Michael McIntyre: ‘I checked my wife Kitty’s texts at 3am to see if her friend said I was funny’
Comic star on love, laughs and self-doubt
IT’S the early hours of the morning and Michael McIntyre is careful not to disturb his sleeping wife Kitty as he reaches for her phone and scrolls through the messages.
The desperate act of a man who suspects his partner is having an affair?
No, the act of a comedian riven with self-doubt that someone, somewhere might not find him funny.
“A friend of a friend came to the show. She texted Kitty to say she was on her way there, then at the show and very excited etc. But then we heard nothing afterwards and I started fretting,” he explains.
“I actually checked Kitty’s phone at about 3am to see if this woman — someone I barely know — thought I was funny or not.
“You want so badly for people to like you. I worry the whole time about things like that and it can be quite detrimental.”
You may have guessed by now that, despite being one of the country’s most successful comedians, 36-year-old McIntyre suffers from anxiety.
He is currently in the middle of a 71-night arena tour and his new DVD, Showtime, is out now. His first, Live And Laughing, was the fastest-selling stand-up DVD of all time. And yet...
“The anxiety creates a fear that it’s all going to go away, fear that something might not happen, fear of not being successful,” he says.
“That’s what I have had for the whole time and it’s never going to go away.
“But it means I am never complacent.
“My wife counters it. Only last night over dinner, she was saying the same thing to me that’s she’s said so many times — ‘It’s good, it’s always been good. Don’t go down on it, just keep refreshing it’. But I lose that reassurance. I forget it.”
Then there’s the hypochondria. Recently, when his thumb started twitching, Michael looked up the symptom online and called Kitty to say he might have “something like motor neurone disease”.
Another time, he chewed one of the children’s strawberry vitamin tablets, forgot he’d had it and panicked when he later noticed his saliva was red, informing her he possibly had “internal bleeding”.
His calm, sensible wife, you feel, deserves a medal for taking it all in her stride and offering him constant support.
“I suppose the only time I might go to therapy is if Kitty got tired of helping me,” he says.
“And sometimes she does and says, ‘Michael, please can you go and talk to someone else just for 50 minutes, because I can’t keep saying the same things.”
Michael was born in Merton, south London, to mum Kati and dad Ray Cameron, a Canadian comedy producer who co-wrote The Kenny Everett Television Show.
He was seven and his sister, Lucy, was five when they divorced.
His parents both remarried and Ray moved to the US, so Michael only saw him occasionally and missed him terribly.
They last spoke when Michael was just 17, on the phone on Christmas Day. The following morning, he was told his father had died of a heart attack.
“I’d assumed we’d have years to hang out and get to know each other properly, then suddenly he was gone,” he says.
“Apparently, he was the life and soul in company but he never got to know that I turned out to be funny too.”
I ask Michael whether he feels his anxiety stems from suffering such a cataclysmic event at a young age. “I understand the theory of what you’re saying. I suppose I’m always a little bit on edge.
“I don’t go around straightening pictures or anything like that, but I do obsess about the safety of those I love, particularly the kids,” he says, referring to his sons Lucas, seven, and five-year-old Oscar.
“I have this worry that everything could just go in a second. I never let anything slip.
“I always have these arguments with Kitty, where she says, ‘Just relax a bit’ and I say ‘No, don’t relax at all’ because that’s when something bad happens.”
These days, the worrying is mostly restricted to the preparation and implementation of a tour. The rest of the time, he says, life is much calmer.
Michael says: “We have a lot of fun together, it’s just silly. I’m not doing comedy. Kitty gets a different version of me.
“When people come round, I will tell jokes but she knows it’s all put on and exaggerated. But when it’s just us, getting stuck in to daily life with the kids, it’s lovely.
“I don’t know how it’s possible to be with someone that much and — it sounds cheesy — but to love them more with each passing day.
“You have an initial attraction, you get on, but then you completely entwine
yourself so that you almost become one person.
“During a tour, if it’s possible to get home afterwards, I will. Because I just sleep better when I’m home and she’s there.”
Michael met Kitty, also 36, when he was a struggling stand-up and clearly marvels at landed such an intelligent, attractive woman.
“Because she’s so gorgeous, people assume it’s like, ‘Oh what first attracted
you to the millionaire Michael McIntyre?’,” he laughs.
“People say it out loud too, which is very disconcerting.
“No, no, no! I was £40,000 in debt when we met and she STILL liked me! I was this chubby and this Chinese and very broke.”
Michael found he bonded almost immediately with Kitty’s parents, Alexandra and Simon Ward, the Young Winston actor who died in July this year after a long illness. “He was one of my closest friends. He would come to my gigs in the early days,” says Michael.
“I went through some of his old texts the other day and they were supportive on an insane level because he was just so articulate.”
The family were in Italy when they got a call to say Simon had taken a turn for the worse.
“It was out of the blue. We were going to have a pizza night... then we were
saying to the kids, ‘It’s not happening, we’re going home’.
“He actually died when we were in the car heading back to Britain.
“I felt so bad for the kids because they took it... so they seemed to understand and were really, really upset. It was horrific.”
With the death of his father-in-law and the continual stresses of an ongoing tour, you might expect Michael’s anxiety to be at its height but he seems remarkably chilled.
“Success and arena shows are a great anti-depressant,” he says.
“Also, when I start to worry about things, I’m able to take a step back and look at all this evidence of happiness with Kitty and the kids, and that makes me feel better.
“Before I went into comedy I was a loner, very much wrapped up in my own thoughts.
“But I always liked myself and the way I thought. I liked coming up with stuff, making people laugh. But I wasn’t gigging, I was just being myself.
“I am still trying to achieve something that I’m never likely to achieve... for everyone to love what I’m doing.
“That gives me a hell of a lot of pain and suffering but it forces me to focus every day.
“I will carry on for as long as I enjoy it. Besides, I feel I have a lot more to say.”
It seems that Michael McIntyre will be making us laugh for many more years to come.
