Motherland’s Paul Ready: ‘Men didn’t like Kevin – they thought he was weak’

“A lot of people look at me and see someone gentle,” says actor Paul Ready. “And I am quite gentle in real life. But if you take that gentleness and reframe it, then it becomes quite terrifying and people don’t see that coming.” Ready is best known for his role in Motherland, the hit comedy series which offered a bracingly unvarnished portrait of the stresses of parenthood. He was the sweet-natured Kevin, the only stay-at-home dad in a gaggle of middle-class London mums. Kevin’s efforts to interest his off-screen wife in sex recalled the tragicomic trials of Niles Crane in Frasier. It is Kevin, Ready says, that strangers want to talk about when they approach him for a chat. He is delighted people have so much love for the show, though he adds: “I’ve always been interested in playing lots of different characters. [Starting out] what I feared was being stuck playing within a certain genre and certain characters … If I was ever typecast, I would stop. I think I’d do something else.” All of which is why Ready, who is 49 and cut his acting teeth in the theatre, relishes the opportunity to play creeps and crazies when it arises. His breakout TV role in 2013 was Lee in the sci-fi series Utopia, a bequiffed hitman who delights in torturing people and gouges a man’s eye out with a spoon. He credits director Marc Munden for “seeing the gentleness in me and going: ‘Let’s see what happens when he plays the psychopath’. That opened doors for me.” Ready’s last film was 2025’s Bring Them Down, a revenge drama about a feud between farming families in which he played Gary, the temperamental father of Barry Keoghan’s Jack. One critic was moved to describe Ready as “unrecognisable and frankly rather terrifying”. “The film is very dark and not everyone’s cup of tea,” Ready says, “but I loved every minute of it.” Sue Johnston with ‘Ann Droid’ co-star Ready, who describes his new character as ‘selfish’ – a far cry from Kevin (Photo: BBC/Boffola Pictures/Gary Moyes) Ready is talking over video from his home in Kent where he lives with his partner, the actor and artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Michelle Terry, and their daughter. He is here to talk about Ann Droid, the new comedy series from writer-actors Diane Morgan and Sarah Kendall. The Royle Family’s Sue Johnston plays Sue, a lonely widow who has recently been hospitalised following a fall. Ready is Michael, Sue’s self-absorbed, weak-willed son who, after a spell living with his mum, has decided to move back in with his philandering wife (Kendall). It is Michael who comes up with the idea of hiring Linda (Morgan), a cut-price domestic droid to help Sue around the house. At first, she is resistant to the idea of a robot companion, though soon she and Linda become inseparable. Michael may not be a psychopath but, says Ready, “he is a selfish character, which is enjoyable to play. I have sympathy for him as he is just trying to work out how to get through his own life. But he’s also a guy who makes bad choices and doesn’t have a lot of self-esteem.” Ready was thrilled to be reunited with Morgan, who played the sardonic single mum Liz in Motherland and who has also won accolades for the equally mordant Philomena Cunk. Given Morgan’s status as the queen of deadpan, he says, “she fit into playing a droid particularly well. It’s a challenge to be present in a scene and give something even though your face doesn’t do anything. When scenes would go on for a long time on the set of Motherland and there would be a lot of takes, Anna [Maxwell Martin] and I used to joke: ‘Oh hang on. Di’s sent her droid in.’ Di’s face would be all, ‘Enough, I’m out of here.’ So I’m not at all surprised she’s playing a robot.” Unlike a lot of TV shows tackling themes of encroaching technology that lean into the horror element, Ann Droid is sweet and ultimately uplifting. “Sue and Linda’s relationship exposes a lot about human loneliness,” Ready explains. “One of the questions the series asks is: can AI fill that relationship gap? It’s part of comedy’s job to look at truths around these issues and to open the [conversation] but do it lightly.” Ready worked with ‘Ann Droid’ writer Diane Morgan in ‘Motherland’ (Photo: BBC/Merman) Ready grew up in Harborne in Birmingham and got the acting bug at school. At 14, he signed up to join a local drama group and later attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He notes how, from a young age, he was interested “in the different dynamics between people and what was going on beneath the surface”. Early in his career, he suffered from terrible stage fright. “I would get so anxious and I wouldn’t quite understand it. There would be so much adrenaline, and I did begin to wonder: ‘Why am I putting myself through this?’ But then I began to understand that what happens in a fight-or-flight moment is just the body preparing itself to really be present.” Ready has been working steadily over the last 25 years, appearing in stage productions including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Major Barbara, Noises Off, Much Ado about Nothing and Macbeth, while popping up in episodes of long-running TV shows such as Life Begins, Holby City, Pulling and Silk. Utopia brought Ready his first juicy recurring role, though it was Motherland, which debuted in 2016, that made him famous. “Motherland certainly changed things for me in making me recognisable… I love the clown characters and Kevin is a clown. But there’s a melancholy there too and we worked hard to find that balance with him. Though Kevin was a figure of fun, he couldn’t be too comical because it would have undermined what he represented which was a dad doing his best. I found it interesting because there were some reactions from men that didn’t like him at all and who didn’t like what they perceived as weakness.” One of Ready’s favourite roles came in 2018’s The Terror, a series about the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845 in which two ships attempted to travel through the Northwest Passage. The series, based on the book by Dan Simmons, saw the crews succumbing to lead poisoning, starvation and scurvy or being murdered by malevolent forces. Ready played Henry Goodsir, a Scottish doctor and naturalist, who – spoiler incoming – dies by suicide and is eaten by his shipmates. The series was glowingly reviewed though it also brought a challenge that Ready is less keen to repeat. ‘Motherland’ changed things says Ready (Photo: BBC/Merman) Rather than have him playing Goodsir’s corpse, the directors decided to make a plaster cast of the actor. “So there I was, in my pants, lying face-down on a slab in an artist’s studio in Hungary with multiple people slathering me in clay,” Ready recalls. “It was very exposing. I don’t know how many people were in the room when my pants got snipped off.” The plastering process had to be done in two parts “or the body can’t breathe. So after they did the body, they did my head and gave me a straw to breathe through. That was a moment where I needed extreme zen because it was the most claustrophobic experience I’ve ever had.” The result was a model that looked so like him, it took his breath away. His main regret is that he didn’t get to take it home with him as a memento: “How I’d love to have that in my garden with a plant pot in its ass.” Ready’s next project is Little Animals, a one-man show that he wrote and is performing at the Edinburgh Fringe next month. Conceived as a response to our increasingly fractured world, it tells of a friendship between two men that has fallen apart after a disagreement over the climate crisis. It is, he says, a piece “that is specifically written not just to be in a theatre space but in a circle of chairs, so the actors and audience are all together. With all this anxiety about technology, I think there’s something powerful about human beings coming together in a place where real connection can happen.” ‘Ann Droid’ is available now on BBC iPlayer