Matthew Macfadyen on the return of Succession: ‘I love playing Tom so much — I don’t even have to learn the lines

I’ll be walking in a tiny square in Siena and someone goes, “TOM! TOM!”’ says Matthew Macfadyen.

‘It’s lovely because people aren’t that interested in me and they don’t want selfies — they’re obsessed with the show. It’s all, “When’s it back? October? What date?” It’s very gratifying that people love it.’ Although some people get a bit confused. ‘Sometimes they’ll shout “GREG! GREG!”’ he grins. Greg (Nicholas Braun) is, of course, the sidekick/whipping boy to Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans: a twisted bromance that, he says, ‘feels like the show’s main love affair’.

People certainly do love Succession — the forthcoming third season of the drama that tracks the internal power struggles of the Murdoch-esque billionaire Roy family is, after its Covid-enforced hiatus, the most anticipated TV return of the year. If you haven’t yet watched it, you have doubtless had endless people telling you that you have to watch it, and they are right.

We’re taking tea in the lobby of a Fitzrovia hotel and thankfully Macfadyen, 46, couldn’t be less like his hilariously vile, venal, social climbing character. In fact he is the anti-Tom. A non-Tom. His favourite adjective is ‘lovely’ — deployed 23 times in an hour. I don’t think he’s ever met anyone who isn’t lovely. He laughs loudly at my lame jokes and he’s self-deprecating to a fault. While Tom would shoot his grandmother to nab a promotion, Macfadyen shrugs that he’s merely ‘a gun for hire’ and is professionally ‘in the wilderness’ when not filming Succession. His 2020 Emmy nomination for the role? ‘Lovely but it’s not tangible. It’s just fluff,’ he demurs.

You can see why he’s a big hit with ladies of a certain age — witness the plethora of cutesy Macfadyen fansites — thanks to his hefty back catalogue of playing dashing, sideburned chaps in British period dramas, such as Howards End, Ripper Street and most notably as Mr Darcy, opposite Keira Knightley, in Joe Wright’s 2005 movie version of Pride & Prejudice. Not forgetting his early 2000s role as an MI5 boss in the long-running BBC series, Spooks, where he met his wife, Keeley Hawes. He is, naturally, not entirely comfortable with this heartthrob status. ‘I don’t really have any feelings about it,’ he splutters, before busying himself with the tea strainer.

All of which is exceedingly English. But he can shapeshift into fast-talking, oleaginous Tom in the blink of an eye. ‘Oh God, honey badger, I wanna dock myself inside you so bad,’ he drawls terrifyingly across the table at one point (luckily the waiter isn’t hovering). It’s a favourite line from a scene between Tom and his wife, Shiv Roy, played by Sarah Snook. ‘The American accent is hard,’ he says. ‘Sarah [who is Australian] and I have days when we’re, like, “We can’t do it today.” But once I’m in it and I can hear it in my head, it’s like a wonderful release. It’s like putting on a hat. Because it’s so far away from how I speak, it’s liberating.’ Tom’s most cringeworthy lines are ‘like a magic therapy. It’s so far removed from what I think is me… but obviously it’s quite close because it’s all coming out from somewhere, isn’t it?’ Are there qualities he shares with Tom then? ‘He’s funny and he’s not stupid. But he’s vain and petty and gauche, like all of us. I love playing him so much. I don’t have to learn the lines, they just go straight in my head because I read them and think, I want to say them, I can’t wait to do this scene.’

It’s testament to both the quality of the scripts and Macfadyen’s nuanced performance that despite Tom being a complete tit, you still root for him. ‘Yeah, he’s not completely unsympathetic,’ he says. ‘He’s quite sweet in some ways. He tries to do his best, it sometimes works, it sometimes doesn’t. I think he genuinely loves Siobhan [Shiv] and Greg, but it’s complicated. And he’s scared a lot of the time.’

Despite having impressive recall of the finer detail of dialogue from the first two seasons, he claims not to remember anything about season three. Which is probably for the best as, truthfully, we don’t really want spoilers, do we? I do glean that the action picks up minutes after the end of season two, when Kendall Roy publicly betrays his father Logan and blows the whistle on a huge corporate scandal, with Greg loitering with intent by his side. As for what’s next in The Tom & Greg Show: ‘Nick and I are as interested as anyone to see where they’ll take it. We don’t know.’ The two actors have become close and hang out in New York during filming. ‘Nick’s an utter delight. He’s gorgeous, a lovely man. Our scenes are really hard to get through without corpsing. We’re thinking we’re hilarious but it’s not as funny to anyone else. The boom monitor is like…’ He pulls an unimpressed expression. ‘Sometimes Nick and I need to have a little chat and say, “Come on, we’re going to embarrass ourselves now.” We have to stop and have five minutes apart. But better that than low energy.’

Those warm, fuzzy feelings are reciprocated. ‘To me, Matthew can do no wrong,’ says Braun (I got an email from Greg The Egg!). ‘As an actor, he is always just solid. You can count on him. He doesn’t judge his work, which I am not good at. He’s a very sensitive, interested and supportive person. And he’s funny as hell.’

His on-screen wife, Snook, concurs: ‘Never underestimate how funny that man can be,’ she says. ‘I was a little intimidated by Matthew when we first met because I knew of his work and thought he was brilliant. But he was just so personable and lovely, such a British gentleman and so easy to get along with.’

If you look hard enough you can find a few people who aren’t obsessed with Succession. Macfadyen and Hawes’ three children, for a start. ‘They haven’t seen it. My daughter [Maggie] who’s 16 is like, “Can’t you just be in a good show, like The Vampire Diaries?”’ he says. ‘It must be so odd seeing your parents on screen.’ And Hawes, a stalwart of quality British TV drama, is rarely off our screens, with acclaimed turns in Line Of Duty, Bodyguard and It’s A Sin in recent years. How do they balance two huge careers with family life in south-west London (they also have a son Ralph, 14, and Myles, Hawes’ 21-year-old son from her previous marriage)? ‘You have to make compromises a bit but you just muddle through like everybody. You just take it day by day. Can I do this? Can you do this? Will it work?’