Nick Frost Talks ‘Mr. Sloane,’ Acting With Kids & Penning His Autobiography

Film star Nick Frost heads to American TV screens in May, with the debut of his new series, “Mr. Sloane.”

Set in 1969, the series (part comedy, part drama) opens with Frost’s character, Jeremy Sloane, at his lowest. His wife (played by “Broadchurch’s” Olivia Colman) has left him, most of his friends are jerks, and he’s lost his job. The opening sequence finds him trying to end it all, until the rope snaps. His next move is to carry on living and with it comes chages. Very quickly, a door opens when he gets a call offering him a substitute teaching job at a local school.

Although he’s known for his funny films, like “Paul” and “Shaun of The Dead,” “Mr. Sloane” provided different acting challenges for Nick, something he spoke about with Access Hollywood, ahead of the series’ America debut, beginning May 7 on Southern California’s KCET, Thursday at 10 PM PT (and premiering May 17, in a marathon on Link TV, brodcast nationwide on DirecTV and Dish Network).

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AccessHollywood.com: You must have been excited when you found out ‘Mr. Sloane’ was picked up to run stateside. Did you do a little dance?
Nick Frost: Yeah! … I did do a small dance. I pumped my fist repeatedly into the air, and said, ‘Yes!’ five times. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so many British shows that don’t get a chance to be seen by a wider international audience and I’m just really lucky that someone liked it and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s show it.’

Access: You Tweeted that you were really proud of this and I was just curious if it was because it’s a different character for you, or the fact that you were an executive producer on it, or it’s just a [combination] of things?
Nick: It’s a bunch of things. It’s yeah, the fact I [executive produced] it and I had a part in its creation and the creation of Mr. Sloane himself, and that — you know, I think it’s always difficult – I never trained as a comedian. I was just that naturally funny idiot that everyone knew, so just to kind of have people expect me to continue just that, I think is — it can be really frustrating. So to be given the chance to not only do some lovely comedy, but to get my teeth into a real character and act, is a treat for me.

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Access: Do you think there’s anyone in [Mr. Sloane’s] life that isn’t a [bad] friend or loved one to him?
Nick: This is the big reveal at the end of [Episode] 5, beginning of 6. … There are two people that you find out were actually true to him, and were everything that he expected of, of them, out of all his friends and his partners and girlfriends and ex-wives and stuff, there are two people that do the right thing. And I think in terms of a sitcom where the main protagonist begins by trying to hang himself, I think two close friends is a pretty good victory.

Access: How did it feel for you standing up in front of a room full of children [when Mr. Sloane goes to become a substitute teacher]? Kids can be intimidating. I don’t know if actor kids are less intimidating because they’re being paid to work there, but was there some intimidation there [when you were doing] your work in front of a bunch of children?
Nick: No, not really. First of all, they were great kids, but just because they’re acting kids doesn’t mean they’re – they’re still kids and I think, if anything, because they’re kids who are also actors, it makes ’em a lot more precocious because you sense that they’re critiquing you on your performance while they’re looking at you (laughs). But, you know, I mean Mr. Sloane obviously becomes a [substitute] teacher, so once I had my costume on and my glasses, it was kind of weirdly easy to actually become Mr. Sloane and be a teacher, so a lot of the time I found myself in between takes still teaching. And I have a son, I have a little boy and I kind of love children and I’m pretty good with ’em I think — I hope — and so, if it ever got loud or rowdy, I’d be the one to shout ‘QUIETTTT!’ and they would pipe down. But yeah, I think towards the end of it, a lot of them, I’d like to think, saw me as some kind of teacher role because they’d always come up at the end of the day and say, ‘Bye, Sir.’ And a few of them would come up and ask me if they could go to the toilet (laughs), things like that… which kind of meant I was doing my job right.

Access: You said you ended up teaching them. What kind of stuff did you teach them? Was it about the craft? Was it about mathematics?
Nick: No, I think we’d just be sitting there between takes and they’d come up and ask me questions and, ‘What does it mean when someone says–?’ or, ‘What’s the capitol of Mali?’ You know what I mean? Just that kind of [stuff] and just chatting and I think kids like it when adults treat them as adults and not treat them as children. And I’m a big fan of treating kids as human beings and not as some kind of form of smaller sub-human, and I think kids really respond to that and I think certainly in my experience, you get the most out of children when you treat them as contemporaries. Even though they’re just a little bit younger and have a thousand times more energy than me doesn’t mean they’re any less valid.

Access: Right, well, until 8 o’clock at night and then they probably have a lot less energy than you.
Nick: Yeah, plus I get to drink wine and eat cornflakes at night, so f** you, kids.

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Access: (Laughs) I know you’re quite busy, but do you get time to watch much television yourself?
Nick: I’m a flicker. I tend to not watch anything through to the end. I mean, I write a lot and I’m writing a book at the moment and part of my process is that in a six or seven-hour work day I will just watch films as I’m working. I don’t necessarily watch them, but they’re just on in the background, so I watch a lot of films rather than episodic TV. But that said, I’m a big fan of ‘Friday Night Lights’ when it was on and we’ve just been watching ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ which is amazing, which I really love and I’ll watch a lot of stuff on Netflix, so I’ll wait until a whole series is released on Netflix and then I’ll watch it as a whole box set, one after each other. So I just watched the whole series of ‘Daredevil,’ which I really liked and I love ‘Breaking Bad’ and I really like ‘Game of Thrones,’ and apart from that, I’ll be watching shows about cooking, or documentaries about some kind of volcanic crater somewhere or you know, ants.

Access: What are you writing your book about?
Nick: It’s an autobiography.

Access: Has that been cathartic at all? Has it been hard?
Nick: I’ve kind of always been a keeper of journals in one form or another. Not every day, but just thoughts and memories and feelings and teen angsty bulls**t. I was reading one the other day and it was from 1994, or something and it said, ‘Today, Kurt Cobain died,’ you know, that kind of thing. So it’s just a process of reading through all of those, and listening to the things I listened to then and looking at pictures and it kind of wrote itself to be honest. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Access: Finally, I wanted to just ask you about the ‘X-Files’ coming back because you’re excited about that, right?
Nick: Yeah! We a saying here in England that I’m ‘chuffed to bits,’ which means I’m over the moon. I think it’s gonna be fantastic and is it six episodes or is it a movie as well?

Access: It’s six episodes. They’re calling it an event series.
Nick: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,… towards the end, the whole kind of alien are-they-with-us, are-they-amongst-us thing kind of got a bit boring and I think they did as much as they could do with it, but at its height, when they did the creature episodes and the monster episodes, and the weird ones… it was just the best. It was the best TV. I hope they kind of mix it up and you know do a little bit of each.

“Mr. Sloane,” from creator/director/writer Robert B. Weide (“Curb Your Enthusiasm) and starring Nick, premieres May 7 at 10 PM, with the first two episodes airing back-to-back on KCET, and continuing on May 14 and 21. Link TV (DirecTV channel 385 and DISH Network 9410) will air all seven episodes on Sunday, May 17, starting at 8 PM ET/PT. “Mr. Sloane” will also be available at that time on KCET.org and LinkTV.org. Nick’s autobiography is expected out in the UK in October.

— Jolie Lash