‘I’m never going to be bloody Robert De Niro!’: Rob Brydon, the most chipper man on TV

The nicest man in acting is back with new comedy, Bill’s Included. He talks about rejecting Hollywood, refusing to play a villain – and why he just can’t make fun of Steve Coogan

‘I’m a nice person, you know,” says Rob Brydon, as I met him in a basement green room of the BBC, where probably nobody with such a mellow ego has ever sat. “I am a people-pleaser. That’s who I am.” It’s an unnecessary clarification – at 61, he’s been nice on TV, as himself and in character, for most of our adult lives.

We’re here to talk about his new six-parter, Bill’s Included, but his character in it, the eponymous Bill, is such a distillation of pure Rob Brydon that it’s (accidentally, he says) a celebration of…