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Born in Essex in 1979, Rufus Hound is a comedian, actor and broadcaster. He left his job in PR in 2000 to work full-time as a comedian, first in standup and then on TV. A panel show regular, including Mock the Week and Celebrity Juice, he has also built a substantial stage career, with roles in West End productions such as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Wind in the Willows and One Man, Two Guvnors. He stars in The Mesmerist at Watford Palace theatre from 2-21 March.
I was six, and on holiday. My dad was an accountant who benefited, briefly, from the jobs boom of the 1970s. Suddenly, getting on a plane was an option for our family. We spent our summers in Corsica, going on boat trips. A few years ago, I would have said that boy was wide-eyed and innocent. Now I’ve done a bit of therapy, I know he was consumed by anxiety and desperate for attention.
According to my mum, my first word was “look”. My brother arrived 17 months after I was born, so most days Mum would have been pushing us around in a buggy, and I would be pointing at everything going, “Look, look, look.” What I was really saying was, “Everyone, I’m here!”
I was a huge fan of The Muppet Show – my favourite episode was the Rudolf Nureyev one where he sings Top Hat, White Tie and Tails. I watched it enough times that I vaguely knew some of the words, so one day, aged three, I put on a silver snowsuit and sang it to my parents, who filmed it. It was the first time I realised, “If I do a special performance, I can win the approval of the folks that love me.”
Every school report I had from four onwards said, “If Rufus spent less time trying to make everyone laugh and more time doing the work, he’d be much better off.” That all changed when I met David Proudlock. When I was a teenager, I went to a boarding school called Frensham Heights. David had a soft spot for kids like me, who financially struggled to be there, compared with kids who were the sons of Ghanaian princes and South African property moguls. He was firm – a no-bullshit teacher and the first person who said, “You spend all your time showing off. But what are you actually doing when you get people’s attention?” He taught me that I needed to be good – do the homework, take it seriously. Being charming and silly is not enough. After a few years, my parents couldn’t afford to pay the fees at the school, but David managed to get me a scholarship. For the next two years I read fastidiously, studying the plays of Jim Cartwright, Willy Russell and Shakespeare. When I got into theatre as an adult, I inherently understood what to do, because David Proudlock had taught me decades before.
Before I started doing standup, I went out with a woman who wrote about comedy. I had been in the house when she interviewed a brilliant comedian called Boothby Graffoe, and remember him saying, “Standup is 70% confidence, and 30% material.” A few years into my standup career, I bumped into him in a cafe and told him about how inspiring I thought that quote was. He said, “I would never have said that. It’s 90% confidence.” That was the point at which I became the comedian Rufus Hound. I’d been doing material, and I knew it worked, but the laughs weren’t as big as I’d expected. From that moment on, I approached the stage as if I was the world’s funniest human. The clouds had parted, the mood in the room shifted, and from there on my gigs went better.
If I ever got picked on by another kid at school, Mum would say, “You can’t fight them. But you are smarter than them, so you can talk your way out of it.” All I had to do was make everyone laugh. By the time I started to do standup, I realised I had been training for it my entire life. The TV panel show world was the same: you’re team A, you’re team B, now duke it out. Who is going to win?
I’ve had a very diverse career. I’ve done comedy, ballroom dancing, classical theatre and talkshow radio presenting. I always knew that if one thing went wrong, I had other skills I could lean on. When the pandemic struck, that all changed. I’d spent the afternoon in dress rehearsals for Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I went out, got some sushi and came back to the theatre, whereupon the stage manager called us all together and said, “Right, the whole of the West End is shut down from now.” At that point, I had 18 months’ work in my diary, which as a theatre actor is absolutely unheard of. By the end of the year, I had nothing. I had separated from my missus and I was no longer living in the family home. I’d been diagnosed with ADHD and I was trying to process a lifetime of struggling with concentration and insecurity. A year later, I was working as a circus ringmaster because it was literally the only thing that meant I could earn a living.
Then came Dancing on Ice. That was a transformative time. My partner Robin [Johnstone] would teach me how to do a move, and I’d say, “Can you just leave me alone for five minutes while I go and practise this by myself?” So I’d go off and try to learn it. Until one afternoon, the camera guy called me over and said, “You have to stop.” I asked what he meant. He said, “I’m over here with headphones on and you’re talking to yourself all the time.” I listened back to the audio, and it was five whole minutes of me going, “Come on, you fucking idiot. Just do it. Not like that. Oh, you moron. Listen, twatto, do it right.” I had no idea that was my internal monologue.
Last year, I took a month off and went to a place in Thailand to get some help. I had realised I was always doing something to try to make painful feelings go away – using substances such as booze, sugar and vaping as a crutch. Before I went, I spoke to the people who ran the facility on the phone and told them I didn’t want treatment as an addict – I wanted to help treat whatever is fuelling this reliance on drinking, eating or smoking. When I got there, they searched my bags and told me I wasn’t allowed to leave. A man started shouting at me about addiction. It wasn’t exactly what I had asked for, but I did take away one thing – the ability to sit in discomfort, instead of reaching for something to soothe it.
I could still do without waking up at 3am, feeling completely overwhelmed and thinking, “Fucking hell, can I pull off whatever job I am doing this month?” I could also really do with somebody offering me a job that paid me the kind of money that I was earning before the pandemic. Or winning the lottery. But I also have so much to be grateful for. My children still love me. I’m also engaged to somebody who is phenomenally wonderful. She has helped me deal with a lot of my nonsense. Over Christmas, my daughter sent her a card saying, “The best present you could ever give us is a dad who isn’t tearing himself to pieces all the time.” So, really, what more could I want?
