a mainstream audience was a central theme of Extras.)
Yet he loves American pop culture and admits to indulging regularly in watching “reality TV.” And he is
eager to make a bigger splash across the pond—here
he is, wrapping work on what by all appearances is an
archetypal Hollywood tale.
Indeed, as he stands at the Hollywood crossroads,
Ricky Gervais also stands as something of a paradox.
Shortish and rotund, he makes up in comedic charisma
what he lacks in leading-man looks. He’s a genial and
witty conversationalist, zinging one-liners like ammo
fired from a toy gun and then giggling along with you as
you duck and dodge. But can the unlikely middle-aged
maverick—who favors uncomfortable humor but only
jumped into comedy in his late 30s—really make the
leap to Hollywood movie star? And why, exactly, does
he care to try?
If it’s not so much about seeing his “big fat face” on
the screen, as Gervais goes out of his way to put it, the
answer may lie in his zeal for collaboration. It starts
with the writing and spills into all manner of revising
and tinkering, a hallmark of his carefully sculpted TV
creations. Even when peppering a comedy with blatant
gags, he says, “it’s not the jokes that keep you hooked.
It’s the story that keeps you hooked.”
A Babe in Hollywoodland
After television success delivered Hollywood scripts
to his doorstep, Gervais resisted for a while. “A project
really has to offer so much potential and possibility,” he
says. He found the script for Ghost Town distinctively
funny. Additionally, director David Koepp, who also
cowrote the movie, offered the kind of access Gervais
craved. “We fiddled with the script together for a couple
of days and then I knew I was definitely in,” Gervais
says. “I feel like I was part of it from the beginning.”
The Brit’s approach impressed Koepp. “You want
input from your actors; they’re not really doing their
job if they’re not actively involved,” Koepp says. “For
someone who has written so much himself, Ricky was
an interesting combination of wanting to play the part
as written on the page but also paraphrasing and going
off on riffs.”
As the day sprawls forward inside the cavernous
Brooklyn studio, Gervais looks a little weary. It’s been
12-hour days, here and around the city, for eight weeks
straight. But the gleam stays in his eye. “I love the hard
work,” he says. “Winston Churchill said, ‘If you find a
job you love, you’ll never work again in your life’—and
it’s true.” Gervais ponders this for a second. “He also
said, ‘Give me some more brandy.’ ”
The laugh that bubbles up when he delivers such
lines is quite familiar to actor Aasif Mandvi, who has a
supporting role in Ghost Town. “We’ve had a hard time
getting through the scenes because we kept cracking
up,” says Mandvi, who gained notice as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the popular
fake newscast on Comedy Central. “Ricky is a great
person to bounce stuff off of because he likes to play.
I love to work with people who just want to explore the
possibilities like that. Sometimes you come up with
crap, but sometimes you come up with gold. It makes it
very alive.”
“I get very excited about creating stuff just from
scratch,” Gervais says. “You’ve got to be in this work for
the right reasons—being rich and famous ultimately
doesn’t mean anything.”
A Star Is Born … Sort Of
It would be hard to overstate Gervais’ fortune and
fame, both primarily due to The Office, which he wrote
and directed with his longtime creative partner, Stephen
Merchant. Although the series didn’t get much attention
when it first aired in the U.K. in 2001, it soon became
one of the most successful television comedies in
British history, winning prestigious awards, selling
