Hang Ups: Interview with Steve Oram who plays Neil

31 July 2018

Can you explain to us a bit about Hang Ups?

The show is about a therapist played by Stephen Mangan who offers online therapy sessions to a variety of people. There’s a huge, amazing cast of funny characters in it.

Would you say the show is a who’s who of comedy?

It basically is, isn’t it? He’s also got his family in the background who are slightly dysfunctional. Definitely a family affair.

Can you tell us a bit about your character, Neil?

My character is someone that Stephen’s character (Richard Pitt) owes money to. He’s a slightly unbalanced sociopathic, not very pleasant man and Richard ends up offering some therapy sessions to me, my character.

Which are probably very needed.

It ends up going to places where both my character and Stephen’s character did not want to go. Things rapidly deteriorate and become very stressful for him.

What’s it like playing someone who is essentially a psychopath?

I’ve played a serial killer in a film called Sightseers a few years ago, and that sort of led me down this route of being offered these sorts of parts. It’s not something that’s actually within me but I do enjoy playing them, it’s really good fun. You can just be as horrible as… they were saying to me “Go, be as horrible as you can!” So that’s what I did!

Who’s more terrifying: Neil or Chris from Sightseers?

The more terrifying one is probably Chris from Sightseersbecause he’s very ordinary on the surface. He’s very much like anyone you might just pass in the street. Whereas in Hang Ups he appears psychotic and very unhinged. He’s the sort of person who you’d probably really, really avoid eye contact with in any possible way. If you saw him in the street you’d cross the road. 

A lot of the show was improvised. Was that a big draw for you?

It was, yeah. It was just an amazing way to work. I’ve always loved doing that. A lot of the stuff I’ve done in the past has come from being improvised. The starting point has often been improvised. Sightseers was. Alice and I improvised lots of stuff within that when we were filming. It’s a really good way to work. It is stressful. I mean the flipside of it is you have to come up with good stuff on the hoof. It was a very short space of time to record all the stuff that I did. I think it was the same for everybody really, a couple of days. So it was a really intense way to work, making it rewarding and brilliantly guided by Robert.

It must give you so much creative freedom to work in that style

It was brilliant. It was so simple. You didn’t have blocking or anything like that, really. It was just a locked off camera and you were coming up with ideas all the time. Literally all I could see was Steve on the screen of the computer. So it was very intense and great. I loved it.

It feels like a fresh, up-to-date filming style. Did that feel like a very different process to anything you’ve worked on before?

It did, yeah. I’ve never done anything like it before. There was a very strong concept which they never stuck to completely. It was always a camera and they always filmed it being filmed. It’s almost one step beyond mock-doc, isn’t it? Much more impersonal really. You don’t feel you’re being guided by someone. You’re just watching it unfold on a sort of weird digital platform.

It’s based on Lisa Kudrow’s web series Web Therapy. Had you seen that before you started filming?

I saw a couple of clips on YouTube.  I haven’t watched much but it did feel very different. I think this is an entirely new thing, it feels entirely new. The style of humour we do in that is very much British character comedy. We don’t have the character try to be verbose or clever or anything. It’s much more just we are a load of very strange, odd characters.

Alice Lowe is in the series as well. I assume you guys didn’t cross paths at any point during the filming process?

We didn’t, no. I think she was a different day. I didn’t see anyone else. It was just Stephen really.

Obviously the show had an amazing reception. What was it like being a part of that?

You’re just very pleased because you never know how things are going to go. It was a lovely project and I love the two lead actors, they’re fantastic. Really oddball kind of characters. It was good to see. Very pleasing.

Across your career you’ve played comedic roles but very serious roles as well. Do you like the flexibility that gives you? Do you have a favourite? 

It depends on the script and the project basically. I’d do anything if I really like the script and respond to it. And it’s always good to challenge yourself. My career started off almost exclusively in comedy, so when I was able to do more serious roles I jumped at it really. It was scary and I wanted to be scared, because you’ve got no comedy to fall back on in certain roles which I found quite interesting. But comedy is where my heart lies. That’s where I get the most pleasure