"There aren’t that many out actors."
What is The Other Bennet Sister's Ryan Sampson watching?
what are they watching? is an interview series for my newsletter in which I chat with a television creative about television itself. Previous interviews include Toheeb Jimoh, Janicza Bravo, Chelsea Peretti, and Jeff Hiller.
This time around, I had the pleasure of speaking with actor and writer Ryan Sampson, who has been working steadily in British television since the early 2000s, appearing in everything from Brassic to The Crown and Doctor Who. Most recently, he played Mr. Collins in The Other Bennet Sister. He also creates, writes, and stars in Mr. Bigstuff, which is streaming on Hulu (and has been renewed for a third season).
I like to start these interviews off by asking: What are you watching on television lately and enjoying?
I’ve always got a parallel thing going, a high/low of good TV. I can’t watch modern trash, I find it too abrasive, so I’ve got an ongoing thread of ‘90s home decor TV shows that are my comfort thing. At the moment, I watch a lot of gritty British crime/forensic stuff. I just started The Pitt the other night, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet.
Stay on it! The Pitt gets juicier. I want to talk a bit about Mr. Bigstuff, which I’ve been watching. It’s hysterical. You write and create the show—at what point in your career did you feel you wanted your own show?
Oh yeah how does the show translate to an overseas audience? I don’t know how many references might be a bit alien to you. I’ve always felt a bit frustrated by being exclusively an actor—I’m creative, obviously, in that I want to make things. It’s not a new thing to say but you don’t feel you have a great deal of autonomy as an actor. I’ve done a lot of series where it’s very heavily improvised and where your direction of the character is embraced, especially with long-running things as they go on. But I still found it frustrating that I wasn’t directly making things.
I find it odd that a lot of actors don’t do that. I’ve been in TV for fucking decades now, it’s frustrating when you get your scripts and you’re like, I love this but I want to be able to pull this part or do something differently, because I’m reading scripts constantly, so that muscle is really exercised. So I pitched TV shows for 15 years. It speaks to, on the good side, perseverance, but on the bad side, maybe a slightly delusional quality in retrospect.
So yeah, I think I’ve been visioning for ages, and then I decided to do a different approach a bit, and go, What do you actually want? I think there’s a great appetite at the moment for things that are autobiographical, and maybe that will be my next one. But I’m sort of okay with going: I can make something that has my taste within it from the starting point of what you want to do. Funnily enough, it turns out it’s a slightly easier way to access things.
I mean, I feel like creative people need a bit of that delusion to succeed and to create things.
I think so, but I can see the faces of my friends when every time I was like, This one’s gonna go! But I’m really glad it’s gone down very well.
I’m curious, why make television, why was that the medium you felt pulled to create?
That’s a really good question. I think because I was a big TV-watching kid, it was a thing that me and my mum did together. I lost my mum a few years ago and it’s partly woven into the story. I realized really young that this medium is uniquely placed to what we’re all inheriting. Like all kids of the 90s have got a similar ideology in their head from the things that we consumed on a really basic level. Many narratives back then were about like, be your true self and you’ll prevail in the end. And I think that reflects in an entire culture because of how those stories shaped us. I want to be in the privileged position of going, here are my ideas about the world. I’m not banging you over the head with it by making a gritty exposé, but at the same time, you feel like there’s some sense of being able to shape people. So I suppose really it’s being a control freak. The way I feel about people could maybe slightly influence someone somewhere. Sort of amazing.
What are your foundational TV shows from childhood?
British sitcoms, I loved The Vicar of Dibley. Keeping Up Appearances is kind of a brilliant watch. This woman Patricia Routledge, who now I know was a very feisty lesbian in an 80s/90s TV arena which was pretty homophobic. She had a relationship with quite a prominent political figure, but she is the finest character/comic/clown that I can imagine. Her physicality is so specific as this character—she plays this middle class, looking-through-the-curtains-at-what-your-neighbours-are-doing type, kind of obsessed with class and propriety and one-upmanship. It’s an amazing character for me.
On 90s British television there were a lot of these character performances that I found really inspiring. I had like zero friends as a kid, the old gay kid story. I grew up in quite a working class area and I spent loads of time in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, until I could do the exact character to the point where I was losing myself for a moment. I became obsessed with character studies. I definitely wasn’t actually socializing with people. It was a useful supplement.
Fascinating, and very much the roots of your acting career.
Totally. The foundations are there. I spent a lot of time watching people. I remember watching so many playground interactions and trying to work out, in my teenage years, what was happening between people. You turn on a little muscle in your head, but then you can’t turn off, and you become a sort of observer. So fascinating, the quirks of your formative years.
So I know some folks who watch Brassic and love it, and obviously you had your episodes in The Crown, but what has it been like promoting The Other Bennet Sister?
Did you watch it? Full disclosure, I can’t watch anything I’m in. It repulses me, it turns my stomach. I was on a plane recently and my boyfriend was watching it, and I was looking over every now and then. But as soon as I come on screen I just see a baby potato in a wig. It just makes me want to vomit in my mouth. It really fucks you up seeing you on screen all the time, particularly because I play all these like, gross characters. From what I’ve seen, it looks really good, and people are responding to it in a way that is…incredibly surprising. I’m taken aback at what an enormous amount of love and attention there is for Jane Austen stuff, because I’ve never really been an Austen person. There’s a fan base but I didn’t know they were as avid as they are. I’ve always been a Dickens type.
I’d love to ask a bit about your coming out as a queer actor, if you’re comfortable talking about that. You came out publicly in 2019 via social media, what was on your mind at that time? My instinct is that a lot of actors…don’t come out these days, for whatever reason.
Yeah, I think you’re right about the coming out thing. There aren’t that many out actors. Weirdly, from my experience, there aren’t as many gay actors as you’d imagine, not in TV anyway. It’s really strange. I don’t really understand it.
I felt a bit of a duty. And then someone in my Instagram comments was taking the piss out of someone else in a homophobic way. I thought, well, now I have to. If you let that slide, that’s just odd. I would like to imagine that I could be a bit useful, helpful for some kid out there. I grew up in quite a poor area. And if there’s a kid there feeling like they don’t fit in and they’re really weird, wouldn’t it be lovely to think that they go, oh, maybe I’m not that weird.
I imagine a lot of actors hesitate to come out publicly due to fear of being typecast or losing out on opportunities, but you look at your career and how it’s skyrocketed since 2019 and all the things that you’ve achieved, including your own show. Was there a fear that opportunities might not look the same?
Yeah! I don’t know why I really had that feeling because I’m not exactly romantic lead casting, that’s not really what I’ve got a desire to do either. People say it’s a boys club, but I think everything’s traditionally been a boys club. So it’s not like writing TV or TV acting is any different. I think sticking your head above the parapet and being a bit different, that’s not generally/traditionally speaking likely to help you. So it was really worrying, actually.
And yet it all worked out! Well I appreciate your out and proudness and visibility.
Thanks, yeah! I hadn’t really thought about it in great deal until now, to be honest. I forgot how racked with nerves and guilt I was before it happened. I think it did mean a great deal to me at the time, but as soon as the fear proves itself as not being based on anything real, then you sort of forget about it.
How do you feel about TV watching with your partner? How does the TV relationship work?
We watch everything together, and we’ve got that thing of him saying don’t continue to watch this without me. Then sometimes there’s a grey zone and you think you’d stopped watching that thing together, and you continue to watch, and then turns out it wasn't a grey zone for him. We also have a lodger who works in TV so we’re really annoying at shouting out ADR. The real gem is when you can spot that they’ve done a back of head shot and then put in someone’s line that the person is not really saying. So…that’s quite annoying for my boyfriend, and it’s ruining TV for me, really. It takes a really good show now for me to get lost in it.
What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?
I’m a really greedy individual, so it’s more about quantity, to be honest. I need stuff that is relatively healthy so I can eat a stupid amount of it. So ridiculously, it’s crudités and it’s a bit gross, but a lot of salt and vinegar mixed together. Punchy!
