When Robert Carlyle was smashing up bars as Begbie in Trainspotting 24 years ago, spitting psychopathic invective at anyone who’d listen, it became his career-defining role. So to find him pitching up last week as a softly spoken prime minister is initially disconcerting — and then brilliantly confounding. ‘Well, anarchy is always only around the corner,’ he says during a break from filming Sky One’s new thriller Cobra.
Still, prime minister Robert Sutherland couldn’t be further from the provocative Begbie. For starters, he’s very much a Conservative.
‘It’s never actually mentioned but I think his politics are pre-Thatcher — he cares about people,’ Carlyle protests.
Either way, the character needs a cool head when thrust into the middle of a major crisis: a solar storm has knocked out the power grid, causing planes to crash and communications networks to fail. Sutherland calls a meeting of Cobra — the government’s crisis management get-together — and calls for his chief of staff, Anna Marshall (Victoria Hamilton).
‘A woman telling me what to do — it’s basically the story of my life!’ jokes Carlyle. ‘But the relationship they have runs to the heart of this piece. It’s the human angle to Cobra and the personal storylines which really interested me. The big crash-bash stuff is great but it’s purely a backdrop.’
As a guide to the tone of Cobra, Carlyle thinks it’s probably closest to The West Wing, as political dramas go, although there are elements of Danish series Borgen in the way a prime minister has to juggle his public and private lives. Interestingly and refreshingly, the relationship between Sutherland and Marshall doesn’t develop romantically.
‘With Theresa May, did you ask yourself, “What’s going on in your life?”’ adds Carlyle. ‘All you must think as PM is that everyone appears to hate you. Playing a prime minister has given me a new respect for these people and what they do. It’s easy to be nasty about them but you realise when you play a politician that they’re just people, at the end of the day.’
And it seems as if Carlyle understands this in his depiction of a prime minister under pressure. Not only is the UK on the verge of a breakdown in Cobra but he’s having to cope with the rise of right-wing factions.
‘I found that element really frightening because it suggests a kind of flimsiness to who we are in moments of pressure,’ says Carlisle. ‘The PM can be incredibly vulnerable and I’ve tried to show that in quieter moments this is just a man who can’t really cope.’
By way of a conclusion, you have to ask: what would prime minister Carlyle do in his first 100 days in office (if there wasn’t a major international crisis to avert, of course)?
‘Well, hopefully I’d be aware of health and education, two things everybody needs but which get damaged and bruised in bad times — it would be lovely to wave a magic wand and sort that,’ he says. ‘I’d also play a lot of good music and make sure people wore nice clothes.’
■ Cobra is on Sky One at 9pm on Friday. Episode one on NowTV now
A national and family emergency
VICTORIA HAMILTON (above) feels she now understands the personal cost of being in the public eye on a daily basis.
With Cobra, written by Ben Richards (Spooks, The Tunnel), Hamilton was impressed by the frailties of people who are supposed to be convincing.
‘Our leaders must be breaking at some point,’ she say. ‘How do they cope? That’s what’s great about this show — you’re watching a father and daughter in crisis, and 15 minutes later he’s running the country.’
