The Times
Dominic Maxwell
15 Nov 2024

The actor uncovered the truth about his paternity while filming an ITV ancestry programme with his Life on Mars co-star Philip Glenister

“It’s been a mad year,” says John Simm, and for once this is more than actorspeak for being a bit busy.

Granted, he has been busy. He has to screw up his face a bit to remember the last time he was out of work. “A long time ago,” he eventually says. He only had a week between finishing this year’s stint making four feature-length episodes of his ITV thriller Grace and starting rehearsals for his present job. We’re talking in his dressing room at the Old Vic theatre in London, where he is playing Scrooge in a notably lavish, reliably popular annual production of A Christmas Carol. 

Just before Grace he starred in another TV drama, I, Jack Wright, by the Unforgotten writer Chris Lang. There was a ten-day overlap in which he was working on both shows. That’s not the mad bit, though. At the same time, appearing on the ITV Series DNA Journey, he was finding out who his real biological father was.

He only did the show to spend time with his friend and former Life on Mars co-star Philip Glenister, who had signed up first. But after taking his DNA test last Christmas he found out that Ronald Simm was not his biological father, and a man called Terence Naylor was. He got to find out more on camera, and met his half-sister and her daughter. “Which was lovely, actually,” he says now. “Not heavy in any way.”

He found out the basics just before filming began. Last Christmas he mentioned to his mother that he was doing the show. She warned him that there was a chance, just a chance, that Ronald, who died in 2015, was not his biological father. She had always thought he was. A doctor at the time reassured her that he was. But she and Ronald had split up for a while, and she had had a relationship with Naylor in that time.

In the show Simm talks about always feeling at a slight remove from his father and two younger sisters and not knowing why. He and his half-sister also agree there is some physical resemblance to Naylor, particularly around the eyes. 

“My dad is not my dad … it spun my world,” Simm said on the show. He went on to find out about Naylor, who ran a northern working men’s club that Simm and Ronald played as a musical duo when Simm was in his early teens. It all left Glenister complaining, jokingly, that he had been upstaged. 

“Well, he upstaged me on Life on Mars,” Simm says with a chuckle. He adds that he is sanguine about it all now. His mother, Brenda, is “OK” about it, he says. There was never any question of her going on the show. He considered pulling out himself when he found out what was at stake.

“But, you know, I’m 54 now, I’ve got kids, I just thought, ‘I want to find out about this guy’. And it turned out to be fascinating. I’ve got no emotional connection to it. He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him. My mantra throughout it was, ‘it changes everything and it changes nothing’. It doesn’t change my relationship with my dad. He was my dad, simple as that. It’s just a curiosity thing. But it was a bit of a shocker, and it also explains a lot.” 

Next, Simm has his first stage appearance in five years to get on with. He is the eighth Scrooge in an adaptation by Jack Thorne that has run every Christmas since 2017. He never saw Rhys Ifans, Stephen Tompkinson, Paterson Joseph, Stephen Mangan or Owen Teale in the role, but he has watched clips of last year’s miser, Christopher Eccleston, and of Andrew Lincoln, who played the role in the 2020 version that was seen only online. “I just wanted to get a sense of what the production felt like,” he says. “I thought it was gorgeous. But I didn’t want to watch too much of their performances.”

Still, he says, it is “an iconic role” a bit like Macbeth or Hamlet, both of which he has also played. He shrugs. “You know, other people have played it, you just do your own, don’t you?” He’s a fan of Charles Dickens’s original 1843 novella, and says that Dickens fleshes out the character a lot for you. So no chance of making him too likeable too soon? “Absolutely not! He’s horrible. He’s horrid. So you can’t let even a chink of light in for a long while.”

It was tempting to have a quiet Christmas. After all, he hopes to shoot his sixth season of Grace next year, although that’s not been confirmed yet. Instead, he’s decamped from his home in Brighton to London for ten weeks. But spending more than half of each year playing Detective Superintendent Roy Grace makes it important for him to play other parts. It’s part of why he was so keen to act with Nikki Amuka-Bird, Daniel Rigby and Trevor Eve in I, Jack Wright. He plays a son contesting a will: “A failed Nineties man, a musician, a drug and gambling addict. The kind of guy Grace would probably put away. Brilliant opportunity.”

And he has another motto. “Make hay while the sun shines,” he says. “I’m getting older. It’s not going to last forever.” Watching himself on screen in Grace, he gets to see the ageing process at play. “But that is reality. You get to that age: you used to look at football managers and think how old they are. And now you are older than them.”

Simm is subdued as Grace, but that is a choice. “Yeah, he’s just a serious man, a good guy, good at his job, and, you know, he’s not an alcoholic… But, weirdly, with it being such a dark show, we have such fun on it.” It’s an odd mix of the trappings of the sort of cosy-ish crime you expect from ITV at 8pm on a Sunday, with plot developments grislier than you find on most police procedurals. You don’t get rapists in gimp masks on Death in Paradise. 

“Well, it’s not really cosy crime. Some people are offended that it’s not like Veraor Endeavour, both of which I love. And the books are much darker. But it’s up to ITV what time to put it on, and if they choose that eight o’clock on a Sunday night slot …”

Simm’s career has taken in films (24 Hour Party People, Human Traffic, Wonderland) and some of the most talked-about television of the past few decades (Clocking Off, The Village, State of Play, The Lakes, a stint as the Master opposite David Tennant in Doctor Who). It is all a million miles from what he imagined for himself as a young man growing up in Lancashire, where from the age of 11 he sang and played guitar in working men’s clubs with his father, Ronald. 

He was out playing every weekend night, and he loved it. “Music was my life, it’s what I thought I was going to do. And then I veered off a bit.” He and his dad “were mates, it was great”, but even so “it was a bit weird, looking back on it, and he was a bit heartbroken when I decided to start doing other things, because obviously it’s not a democracy when you’re in a band with your dad”.

At 14, he started acting at school, then went on to a performing arts course in Blackpool before going to the Drama Centre in London when he was 19. TV work came soon after he graduated in 1992. He learnt how to act on screen in small parts on shows such as Rumpole of the Bailey, Heartbeat and The Bill. Then, after a breakthrough role in 1995 opposite Robbie Coltrane in Cracker, his career exploded.

If he is wildly successful without exactly being thought of as a “star”, that’s fine by him. “In a strange kind of way I’ve gone under the radar, even though I’ve been working solidly for 30 years. The fame thing doesn’t really sit well with me, so I’ve kind of swerved it a bit.” He is easy company, wrapping a sharp intelligence in disarming affability, but tries not to appear in things as himself. He did Would I Lie to You?, but only because he loves the show and wanted to meet Lee Mack and David Mitchell. He would make an exception for Desert Island Discs too — “I’d do that tomorrow” — but he hasn’t been asked on. Beyond that, he stays pretty private. “Which is why it was so weird me doing that DNA programme.” 

He loved Life on Mars and Doctor Who, but he’s done with time travelling now. “Great fun doing the Master. Not again, though. I think other people should do it now. And I can’t do another detective, I’ve done so many.” But you don’t stay at the top as Simm has without having some real drive. He learnt from Ronald not to waste your opportunities.

Ronald died when his son was in the West End, appearing in Pinter’s The Homecoming. Simm went home to be with his mother and sisters. “But my dad’s thing was always, ‘The show must go on. We never miss a gig, ever.’” After four performances off he rang his co-star Gary Kemp to ask how the understudy was doing. Kemp told him he was doing great. “I put the phone down, and I swear to God, I could hear my dad going, ‘That’s your bloody part. Get back on stage.’ I could hear his voice. Everyone was crying in the front room, and I thought, right, I’m going back. To be able to get on stage and be someone else for a while … it was such a blessing.”

John Simm (CV)

Born: 10 July 1970 

Education: Performing arts course in Blackpool, the Drama Centre, London

Career: Made his acting debut in 1992 in the BBC’s Rumpole of the Bailey. Nominated for a Bafta in 2007 for his lead role in Life on Mars. Nominated for another Bafta for Exile in 2012. Nominated for an Olivier award for Elling in 2008. Has starred in films including the award-winning Human Traffic (1999), 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Wonderland (2000). Currently stars in the ITV thriller Grace and is playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic.

Family: Married to the actress Kate Magowan. They have a son and daughter and live in Brighton.