Rob Brydon on his Aussie tour, sharing a pool with a Hemsworth and heckles from Barry Humphries

Apart from his embarrassing incident in a pool with Chris Hemsworth, Would I Lie To You star Rob Brydon reveals why he loves all things Australian – and can’t wait to get back on tour.

There is nothing quite as humiliating, according to Rob Brydon, as standing half naked next to Chris Hemsworth.

The versatile comedian, star of sitcom Gavin and Stacey, quiz show Would I Lie To You and The Trip movies found that out the hard way, thanks to a lunch at the house of their mutual friend and colleague, Kenneth Branagh.

The Oscar-winning all-rounder, who had directed Hemsworth in Thor and acted alongside Brydon on the West End in The Painkiller, had instructed the pair to bring along their families as well as their swimming costumes and sure enough, the famously shredded Aussie A-lister and the somewhat more normally proportioned Welsh funnyman ended up together Branagh’s pool.

“Big mistake,” recalls Brydon with a laugh over Zoom call from his London home. “The only people in the pool are me, my two boys, Chris and his children. And you don’t want to be stood in the shallow end of an indoor swimming pool anywhere near Chris Hemsworth. I could see my children looking at me, and then looking at Chris and then looking back at me and wondering what bizarre genetic experiment had gone wrong to create me.”

Nick Frost, Chris Hemsworth and Rob Brydon in a scene from film The Huntsman: Winter's War

Brydon had worked with Hemsworth – and added him to his list of impersonations – on the 2016 fantasy-action film The Huntsman: Winter’s War and had been impressed with his “above average interest in comedy”.

“He was asking me all the time about comedy stuff, about The Trip and everything,” Brydon says. “And since then, certainly in the Thor movies, he’s become much more comedic. I found that very interesting having spent that time with him and witnessed his real interest in comedy.”

Body shaming aside, Australians and Australia have long been a happy hunting ground for Brydon. He names Barry Humphries as his most important comedic influence and he first fell in love with the country while shooting two seasons of the sitcom Supernova in Broken Hill in the mid-2000s. He then spent more than a decade trying to figure out a way to come back and have someone else pay for it and finally managed it with his 2018 comedy tour, which included three sold-out nights at the Sydney Opera House.

“I was amazed and I loved it,” he says of his acclaimed I Am Standing Up Tour. “And since then, I knew that whatever I did next, I would take to Australia as well.”

That new show is A Night Of Songs and Laughter: Rob Brydon and his Fabulous Band, which has been making its way around the UK and will hit these shores next March, promising to deliver exactly what it says on the tin.

A Night of Songs and Laughter With Rob Brydon and his Fabulous Band will tour Australia next March.

“It’s a different sort of show, it’s me and an eight-piece band,” he says. “It’s sort of autobiographical, telling the story of my life from being in school musicals. I sing a couple of those songs, tell some stories from then about how I was madly in love with the girl playing opposite me in Guys and Dolls and she didn’t want to know. And then going to drama school and then some of the different things I’ve done.”

Brydon’s last tour featured musical elements and he also had a UK No. 1, singing Islands in the Stream as Bryn from Gavin and Stacy alongside his co-star (and childhood friend) Ruth Jones and his revered compatriot Tom Jones for the Comic Relief charity. While he’s long wanted to ramp up that part of his performance, he admits that “I was always very wary of ridicule”.

Would I Lie to You? host Rob Brydon, with team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack

He says his musical tastes are hugely eclectic – from Elvis to Springsteen to Streisand to Coltrane – but he was wary of wearing his heart on his sleeve with such songs as Billy Joel’s Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel), while recalling the birth of his now 28-year-old oldest child, Tom Waits’ Broken Bicycles, as well as a dramatic reading from his countryman Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.

“I think when a comedian says ‘hey, now I’m gonna sing …’,” Brydon says, wincing slightly. “It is one thing to sing a funny song – and there are funny songs in the show – but there are several heartfelt, emotional songs.

“It’s also silly things. It’s taken me a while to become confident in the way I hold the microphone when I’m singing because when you start, you feel like it’s ‘who does he think he is – Rod Stewart?’ You feel very self-conscious. I’ve been funny on stage for years but I’ve always felt I’ve been playing catch-up with the music side.”

Rob Brydon with his hero – and now friend – Australian comedian Barry Humphries. Picture: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images)

While he’s clearly proud of the expanded role of the music, and delighted to be touring with a crack band, Brydon is also at pains to point out there will be plenty of his famous impressions, audience interaction and more straightforward comedy elements.

“It’s important to stress that because I do want people to realise that it’s a funny show,” he says. It’s a very uplifting show – I want people to come to my shows and go away happier.”

Brydon says he learned the art of audience interaction from Humphries, and particularly his comedy creations Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. Brydon’s early breaks came from performing live in character as Keith Barrett from the BBC mockumentary Marion and Geoff, which, like Humphries, enabled him to get away with saying and doing things he thought he couldn’t get away with as himself. He shied away from doing that once he started performing live under his own name, but once he realised that “Keith is a part of me, an aspect of my personality” became bolder with audiences again.

Brydon and Humphries have since become friends as well as mutual admirers.

“In the early days of getting to know him, we did this show at the Palladium and he came, and he started heckling me early on,” recalls Brydon incredulously. “I thought ‘this is the most surreal experience – I’ve got Barry Humphries shouting out from the stalls’.

“But when I was first getting to know him, I said to him, ‘You’ve influenced me so much and so much of what I do on stage is pretty much taken from you, I hope you don’t mind’ and he said, ‘it’s wonderful that somebody is carrying the torch’.”

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip To Greece. Picture: Supplied

With four iterations of The Trip – his culinary comedy collaboration with fellow comedian/actor Steve Coogan – having taken the pair around England, Italy, Spain and Greece, Brydon’s not sure when, and if, there will be another. Coogan recently revealed they are collaborating on another project, but Brydon gently chides his colleague, saying it’s early days yet.

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“He’s talking about that way too soon,” Brydon says. “I read that in something and spat out my Cornflakes. There is something bubbling away but I don’t know when or if it will see the light of day. We are nowhere near that stage yet. But anyway, it’s quite promising and we have done a little bit of work on it and we’ll see.”

A Night Of Songs and Laughter: Rob Brydon and his Fabulous Band, Canberra Theatre, March 10; State Theatre, Sydney, March 17, 18; Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, March 21; Hamer Hall, Melbourne, March 24, 25; QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, March 30-31. Tickets on sale 11am Wednesday. Livenation.com.au