‘Westminster is where I’m most recognised’: Chris Addison on life after The Thick of It

Is Chris Addison a famous face? The honest answer, he admits, is it depends where he is. In mainstream Britain, he enjoys a decent enough profile as an affable comic and actor. Over in America, where he’s been making it as a director, he’s less recognisable. But in one London postcode, he’s a veritable A-lister.

‘It was like being in a Hollywood movie,’ he laughs, as he recalls a walk across Westminster shortly after starring in the first season of The Thick Of It as the hapless junior SpAD Ollie. ‘Everywhere I went people were going “it’s him! It’s him!” - much more than anywhere else I’d been.’ That cult fame has followed him ever since - at least in SW1.

You can see why. Almost ten years on from its conclusion, Armando Iannucci’s political satire remains a universal reference point in Westminster. While Addison and his fellow stars started off playing characters inspired by the late-Blair/Brown/Cameron era, they ended up being more recognisable than most of those they were parodying.

Still, Addison hasn't jumped on Zoom to talk about The Thick of It (he's moved on; even if some of us haven't). He's here to discuss the second series of Breeders: the brutally-honest parenting sitcom he co-produces, and sometimes directs, with fellow Brit dads Martin Freeman (who also stars alongside Daisy Haggard) and Simon Blackwell.

From some of the marketing material, you might assume you’ve got the measure of Breeders. Two parents, two kids - that familiar ‘sitcom’ pose that suggests a healthy dose of silliness is on its way before long. And you’d be completely wrong.

For Breeders, as Addison explains, isn’t actually a show about children whatsoever but about parenting itself. ‘It’s really hard bringing up kids,’ he says (Addison himself speaking as a father of two). ‘It doesn’t matter how stable you are, or how stable they are. It’s still really hard.’

It was this fundamental, if slightly uncomfortable, truth that he and his co-creators felt was missing from most family sitcoms. ‘We felt we’d never seen a show where the relationship between the parents and the children was completely honest. That sense that, there’s nothing you love more than your children but equally there’s nothing that makes you angrier than your children,’ he says.

They wanted to be equally honest, too, about how those things affect adult relationships. In the Breeders universe, family dramas morph not into credulity-stretching comic pay-offs like many sitcoms, but instead in tetchy therapy sessions, sleepless nights, school-night drinking and general existential anguish. All based, of course, on first-hand experience.

Stressful though the subject matter may be, he insists he’s enjoying the project. Working with a large writers’ room - all of them parents - functions like 'a parenting support group', as well as ‘the most fantastic place creative-wise’. Has he ever found himself sharing his own parenting nightmares only for the rest of the room to recoil in horror? Thankfully, he says, it hasn’t happened yet.

With a sizable budget and a fair degree of ambition, Breeders is, in many ways, the ideal project for Addison, who’s been doggedly expanding his repertoire ever since his Whitehall days. After the success of The Thick of It, he headed stateside, having been offered a gig - this time as a director - on Iannucci’s successor project, Veep. During his time there, the show won ‘Outstanding Comedy Series’ at the Emmys, with several other nominations to boot.

His most recent directorial project was rather different: a gender-swapped remix of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, entitled The Hustle, starring Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway. Snooty critics hated it, largely for what it wasn’t - i.e. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - rather than what it was: namely a vehicle for Wilson to give one of the most riotous comedy performances since Jim Carrey’s heyday (no joke: watch it on Netflix).

Addison is bashful as to how the project came about. He’d acted (briefly) with Wilson before, he explains, and had also worked with the film’s screenwriter Jac Shaeffer (now showrunner of Wandavision), and ‘ended up directing it’. And how was it working with Ms Wilson? An absolute treat, he says. ‘She’s super talented and just shines on the screen.’

Was he involved, I wonder, in giving a hand-up to some of the other British names involved in the project? Or is it common to see the mad one from This Country in the same cast as Hank from Breaking Bad? He might have played a part, he admits - not least in bringing on board the ever-excellent Ingrid Oliver as an ice-queen police chief. That’s what we like to hear.

Though Breeders might be a return to home turf - being filmed and set in London - it has at least allowed him to keep one foot (virtually) in America, with the show being co-produced by, and broadcast on, the Disney-owned network FX. It’s gone down well with the US critics, meaning a third series should arrive before long.

Is he starting to build a profile in Hollywood, I ask. ‘I have a career,’ he says. ‘But that’s a slightly different thing.’ That’s true, yes. But, still - how many former SpADs can say that?

The new series is Breeders available on Sky One and streaming service NOW from 27 May. All episodes available on demand.