Biggest Fans

In 2007, the three-man team of director James Griffiths and screenwriters/leads Tim Key and Tom Basden made the award-winning short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. Centered on a man living on a stunningly beautiful remote Welsh island who employs his favorite musician to play a private concert, that story has been fleshed into a feature-length film now with The Ballad of Wallis Island.

As I tell Tim and Tom below, this is a hilarious and heartwarming film. It also never feels like a short film that has been stretched well beyond its breaking point. Here, Carey Mulligan joins the cast as former musical and romantic partner Nell to Tom Basden's Herb. He agrees to the gig under financial and solo career stress without being told she will be playing, making this a reunion. Nell has left that lifestyle behind and has a new significant other.

Tensions flare and conflicted feelings arise, all while Tim Key's obsessed but wholesome fan Charlie quips and jokes in the background as part of his personality deflecting away from inner sadness, a means to diffuse some of the strife between Herb and Nell, and primarily because the character is naturally a goof. The endearingly silly humor is sampled at the beginning of this talk.

It was a pleasure to talk with Tim and Tom about writing and starring in this feature-length version of a work that holds significant artistic value to them. They are funny and insightful, demonstrating growth as individuals, writers, and actors within the past 18 years since that short film. With moving music rounding out the witty humor and terrific performances, The Ballad of Wallis Island is well worth checking out. Please enjoy the interview:

Robert Kojder: Hi, I'm Robert Kojder with Flickering Myth. I'm from the Windy City, you know, Portland.

[laughter]

Tim Key: That's a good opener!

RK: I have to ask, who came up with that joke?

TK: Him! [Pointing to Tom Basden]

Tom Basden: No idea, was it me? I don't know. I think some of that scene was improvised. Charles just gets everything wrong. He doesn't know who he's talking about.

TK: I managed to channel how much I know about America into my character.

RK: [laughs] Those jokes seemed fun to improvise or write, especially the Reese's bit. That had me cracking up.

TK: Yeah, that stuff, it's a fun film to be in. There's definitely a lot of story and a lot of stuff that has to be said, but also, there is room to enjoy it. And our director is very tolerant. So all the stuff in the shop, it's good. You have like three hours in the shop, you've gotta do the script, but also you're allowed to just sort of look around the shop and say what you see slightly. It's very enjoyable.

RK: Speaking of that, can you talk about your approach to balancing the comedy and the emotion?

TK: Yeah, that's the difficult thing. We've done it for like 20 years, so we'd be disappointed with ourselves if we didn't get the comedy on screen. It's not a given, but you've got a chance of getting that in. Then, the emotion, you just gotta work hard with the script and try and give yourselves the best chance of making a story that might be engaging. Once you've done that, within the scenes, you can sort of listen and try to act with some truth. And hopefully, you'll be able to uncover that emotion. Also, I think there's a slight advantage: if the comedy works, you can make the emotion unexpected. It can reveal itself out of nowhere. As an audience member, you can be surprised that there's a scene where you're engaged emotionally. And then my character can clatter off, and we go back into comedy in a shop for a bit. We're very lucky in 18 days of shooting for those two things to be enjoyable and challenging.

RK: Tom, I've read that you have written comedy songs before. These are obviously much different songs, but can you talk about how that experience helped or informed you in writing these songs?

TB: I've been writing songs of various forms for a long time, some of which, you know, performing on stage and some just for myself that I would play in my bedroom and then get very sweaty at the thought of anyone ever hearing them. But like many actors, I'm probably quite a frustrated musician, and I would quite like to have been a musician. All of the experience writing songs over the years for different things didn't really help with this. It helped me generate the music for the film quite quickly, as well as the lead-up to it, and sort of commit to it a bit. That's the thing with anything like this; there comes a point where you've just gotta say, okay, these are the songs. This is the song we're playing in this scene. I'm now gonna press send on this email to Carey Mulligan, and they're gonna hear this demo. That's just what it is [laughs]

RK: How nerve-wracking is it to press send on an email to Carey Mulligan?

TB: It's horrendous [laughs]

TK: The first time, and this is how Carey Mulligan came to be in the film, is she'd asked me to do something about five years ago, and then when we made our hit list of Nells to be in the film, Carey was at the top. So then I told Tom and Griff [director James Griffiths], I've got her email address; shall I email her? Both of them were like, yeah, I don't think you have her email address. Anyway, I'm very proud of the script for the film, but my email to Carey Mulligan is absolutely next-level!

RK: You should adapt that into a movie next.

TK: Exactly. If we can dramatize my email to Carey Mulligan, we're in business! But yeah, once you hit send two hours later, you're checking. The next day, you're checking, and you sort of think at some point after about 10 or 15 days, she's not gonna reply. Luckily, she replied quite quickly, and that started the wheels in getting her into the movie.

RK: That's amazing. Tim, your character Charlie, hides a well of pain, sadness, loneliness, and even some insecurity underneath all the jokes as if the humor is like a distractive coping mechanism. Can you tell me the challenges of putting everything together into one performance?

TK: This is right in my wheelhouse. It'd be more challenging for me to be in an action film where maybe the character doesn't have as much going on, isn't being funny, and is trying to make his space rocket go into the air. This is this kind of character... Me and Tom started out writing sketches, and they were quite character-driven. So this kind of staple character, a guy who talks nonsense, was, again, in our wheelhouse. Then it's pulling the emotion in with it. But that came quite easy once you give them a bit of a backstory, and there is a bit of pain there. You can balance them off.

The scenes near the start are incredibly annoying for the recording artist. He's invited to this island, and after about 40 minutes on it, it feels quite natural to be emotional. It never felt like a stretch. It all felt like it was coming from the same character, which is the dream, really. But it takes some hard work two years before you make the film when you're writing it and setting everything in place to give yourself a chance to perform it on screen.

RK: I know you adapted this from a short film you all made about a decade ago. Can you tell me why now felt like the right time to turn it into a feature-length film?

TB: To be honest, we always wanted to come back to that short film, and if we had got our act together or even had someone really pushing the project like 10 years ago, we probably would've wanted to do it then. We definitely would've done it. However, the real benefit of having waited this long is that we are now finally at the right age to play these characters. We were far too young for the characters when we made the short. Now we can bring things into the film that are sort of from our own life and our own experience and speak to what it's like to be in your mid-to-late forties, looking back on your twenties and looking back on how you felt about your early career and your first loves and what that feels like to remember kind of that and sort of long to return to it, but not be able to. That has ended up being a very big part of the film. From going to screenings, watching the movie, and seeing those themes there, I think we've become aware of what a big part of the emotional engine is. We certainly couldn't have done that until now.

RK: For Herb, the lyrics and songs are entangled with his love for Nell, and for her, they're about the music, and they can be separated from that past relationship and the current moment. I think it's tapping into the idea that art can mean something different from artist to artist. So, years down the road, do you think this film will carry a distinct or separate meaning for either of you?

TB: Yeah, I think so. Tim and I have found ourselves getting quite emotional when we've been in screenings for the film or talking to people who've seen it because we didn't know that we'd ever get to make it, even though we always knew we wanted to, having made the short film. There is certainly something to revisit, like a fulfillment of an early idea or a promise or potential that has been an unexpectedly moving thing for us. I'm sure we'll feel differently about it again in, you know, 5 or 10 years' time, maybe 20 years, when we come back to the characters for a third time and make the sequel. [laughs] Inevitably that's what's going on for us as performers when making this, but also for the characters. To go back to your point about how we balanced the comedy and drama, a lot of it came very organically because I think the way that we were feeling about the material was kind of the way our characters were feeling when we were in those scenes.

TK: I think, on various levels, we are quite nostalgic, and maybe we'll be quite sentimental about this. I like the film and so, but I feel like in 20 years' time, maybe we'll have made other stuff, but I feel my reaction to the film in 20 years will be partly that it's, I like what we did, but I can't believe that we managed to make that film at that time in our lives. It is sort of a similar feeling that I think we both have to the short film. When we look back on that, I like that short film, but I also think we have a relationship with where we were in those days. I'm glad we've made it; it's nice to have something you will return to and look at. We'll put it down in a month or two, but I can imagine us watching it at some point in 20 years together and going, that was mad that we made that feature film.

RK: James Griffiths also directed the short film. Was he always on board to direct this adaptation, or did it take some convincing?

TB: No, no!

TK: It didn't take any convincing.

TB: I don't wanna speak for him, but I think he had a good time making that short film with us. I think as soon as we told him that we were working on the feature script, he was really excited, and he wanted to read it and be of any help that he could, but he also gave us our space to get there and work out exactly what we wanted it to be. James is such a lovely guy to work with because he's so talented and he's so committed, but he is also very trusting, and he really did give us the time and space both on set and in the lead-up to figure out what it was and to figure out exactly how everything was gonna work and what it would sound and feel like. He had confidence in us. That's a very lovely thing when you're working with a director, and you know they've got your back.

TK: We were very much a team when we made the short. It was a very warm, enjoyable experience. Whenever we talked about making it again, it wasn't the idea of making the feature; it wasn't the idea of Tom and I thinking, well, let's write a script, and then let's see who would be the best person to direct with Griff being the front runner, it would always be the three of us meeting together, and we come as a three for this, which can be tricky, In the film industry, notoriously, you can't choose exactly who you have directing your thing always, but we were pretty adamant, and lucky when the film got green-lit. Everyone was happy for the three of us to go forward together. Otherwise, it would've been a really difficult thing, I think, for all three of us, too, and I can't conceive that we would've made it if it wasn't the three of us making it together.

RK: I know we discussed improvisational moments before, but the island is so beautiful. Does that cause improvisational moments itself? And for each of you, what was your favorite spot on the island?

TK: Definitely. We get on with writing the script, and we're doing other things, and Griff was there for a long time before we got there; he's very thorough and diligent and leaving no stone unturned. So he is driving around with his mate peers, and they're finding stuff. Once we started performing on that island, particularly in the shop and the house, we were very reactive to it and went up there maybe two weeks before we shot to see whether anything would inform the script. In terms of where my favorite place was to film, I think, weirdly, the short answer is maybe the shop. It was very low pressure in the shop.

It was just a nice moment; it was never emotional in the shop, and it was always nice to see Sian Clifford in the shop. Personally, I was either in the shop doing a nice scene with Tom and Sian or in the shop doing a nice scene with Carey and Sian. It was cramped. It wasn't easy to film in, but it was enjoyable, a little bit cartoonish.

TB: My favorite place to shoot was probably the beach at low tide on that particular stretch of coastline in the West of Wales. When the tide goes out, you go from having, probably, a meter or two of pebbles to suddenly, when at low tide, you've just got this massive expanse of golden sand. It's just incredibly beautiful. There was one scene that we shot where we were walking back from the shop, Tim and I, and that's all low tide on the beach, and the sun was out. At times like that, you feel like it's everything you want from a shoot, that you get to be in this incredibly beautiful place. It comes at a time in the film when they're really opening up to each other and already getting on. The use of locations to sort of map how the characters feel in the film is brilliantly done. It's something that I didn't pay a lot of attention to when we were shooting, actually. It's just when you look back at the film and go, oh my God, they've done so well with those locations at certain times of the film. They add so much, particularly emotionally, to what's happening.

RK: Thank you so much for your time. This movie is hilarious and heartwarming, and I loved it. Before we go, Tim, give me some winning lottery numbers.

TK: [laughter] 4, 19, 23, 28, 40 and 41.

RK: Thank you! Have a great day.

No, Tim Key doesn't know why he's dressed as a pigeon either. In Mickey 17, triple-Oscar-winner Bong Joon-ho's recent sci-fi blockbuster, the comedian plays a man desperate to join a mission to colonise the ice planet Niflheim. The next thing he knows, he's on the spaceship – inexplicably trussed up in a luxuriant pigeon suit and acting as the expedition leader's lackey. Can Key shed any light on this turn of events?

"No I can't," he says, decisively. He enquired about his character's outfit during his first meeting with Bong. "And he laughed and didn't answer." On set, Key says he "shuffled over in my costume" and asked again. "And he laughed again." At the premiere, the Parasite director gave Key "a big hug, and then I said: 'Just going back to this pigeon thing ... ' and he laughed again. I don't think I'm going to ask him any more."

Despite not being privy to even the most basic information about his character, Key certainly made Pigeon Man his own. It's difficult to describe his performance in the film, which stars Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, as anything other than very Tim Key-y: it's the velocity of his sentences, the raising of the eyebrows, the combination of boyish eccentricity, melting desperation and a tendency, when pushed, towards bone-dry belligerence. This singular mode is the common denominator in the 48-year-old's sprawling CV: present in everything from his criminally underrated sketch show Cowards to his Edinburgh award-winning live act to his pitch-perfect stint as Alan Partridge's Sidekick Simon.

There is something ineffable about Key's comedic presence – even a legend like Steve Coogan has admitted that upon meeting his future co-star he struggled to work out "why what he was doing was funny". While the Partridge gig did give Key a profile boost, this unpinpointable idiosyncrasy has kept him a cult figure, even within British comedy. Now, improbably, it looks as if it might make him a mainstream global star.

I'd just be shaking my head thinking: 'The esteemed Hollywood actress is now talking about my poetry show with Tom Basden'

It's not just decorated directors who have become enamoured of Key (Bong recently described a collection of his poetry – which renders the surreal, the extreme and the utterly mundane in pithy yet jarringly prosaic verse – as "one of the most amazing things I've ever read"). America is cottoning on, too. The US's embrace of offbeat UK comedy talent has been gathering steam for a while (those in particularly high demand include Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jamie Demetriou, Richard Gadd, Will Sharpe, Brett Goldstein and Richard Ayoade), but Key's inordinately wry stylings seemed particularly unlikely to translate. Apparently, not the case. Key spent last autumn in LA filming The Paper, the much-anticipated sequel to the US version of The Office, in which he has a major role. Soon after, his new film The Ballad of Wallis Island premiered at Sundance to a standing ovation ("One of the more overwhelming things that's happened to me") and has since been released across the Atlantic to glowing reviews.

Based on Key and his Cowards colleague Tom Basden's 2007 Bafta-nominated short, the film sees reclusive lottery winner Charles (Key) pay his favourite musician, indie-folk has-been Herb McGwyer (Basden, who also wrote all the film's legitimately beautiful songs), to play a gig on a tiny Welsh island. Unbeknown to McGwyer, Charles has also invited his ex-collaborator and old flame Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) in an attempt to get the band back together. Key admits it's a "quirk" that this deeply British film was released in the US first, but is "surprised and delighted" at its reception. So am I, considering it shouts out Monster Munch, Mick Hucknall and BBC 6 Music presenter Gideon Coe. Key is still unsure how many of the jokes will land, "because there's no chance an American would laugh at any of those things". Ultimately, though, the film's quintessential Britishness – it also features Olympic levels of emotional constipation – "felt like a positive rather than a negative". With that thought, he begins to doubt himself. "Maybe we've accidentally made a film that only works in America."

Time will soon tell. Key is now back on home turf, his local coffee shop in Kentish Town, north London, ahead of the film's imminent UK release. It's a scorching May day and he is dressed for it: T-shirt, shorts, bright stripy socks, colourful trainers. Softly spoken and given to sudden, bashful smiles, he is feeling "self-conscious" about chatting in the silence of the cafe's informal co-working space, where he sometimes writes himself. On stage, Key's alter ego is petulant, commanding and bemusingly elliptical. In real life, only the latter remains. Last night, he tells me, he went to see the hit Gareth Southgate play Dear England, which he describes as "absolutely fine" and "not a problem" – a verdict that could be glowing, neutral or damning, I honestly have no idea.

Generally, though, Key plays it straight. He certainly doesn't have the same compulsion to crack jokes as his character Charles, who seems powerless to stop the stream of dubious puns and inane chatter that spools out of him as he tries to smooth things over between Herb and Nell. Yet, alongside this general buffoonery, Key manages to convey Charles's gradually revealed grief with the utmost subtlety and poignancy, in what I tell him is quite an incredible dramatic performance. "Oh wow," he whispers, drowning the compliment in absurdly intense embarrassment. Seriously, though, he does "think there's less difference between comedy acting and [dramatic] acting than you'd think. It's all about finding the truth." Having spouted such a luvvie cliche, he puts his head in his hands. "Oh my God."

Key began his comedy acting career on a strange but indisputably triumphant note. After graduating from the University of Sheffield, he moved back to his home city of Cambridge and successfully auditioned for the Footlights comedy troupe – without mentioning his lack of student status. His peers – including Mark Watson, Peep Show's Sophie Winkleman and his future Cowards comrades – did eventually find out, but by that point he was indispensable; they ensured he was still able to perform in their 2001 Edinburgh fringe production, which was nominated for the festival's newcomer award.

In the intervening years, Key has worked steadily: there have been Radio 4 shows, the sketch series, a sitcom (2022's The Witchfinder), a double act called Freeze with Basden, various Partridge iterations and myriad TV appearances. But his success has never felt like "a runaway thing" – at no point has he been "swept away" by a powerful industry tide and found himself "in a long-running sitcom or playing Lewis or something". This means, at the end of every onscreen project, he still goes back to his solo work: the poetry books, the live shows. There are upsides and downsides. "You never feel like you've lost your way creatively; you might have lost your way financially ..."

A case in point: Key has spent recent months finishing his new book, LA Baby, a semi-fictionalised, poetry-peppered account of his time spent filming The Paperin Hollywood last year. He looks panicked when I bring up the show – a mockumentary set at a failing Midwestern newspaper – and insists The Paper itself is "not relevant" to the book. So let's just say LA Baby is a hilarious and often dreamlike chronicle of Key's mounting insecurities about his inability to fit into his costume, do an American accent and generally act on an unnamed big-budget TV series.

Last September, Key arrived in LA for the first time, feeling "petrified", stressed by the city's ongoing heatwave and failure to cater for pedestrians ("I love walking around"). Living alone, he initially had no social circle and was only required on set half the week. The writing started as a "very enjoyable form of therapy" in the face of loneliness, clammy discombobulation and homesickness (the last one manifests in the book in imagined sightings of BBC news presenter Nicholas Witchell and an extended fantasy about an Only Fools and Horses cuckoo clock). It was a period that echoed his experience of the pandemic, when he started writing "to stay afloat" during months by himself in his north London flat: his anthology He Used Thought As a Wife covers Key's time chugging beer, craving hugs and losing touch with reality during the first lockdown, interspersed with grotesque vignettes sending up governmental incompetence.

Mercifully, his isolation in LA was far more short-lived: by the end of the three-month stint, he was filming more frequently, had befriended his castmates and connected with one or two English expat comedians he knew from back home "who generously introduced me to their circle of friends. By the end of it, I had quite a nice little group."

I can imagine myself on the outskirts of comedy trying to make friends with Alex Horne. I've definitely got it in me to fanboy

In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Key embodies another cartoonishly lonely character: Charles's heartbreakingly solitary existence is best summed up in the image of him aggressively playing a solo game of swingball. Does Key consider isolation a recurring theme in his work? He seems doubtful. "I hadn't noticed that. I don't know. I don't think those two things are linked. Maybe they are." Does he find loneliness a creatively fertile state? "Dunno. Maybe. I think that's more for you to say." He doesn't seem overly keen on analysing the prospect (or perhaps he's just not a fan of introspecting in the company of journalists, which would be fair enough), yet it's clear he does funnel his psyche into his work: he would be "interested" he says, to to re-read He Used Thought As a Wife, which he wrote during lockdown, "because I probably was going out of my mind, and it would be interesting to go back into it".

Charles, on the other hand, isn't especially autobiographical. For a start, he's an obsessive fan – a compulsion Key doesn't share: he never had any comedy heroes, let alone musical ones. That said, in a different life he can imagine himself "on the outskirts of comedy trying to make friends with [Taskmaster co-host] Alex Horne". Also, he did get starstruck bumping into ex-England cricket captain Mike Atherton. "So I've definitely got it in me to fanboy."

Another person Key seems slightly starstruck by is his co-star Mulligan. He and Basden co-wrote the film during lockdown, and the Oscar nominee topped the list of dream Nells. Key happened to have her personal email address; a few years prior she'd asked him to host a fundraiser she was organising. He'd actually declined – MCing a big event being something he'd "find really, really hard to do". Still, he took a punt. Mulligan was unexpectedly keen; it turned out she was a longtime admirer of Key and Basden's work – specifically, the pair's Radio 4 series, Tim Key's Poetry Programme. "It's a deep cut," he nods, mystified. During their US press tour, Mulligan would sometimes reference the show. "And I'd just be shaking my head thinking: 'This is insane: the esteemed Hollywood actress is now talking about my poetry show with Tom Basden.'"

Mulligan may be the headline name, but The Ballad of Wallis Island's real charm patently stems from Key and Basden's decades-honed dynamic. This is perhaps why its wholesome parting message – meaning over money, kindness over ego, the true and the good over the shallow and the starry – packs such a punch. For Key, the achievement of having made the film is inextricably bound up with that bond. The first time he was asked in an interview to pick his favourite scene, he chose one with Mulligan. The second time, one with Basden. But "I found it really difficult to say it – I got really emotional. It's easy to get blinded by the new and the fun. It's also easy to get complacent and take for granted a friend who's really, really talented. Not everyone has that."

For all the lavish, baffling blockbusters, A-list co-stars and LA stints, making The Ballad of Wallis Island is proof of his longstanding good fortune – and a reminder "that the other, more famous people aren't better than this person you had all along".

The Ballad of Wallis Island is in UK cinemas on 30 May.


via The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/may/25/tim-key-interview-ballad-wallis-island)

Bong Joon Ho would not stop laughing. They were at brunch, Director Bong, his producer Dooho Choi and comedian-slash-poet-slash-actor Tim Key, and Key was obviously delighted. Being cast in Mickey 17, Director Bong's follow up to Parasite? Yes please. He did want to know one thing though.

"When I first met them, I'd read the script," says Key. "And so obviously, my main question is why am I dressed as a pigeon?  Director Bong is laughing. And I'd say, 'Okay, but why?' Carries on laughing."

Costume fittings came and went, and the shoot arrived. "On the first day I'm wearing it, he's laughing. Shoot all the scenes, and then go to the premiere, watch the film. No idea why I'm dressed as a pigeon. And then we go to this drinks do after the premiere, find Director Bong. Director Bong gives me a big hug and I say, 'Um, just going back to this pigeon costume – why am I dressed as a pigeon?' And he laughs again, and that's that."

Key is relating this from his home in North London and cracking up. On the wall behind is a picture of him and his longtime comedy partner Tom Basden with the Cheeky Girls at a charity football tournament. He's come a long way.

Key has popped up in every British comedy worth watching in the last 10 years, from various Alan Partridge ventures as twitchy, crumpled Sidekick Simon to Peep Show, Detectorists, Stath Lets Flats and Inside No 9, had a hand in the creation of Taskmaster and has written several extremely good volumes of poetry, all while become a totally unique kind of not-quite-stand-up-but-really-funny performance poet.

Now he and Basden – who you've seen in After Life, Here We Go and David Brent: Life on the Road, along with loads of other stuff – have written and star in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a feature-length revisiting of a short film of the same name they made in 2007. The premise is the same: an eccentric multimillionaire Charles (Key) invites his favourite early 2010s indie-folk musician Herb McGwyer (Basden) to his private island under false pretences. But this time Carey Mulligan's in it as McGwyer's estranged former bandmate Nell Mortimer, who's also been invited along too without Herb's knowing.

The story could have gone a bit Misery ("Look, if there's a guy who's being deceitful to get someone onto a more or less deserted island, it does feel like it's hard not to make him kill the other guy") but it's an utterly lovely thing, a big-hearted sort-of-romance about regret and nostalgia that's also jammed full of funny, funny stuff.

It was picked for this year's Sundance Film Festival, which felt like a useful thumbs-up, though the screening itself was slightly terrifying. "All the different options are on the table, I suppose." He ponders. "I don't think the option of 'it's a terrible film' was on the table, but you worry that it might just wash over people."

It didn't. "The reaction was kind of crazy. And then there was..." He laughs. "A standing ovation." He sounds half embarrassed, half overwhelmed. "I dunno."

Mulligan's involvement makes it feel particularly big time. " Both from her performance and also just being able to spend time with Carey and for her to be associated with our film, it sort of makes us feel like we're um..." He trails off. "We're not little boys.  It does feel proper if you have Carey. I don't think it's worth a film feeling proper if also what you get is someone who is a nightmare. But Carey, fortunately, is everything that you want Carey Mulligan to be."

She is not the only A-lister Key's worked with lately. In Mickey 17 he was alongside Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette, all of whom were conspicuously not wearing pigeon costumes.

" You do feel a bit more of imposter syndrome. You do feel like, I don't want to fuck up Director Bong's movie. You sort of have every right to be there, but at the same time, Mark Ruffalo is in another universe to me."

He managed to stay cool. " Well, I didn't take any selfies, let's put it that way. That's the first hurdle. And then you desperately scamper around looking for someone else who's done Edinburgh shows."

Acting wasn't something he really thought about as a "pretty clueless" teen. Then during freshers week at Sheffield University, he and some friends walked past the auditions for the theatre society's production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and he ended up being cast as Hamlet. Comedy wasn't on the cards though: "I always loved it, but the idea of doing it would be insane."

Back in his Cambridgeshire hometown after graduation, he auditioned for a Cambridge Footlights production of Treasure Island and got in despite not actually being a student at Cambridge; everyone agreed to pretend he was doing a PhD about the Russian absurdist Nikolai Gogol. Soon Key had an agent and a nucleus of funny people around him, including Basden.

"I have a good skill, I think, of, once I meet someone like that, just really, really clinging on to them like a limpet." Key laughs. "It's horrible. I identified Tom Basden as an asset.  Smashed his door down, put my stuff in his flat and took it from there."

After he moved to London, Key worked at the toy shop Hamleys, selling yo-yos. Even if he wasn't performing-performing, that was still a kind of performing, wasn't it?

"Well..." There is a gigantic pause. "Yeah. I knew how to handle a yo-yo, let's put it that way." When he started doing stand-up spots, he took the yo-yo with him. It didn't help. "I don't think anything could have helped at that point."

Key's early stand-up material was, by his own admission, "terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible stuff". He did about 10 spots over six months, all of which went horribly. "I was never someone who was thinking, 'Why is this audience not laughing?' I'm looking at the audience thinking, yeah, there's no way I would laugh at this stuff." He cackles.

When someone asked him to do another spot, he said he'd jacked stand-up in. They asked him to read some of his poems instead. "And everything clicked. Immediately. Don't know why."

Suddenly Tim Key was just there: that first gig, he wore a suit, which he'd never done before. Soviet lounge music played as he read his poems. He cracked open a can of lager when he walked on and it sprayed everywhere.

"Every single building block of what would become my act was there, just through throwing it all together at the last minute," he says. "So from not even being able to express what was wrong and what I needed to do in my first incarnation, now I couldn't really express what worked and why it worked. But it was a much better position to be in." He roars with laughter.

It's still quite hard to catch exactly what it is that makes Key so funny. But maybe the key Keyism, the Keystone, is his weaponisation of incredibly mundane turns of phrase that he throws like darts. He and Basden are obsessed. They're like magpies, he says, or maybe jackdaws. No, magpies. They'll keep an ear out for a "your friend and mine" or a "very much a case of," a "shall I be mother?".

"And it doesn't translate. It certainly won't come off the page in your article." An example, then: he and Basden were in the pub once, and Key went to pick up his pint but grabbed Basden's by accident. "And I remember him saying, rather than, 'what are you doing' or 'that's mine', him saying: 'sort of'." Key laughs. "And I just thought, that's so funny – that someone would say 'sort of', when they're not happy with you."

Whatever it is he's actually doing, Key's in demand. He's been cast in The Paper, the new spin-off of the US version of The Office in which the documentary crew which captured Dunder Mifflin follows life in a provincial newspaper office. "I literally don't know what I'm allowed to say," he says. "I know we filmed it."

He was out in Los Angeles for it, and had worried it wasn't going to be for him. "It's a mad place, and it just takes a couple of weeks to work it out." As it turned out, a few months in LA suited him: he went hiking a lot, and has put together a book of LA-set poems.

He pops up in the new Alan Partridge series Alan Partridge: How Are You? too, albeit briefly. "I did have my most intense scene with Alan Partridge to date, which is saying something because there's been some intense ones. But it felt very spicy."

The Ballad of Wallis Island is the big one though. "It's a very serious business," Key says. "Someone else's feature film, I would happily ruin. But our one is very precious to us."

The Ballad of Wallis Island is out now in cinemas across America, and is out in the UK on 30 May

Via Esquire (https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a64503046/tim-key-the-ballad-of-wallis-island-interview/)

Friday 30 May 2025

How do I describe Tim Key? To a certain subset of UK comedy nerds, he's a man who needs no introduction. To those who need one, I could say he's a poet, known for his wry, observational free verse. Or an actor, who's popped up winningly in some of the best British comedies in recent memory (Peep Show; Inside No 9; the Alan Partridgeverse), and the odd blockbuster (Mickey 17). Or maybe a writer – having co-written (and starred in) the new feature film The Ballad of Wallis Island. "I quite like the fact there's a lot of things," Key muses. "When you think back to when you're 16 years old, they all look like things you aren't supposed to do as a job."

The 48-year-old poet-cum-actor-cum-screenwriter – what Americans might call a "multi-hyphenate" – is lounging on a sofa in a private room of a central London hotel. He's wearing a vivid pink sweater and a baseball cap with the letters "LA" stitched on. Key has, in fact, spent a reasonable amount of time in Los Angeles over the past couple of years, having flown out to star in The Paper, the newsroom-set remake of the US sitcom The Office; the experience is documented in a new book of poems, LA BABY!. "I really like America," he says, "but it's not plain sailing. I miss stuff about England – fish and chips, genuinely. A local pub. Rain. Lime bikes. Football."

The Ballad of Wallis Island is, much like Key himself, about as British as it gets. In The Independent's four-star review, Clarisse Loughrey describes it as "Stephen King's Misery with a mug of tea and a lemon scone on the side". Key himself plays the would-be Kathy Bates – an obsessed folkie called Charles who lures his favourite singer (played by Tom Basden) to his remote island home. Rather than a sledgehammer to the ankles, Basden's character, Herb McGwyer, instead gets a suitcase filled with half a million pounds in cash – in exchange for a private beachside gig. The spanner in the works? The arrival of McGwyer's ex-singing partner and ex-lover, played by Carey Mulligan.

Key and Basden's working relationship goes back decades; Wallis Island started life as a short film in 2007, directed by James Griffiths, who would later return for the film. "It was very self-contained, like a little fable," Key says, "but there was something nagging between all three of us... Maybe every year or two, we'd think about how that could be a feature." The missing ingredient, it seems, was Mulligan – and the bittersweet remnants of a bygone romance that gives the film its emotional impetus.

"When I'm writing stuff for fun, it's usually poems, which last for maybe 45 seconds and then just sort of disappear," says Key, folding his arms above his head and reclining. "This is obviously a much bigger undertaking. We feel proud that we managed to start and finish it, and then film it." Strangely, perhaps, he seems almost ambivalent about folk music itself. "The music side of this film," he says, all "comes through [Basden]" – who wrote a soundtrack of surprisingly credible folk songs for the movie. "I just let him get on with it. It was crazy exactly how hard it was, because I think that the film sort of lives and dies on the music. To invent a musician in a film who is believable and plays music you can imagine someone becoming obsessed with? It's kind of a magic trick, I think."

Acting alongside Basden was, he says, a "complete joy" – and, for what it's worth, Key turns in a strong, endearing performance. There's a particular quality to most of the characters Key plays on screen, a sort of flustered, awkward patter that veers just clear of David Brentian pomposity. By now, he's rather good at it. "But there's some stuff about acting that's quite miserable," he says. "Auditioning isn't very pleasant – and can be quite demoralising. There are a lot of jobs where once you get your job, that's just your job. In our job, you're constantly trying to get another job." An assistant walks in and hands him a mug of something brown and rich-looking. "Mocha," says Key, contentedly.

He must be doing something right, auditions-wise. Key got his start on TV back in 2002, with an appearance in the reality series Britain's Worst Driver. Before then, the Cambridge-born performer had lived for a stint in Kyiv, been a member of Cambridge University's sketch comedy troupe Footlights, and formed his own group, Cowards, with Basden, Him & Her's writer Stefan Golaszewski, and actor-writer Lloyd Woolf. He didn't so much break through as enjoy a sort of gradual reputational ascent, becoming a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe with his poetry shows.

It was Steve Coogan ("a very generous performer, who's been very generous to me in general") who propelled Key further into the public consciousness when he snared him for the two-season comedy series Mid Morning Matters as Alan Partridge's DJ wingman, "Sidekick" Simon. Set entirely within a radio booth, Mid Morning Matters was pound-for-pound the funniest Alan Partridge has ever been, and Key's character – part straight-man, part foil, a normalising force and irritant at once – was a big part of that.

"I think I was living in quite a lot of fear," says Key. "Fear of letting [Coogan] down, and letting the whole project down, or in some way screwing it up. Because it's a very specific job. You're not there on an even keel – that isn't what the assignment is. You've not signed up to be a double act. You've signed up to make sure that Alan Partridge operates efficiently, that he has the best chance of being the best possible Alan Partridge in this new incarnation." Key later reprised the role for multiple other Partridge projects.

If Partridge was a high-pressure assignment, then Peep Show, he says, was "even more petrifying, really". Key joined the modern-classic sitcom in its final season in 2015, playing an insufferable colleague and roommate who is, in his first episode, memorably sealed in a sleeping bag and waterboarded with lager. "It's just all too much," recalls Key. "I mean, bear in mind, I wasn't young when I did it. I've been acting for years, but even so – you've watched Peep Show for 15 years, and then you're suddenly in the flat. I don't care who you are: it's all so familiar and so intimidating."

In the decade since Peep Show finished, Key's credits have been varied; perhaps most fascinating was his bizarre comic role in this year's Mickey 17, the sci-fi clone-fest directed by Oscar-winning Parasite filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. (Key spent much of the film dressed in a pigeon outfit.) "[Bong] was a lovely, avuncular figure," says Key. He's got a great vibe where you just look at him and think, 'This guy really loves making this movie.' Considering how big that movie was, the scale of it, he doesn't emit any stress or anxiety, just holds the whole thing together in a very light, kind of blissful way."

I wouldn't exactly describe Key himself as blissful, but there seems to be little of the anxious stiffness he's so skilled at transmitting onscreen. I'd go so far as to say he seems sanguine. I find it oddly telling that he's a committed football fan – despite not supporting a team. "It's kind of crazy: I don't think I know anyone quite as neutral as me watching football," he says. "It just really, you know, calms me. When I was a kid, I used to support Liverpool fanatically... then I realised that I'd never been to Liverpool."

LA BABY!, out on 4 July, paints a picture of Key as a sort of amiable fish out of water, not so much grumbling as taking in his American sojourn with a very British bemusement. The book is packed with "arbitrary" references to celebrities, films, strands of culture: one poem imagines an encounter with the ghost of Stan Laurel. "When you're little, you just think Laurel and Hardy are funny people on your TV in black and white," Key smiles. "When you go back to it, you realise they are stone-cold geniuses. Charlie Chaplin especially... I seem to remember him not being my favourite when I was a kid – not as funny as Laurel and Hardy, a bit creepy. But then you watch him as an adult and go, 'That guy is insane.' He's a genius."

The Paper is unmentioned by name in LA BABY!, but the promise of a big, American TV breakthrough looms over it. "With this stuff, you just have to hope that the people doing the casting know what they want and are happy with stuff," he says. "I don't have an enormous amount of range, and am quite idiosyncratic in that show – I don't do an American accent. But I felt very free, and very appreciated."

Feature films and buzzy new sitcoms: it's all a lot to take on for someone who still seems like a poet at heart. "I do find it funny to be able to make a living from writing poetry," says Key, finishing the dregs of his mocha. "I think subconsciously I'm attracted to poetry because it's kind of quite an odd situation. It's not easy. I don't find anything that easy. But poetry is certainly the least stressful. It's just sort of writing any old thing."

'The Ballad of Wallis Island' is in cinemas now. 'LA BABY!' is published in the UK by 'Utter' & Press on 4 July

Via Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/tim-key-interview-ballad-of-wallis-island-alan-partridge)

Such a great, friendly, funny New Agents interview with Tim.

So pleased for his well-deserved success outside of Partridge.

I had no idea this spin-off from The Office was being made, or that Tim was in it. Excellent.