Sanjeev Bhaskar as King Arthur

Spamalot

How wonderful to have you in the world of the West End musical! Tell us how you ended up cavorting nightly in Spamalot. Did you put in a bid to the powers that be?
[Laughs.] The power I made it known to was my agent. I knew that having an Asian guy in this show would be left-field casting, so I asked my agent whether they thought I could be in the frame for it, since this show is all about trying to find the extra factor that an actor can bring with him. I had seen [Spamalot] a few weeks before I auditioned, with Alan Dale playing Arthur, and I felt like I more or less knew everything about it anyway because I knew Monty Python's stuff so well.

Presumably you'd been looking to do some theater.
Yes I had. I'd been working in TV and a little bit of film over the past couple of years and I wanted to do something on stage again, really for all the almost-cliches that are spoken about stage work, all of which of course are true: the immediacy; the very direct, visceral relationship that an actor has with an audience and so on. Also my wife [Meera Syal] did a play last year [Rafta Rafta], and I realized how much fun it can be. TV is all very well and good, but I wanted to have some fun. A couple of plays had been pushed at me, but either they weren't right for me or I wasn't right for the play.

I think Americans are particularly impressed by the London theater's commitment to colorblind casting.
I'm not sure with the media in this country that there is any real commitment to colorblind casting. The closest you come to it is the theater and places like the National Theatre and the Royal Court. American movies, I think, have probably blazed a bigger trail than anywhere else. There are these huge black stars that transcend ethnicity. No one needs to describe Will Smith or Laurence Fishburne as black. Here, there's a slight hangover that comes with Britain being a smaller country where we're thought of in terms of ethnic origins. It's the theater that probably comes closest to that thing about transcending ethnicity. Casting me in Spamalot was an incredibly bold move, but once I got the part, I did think, if people were still aware of my ethnicity by the end of the show, then I hadn't done my job as an actor.

You have, of course, played the West End before—in 2002, as the middleman Yvan in one of the last casts of the Whitehall Theatre transfer of the hit comedy Art, opposite Ben Cross and Alex Ferns. What was that experience like?
That's something I was asked to do. I had seen it in New York with my friend Alan Alda, and five years later I got to do it, playing Yvan—a character where it's just not possible to remember that many lines and at speed. I played it with a nod to my ethnicity and was able to give different voices. But I just remember on my opening night, three previous Yvans came up to me and gave me a "there there" look [laughs]. That script was a challenge coming as I do from TV and the world of improvisation: half of The Kumars at No. 42 was improvised, but improvised within a character.

Andy Spillett and Sanjeev Bhaskar in Spamalot

Does Spamalot allow you a lot of latitude?
I think it's an actor's job to go in there and push the envelope and a director's job to tell you where to stop. In the end, I've gone back to the script in the absolute expectation that I've made it my own, just like Daniel Craig has been stepping into Bond's shoes and making them a new fit. I think I play Arthur with less of a knowing wink to the audience. It's very easy to nod and wink, but I've tried to keep that to a minimum. The thing about [Arthur] is that he has to be the anchor point for lots of madness and mayhem going on around him. It's very easy to step outside this show, but I can't do that. Whether I'm appearing before 2000 people or 100, each show is still an opportunity to find something new in my performance. I'm the youngest of all the London Arthurs and in terms of my predecessors, I'm probably closest to the energy that Simon [Russell Beale] brought to the role.

Did you speak to anyone for advice on sustaining a starring role in a musical?
One of the people I contacted was Hugh Jackman and asked him how the heck he managed to do The Boy From Oz every night, where his energy level was just extraordinary. He gave me a lot of advice about looking after your voice and said that the key to a run like this is how much fun you are having on stage.

Which I trust you are having?
If you're not enjoying it, it's up there on stage! With film and theater, you can hide things and cut and edit, but one thing I cannot stand to see is disinterest. I do think my King Arthur has made everyone else's performance a little more playful. I've found three moments during the show where I can improvise, and those moments become important; the audience picks up on the vibrancy. With Spamalot, I've found that if you get the humor, then the improvised moments within the show are seamless; to that extent, the production is closer to a revue.

You mentioned earlier The Kumars at No. 42, and I'm always fascinated by the way in which British TV series manage to snare a public with relatively few series or episodes compared to American series, which tend to run year in, year out.
Absolutely, the classic example being Fawlty Towers which did only 12 episodes in all—two series of six and yet everyone seemed to know every minute from it. I don't think that would happen now unless you had a cult classic, like The Larry Sanders Show. We did three series of Goodness Gracious Me and seven of The Kumars at No. 42, which incidentally got the best reviews in America of anywhere in the world. I read somewhere that Angelina Jolie had seen it, and Scarlett Johansson, which is further proof of that bizarre reach that only TV has. The power of TV works slightly differently here anyway, since up until six or seven years ago, there were very few channels, so it was more of a shared experience: people would watch television as a family, and because there were only four or five channels, the shows had to appeal to everybody.

And now?
With all the other channels, there's been a kind of dumbing down, so that you get the Seinfelds and M*A*S*H's of this world but you also get the Losts and all the reality TV shows. I watched two episodes of Lost and knew that I was never going to commit to it [laughs]. It was like going out on a bad date.

Do you think your courtship with the theater will continue?
I would love to do another musical, I really would. I'm a huge Cole Porter fan. I love his dexterity of language.

So, might we see you in Anything Goes?
[Laughs]. My next show will probably be Monsoon Wedding - the Musical or Bend It Like Beckham - the Musical. That's like having The Olympics - The Musical, with someone as Michael Phelps. I'm thinking of the songs now: "I'm a Man, Not A Fish," or "Catch Me, I'm a Fish."

Who would you play?
I'd play the guy with the starting gun.