Brexit, kindness, and a 'washed-up' Hugh Grant: Ben Whishaw and the cast on the making of Paddington 2

When Paddington Bear leapt from the pages of Michael Bond’s books and hit our cinema screens back in 2014, it was impossible not to love him. How could anyone dislike a marmalade sandwich-loving, duffle coat-clad, softly-spoken Peruvian in bear form, whose eventual welcome into the heart of the Brown family made us all feel better about ourselves?

Paddington duly became a hit, topping the charts as the most successful British film of the year, grossing ￡203 million worldwide and becoming a critical darling like few other family pictures.

Yet, in the run up to its release, Paddington’s success had seemed far from a sure thing. The production was fraught with difficulties: Warner Bros, who had developed the screenplay for years with writer-director Paul King, opted not to pursue it, leaving poor Paddington homeless once again.

That issue was resolved after StudioCanal leapt into the breach – stumping up the entire ￡42 million budget, making it far and away their most expensive, and risky, production to date – but there was then a further hiccup with how Paddington sounded.

Everyone realised that Colin Firth, the original choice to voice the bear, wasn’t quite right - his mature tones didn’t fit with Paddington’s na?veté and vulnerability. So a last-minute switch was made, with Ben Whishaw stepping into those little red boots.

Against heavy odds, then, the team pulled off something of a miracle. A sequel, at some point, was an obvious move. But how to make lightning strike twice?

“You live petrified!” says King, Paddington 2’s returning mastermind, with the friendly self-deprecation that makes him such a perfect custodian for this character. “Just to find a bear that doesn’t disappoint too many people is a bit of a challenge. And to find a sequel that doesn’t feel like diminishing returns, which they almost always do.”

So far, however, so good; Paddington 2 has already gone down a storm with critics. King must be wiping his brow in relief. And hopefully, catching up on some shut-eye. “He doesn’t sleep during the year and a half of prep, shooting and post-production,” says David Heyman, Paddington’s producer.

We had to write this very awkward letter going, ‘Dear Mr Grant, we’ve written a character who’s a slightly over-the-hill, washed-up old fop. And we thought of you!’”

Writer/director Paul King

King had a writing ally this time in Simon Farnaby, an old pal from his days directing surreal BBC3 sitcom The Mighty Boosh, which made a star of Bake Off presenter Noel Fielding, and its semi-spin-off, the 2009 feature Bunny and the Bull. Their work together on Paddington 2 is a joy, and the script provides an especially delightful array of new characters, including a new, even more dastardly guest villain - after Nicole Kidman’s vanquishing as that sadistic taxidermist.

“When I was writing the first film, I vaguely had the idea of a villain who might be a vain-actor-slash-master-of-disguise,” says King. “We abandoned the idea after about 20 minutes. It was always too much legwork. But when I started working with Simon Farnaby on this one, he really ran with it. He is very funny on actors and the ridiculousness of that trade.”

The fruit of their inspiration is Hugh Grant’s hysterical Phoenix Buchanan, a dastardly ham fallen on hard times, who has been reduced to doing gourmet dog food commercials and is seeking a comeback. He wants the pop-up book that Paddington himself is trying to save up to buy for his Aunt Lucy’s birthday - thinking said tome will lead him to hidden treasures - and is happy to throw Paddington under a bus in the process.

"We thought of Hugh almost immediately,” King recalls, having seen and loved the actor’s sleazy performance in the 1995 Beryl Bainbridge adaptation An Awfully Big Adventure, in which he played a disreputable theatre director. “It didn’t feel like he’d done too much of that, so it wasn’t a case of, ‘Oh God, it’s that again.’

"We called the character ‘Hugh Grant’ for about the next six months, as we wrote the script. And we thought, well, we’d better offer it to him. We had to write this very awkward letter going, ‘Dear Mr Grant, we’ve written a character who’s a slightly over-the-hill, washed-up, vain old fop. And we thought of you!’”

Another new addition is Knuckles McGinty, a safe-cracker and prison chef played with burly menace by Brendan Gleeson, who stars in a middle act that has Paddington framed for burglary and locked up.

"This is a heightened prison,” Heyman clarifies – “it’s not The Shawshank Redemption. It’s the prison of Paddington’s world. The warden ultimately comes to read all the inmates a bedtime story.”

"When I heard my character’s name, it was either going to be really good or really bad, from my point of view,” Gleeson says. “His essential-ness was there on the page, and then we had a lot of fun bringing that out.”

Many of Gleeson’s scenes are one-to-one face-offs with the accident-prone Paddington, who makes a near-fatally-bad impression on the hardened lifer by squirting ketchup on his smock the moment they’re introduced.

"I’ve worked with more wooden actors than Paddington,” the actor quips. “So that wasn’t an issue really. What it did mean was quite an intimate relationship between myself and Paul.”

If Gleeson was a little disconnected from the other cast members, he didn’t have it nearly as bad as Whishaw, whose job involved 120 hours of recording sessions for a character who doesn’t even exist, visually speaking, when he starts out.

“When I record the voice I’m wearing this kind of helmet, which has a huge arm on it and then a camera stuck on the arm recording my face,” says Whishaw. “You can’t wear anything that wears a lot of noise or rustles. And then there are other microphones attached to you. It’s not that comfortable – or that conducive to giving a good performance.”

It’s a common but mistaken assumption that voice work in family films, especially ones of this complexity, is just a case of swanning in and reading off a script. But “Paul wouldn’t let you get away with that,” Whishaw explains. “He wants to engage with you, and wants your thoughts about judging every moment just right, getting the humour. It’s much more fine and fiddly than just putting some voice over something.”

So what of Paddington’s situation - as an immigrant to our shores now firmly settled as a British resident - especially after last year’s Brexit vote? Much was made, when the first film came out, of its gently welcoming stand in favour of multiculturalism.

“I’m certain it was on Paul’s mind. How could it not be?” says Whishaw.  “I do remember him joking in rehearsal – ‘How did Brexit happen? Did people not watch Paddington?!’. Paul is brilliant at getting some of those themes or ideas in there in a way that’s funny, and light, and touching.”

King is certainly keen to downplay any ostentatious soapbox-climbing. “Different sides of different debates have been tearing each other to pieces forever,” he ruminates. “Remembering to love one another and be kind is never as needed as now. I don’t think it’s timely – I think it’s timeless.”

Paddington 2 is in cinemas from tomorrow