But you can still feel that. Sometimes, something I ask people who are in scary things, “Is it scary to film a lot of times?” They’re like, “No,” because you’re sort of not—

Yeah, it’s a technical thing, sure.

—you know it’s effects. But like when you’re filming something that’s so squirm-inducingly awkward, does it feel that on set?

Sometimes, yeah. People are sort of wincing behind the monitor.

Especially because sometimes you’re going up against Jeremy Strong, who is playing this very sort of serious character, and Brian Cox, who’s this towering figure, and it makes Tom seem all the more like this weird, wet dog who’s just, you know, because everyone else is so still.

Brian described Tom as having a sort of panicky ambivalence, which I thought was kind of good. Yeah, you’re right, especially with Brian and Jeremy because you think, “Am I in the right show? Am I in the same show as . . . ” And you just have to trust in the grown-ups who are directing it and writing it and putting it together. I think you are because we’re all in the same show. I mean, in life, everybody's, you know . . . and then often you see sort of behavior from people that if you put in a TV show or a film you gasp too much, you know. It just . . . Yeah.

I think that’s why Tom resonates the way he does is because we’re in this world that very few of us have any real interior knowledge of. But Tom keeps doing things where we’re like, “Oh, yeah, I could see myself doing that,” or feeling that or who knows, you know. So I think that even though he’s playing a guy who can be really slippery and slimy and not the best guy, he’s relatable—

Totally.

. . . in a way that, you know, and I think the show is challenging in that it asks us to find people like that relatable. I don’t think it’s an effort to defend them but humanize them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly because they all are human, and I think they all are. Yeah, otherwise it would be boring.

Yeah, right. It would be something kind of like soapy beyond sort of any realistic—

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So the show, I don’t know what your experience of it has been, but from where I’m sitting, the show was this kind of sleeper hit. People were not really sure what it was when it wasn’t getting the fanfare of Game of Thrones, necessarily, because people just didn’t know what it was. But then as the course of the weeks went by last summer, people were really, really into it. Did you experience that kind of build too as one of the stars of the show? Did more people start recognizing you after a certain point or . . . ?

A little, yeah. I was sort of aware that it became the show that perhaps you haven’t seen but you ought to see, which I suppose is better than a great bit hoo-ha and then it dribbles away.

Yeah, definitely.

So, yeah, yeah. I got a lot of lovely feedback from people that I hadn’t heard . . . you know, actors and directors and producers, who I had worked with, got in touch and that always doesn’t happen. I think because, in a way, it appealed to a lot of people in the industry, I suppose, because it feels a very free, organic, kind of artless thing, especially with the way it’s shot, but with some sort of heft with helicopters and heft behind it, and shooting on Madison Avenue. So it’s quite something to watch, I think, and the writing is so rich and twisty and caustic and filthy. It’s a lot of Brits writing it, interestingly, and often the script supervisor will come up and say, “What does this mean because this is not . . . This is a Britishism.”