Tom Hollander

When I was 38, I let a drunk pick me up in a bar. You know, just to see if I still had it. It was raining. It was a November evening, and I was somewhere in the backwoods of the Adirondacks. I was driving from Rhode Island to Toronto, staying in motels. Taking my time. Getting lost. His name was Billy Ray and he was from the south. The land of Spanish moss and blurred boundaries and antique sentences delivered in a languid drawl. Beautifully dressed, an elegantly ruined bachelor of 48, he looked 65. He said he was related to the man who had invented Coca-Cola and had never had to work. ‘I really have had the most wonderful life, you know.’ I had started talking to him because he looked more interesting than the book I was reading.

Poor Eddie Redmayne. Just because he looks quite like a girl, he finds himself a spokesperson for the burgeoning trans movement. Recently, he was forced to explain to those of us watching BBC News that ‘the notion of gender being binary’ is now considered ‘antiquated’. People are very excited about being trans at the moment. Countless TV shows and films depict it, Mark Zuckerberg has just called his daughter Max, and a man called Hilary has just talked us into another war. Being trans is clearly catching: hermaphrodite whelks on the undersides of fishing boats are growing penises, and vast swaths of young people, unable to buy a home or get a job, now realise they are trapped in the wrong body. Well, great.

I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I believed her. It was years later that someone explained to me that she really was having a fling with the third assistant director. But I never minded. She was so nice.

Last time I was allowed to write a story for The Spectator, I managed to get away with a frankly smutty and boastful piece about sex. Well, it’s been a while, so... I do hope nobody minds if I do that again. If I’m honest, when young, one of the reasons I decided to mortgage my life to showbiz was because I thought that if I did, I would get more than my fair share of bedroom action. Hang on. Sorry, not more than my fair share. (I must stop putting myself down.) Firstly, as we all know there is no such thing as fair in these matters; very attractive women regularly confound the rest of us by sleeping with people everyone thinks are ghastly.

This is an extract from a piece from December 2011 on Tony Soprano, depression, and the end of the world. You can read the full piece here. The thing with Tony Soprano is that I actually know him. Well, knew him. Well not him, but I knew James Gandolfini, the actor who played him. Because we did a film together a few years back. At the time, having never seen The Sopranos, I was quite relaxed around him. I noticed others looking nervous and staring at the floor in a half-witted way. But to me he just seemed like a large and quite nervous actor from New York. I offered to show him a slice of west London life. One afternoon we met at the Serpentine. It was June and it was raining.

If I subtracted from my life all the time spent either thinking about sex, or engaging in behaviour calculated to achieve it (by which I mean most of my social life and career choices); or dealing with the consequences of having achieved it (by which I mean all of my romantic life), well, I don’t know how much of my life I’d actually have left. Childhood. The useful bit. Fifteen years ago, in August, I boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York.The journey time was 29 hours. What to do? Write postcards? Read a book? Try to have sex with someone? It was a sultry afternoon: Spanish moss dangled in a sensuous manner, the edges of things were blurry in the heat. And we passengers would be packed together for a really long time going in and out of tunnels.

Life is about choices. You can explain your lot away as bad luck, but I face you with the possibility that your lifestyle is the result of choices you have made. Said the therapist I went to see last week. Before leaving I made another appointment to see him so that I wouldn’t appear to have the problem with commitment that he had identified. But I don’t think I’ll go. I went to see him because, with the combination of the end of a relationship and George Osborne’s well-named autumn statement, I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed. I went to see Ruby Wax’s excellent show about mental illness and in it she said that when the black dog descended she couldn’t get out of bed.