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‘I had the audacity not to peg it!’ Timothy Spall on cancer, cosy crime and being heckled on the red carpet

From Auf Wiedersehen, Pet to Hollywood star – and nearly dying en route – his career has been a wild ride. He talks about how he’s ended up sparkling as the BBC’s new Sunday night crime-solver – and why he just wants to be brilliant

Some of his most exceptional work was seen recently on television: as a bewildered Duke of Norfolk in Wolf Hall, and the university lecturer Peter Farquhar, tormented and murdered by the young man with whom he believed he had found love, in The Sixth Commandment. That performance, which won Spall a Bafta and an International Emmy, amounts to a moving reclamation of a man who could have been seen as a victim but was instead rendered noble and even inspiring because of his ingenuous faith in love – and the actor’s skill in embodying that quality. The year before Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Spall fell into the orbit of the director Mike Leigh, known for building his comic portraits of quotidian British life from a lengthy improvisation process.

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