Matt King has a complicated relationship with Super Hans, the wild-eyed, drug-devouring friend of Mark and Jeremy whom he played in Channel 4’s cult sitcom Peep Show between 2003 and 2015. This is partly because many fans think he is Super Hans.
“Everyone knows David [Mitchell] is David and Robert [Webb] is Robert but I am Super Hans,” he sighs. “When people yell at me in the street, I never get called Matt. I’ve had people come up to me when I was with my ex-wife and ask her, ‘What’s it like going out with Super Hans?’ and they’re completely baffled when she says I’m an actor. It’s really weird. And it continues to this day. I was stopped for a photo 20 minutes ago by a 16-year-old. The show’s been off-air for 11 years and that’s still who I am.”
This is obviously a mixed blessing, but King is very fond of his alter ego. He has performed live shows and DJ sets in character and recently published a book named after Super Hans’s famous assessment of crack cocaine: Moreish. It may look like a comedy book but it’s really a novel that goes to some surprisingly profound and moving places. “If HarperCollins had wanted Super Hans’s Crazy Guide to Drugs of the World, I wouldn’t have done it,” he says. “We always heard Mark and Jeremy’s inner monologues and I wanted readers to hear Super Hans’ inner monologue for the first time. I wanted to explore why this reasonably intelligent, well-read man became a crackhead. I wanted to give him a life, I guess.”
Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain granted King permission to use the character as long as he didn’t contradict anything revealed in the show (“You can’t fuck with the lore”), so he largely skirts the Mark-and-Jez era to tell the story of Super Hans’s troubled past and his chaotic present, one year after the final episode, when his moped-rental business in Macedonia falls apart and he embarks on “a Hunter S Thompson-style road trip” through Europe.
King tweaked the first chapter to open with ruminations on mortality due to the startling fact that he almost died while writing the book. One day in April, with only a few chapters to go, he suffered a rare and serious spinal cord stroke. He thinks it was triggered by a “pretty horrific” family dispute a few days earlier. For 36 hours he was paralysed from the neck down. In the stroke ward, he could barely talk or walk and couldn’t so much as write a text message. “When you’re in hospital for two weeks, you do a lot of thinking about life and death,” he says. “That could have been the end of my story.”
After some physical and cognitive therapy, he was able to write again. “I had to write the rest of the book with a misfiring brain, typing incredibly slowly. I think it’s ended up being weirder and more Super Hans than it might have been.”
Speaking to me via video call from Brighton with the camera turned off, King apologises for his “shot to pieces” short-term memory (he forgot we were doing this interview) and for losing his thread. “I’ll often completely forget what we’re talking about. I lose track of what day it is — much more than a normal 58-year-old. It’s kind of scary because my dad died of Alzheimer’s two years ago and it reminds me of that.” He sounds well, though – sharp, funny, wise – and has been told he will eventually make a full recovery. “I’m in pretty good spirits now. Three months ago I couldn’t walk to the bathroom.”
King’s long-term memory is unaffected, which is lucky because he’s now writing a memoir (as himself, not Super Hans) – and he draws on some of his personal experiences in Moreish. “In a way I’m exploring some of my own trauma through his story,” he says. “I don’t know how, or if, I’m going to tackle certain subjects in my own book.”
Would he say he had a difficult childhood? He laughs. “Yes, I would say that. I had a very confusing childhood.”
King grew up in Hertfordshire with his adoptive parents. His father trained cadets for the Metropolitan Police. “He was a disciplinarian. And that’s as far as I’ll go.” I had wondered if his 2012 family sitcom Starlings, co-written with Steve Edge, was partly autobiographical but evidently not. “Steve lost both his parents when he was young and I had a really difficult time. We both wanted to explore what it would be like to have the ideal family that we didn’t have. The show’s all about love.”
When he was young, King desperately wanted to be in a band. “The only thing holding me back was I couldn’t sing or play an instrument.” In 1990, he decided to move to Australia for a fresh start but was told he had to belong to an in-demand profession to get a visa: airline mechanic, dentist or chef. So he trained at a country-house restaurant for two years, which later inspired his Alan Davies-starring sitcom Whites. By the time he graduated, Australia had enough chefs but the authorities were so impressed by his commitment that they granted him lifetime residency anyway.
After a year working in restaurants, King spent the next decade as a stand-up comedian. He was performing at the Edinburgh Festival when Peep Show’s casting director Rachel Freck approached him to try out for Super Hans — his first ever audition as an actor. “They were auditioning all sorts of people. I don’t think they knew what they wanted until they saw it. I decided to just say the words in a flat tone, like me when I’m a bit down. During the 90s I’d been quite a raver, and all that that entails, so I knew what that felt like.” For many reasons it was fortunate that he beat fellow contender Russell Brand to the role. “I concur wholeheartedly,” King deadpans.
Between the final episode in 2015 and a partial reunion on The Great British Bake Off last year, King fell out of touch with his Peep Show peers. When I ask King what he makes of their subsequent successes — Jesse Armstrong with Succession, Olivia Colman’s Oscar — he jokes, “All right, don’t rub it in!”.
But he’s done a lot of interesting things, too. He’s played a pickpocket in Paddington and the father of Jack O’Connell’s character on Skins. He worked with a young Tom Hardy on the 2008 prison drama Bronson. “I rocked up on my first day and there’s Tom with his top off in a barn, fighting gypsies. I thought, this is the real deal! It was the first time I really thought about acting.” He’s proudest of the Australian comedy-drama Spirited, in which he played a rock star’s ghost. He’s proud, too, of recommending his co-star Sarah Snook to Armstrong for the role of Shiv in Succession.
Now, though, King is all about the writing. “I’d be happy if I wrote until I was 90 and never acted again,” he says. After his memoir, he might write a book about strokes. “It’s a weird thing. Everybody looks at you and thinks you’re OK but they don’t see the internal short-circuiting of the brain and how upsetting it is.” He also has an idea for a second Super Hans book because he’s found revisiting the character so “joyful”.
“I went through a phase five years ago when I’d had enough of it,” he admits. “I really resented him, like he was a real person. But I’m getting on for 60, and I know this will sound wanky, but I feel grateful to have played this character that nobody seems to dislike. This show keeps getting handed down, generation to generation. Especially since my stroke, I’ve felt really chill about it. I’m so lucky that I got to play an iconic character in an iconic sitcom. I’ve totally embraced him.”
In Moreish, King writes as Super Hans: “Life itself has no narrative as such. It’s just a series of things that happened.” Is that his own view, too?
He pauses. “I haven’t thought about it but I think that is my philosophy. I definitely don’t think there’s any sort of divine plan. Nobody could have planned the shit that’s happened to me unless they had a very sick sense of humour. It’s a series of brilliant things and a series of f**king horrible things. That’s life.”
‘Moreish’ is out now. The audiobook is released on 29 October