Timothy Spall: ‘England is a much less equal society than it was in the 1960s – it’s alarming’

The much-loved Harry Potter actor has played everyone from Winston Churchill to JMW Turner. As he prepares to take on Santa Claus in a new Sky comedy drama, he talks to Chris Harvey about the cost of living crisis, his recovery from leukaemia, wild days in the drinking dens of Soho – and why he won’t be touching a drop during this year’s family Christmas gathering (with his three children and seven grandchildren!)

Timothy Spall says his Christmas show is ‘original and daring in the way that it combines aspects of social commentary with entertainment’ (Getty for ZFF)

What I must remember to tell you,” says Timothy Spall, “is that I am a Christmas. My father’s mother’s name was Margaret Christmas, so there you go.” I’m on a video call with one of Britain’s great actors; he’s at home in central London, dressed in a black-and-fawn hooped sweater, surrounded by books and paintings, with sunlight from a high window tripping towards his face. He’s in a playful mood. I realise I may have spoken to him more times than I have any of his contemporaries. “Well, we must have a high tolerance level of each other,” he quips.

Over his long career, Spall seems to have played every type of character imaginable, from the ratty Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films to Britain’s last hangman in the 2005 film Pierrepoint, from the painters JMW Turner and LS Lowry to football coach Peter Taylor in The Damned United (2009), from Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech (2010) to the Holocaust denier David Irving in Denial (2016). He’s performed for Bernardo Bertolucci, Tim Burton and Mike Leigh, acted with everyone from Judi Dench to Tom Cruise to Sting (in 1979’s Quadrophenia). But this Christmas, at the age of 66, he’s playing a version of Santa for the first time. “So many brilliant actors have played him before me,” he says, “it’s a bit like Churchill. You go, ‘Whoa, what am I going to do?’”

He’s starring in Sky Max’s feature-length Christmas Eve drama The Heist Before Christmas. It’s set near Belfast, where single mum Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to make enough from her job at the local Stuff for a Pound store to celebrate Christmas at all. Her younger son’s dream of a bike is out of reach, while his brother, 12-year-old Mikey (Bamber Todd), has given up believing in miracles and is going seriously off the rails. When Mikey sees a man dressed as Santa (James Nesbitt) rob a bank and escape into the woods with a binbag full of cash, he hatches a plan and follows him. But there, in the snow, he runs into another Santa (Spall) who apparently speaks Norwegian and claims to have fallen from his sleigh. The two men find themselves in a good Santa/bad Santa standoff.