Chris O'Dowd chats about winning a BAFTA, Ireland and Corpsing...

You're best known over here for your role in the film Festival. You won a Scottish BAFTA for it, didn't you?
Yeah, that was just a couple of weeks ago. It was cool. Although, not to belittle the whole thing, but it was Best Actor in a Scottish Film, and I think there was maybe two, or even three, Scottish films this year. But it's still cool. Better than not winning it.

At home you were in The Clinic. It's one of Ireland's biggest ever shows, isn't it?
It does really well, and it gets something ridiculous like 49 per cent of audience share. But I'm not sure what they're going to do with it, in terms of bringing it to the UK. I think there have to be a certain number of episodes before they can sell it. They only do eight one-hour episodes a year.

Did you find it a wrench to leave The Clinic?
No, I wanted to leave. I'd done as much with it as I could. And the character was very distinctive, almost autistic, and when you play a character who's so distinctive, it's hard to get out of it in other people's eyes, so I had to move on.

Are you a Graham Linehan fan?
I've been a big fan of his for ages. As soon as I heard he was doing something I wanted it, but I didn't even think I'd get seen for it.

Was Roy written as an Irish character?
No, no, and Graham really didn't want him to be Irish. It took an awful lot of convincing. I did a good few auditions for it, and one of them I even had to do in a British accent, to see how that went. And Graham, from the start, was saying 'Ah, Chris is great, but the character's not Irish, so we can't use him', and that was it. Ash was much more behind me doing it, so we worked on Graham for a while and ended up convincing him that it was alright.

Being in front of a live audience, did you find a real pressure to get things right first time?
There was a bit of that, but we found that we were really well-rehearsed, more than you're ever normally going to be when you're being filmed, other than maybe a Mike Leigh film. You're never going to get as much rehearsal time as we did for any other sitcom. Having a crowd really helps, it just pushes everything along. And you get a buzz performing it in a way that you wouldn't on a closed set.

Is it difficult not to corpse?
God yeah. I couldn't look at Richard. I couldn't look at his little f***ing face. I was dying. I remember in the first week, everyone was so stoic, and we just wanted to get through it, and get it right, and then from then on we started messing around with the audience and stuff. But there would be scenes where it was impossible not to laugh. And Richard is so professional, he'll be looking at me, I'm in floods of tears, but the camera is nowhere near me, so it doesn't matter, even though it's terribly unprofessional. But then Richard will finish his bit, the camera will move on to me, and the audience will just collapse. Sometimes Richard would just do the smallest thing and I'd go. There were bits we had to cut, because I couldn't stop laughing.