand-up after you edged back towards it in early 2020?

I was only doing it as a favour to friends. Nowadays, I just want to sculpt. I'm back into my art, massively. It's what I'd love to do, pretty much full-time, depending on what other projects come in. I always want to have options.

You seem busy enough … 

It's my attention deficit disorder. 'I want to be doing that.' 'I like doing that.' Ideal was a passion project from the start. And it was a fight to get it on iPlayer, that's been a long battle [It was finally put on the streaming platform last October]. 

I need to do what inspires me at any time. It needs to spark my interest. Right now I'm really passionate about creating art again. I wish I hadn't stepped away from it. I wish I'd struck a better balance, like Jim Moir [Vic Reeves].

You were directing for a while ...

I desperately want to do more of that. But unless you're at a certain level, it's just not financially viable. When you neglect other concerns, it's losing you money.

But I loved it, which was bizarre, because it went against the ADHD. I liked having to come up with answers, having to be organised. I loved working with a team, seeing how far we had to go to make something happen. Stand-ups don't always make the best team players. But I like taking an idea and seeing it through to fruition. 

Do you consider yourself an actor now?

I'll forever see myself as a stand-up who fell into acting. And I don't think I've ever felt I truly belong. I love working with actors and I've developed a deep respect for them, I get the anxiety to perform that we all share. So I like directing, putting them at ease. Putting them in a place where they feel they can perform to their best. 

The one thing I miss with stand-up is that you stand and fall by your own standards. You don't have to do it by committee, which is what I've found frustrating throughout my television career. Those suggestions of creative changes where you end up with something with no resemblance to what you started out with. Trying to be original in television is extremely difficult. When I see a show I love, I'm always immensely pleased that someone's won their battle.

Has television ever come close to capturing Johnny's essence live?

I never wanted it to. I remember having a chat with the brilliant comedian Tony Burgess, who wrote for Steve Coogan. He said he wanted a gag every seven seconds. And it's brilliant when you see that, bang, bang, bang!

But I loved Les Dawson's story about the outside loo. 'The myriad of stars'. Imagine saying that in a working men's club! Not just 'please like me, please like me, please like me'. By the time you get to the punchline, and it's a beautiful punchline, he's taken you on a journey.

That's what Johnny does. He had that confidence to go, 'you've got to invest in this. You don't get it for nowt'.   

Did Shooting Stars offer a flavour of Johnny?

Oh, I loved it. The Fast Show and Vic and Bob were my comedy heroes. So to end up on Shooting Stars, going to work and proper belly laughing, being there to witness Matt Lucas in full flow … it was the opposite of being a Vietnam vet. I was there man. I saw it. And it was joyous. You never knew what to expect.

I also did Happiness with Paul Whitehouse. I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to acting with that incredible cast, just dead generous and funny. Pearce Quigley, my God, he made me wet myself with laughter. Every so often a show comes along and you think it'll never get better than this.

But then I did Taskmaster and I've never laughed as hard. Greg [Davies] taking the piss out of us in the studio, I've never enjoyed being so personally offended for hours on end. 

These were shows where you think how fortunate was I to be part of the DNA of this? Shooting Stars was the moment I felt I'd arrived, a little bit.

Then I did their live show and Vic didn't speak to me! I felt like I'd offended him for going off script and doing a Bonnie Tyler impression.

You properly offended him?

He wasn't being funny. It was just Jim being Jim. He's wound down now though. And he's gorgeous. Myself and [sculptor] Emma Rodgers have got a studio in Port Sunlight [in Wirral], he'd had an exhibition there and I saw him. It's been years since we'd had a proper sit-down chat about comedy, the good old days. And The Hernia Hotline. 

That took about 42 takes because we all kept corpsing. Matt Lucas, I could feel him shaking next to me. They shouted ‘action’, the camera was coming round on a slow pan and he'd gone already. I could feel him trembling because he couldn't do The Geordie Jumpers. His voice just kept changing every take. And meeting Geoff Capes! It was fabulous.

You mentioned Paul Whitehouse. Listening to you on his podcast with his wife Mina Conkbayir, you said you'd keep your ADHD if offered the chance to get rid of it. Has the diagnosis helped?

It helps in the sense that I understand myself better. I don't resent myself for not being as good as other people at certain things. I converse with my ADHD. I tell it we've got to do something and it'll be like, 'I don't want to', like it's a stubborn child. I implore it, 'we've got to, I'm very sorry'. I'm learning that it's like a child I have to persuade to go to school.

Rehearsing the Ideal live show, I told everyone that if I seem distant, it's because my brain's just not bothered anymore. It's thinking about something else. I don't want to be discourteous or rude. It's just … gone. It's like a dog that's run off and won't come back. It won't be back for three days but it'll have a lovely time. Right now, this is the maximum amount of focus I can give. 

And trust me, doing the live show, I could also be spending 18 hours a day having anxiety over it. Until a little bit of me, which is almost angry at times goes ‘right, sod it’. I hold onto things too much. And sometimes it tells me when to let go.

So now, I realise why I get anxious over nothing. I realise why my house is the way it is. I realise why I resent simple tasks that it makes me feel are impossible. And to be avoided.

I blame my parents. As an unplanned child, having the chaos of ADHD seems funny.

Are the oddball characters in Time Travel Is Dangerous what drew you to making the film, with two non-actors in the lead roles?

I don't care if they're established actors or not. The script was really, really quirky. The short they'd made before was really funny. And sometimes in this business you need to be blindsided. So to have two central actors who weren't classed as actors, for someone who has that same fear of not being seen as a real actor, well, it was a blessing.

The script was all over the place. It was madness. But you thought, this might just work. I'd acted with Sophie Thompson on Tales From The Lodge. I've been through a spell of doing these indie films that are just great fun to make. Tales was hard work though. I nearly lost a leg to frostbite. 

Nothing like that on Time Travel Is Dangerous thankfully, just a cast that leaves you going: 'Wow!' It was a project I was happy to take a chance on.

Ben Crompton was reading out the film's reviews. Because he likes to distract me before a gig. 'Where the hell is this going?' But others have called it 'genius'. I shouldn't mention the negative ones. Sometimes it's nice to lose people though. They probably voted Brexit.

Your character, 'Botty', he's a familiar role for you in that he's down on his luck and self-pitying ...

Yeah, he's embittered. He feels he was robbed, he was the brains behind the outfit, he's carried it around for such a long time. He has this resentment. But there's atonement for him at the end.

Speaking of Tales From The Lodge, a film that reunited you with Mackenzie Crook, how do you feel about the slating that the pair of you took for Sex Lives Of The Potato Men?

I've had so many compliments in the street about Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. For critics, it was a film that was easy to go after. But many people have told me it's their favourite film. It was like … Parklife by Blur. Social observation. And it was better than it was given credit for. Look at the cast it attracted. It got loads of grief because it was National Lottery funded and that money could have gone to the National Opera. Everybody got snarky about it.

It was a crude film. But it was about larger-than-life people, people that I know. They exist in everyday life. I've heard these conversations in pubs, about penile warts. It was quite disappointing how everyone just distanced themselves from that. 

I hate to namecheck Stewart Lee. He said: 'I've tried to watch your film and they won't print a ticket for it'. So the conspiracy runs deeper than we think. But after he finally watched it, he said:  'I wish they hadn't printed the ticket'. 

I refuse to apologise though. It's a shocker in places. A pensioner holding a penis is not to everyone's taste. So yes, it's a far cry from The Remains Of The Day. 

But we were approached about adapting a TV series of it.

What? Back then?

No, three years ago. And we'd be up for it. With time, things have settled down. [Writer-director Andy Humphries] wanted us to play ourselves, trying to make this TV show about a movie that got panned.

There was a lack of promotion for that film. But you know what I love about it? I never signed an official copy of the DVD. When I was out and about in my camper van, everybody was asking me to sign their illegal burned copy. I'm not sure what that says about its quality!

Stewart Lee directed your stand-up special Who's Ready For Ice Cream? Did Johnny take direction well? 

Trying to film me doing stand-up is like trying to make a squirrel sit and beg. It just won't do it. It will snatch but it'll never sit for you. It'll never reach up, it'll never let you stroke it. I gave Stewart an A4 page with eight boxes with stick men drawn in. That was his script. 

He was brilliant though, I worked with him a lot. He directed me in [the site-specific show] Interiors for the Manchester International Festival and that was a glorious time. Every day we walked through, ad-libbed, ad-libbed and ad-libbed. Stewart wrote it up, handed it back to me, I'd tweak it, make it semi-autobiographical. I loved working with him because I had ultimate respect for him. I mean absolute. I'd stop a bullet for Stew. 

I remember two girls who were hammered coming to see Interiors. And I don't think they were told it wasn't stand-up. One of them was going 'oh Johnny!' And the other was going 'he's not Johnny, he's pretending to be somebody else. Aren't you Johnny?'

Stew made me really get off my arse and think about what I was doing. I was recalling a scene in Who's Ready For Ice Cream? the other day. 

Johnny's in a onesie [on Edinburgh's Royal Mile]. And if you watch it, if you want a metaphor for celebrity, it's a bloke [Tony Pitts] forcing me to dance in a onesie. Everyone in the crowd is going 'it's Johnny Vegas!' and clapping along. And there's one guy, just this one guy, who thinks it's morally corrupt. This tall guy, you can see him thinking 'I don't think this is right, he's being made to do this against his will!'

And yeah, that's TV.

Do you look back fondly on Johnny's stand-up heyday, like breaking through at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe?

I do, yeah. I've never wanted to regret any of it. It was a very personal journey, taking Johnny up and proving something. You can't live with regret. You have go right, what's next? If you wait for opportunity to knock on your door you can end up very angry. You've got to go and knock on other doors.

Like Jim Moir with Vic Reeves, have you essentially retired Johnny?

Obviously I don't do stand-up very regularly. And when I do, I do it more to help those people who were really good to me when I was up and coming. 

But I don't like making grand statements about my career. I don't believe in it because it makes you seem ungrateful, like you're giving ultimatums. And I'm not. It's just that right now, I'm loving making art as Michael. I like making stuff and there's a permanence to it. Fame is fleeting but this is forever.

You've said you thought you'd be sectioned after writing your memoir Becoming Johnny Vegas, which revealed your competing inner voices. It feels like you're in another chapter of your life now. Will you write a second book?

I don't think I'll ever write a book again because I felt so let down by how the publishers promoted it, how they didn't know what to do with it. It was a genuine introspective study rather than 'hey, I can't believe I'm famous'. And it's probably the hardest thing I've ever worked on. But Tesco basically said that they had to sign off on the cover or else they wouldn't stock it.

Very early on, myself and Stewart Lee worked on it being a fictional biography by Johnny, not Michael. And we were told no, no, that'll never sell. And then I, Partridge came out and was a massive hit. And then they went 'hey, we love that idea about you and Johnny!' And we told them we couldn't do it because it had been done. 

That's a shame.

Why didn't they have any faith in us? We knew what we doing. After the Tesco thing, Stew stopped writing it and it became this long, long process of working with many different people, trying to get it right. It was so hard, harder than any exam I ever sat.

[Sunshine on Putty writer] Ben Thompson really helped me. I wrote a chapter one night, but it was kind of 'leave me alone, I can't do this'. He told me it was brilliant though. And that he couldn't ghostwrite for me, I had to do it myself. So I did and it was a long, painful slog. 

I wish I'd gone with an independent publisher. I really do. Because I think the book was far better than they thought. They didn't know what to do with it because it came from the heart, it wasn't about the wallet.

I can't listen to the audio version because Kevin Eldon's version of the Dr Death [inner voice] is just so spot on. He nailed it, just this casual approach to you dying.

Yeah, that must have been horrible, when you'd long since stopped hearing that voice in your head.

To resurrect it, to hear 'you're dying' ... It made me think, if I've retired Johnny, have I lost my defences? Do I lose me?

You're reuniting with Lucy Beaumont in a production of Jim Cartwright's Road next year. What attracted you to the play and how do you think she'll get on in Celebrity Traitors?

I haven't watched The Traitors. But Lucy is far smarter than she allows anyone to give her credit for, so I think she'll do really well if it's about fooling people. 

And with The Road, the director talked me into it. Reading it, again I thought I know these people. I served them in the pub for years. 

Will there be any more Murder on the Blackpool Express series written by Jason Cook?

No, none that I'm aware of. I think that's done and dusted. Sian [Gibson]'s amazing but she's busy and I'm busy.

Finally, you're starring in The Twits. Were you a Roald Dahl fan growing up?

I discovered him through the film adaptations rather than the books. If I'm going to be completely honest, when I was 10 I was reading The Road to Wigan Pier. I was a socialist in the making.

I do love the stories now though. Because they're about underdogs. Becoming aware that it's about people who are undervalued and bad people who get their comeuppance, every dog having its day, made me wish that I'd read him when I was younger. But it might have made me an even angrier young man. 

I'd worked with the director, Phil Johnston, on [Sacha Baron Cohen's] Grimsby, which was very heavily based on ad-libbing. We ad-libbed ourselves to near-on exhaustion on that. I'm amazed and proud that Netflix have stuck with someone with an accent like mine. Every day I waited for the call to say we need someone a bit more generic. We're an odd pair, Phil and I. I have a fear of clowns, he has a love of them.  

Yet he stuck with me, bless him. We did it scripted, we messed around, we ad-libbed, we did everything we could. I was thrilled. I'm a fan of animation and it's absolute genius what he's done with it, it's all down to him. 

• Roald Dahl's The Twits is out on Netflix on October 17. Time Travel Is Dangerous – which also stars  Stephen Fry, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Jane Horrocks, Mark Heap and Sophie Thompson – is out now on digital platforms. Read our four-star  review here. Ideal is at the Bloomsbury Theatre from tonight until Saturday. Tickets

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Published: 8 Oct 2025