The former Peep Show star felt right at home playing a lily-livered journalist in Michael Winterbottom’s film Greed. He talks about marriage, capitalism – and Armageddon
‘I find nuclear war quite comforting,” says David Mitchell when we meet. The 45-year-old has been trying to make himself feel better about the state of the world, and this – weapons of mass destruction primed to annihilate us all – is what he’s landed on. “What’s comforting is that, these days, it’s so far down the hit parade of threats that we barely reflect on it at all,” he continues, before pausing to consider this. “It almost makes me think that there will be a nuclear war – because that’s the thing we’re not focused on!”
It didn’t take long for Mitchell’s optimism to turn to dread. But then that’s his stock-in-trade: a permanent sense of trepidation. Indeed, he rattles through a list of current terrors – Trump and Putin, the climate crisis, the internet’s grip on our lives – and says it’s all got so bad that he has resolved to stick his head in the sand from now on. “I don’t want to feel perpetual anguish,” he says, “and I’ve decided it’s not my duty to, either.”