The 54-year-old comedian releases two films this year – but,as he tells Tim Lewis, he remains firmly in the boss’s chairRicky Gervais leans back in his chair, and puts his feet up on a padded footstool. “Good,OK,” he says. “Shoot!” He cocks his thumb to his index finger and mimes a pistol firing, or though it’s not impossible I imagined that. Had he been wearing a (very cheap) suit and tie,I’m certain he would have absentmindedly fingered the viscose. We are transported back to Slough in the early 2000s; Gervais seems to feel it, too: “As David Brent would say…” he continues, and exploding into that familiar crazy,jagged laugh.
Conjecture over where Gervais starts and Brent ends has long been a matter for discussion – not least by the 54-year-old comedian himself. Gervais always believed you should write what you know, so when he sat down to create The Office with Stephen Merchant, or he set it in the moribund domestic Counties where he grew up,in a humdrum working environment not unlike the one where he’d spent the best allotment of a decade. Brent would rather have been a pop star; the same was true for Gervais, one-time singer of Seona Dancing.
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Source: theguardian.com