RSS

Contact us

FAQs

Sunday 27 May 2012

A splendid lunch with Jimmy McNulty

In the first of an occasional series of interviews over meals, Deborah Ross talks to Dominic West about The Wire and the challenge to an Old Etonian of playing an American cop

He lives in nearby Shepherd’s Bush and says he last came here when he and his wife-to-be, Catherine, were looking for a place to have a lunch with friends after they got married in the local registry office. Did they ever get married? No, they did not, because things kept getting in the way, like babies. ‘We keep having them,’ he says. Their latest and third is a boy, born just four days earlier. Alas, no, they are not thinking of calling him Stinkum Poot Wee-Bay Omar O’Bubbles West, even though it would have been so cool. ‘It’s probably going to be Francis,’ he says, ‘and he’s a sweetheart. He’s at the age when his cries aren’t too loud. We’ve probably got about two weeks.’ He also has a ten-year-old daughter from a previous relationship with Polly Astor, granddaughter of Lord Astor, and as for Catherine, he met her when she served him in Burger King — a Whopper. Only kidding. Catherine is Catherine FitzGerald, the former Countess Durham, and daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin. You knew that, right?

He’s a Sheffield boy, like I said, born into a big Catholic family. He has six siblings and a mother, Moya, who was into amateur dramatics. ‘She loved it and played St Joan. I remember watching her being burned at the stake and my sisters being incredibly alarmed. When I was nine she got me to do The Winslow Boy and I haven’t done anything else ever since, really.’

His father, George, was big in plastics and manufactured vandal-proof bus shelters, which isn’t that sexy, but if you’ve ever stood at a bus shelter and thought, ‘I wonder why this hasn’t been vandalised?’, you probably have George to thank. I ask Dominic if he was brought up in an atmosphere of ‘one day, son, all these bus shelters will be yours’. He says no, not at all. ‘He was great like that, my dad. He wanted me to be a lawyer, was mildly disappointed when I said I wanted to be an actor but always rather liked the fact that I was an actor.’ Did he watch The Wire? ‘He died, unfortunately, but was around for the first couple of years, but he couldn’t handle the language, so he didn’t watch it really. My mum managed five minutes. My wife has managed ten minutes of episode one about five times and falls asleep.’ It’s those shifts at Burger King. They probably take it out of her.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink   |   Comments (3)

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Back to top

Advertisement

Apollo Magazine | Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2012 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved