It was a demanding role, because he was playing two people. I’ve been on everything, dude.”Īt 26, Gilgun had been cast in Misfits as Rudy, a character split into two versions of himself – one upbeat, confident and gregarious, the other melancholy, insecure and uncertain. They’d put me on one, I’d go all the way up to the highest dose, then it’d stop working again and I’d go on to another, go all the way up to the highest dose, taken off that, go on to another. “But it was a long wait and I needed help there and then.” He took the antidepressants instead. At first, the doctor did offer him counselling.
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I was in the process of going off the fucking rails, deeply unhappy.” He’d heard that the GP would hand out pills that could make him happy, so he made an appointment. “Mum and Dad had separated, life was starting to really change. “We’d always talk like: Joseph’s due one of his meltdowns.” But by 17, the situation had become untenable. “I’d been a difficult child, a very emotional young man, kicking off about something, or fucking bawling my eyes out, heartbroken.” His mother told him that the family had come to expect these “catastrophes”, as he calls them, once a month or so. When he was a teenager, Gilgun was prescribed antidepressants. If I go to my doctor and say, ‘I’m having suicidal thoughts’, they’ll go, ‘Right, well, I can give you some therapy… there’s a three-month waiting list’.” Gilgun wrote this into Brassic its funniest moments are often its blackest.Īppearing in Emmerdale as Eli Dingle, 2008. You need talking therapy, but it’s just not available. “There’s not that many therapists and there’s so many people with mental health issues. I really struggled and I was very angry for a long time, but my job has afforded me the opportunity to do a bit of therapy, and that’s just been fucking huge.” The trouble with therapy, he says, is that it’s not nearly as accessible as it needs to be. When he was 11, his parents split up, and around that same time, his dad was made redundant. “Not because I need a smoothie at three o’clock in the morning – it’s because I can’t read a single email.” “We had to fill an A4 page with writing, and it was so stressful that I was physically sick.” Now, he says, he has a personal assistant. He remembers having to write his first essay. He would write things backwards, and grow easily frustrated when he couldn’t do the work. Puts on a posh voice, depending on what company she’s in.”Īt primary school, a teacher picked up on the signs that Gilgun might be dyslexic. And my mum was a very sensitive, liberal lady, always has been. He was a strong man and he’d work these long hours at the foundry, cycle back, play for hours with us kids. He’d cycle to work, all the way to Wigan. Gilgun grew up with his two sisters in Rivington, a few miles north of Wigan, where his dad worked in a metalworking factory that made parts for boilers. Whether he’s explaining the difficulties of sourcing an antique, Grecian-style dildo that a canine co-star could wrap its jaws around – a saga that turned out to be far more fraught than you might expect – or speaking frankly about his bipolar diagnosis, he is never lost for words, which is how he ended up creating Brassic, a loose and fond reimagining of some of the adventures he got up to as a teenager in Lancashire. He is a warm and vivid storyteller who could chat for England, all packaged up in puppyish enthusiasm. He sits back in his chair, his tattooed legs stretching out. And me and Carl were at an age where one of us might actually use it on the other,” he grins. Like, a huge machete! You could chop a child’s head off with it. And we check the drawer, and for whatever reason, there’s a fucking machete in it. “I think we were being bollocked, me and our Carl. “It always smelled of stale Superkings, because she smoked in the house, and this strong smell of tea, because she used to reuse her tea bags.” He goes back to being eight years old, in trouble, with his cousin, shut in the bedroom. I think she was quite a tough old bird, really.” He conjures up a memory of his grandparents’ council house in Chorley. “I loved my Grandma Sadie, she were amazing. He says my Dictaphone looks like a beard trimmer and it reminds him of Sadie because she used to shave her beard with one. O nly a minute after meeting Joseph Gilgun, he starts to tell me about his Grandma Sadie.