Steve Coogan: Student of comedy

Until today, Steve Coogan was probably best known to American moviegoers as the frazzled film director who loses his head in "Tropic Thunder" or Phileas Fogg in the Disney version of "Around the World in 80 Days." The English actor/comedian might have found his breakthrough role in "Hamlet 2" as Dana Marschz, a hapless high school drama instructor. The film gives Coogan a chance to perform sharp character humor, arm-flailing slapstick and even musical comedy as a hip messiah in the glitzy production number "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus."

Coogan enjoys iconic status in Britain for his TV and film portrayals of insecure, fame-obsessed showbiz types. In fact, he's twice played an actor named Steve Coogan, once in the mock documentary "Tristram Shandy" and again in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes," discussing the travails of English actors abroad with Alfred Molina. His self-mocking self-portrait presented Coogan as a shallow, pompous, scandal-plagued striver. During a recent visit to Minneapolis, Coogan explained that he's not quite that obnoxious offscreen.

"I am not Mother Teresa. I've never claimed to be. I've had certain issues," he admitted -- he is perennially linked to lap dancers and drug excess in British tabloids. Rather than be "angst-ridden' by unfortunate experiences, he exorcizes those issues by "co-opting it into what I do. I take things that I know I'm guilty of and I just increase the dysfunction.

"When someone's playing themselves, the trap is to say 'Look at me, get a load of how I can laugh at myself. I'm such a smart, cool person that I mock myself.' That can look self-indulgent and backfire. I would like to play with it to the level that it's uncomfortable and people think, 'Maybe he really is like that.' I like that tension."

His uncomfortable assignment in "Hamlet 2" included several scenes of Marschz's clumsy roller-skate commute to work. He did every stunt except one (slamming into the side of a parked van). When he saw that the pro did a funny and believable fall, he knew he couldn't do better. "I'm happy if people believe that's me," he said.

The challenge of the role was to make the luckless Marschz, who could easily be an object of ridicule, a sympathetic character.

"I'm more comfortable playing characters who act as if they don't care if people don't like them," Coogan said. "As long as they kind of respect you. Nothing's more off-putting than seeing an actor in a role trying to be over-likable.

"I'd rather die with dignity than try to be ingratiating too much, to prostitute myself. In this film, whenever something bad happened to me, the goal wasn't trying to be funny, it was to be truthful."

Coogan said he had a lot of help in that regard from co-star Catherine Keener, who plays Marschz's fed-up, sarcastic wife. Working with the indie goddess was intimidating, he recalled.

"Being in a scene with her scared me and made me sure I did my job properly," Coogan said.

Apparently, that worked. "Hamlet 2" set off a surprise bidding war among distributors after its Sundance debut. "Before our screening we read all this conjecture from various journalists about what's going to be the thing to be talked about and we were not mentioned anywhere. And then suddenly they have to catch up with their tail.

"That's very gratifying. Those moments don't come along often, and it's nice to enjoy them when they do."

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186