In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper goes rogue and launches an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. He is asked by RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake — a voice of reason in the madness — to recall the B-52 bombers that will end civilization. Ripper refuses. Mandrake asks politely, in an arch British way, why he feels the need to blow up the world. The general talks of how forces beyond our comprehension are slowly poisoning America with a toxic chemical known as… fluoride.
“Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake! Children’s ice cream!”
More than 60 years later, I’m watching Armando Iannucci’s re-imagined Dr. Strangelove at the Noel Coward Theatre in London. Directed and co-adapted by Sean Foley, it features Steve Coogan in the multiple roles made famous by Peter Sellers. The fluoride line gets some giggles, but not from me or an American couple sitting nearby. They look at each other with horror and simultaneously whisper: “RFK Jr.”
The fluoride speech is one of the sections of Kubrick’s original screenplay that Iannucci, the visionary behind Veep, The Thick of It, In the Loop, and The Death of Stalin didn’t tinker with; it was too perfect and too timely as originally written. “I just thought, ‘This is absurd, that this is actually happening in real life,’” says Iannucci, a polite, soft-spoken man who has created so many loud characters. We talk the next day in one of his favorite Italian restaurants. Unfortunately, he is under the weather, so it is a struggle to hear him above the hum and bang of the espresso machine. We eventually retreat to his Soho office that is filled with decongestants and comfort food. “It all speaks of a bigger thing, the questioning of science,” says Iannucci. “The ‘plandemic,’ the idea that ‘the pandemic didn’t happen, it was all a conspiracy to microchip us and the vaccines were part of it. You have people saying, ‘Facts are only one part of the argument, beliefs have equal weight.’”
When first conceived, Iannucci saw a Dr. Strangelove remix as a metaphor for the climate crisis and decisions being made that would have an irrevocable impact on the earth. Then things changed.
“By the time I sat down to write it, we had Putin threatening nuclear war against NATO,” says Iannucci with a look somewhere between wonder and alarm. “It has a real sense of relevance now.”
While Sellers had the advantage of doing the separate roles separately on film, for the stage show Coogan must slip out of a scene and re-emerge as a different character: a muddled U.S. president; Dr. Strangelove, a German scientist with a tendency to offer the Hitler salute; and Mandrake, a stand-in for British politeness as their empire expires. He even adds a fourth role of T.J. Kong, the cowboy B-52 pilot who rides a missile straight into Armageddon. Coogan sees America in Iannucci’s Mandrake, who in the Kubrick film represents a Britain past its prime but still trying to drive the global conversation.
“I think America is like Britain was a hundred years ago,” Coogan tells me one night outside the theater. “Once upon a time, America was the grown up that, like the British Empire, thought it could whip the world into shape. And America has sort of disabused itself of that with Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Coogan’s Strangelove — the character based partly on Wernher von Braun, who built the V-2 rockets for the Nazis and then helped the Americans land on the moon — also still holds relevance, with a little Iannucci tweaking.
“Good actors make alliances with nefarious individuals, and it was ever thus,” says Coogan. “Whenever I make the Nazi salute, everyone [on stage] looks the other way, which is a metaphor for America and the UK — we don’t apply international law with any kind of consistency at all.”
Coogan has worked with Iannucci on and off for 30 years, beginning as a young, awestruck actor in some of the writer’s radio plays. Best known to American audiences through Alan Partridge imports and his roles as a version of himself in The Trip films, Coogan today sees himself as an equal partner with Iannucci. “He used to be the puppet master early on but now our relationship is more of a collaboration,” Coogan says. “I do think I embrace pathos more than him. It creates a nice kind of creative of tension. There’s a kind of a surgical quality to what he does.”
That preciseness can be seen in Iannucci’s Veep, where every character delivers verbal kills shots without mercy or respect for human decency. My personal favorite is when Vice President Selina Meyer turns to the hapless, moronic, and ambitious Jonah Ryan after he crossed her in Congress: “I want to let you know that I will destroy you in ways that are so creative, they will honor me for it at the Kennedy Center.”
Iannucci comes honestly to his cynicism about those in power. His father spoke out publicly against Mussolini and the fascists in Italy before immigrating to England. What began earlier in Iannucci’s career as simply skewering pompous politicians has matured into an examination of what happens when leaders with feet of mud let their egos make decisions that will change the lives of millions. You could say his approach is now Kubrickesque.
“It’s about who’s in power and what’s going to happen when they’re not in power,” says Iannucci. “It’s Succession, it’s Game of Thrones, it’s all who’s next and what do I have to do to get there? It’s endlessly fascinating, but I’m turning more and more now to what does power do. The Death of Stalin was all about these ridiculous farcical goings-on inside the Kremlin, but the consequence for people outside the Kremlin is devastating, the killings and the treacheries.”
It’s odd that the specific issue of nuclear destruction seems to have faded while the weapons have not gone away.
We get bored. We move on. And social media has sort of exacerbated that. One week, we’ll all be hollering at somebody saying the wrong thing, and the next week we’ve moved onto the next thing. We want our hits faster. We’ve become addicted to those highs. So the whole thing about nuclear weapons is, “Haven’t we sorted that? Wasn’t there a wall that came down between Reagan and Gorbachev?” But the weapons are still there.
You’re a huge Dickens fan. You made a documentary on Dickens in modern Britain and directed a critically acclaimed version of The Personal History of David Copperfield. What do you think Dickens would make of Trump and this world we live in?
It’d be interesting, wouldn’t it? I think Little Dorrit is the one that comes across as the closest to now. You have Merdle, that’s the banker, the financier, who’s at the center of it. He’s a kind of cold fish, difficult to know. He’s the Peter Thiel of the Dickens universe. Everything revolves around him and people start loving him, endorsing him, thinking, “It could go either way, but I’m safer if I endorse him.” [Merdle dies by suicide and his financial schemes bankrupt many.]
I would have liked to have seen him writing about Trump and Musk. Eric Trump and Donald Jr. Or he ships some of his characters off to America and they all fall for some poxy land deal. It’s such rich material.
Tony Hale and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep.
You’ve been working on a new project with social media at its center. What do you make of that whole world since Elon Musk bought Twitter? And Thiel is JD Vance’s sponsor.
And he has all of Britain’s mental health records! [Thiel is the chair of Palantir, a data systems company with deep ties to the British Health Service.]
It’s frightening, because Musk’s statement of X being a new source of journalism is bollocks. They don’t have any journalists. All they’re doing is posting other people’s news, but they’re also posting other people’s opinions and other people’s conspiracy theories. It’s left to you to try and work out which one is correct. And he’s now been saying news is the aggregate, the sum total, of what people say. It’s allowed him, not only to have bought Twitter and turned it into what it is but to promote himself above all users and promote his political opinions, even though he says it’s meant to be a mouthpiece for different points of view. His algorithm pushes him as the first post, the first thing you read in the morning. He praises the algorithm and the methodology as being neutral, but it’s not. Any independent news source must be separate from power, but he’s in power.
So, how does that work? Newspapers here all have their different slants and you understand them. Now Musk is being a newspaper proprietor, but for a newspaper that doesn’t write or report its own stories, it’s just based on stories from other people and above it are all of his opinions.
And the whole part of him being in charge of government efficiency. He’s calling out unelected bureaucrats when he is about to become an unelected bureaucrat.
He’s come to America to take their jobs! And he probably won’t stay for the effects of his cuts. Once you cut people, it actually makes things rotten, and you end up with a government that doesn’t work. But he’ll be gone by then. Trump and Musk won’t last. Someone I know said they are like two tomcats in the sand.
A lot of your work centers around theoretically smart people committing a series of snafus and gaffes as they try to figure out how to handle the media. And it never works. It always ends up in a disaster. I spent some time covering the presidential campaign and you had candidates’ intent on not creating a Veep moment. There seems to be a real danger when you shackle yourself in that way.
It kind of rings you in, doesn’t it? It becomes this whole “Oh, I can’t say that. I wanted to say that, but I better not say that.” It’s fear of what the others might make of it. I don’t think that goes through Trump’s head. I don’t think it goes through Vance’s head. And the way the media operates is that it smells fear. It becomes almost like a self-fulfilling thing: The panic not to say anything becomes the story. From what I can see, after the initial burst of enthusiasm for Harris, there was a moment [of] “Tell me what you stand for. Tell your story. Tell us what you want to do.”
“We’re not going back.”
Yes, that is not enough. I did think at the time, when Harris was nominated to replace Biden, “Don’t spend all your time attacking Trump, because everybody knows Trump by now. They’ve decided. Tell people what’s wrong with his policies and tell them what your policies are.” But she didn’t do that. We are finding that here with [Prime Minister Kier] Starmer. Labour got in with a big majority. But they got in by playing things very safe, and it won them the election. But the problem is, what do we do now? Because they said so many things they wouldn’t do. Now they have very few options left.
Trump has a different approach to the media: He just tries to bully it like he does everything else.
Trump is driving a truck and working at McDonald’s for half a day, and making the point that, “You know I’m a billionaire, but I get you.” Whereas Kamala Harris is onstage with Beyoncé. There’s a reality to him in that you know where he’s coming from. You don’t have to try and parse what he’s saying to work out what he is going to do or what he wants to do.
Handling the media is impossible now, because everybody’s the media. Everyone’s got a phone. Everyone Tweets something or posts something. And that’s what the internet has done with it. It’s made everything look as valued as everything else. So, a mocked-up New York Times website looks just as polished as a mocked-up pretend news website. And we’ve lost those figures that we respected, having a high profile, who were able to guide us to stuff that is mostly reliable.
One of the things Trump does is just chooses his type of media, and he knows that’s enough. That gets to the people he wants to speak to. So, he does the podcasts, he does the Fox News. We’re seeing a little bit here before the last election and MPs going on [UK Fox equivalent] GB News. And that’s their way of saying, “Well, we’ve gone on the media. We’ve spoken to a reputable outlet, so we don’t need to go on BBC.”
Coogan during the curtain call of Dr. Strangelove at the Noel Coward Theatre on Oct. 29.
Alan Chapman/Getty Images
Some of your best characters are people who could be described as bullies, like Malcolm in The Thick of It or Dan on Veep. But the actual power is largely off-screen, whether it be the prime minister in The Thick of It or the actual president in the early seasons of Veep.
[Laughs.] I couldn’t write Malcolm today. He’d be thrown out of his job for bullying.
But with Trump, the bully is actually the guy in charge. He has no pretense of being presidential and letting his minions do his dirty work. He does it himself.
Yes, and Trump is giving everyone permission to behave like that as well, and to be outraged and angry and aggressive to people that they don’t like. Elon Musk the other day was tweeting about somebody [Lt. Colonel Eugene Vindman)] saying, “He’s a traitor.” He is saying he’s on Zelensky’s payroll or something and that’s treason, and we know what happens to people who commit treason. So, he’s asking for him to be killed.
But you consistently return to the idea of bullies pushing for things and what that means.
I started trying to work it out after the Iraq invasion and Tony Blair just getting sucked into something that everyone knew was the wrong thing to do. I wanted to know, how does this work? How did that happen where everyone was opposed to it? It has to do with the way that power here has become more and more centralized around the prime minister. And there was this new breed of people called the Enforcers who were the ones who went around the ministries telling them, “No, this is the plan. This is what you can do. This is what you can say.” Just carrying out the instructions and passing out the instructions. That’s what Malcolm represents. For me, it was about bringing to the screen something that was intrinsic to the government now that we just are unaware of in any detail.
And it’s fascinating what people do to just be in the proximity to power. For Veep, we got a tour of the West Wing. Obama was still president. His wingman, Reggie Love, showed us around. And I just remember how small the West Wing was. It’s a warren. But people want to go home and say, “I work in the West Wing.” And I remember seeing a three-star general in a corridor on a chair like this, with his briefcase there and his laptop. That was his office, because he wanted to say, “I work in the West Wing.”
Another thing that’s struck me in your work is that you have these characters who are dealing with these hyper-fluid situations, and that leads to terrible decisions. Some of them are bullies, some of them are just ill-prepared. They might have been doing well in another field like the military, but now they oversee policy. And then they’re just thrown into these situations, like the countdown in Dr. Strangelove, where a decision must be made in minutes.
The more you peer at it, the more you realize a lot of these decisions are made on the spur of the moment. Because there just isn’t time to have a long, thought-out process. And it’s partly our fault in that we put so much pressure on our leaders to get everything right and to answer for everything immediately, even though we don’t want them in our lives. If something happens to me now, I want someone right at the top running the country to sort it now, but I don’t want them anywhere near me because I want my space. It’s made all these jobs impossible for any sane human being to do. Which is why most of them I think go insane after about four or five years. We made the leaders’ jobs crazy jobs that will make you crazy. You must be crazy to want to do it anyway, and therefore you have the right qualifications.
Peter Capaldi and James Gandolfini in In the Loop.
Nicola Dove/IFC Films/Everett Collection
Is it harder to satirize someone like Trump or Boris Johnson because they already have this outsized, clownish image?
They’re entertainers. Their default mode is to play to the gallery. No, that sounds too conscious. I think it’s to have an effect. It’s to be performative. They’re happenings, that’s what they are. Whether they’re in power or not, that’s who they are, and that’s all you’re ever going to get from them. Which is why when they’re in power it’s frustrating, in the case of Johnson, because he could do no more than what he always does, which is just go, “Yeah, whatever, it will be fine.” Well, have you read the policy? Have you seen the pros and cons? Have you weighed them out? That’s not him.
There was a moment in Veep that turned out to be somewhat prophetic, where Selina’s doing a Selina reboot, and she’s about to give her speech and either she or one of the staffers say, “Yeah, we’ve got to cut out all the stuff on immigration.” How do you see the way immigration is approached as an actual issue?
It’s an either-or, isn’t it? You’re either anti it, or else not talk about it. You can’t go, “OK, immigration actually does help with growth. A lot of the jobs that people will not want to do are done by immigrants and we have major things, like our health service, which is run by people from overseas.” So, there’s an acknowledgement that it’s beneficial in certain respects, but also if it’s unchecked it’s a strain on resources. So, how do you make the judgment call? But no one’s prepared to talk across the aisle about how you make that judgment call. So again, everyone’s retreated into, “Let’s get rid of all of them.” Or, “Let all of them in.” There’s no middle.
You do wonder what the next “other” is going to be, because a lot of the rhetoric that comes from the people around Trump is that the other is not people from outside, it’s people from inside, it’s an internal thing now. It’s the Democrats or it’s the liberals, it’s the legacy media, it’s the deep state, it’s the swamp. This mysterious other that’s become more sinister. And it means their supporters feel emboldened to accuse anyone that they dislike of being part of the other.
So, with Trump, what is the question left to be answered? From a writer’s point of view, how does this go? What are some of the absurd options?
So, the big question is, are we collectively nuts? I always used to think we’re not, and I’m not saying we are, but it’s now on the table. It’s a question I think will be answered over the next two or three years. The last couple of weeks of the campaign, there were all these references to Nazi Germany, the rise of Hitler and whatever. And it struck me that we always think of that time in the 1930s as, like, “What were the Germans thinking? They must have just been mad. They must have been mad to have done this.” And then you see your [Marco] Rubios and Vances, who one day were against it and the next day are with Trump. And you realize it’s not an instant thing. It’s a thing that just increases gradually and subtly so that more and more people come round to that point of view. And then it acquires a mass that pulls more people in just for the, “Well, if everyone’s thinking this now, I ought to think it as well, because I’ll have an easier life then by not having to argue with it.”
I don’t think we should ever tell ourselves that there’ll come a point where we collectively look back and go, “I don’t know what that was all about.” Because at that point, far too many of us may already be in that situation. And by then it might be impossible to take that step back.
