Actor/comedian Rob Delaney is the latest guest on Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett's podcast Dish.
In the wide ranging interview Delaney talks about working with Tom Cruise, parenting three boys under seven, and Rob's memoir, A Heart That Works, on the loss of his son Henry. He also breaks the bad news that it's unlikely we will be seeing him in another series of the acclaimed comedy Catastrophe. Read more below.
ROB DELANEY ON TWITTER
“So, if you were silly on Twitter and people followed you, then you amassed enough of a following where you could be like, ‘Cincinnati, I'm coming,’ and then you could sell tickets, and so it was so great. But it's funny, I haven't had like a pleasant thought about Twitter now in some years.”
ROB DELANEY ON DOING ANOTHER SERIES OF CATASTROPHE
“I mean, I hope we don't, only because people reboot everything now. Like let it be. We stopped doing it because we had done four series that we were proud of and we could smell that we were getting in danger of repeating ourselves, and frankly, we said a lot about marriage and parenting in there, maybe Sharon might have some ideas. I totally don't. I like had scraped the barrel and was like, that's all I know.
And so, if we did another one, I think it might be bad, or worse, a cash grab. I would rather starve to death. I don't want my kids to starve to death, but I would totally on principal be like, check it out, I starved to death ‘cause it was cooler than trot out some [rubbish] … And then the ones that do reboot, like so many that reboot, you're like, I was fine with that not existing anymore and then it comes back and you're like, eh, so God help us if we ever did that.”
ROB ON HATING TO COOK WITH ANYONE ELSE
“I like to cook alone, like when my wife is like, ‘Do you wanna cook something together?’ I would totally rather be hit by a car. Like she can cook it a hundred percent and then I'll do all the dishes or vice versa. I don't know why that is. I just, maybe ‘cause I'm ashamed of my cooking, I want to do it alone, like other things I do alone that I'm ashamed about, but I don't want to cook with- oh God, I would totally rather like walk through here nude than cook with a person for sure.”
ROB DELANEY ON WORKING WITH TOM CRUISE
Rob: “Oh, yeah. I mean, [he’s] different from any big star because he's so intensely involved in every aspect of the production, which isn't to like, denigrate any of the other people that I've worked with, but you know, he'll be like, oh, well we should use this lens, that actor in the background's a hair should be an eighth of an inch shorter, like, like a computer, you know? So incredibly passionate. So, learning from [him] was amazing. … And so, an assistant director will be like, ‘All right, we've got about probably twenty minutes, you can go back to your trailer,’ Tom Cruise is like, ‘We're gonna turn the cameras around. Everybody gather round and I'll tell some stories.’
So, he's like telling stories about like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know, like those are his like stories - like where I'm like, yeah, I saw my friend Jeff at the match, and he is like, well, Elizabeth Taylor called me. And so just super fascinating and also the Mission Impossible movies are - were like the only franchise that I would actually go and see in the cinema. So, to get to be even a little bit involved in one of those was very exciting, and yeah, Tom Cruise - worth the hype.”
Nick: “And this might sound like a stupid question, but I'm serious. Does he really look like Tom Cruise? Like, is he like, leather jacket, like the hair, like, ‘Hey, I'm Tom Cruise.’”
Rob: “He is - well I guess, is he, did he just turn sixty? I think he may have, or he is close to it, right. Yeah. But you can still see, even if he's in like a dress shirt, you know, like a smart shirt, you can still see like that he has not just these abs, but the ones that are here as well. You know, the ones that I see on men and just get angry. I'm like, it's like a betrayal. Why are you, come on. Do I have to compete with that? So you can see every muscle through like a jumper. Yeah. But he looks great and he also looks like he is aging, so you're not like, oh, he's obviously just, you know, having a surgery each day at lunch or anything like that, which you feel like some people that age might. But - so he looks real and handsome and lovely.”
ROB DELANEY ON UK/USA CULINARY DIFFERENCES
Nick: “What year did you move to the UK?”
Rob: “2014. So I've [been] here for nine years. Which is bananas.”
Nick: “And culinary wise, did you notice any extreme differences? Was there anything you were like, ‘Ew, what's that that they do over here?’”
Rob: “Once in a while, like a beef and kidney pie would come across the table. I don't so much need kidney meat. I guess maybe if I had discovered it when I was younger, but now if you're giving me - like, you know what? That the ship has sailed. My palate has hit a wall and the wall is made of kidney.”
ROB’S BOOK A HEART THAT WORKS
“So for people who don't know what the book's about, it is about my son Henry, who died of a brain tumour five years ago, a little bit before he turned three. And it's about, you know, that whole experience with my family of him getting sick and then us taking care of him for a couple of years and then him dying. And so to answer specifically your question about reading through it, it felt good to do that because even when you're writing a book, it's rare to go from like A to Z all the way through. And that was one of the times I did that, like in essentially one sitting. I think I actually did take an hour and a half nap in the middle of it and just lay on the floor in the dark booth, I really did, and then, so yeah, it took one day to do.
And I felt good doing that because then I was like, okay, this book is gonna devastate people, but it also makes sense, there's a through line. So honestly, reading it out loud, I was like, it doesn't stink. Also, I was even like- ‘cause parts of it I'd written months before, I was like, ‘Whoa, my God, I'm gonna put this out in the world? I mean, this is gonna wallop people.’ And then I was like, good, because part of the book was, I wanted to do an unvarnished picture of grief and the anger that comes with it. I think it would've been much less kind to put out a book that was like, ‘But then one day the sun did come out,’ you know, and all this stuff. Because then somebody could read that and be like, oh, I guess maybe I'll be okay. And then something like that happens to them and you're just brutalised, you know, something said to me, make it difficult, make it heavy.”
ROB ON THE JOYS OF PARENTING
“I remember the youngest one ate a snail and I hear like crunch, you know, like the escargot slimy noises. He's chewing it with his like two teeth, and then one of the older ones punches the other one, like punch, like boxer jab in the face, and I happen to be watering the lawn at that point so I just hosed him. If you have three kids, boys, under the age of like seven, that's just part of your life. One of them used a phrase the other day where I was like, that's not something people say often, and I sure said it in the filthy context. But I, you know what, I'll just sweep that under the rug. Like, I'll tell you all about my emotions, but like, oh, do I have to do homework that'll lead to me needing to do some parenting later? I’ll just put that under the rug, I don't wanna do that.”
ROB ON GETTING A VASECTOMY
“I should do a commercial for vasectomies. My wife and I can have sex whenever we want, we don't have to prepare. We don't have to go get a thing unless we want to, and nobody gets pregnant. Anyway. But also, I didn't enjoy getting it, but that's okay. So I think that was scarier because I ate food before the surgery and so, when I was like, you know what, maybe I will have those drugs, they were like, ‘But you said you had breakfast?’ And I was like, ‘No, I didn't, no, I didn't have breakfast,’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, well we don't want you to aspirate, vomit and die.’”
Dish from Waitrose & Partners, hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett is available on all podcast providers now.
