Joseph Fiennes: ‘I was very nervous to play Gareth Southgate on TV’

Joseph Fiennes has shed light on the ‘nerve-wracking’ experience of playing Gareth Southgate in a new BBC drama.

Created and written by James Graham, Dear England chronicles the former England player’s journey as manager of the national team from 2016 to 2024.

Starring Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) as Pippa Grange, the team’s psychologist and Jason Watkins (The Crown) as former FA chairman Greg Dyke, the four-part series is adapted from James’ Olivier award-winning stage play of the same name.

However, despite Joseph reprising his role as Gareth for the BBC series, the Handmaid’s Tale star told Metro how the process of switching the stage for the screen brought an entirely different challenge.

‘The play is fictitious,’ he tells me, sitting next to James and Jodie inside a BBC studio.

‘There’s a disclaimer on the tin that says, at the very top of our show, that these are events that happen, but this is the interpretation of these events, done with absolute examination and detail.

‘There is a nervousness about taking what we did in the play and putting it on a lens… If you’re in the middle of a theatre as an audience member if you squint a little bit… [I could] very possibly be Gareth Southgate.

‘But it’s a different thing when the lens is banged [right there in front of me]. So I was very, very nervous about the conceit of playing Gareth.’

Discussing the ‘ride’ he wants audiences to take, Joseph adds: ‘You want them to accept it and then move to the much more exciting things beyond waistcoats, mannerisms and these very famous people.

‘[Dear England] goes beyond football and I think the beauty of the series is that through the lens of the beautiful game we get to examine trickier conversations.’

Directed in part by Rupert Goold and Paul Whittington, the series sees Gareth open his mind up to ‘face up to the years of hurt to take England back to the promised land’.

Central to this effort is Pippa, who Jodie described as being a ‘fascinating’ character to play.

‘The biggest takeaway for me is how at an international level fear is seen as something that you need to pretend you are immune to,’ she says.

‘In James’s writing, it’s so beautiful, but then also in Pippa’s own words and her own explanation – fear should not be a vulnerability.

‘And it’s so simple what she articulates that you can’t quite believe you don’t know it until you’ve been told it, and then you feel gobsmacked that it’s not still being implemented.’

For James, however, the show’s creator – who has also written the acclaimed BBC series Sherwood and ITV’s Quiz – this series was about asking ‘some of the biggest existential questions England faces as a country’.

‘This isn’t endorsed by Gareth, it’s not endorsed by the FA,’ he tells me.

‘But I want to defend him. It’s quite clear my admiration for the people involved, including Pippa and Gareth.

‘They identified that that one of the hugest problems in the England dressing room… was that no one had ever sat them down and gone and what is England to you? What is your country? And they just didn’t feel connected.’

With the first two episodes of Dear England arriving on Sunday May 24, viewers can expect to see the psychological rebuilding of the England men’s football team and how they overcame their penalty-shootout trauma while transforming their team culture.

Dear England is available to watch on BBC One and iPlayer at 9pm on Sunday 24th May.

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