Coogan: "I am drawn to flawed figures and uncomfortable subject matter"

Steve Coogan  says he had only a vague idea of who pornographer and strip club supremo, Paul Raymond, was when a producer friend suggested Raymond would be a good part for him to play.

Coogan who plays Raymond in Michael Winterbottom’s new film 'The Look of Love', says he was only vaguely aware of "this impresario who presided over an empire, and seemed to live an adolescent schoolboy’s sexual fantasy".

‘He’s like the Wizard of Oz; he created a myth about himself,’ Coogan told 'The Evening Standard'.

"He was a master of the art of presentation, of style over substance. He was also not the kind of person the British establishment would normally celebrate. But I am drawn to flawed figures and uncomfortable subject matter. Anything that is awkward appeals to me."

Coogan took the idea to Winterbottom, for whom he had already played another real-life figure, Tony Wilson, in '24 Hour Party People', as well as a fictionalised version of himself in 'A Cock and Bull Story'.

In that film and the later TV series, 'The Trip', Coogan satirised his own past reputation for drug-taking and consorting with lap-dancers. Does he identify with Raymond's hedonism?

"‘I’m not being all postmodern about my 'tabloid image'. Paul Raymond made his living off sex. I make my living by being funny," Coogan replies cooly.

In 1958 Paul and Jean opened the Raymond Revuebar in the former Doric Ballroom in Soho’s Walker’s Court (now home to The Box) as a private members’ club.

A very British form of striptease was born and Raymond went on to become ‘Mr Soho’, moving into magazines, nude revues and softcore films and amassing one of Britain’s biggest fortunes in a Central London property empire bought by the profits. As Coogan puts it, he was "an unwitting participant in the changing of the sexual culture in Britain. The sexual revolution dovetailed with his desire to make money."

"I thought Soho would be a fun place to set a film,’ says director Winterbottom. ‘It’s a world of nightclubs, music and dancing, naked women, brushes with the law. But the more time you spend in that world, the more you realise the veneer of glamour is very thin. But because he had such a long career, you could see through Raymond’s life how Soho — and by extension the rest of the country — changed from the 1950s through to the 1990s."

The film doesn’t delve into gender politics or touch on the criminal side of Raymond’s Soho — the bent coppers and the gangsters he refused to pay off; the seedier business that must have gone on in some of his properties. "We didn’t want to pontificate in a Daily Mail-esque way about the perils of pornography," says Coogan. "We wanted to show that actually it’s rather good fun, but it doesn’t lead to everlasting happiness."

He adds: "At the end of '24 Hour Party People', I wanted to carry on being Tony Wilson because it was such fun. At the end of this film I wanted to stop being Paul Raymond because it wasn’t a happy place to be. But quite frankly, give me a choice between Mary Whitehouse and Paul Raymond, and I’ll take Paul Raymond any day of the week."

The 'Look of Love' is out on 26 April