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‘It’s all been preposterous’: Stephen Merchant on fame, standup and the pressures of cancel culture

From The Office sidekick to standup legend and a serial killer, the multitalented Stephen Merchant is impossible to pin down. He talks about cancel culture, why pubs are more interesting than outer space and hanging out with Christopher Walken

In 2019, he wrote and directed the feature film Fighting With My Family, a wrestling comedy starring Florence Pugh, and in 2022 played serial killer Stephen Port in the shocking BBC drama Four Lives. The new series of The Outlaws begins with a body: the group are thrown abruptly into the centre of a criminal web and must fight for their lives while also spreading manure to their exacting community payback officer’s satisfaction. “I haven’t done anything that features aliens or superheroes, not because I don’t enjoy those things, but because it feels as if there’s a lot of interesting people down in the pub without having to have them land from outer space.” His character in The Outlaws is a painfully awkward lawyer “who made one significant mistake that has put a fire under him.

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