‘I’ve played a lot of sneery bastards’: Roger Allam on bad singing, big paydays and Elgar’s level of ‘gitacity’

He launched a thousand memes as the beleaguered Tory MP in The Thick of It, and starred in the original production of Les Misérables. Now the actor is making not-so-sweet music in the Alan Bennett-scripted film The Choral. But there are plenty of things he draws the line at …

A key plot point of The Choral revolves around Roger Allam singing badly. This is the man who originated the role of Javert in Les Misérables back in 1985, who was Olivier-nominated for his performance in Cy Coleman’s musical City of Angels and who once contemplated a career as an opera singer.

Talk me through that, I say: the bad singing. We’re at his home in southwest London. He’s very busy, filming, but a small window of time was found to meet – did I mind coming to his house? No, of course I didn’t, and here I am on a blustery Monday morning, perched on a chair next to him, sat in the corner on the sofa in a comfortable but anonymous front room looking on to a leafy street.