After the very first airing of the very first episode of the British version of “The Office,” Ricky Gervais, the series’ star and co-creator, was offered leads in a slew of movies.
“It was ridiculous,” Gervais said.
“They were premature,” he added, before launching into a favored mode of expression — the acerbic comic tirade. “Who would go see a bloke who had one hit from a sitcom? People leap way too early [into films] through vanity, fear or flattery. They think, ‘I’m making a film.’ You’re making a film that no one is going to see! You have no power. You’re going to go in there like a grateful little puppy and you’re going to do what everybody says.
“And it’s rubbish. It’s going to be advertised on the side of buses for a week and then go straight to DVD.”
Those initial movie offers came back in 2001. Now, seven years later, the 47-year-old Brit is promoting “Ghost Town,” opening Friday. In the film, which co-stars Tea Leoni and Greg Kinnear, Gervais plays a cranky New York dentist who dies briefly during an operation, and when he wakes up he can see dead people — and they annoy him.
Gervais is known as the poet laureate of comedic discomfort — England’s answer to Larry David. Cringe-inducing embarrassment is his thing, and he’s shown it off to fine effect first in the original “The Office” and later in the HBO series “Extras,” which examines one of Gervais’ pet bugaboos: the unexamined quest for fame. Gervais plays striving Andy Millman, who starts out as an extra and unexpectedly achieves stardom as the lead in an embarrassing sitcom. “Extras” already has won several awards, and Gervais is up for four more Emmys on Sunday.
Promotion doesn’t seem a natural fit for Gervais, though he’s a great talker. He’s a roly-poly Englishman with a cheeky schoolboy grin, offering cutting pronouncements about a range of human foibles, including his own.
“I’ve always felt sorry for those who don’t have a sense of humor,” he said. “The worst thing to me growing up was to embarrass yourself socially. I feel sorry for anyone. Hitler could walk in and make a bad joke and I would cringe and [say] ‘Oh, I wish he hadn’t made that bad joke.’ You know?”
“Ghost Town’s” script reminded Gervais of classic Hollywood films that could play every Christmas on TV and never feel dated.
“Nothing cheap in it,” he said. “No smut, no pandering and there was no aiming at a particular demographic.”
Of course, he Gervaised it up a little bit, working with writer-director David Koepp to tailor it to his own comic persona.
“It’s a flawed character,” Gervais said. “I made sure there were things in the script about me being a putz or ludicrous. I think it’s more heartwarming.”
Before getting into TV, Gervais tried to be a rock star in the David Bowie mold, but he never took off. He managed an indie band and a Queen tribute band, and segued into radio, where he met Stephen Merchant, who eventually became his writing partner and played Millman’s incompetent manager on “Extras.”
“I realized that, um, I had sat in front of my telly for 20 years slagging things off,” Gervais said. “And you can only do that so often and then you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. And you just have to have a go. I don’t think you should slag things off, unless you can do it yourself.”
Even now that he’s starred in a big Hollywood movie, Gervais seems most keen to just go back and do his own work. He recently co-wrote, co-directed and stars in “This Side of the Truth,” alongside Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill and Tina Fey. It takes place in a world where humans lack the “gene for lying,” he said. “There is no fiction, no art. People are brutally honest, and I play a guy who suddenly discovers he’s got this ability to lie. And in a world where no one lies or even understands the concept of lying, then everything I say is gospel and so anything I say goes! They just believe it.”
Gervais is skeptical that he’ll ever find another script like “Ghost Town” — one that is as interesting to him as what he can think up for himself.
“If it’s not my idea, I’m suspicious of it,” he said, laughing. “Someone could come to me with the best idea ever and I would think, so why haven’t I thought of that?”
