Little Britain star Matt Lucas reveals that food is his ‘solace and pain’ after loss of his husband — and says his brother didn’t believe he was gay in autobiography
The TV star has written an autobiography and talks bullying, Little Britain and the suicide of ex-lover Kevin McGee
ON screen, Matt Lucas is famous for playing bolshy show-offs such as Vicky Pollard and Dafydd “only gay in the village” Thomas.
Off screen, he’s anything but: A far quieter, more unassuming character who, one suspects, has been left rather bruised by the rough and tumble of a life that has thrown him some deeply affecting challenges.
In a world where many celebrities share their every cough and burp on social media, he’s always been a fairly private figure, shunning showbiz parties for the company of trusted friends or his labradors Milo and Hob.
So it comes as a surprise to learn that he’s written an autobiography.
He smiles at the irony of it. “I have traditionally been quite guarded, but in the book I think I’m fairly open,” he says. “It was unexpectedly cathartic. I wanted to upload some stuff out of my head, to clear some space.
“Also, I’m 43 and thought if I wait too long, I won’t remember it.”
There’s quite a lot to upload, including, among other things, his childhood as a bald, Jewish boy who always knew he was gay, his father’s sudden death at just 52, his astonishingly successful writing partnership with Little Britain co-star David Walliams, and the husband he loved and lost.
The result is “Little Me, my life from A—Z,” an alphabetically presented journey that successfully treads the often painfully thin line between being honest about your own life and feelings without trampling too hard on the sensitivities of others.
He lost his hair at six. One doctor attributed it to the delayed shock of a road accident two years earlier, another said an overactive immune system had put his body “in fight mode”.
“At the time, the big question was, ‘Will it grow back and how can we make that happen?’”, he says, “but now I’m not looking for my hair to grow back because I don’t really care.”
When he started secondary school, he wore a wig for a while, “But you couldn’t get wigs for kids, so it was a woman’s one. It was bouffant and looked ridiculous. Plus I had no eyebrows.
“I would take it off if it was hot or itchy, then we’d play catch with it or people would try it on.”
Was he bullied about it?
“With kids, they’re still figuring out the basics and empathy is not something they’ve developed,” he shrugs.
“Every kid gets labelled with something. I had no hair, but if someone said something unpleasant, I deflected it with a joke. That got me through.”
He was also, by his own admission, “a big fat pudding” so his mother took him to Weight Watchers classes (later the inspiration behind his Little Britain character Marjorie) and so began a yo-yoing relationship with food — “my solace, my pleasure, my pain”.
“My weight fluctuates. I have the eating age of a nine-year-old whose parents have gone out,” he laughs.
“When I’m in the US, I eat healthily, go on hikes and lose a load of weight . . . and then think, ‘Let’s celebrate by eating absurd amounts of chocolate’. I swing from one thing to another.”
He once said he might consider a gastric band. Is this still an option? “The search to lose weight is an ongoing process with me, that’s all I will say.”
He came out to his friends at 19, shortly before getting his first TV job as drummer George Dawes on the Reeves and Mortimer comedy show Shooting Stars.
But he was 25 before he plucked up the courage to tell his mother Diana and older brother Howard.
“Back then, there was just much less visibility for gay people and pretty much every time you heard about homosexuality in the media it was heavily linked with death and HIV/Aids,” he says, “so very few people seemed receptive to the idea.”
In the book, he says his brother “wasn’t happy” about it, nor convinced.
“Had I tried it with a woman? No? Ah, well that was the problem. He told me he and his friends were going to hire me a prostitute.
“‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Can you get me one with nice pecs?’”
His mother, he says, was “devastated” and ended up going in to counselling to deal with the news. “She said, ‘That means there will never be a wedding or grandchildren.’ Which is exactly how people thought back then,” he reflects.
“But now, it’s just not an issue with any of my family. Everyone came round. My brother gave a beautiful speech at our civil partnership.
“My mum has friends who have transgender children, which also isn’t an issue. Times have changed. That’s not to deny that people don’t still struggle, because they do.”
When Matt was just 22, his 52-year-old father John died suddenly from a heart attack.
“In amongst the enormous shock and grief was sadness that I had never been able to tell him that I was gay, though I later learned from his sister that he had figured it out for himself anyway.”
The trauma of his father’s death prompted him to seek counselling for the first time.
“I was dealing with three things. One was the loss of my father, one was fame, as a consequence of Shooting Stars, and the other was being gay; seeing my friends have relationships and feeling that I couldn’t really make that step until I had told my family.
“I wasn’t interested in having clandestine sexual liaisons in bushes or those ‘spas’. I wanted a boy-next-door-style boyfriend.”
In 2002, just before the first Little Britain hit our screens, he met TV producer Kevin McGee in a London nightclub. In December 2006, they became civil partners, but just 18 months later, they broke up and their partnership was officially dissolved in the High Court.
On October 5, 2009, Kevin took his own life. When I ask Matt about it, he politely rebuffs my question.
“To omit it from the book would have been to give less credence to the love that we had for each other.
“But what I feel, and what I want to express publicly about it, is in the book. No more than that,” he says firmly.
Matt writes: “It was impossible not to fall in love with him. He was handsome and smart and kind . . . I think of him every day and I’m thankful for the time we had together.”
It was reported at the time that they split because of Kevin’s “unreasonable behaviour” and, later on in the book, Matt refers to Walliams being supportive “as it became clear that Kevin had become consumed by drug addiction.” But of their civil partnership ceremony, he writes: “I was so happy. Kevin either was too — and then wasn’t — or already wasn’t. I will never really know.
“Eighteen months later, he left me for someone else while in rehab, and less than 18 months after that, he killed himself.
“I grieve Kevin’s loss every day. It’s a grief that does not go. The facts do not tell the whole story. Nor will I, as I have explained already.
“But I will say this: Kevin and I never stopped loving each other . . . I lived in hope that he would find a way to manage his addiction. I dreamed of getting back together with him and he wanted to get back with me. It wasn’t to be. Some people don’t have the armour.
“At no point, on no day, in no hour or minute do I ever not think of him. How could I not? We two were one. When Kevin died, half of me died with him.”
At the time, Matt and David were preparing to make Come Fly With Me, their comedy set in an airport. They went ahead, but Matt says now, “I barely remember a thing about it”.
In the book he mentions that, at the same time, “My working relationship with David was breaking down too,” and I ask him whether it was because his grief made everything else seem futile?
“Not futile, no. I just realised that I seriously needed to go and grieve. I couldn’t do both at the same time. When somebody dies, if you plough on and then stop in two years time and have a breakdown, which sometimes happens, people are much less sympathetic and much less able to comprehend what’s going on. So after Come Fly With Me I took a step back.”
He says that he and David have no plans to work together at the moment. “Though that doesn’t mean it could never happen,” adding, “but it would be hard to do Little Britain now. It would feel outmoded.”
Following his successful stint as Nardole in Doctor Who and writing this book, he hopes to fulfil his dream of writing a musical and is keen to create another TV comedy.
Is he dating? “I will definitely not discuss that!” he laughs.
Matt Lucas is that rare breed of a public yet private figure. If you want to know what makes him tick, you’ll just have to buy his book.
Little Me by Matt Lucas. Canongate, £20.
Ups & downs
1974 – Born in Paddington, West London.
1980 – Aged six, Matt loses his hair.
1990 – Meets David Walliams while in the National Youth Theatre.
1995 – First appears on the comedy quiz show Shooting Stars as the drummer George Dawes.
1996 – Dad John dies of a heart attack aged 52.
2003 – Gets big TV break with Walliams on sketch show Little Britain.
2006 – Weds Kevin McGee in a civil partnership.
2008 – Split with Kevin.
2009 – Kevin takes his own life.
2010 – New show Come Fly With Me begins.
2015 – First appearance as Nardole in Doctor Who Christmas special.
