‘The penguin helps to take the edge off the fascism’

In The Penguin Lessons’, Steve Coogan plays a teacher in military-occupied Argentina who forms an unlikely bond with a cute seabird. Such tonal extremes required a delicate hand, he and co-star Jonathan Pryce tell Annabel Nugent

- Annabel Nugent

Jonathan Pryce is not a fan of penguins. Steve Coogan tells me this with a sort of “eh, can you believe it?” arch to his eyebrows. Pryce confirms as much. “I’m not an animal person,” says the 77-year-old with an air of grave seriousness. So when everyone else on the set of The Penguin Lessons was all too happy to be acting opposite a real-life seabird instead of some inanimate object, Pryce was holding out for CGI. “I’d have preferred a tennis ball screen partner… Penguins, they tend to poop. Projectile poop.”

The penguin is only half the story, though. Set in 1976, the duo’s new film follows a school teacher from Cornwall who is newly arrived in Argentina when he happens across a penguin stuck in an oil slick and saves it from death. At the same time as this unlikely friendship between man and bird is growing, a military coup has gripped the country, launching a brutal dictatorship defined by rampant human rights abuses; dissidents are abducted, never heard from again, and babies are stolen from captured parents.

It’s a convergence of events so random it could only ever happen in real life. Which it did to Tom Michell. He wrote a memoir about his avian pal a decade ago and now, at 73, is watching wide-eyed as his life story is turned into an off-beat dramacomedy starring Coogan, Pryce, and a projectile-pooping Magellanic penguin named Richard. “All of my Christmases have come at once!” Michell tells me in a separate interview alongside the film’s director, Peter Cattaneo.

In adapting his memoir, certain things have shifted. For one, Coogan’s Michell is considerably more grumpy than the man sitting opposite me, who warmed to his penguin buddy instantly. “We wanted to make Tom more cynical in the film because it gives him somewhere to go, but we had to square that away with the real Tom and make sure he didn’t mind being made a bit more unpleasant,” says Coogan.