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Coogan, 37, with dark hair to almost shoulder length, lines up alongside action hero Jackie Chan as Passepartout, who steals a jade Buddha and seeks refuge with the straight-laced adventurer, Fogg.
Producer Hal Lieberman, who went ahead with the film despite not yet having an American dis- tributor, declared: “Steve might be an unknown in Hollywood, but he is the best man for the job.
“If you said to me 40 years ago that I had the chance to be the first person to introduce Peter Sellers to America, I would have taken it like a shot. It is an identi- cal situation with Steve – he is the new Sellers.”
Coogan won the Fogg role after narrowly missing out on playing Sellers himself, finally beaten to it by Geoffrey Rush for the HBO film special, The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers.
Coogan, who married girl- friend Caroline Hickman last December – he has a seven year-old daughter from a previ- ous relationship – declares: “Everything suddenly came right at the same time. I was really cheesed off after missing out on the part of Sellers, but Caroline said: ‘Don’t worry – something else will turn up.’ And she was right. But neither of us had guessed that the opportunity would be so spectacular. “Caroline is always upbeat about everything and that helps. The whole business is like snakes and ladders. Sometimes you are going up and other times going down. With this one, I have sud- denly gone up a whole ladder.
“It has been a bizarre experi- ence. My agent advised me to
go to Los Angeles, but not do a whole lot of meetings. He said it would be like going around with a begging bowl, because I already have a comfortable career in Britain.
“So I just went in, met with a few people, and all this came out of it. Even I’ve found myself look- ing around and thinking: ‘This is a big deal.’ It’s a huge film with a budget to match.
“There are also people in it like Kathy Bates and Jim Broadbent, who are big names in their own right. Jim is very shy and not at all good at hand-shaking, but we’ve got on really well.
“Our backgrounds are similar, with him from the fringe comedy theatre and me from stand-up, and we’ve really got to under- stand each other. He’s a seasoned actor, who makes thing happen.
“When you are with people like that, you concentrate more and raise your game. This is what I’ve found during the whole experience. There is always some- thing new to learn.”
The film, also starring Belgian actress Cécile de France, has been on location in the cities of New York, Paris, San Francisco, plus Turkey and China. It finally completed filming its 20-week schedule in Berlin.
Since Coogan’s lower-budget films, like 24 Hour Party People and The Parole Officer, have not set the box office alight, much is resting on Around The World In 80 Days.
But he says: “Apart from the fact that it’s a huge project, concentrat- ing on the job is not vastly different from the small-budget films. It is also far from run-of-the-mill, in that it has a lot of twists and laughs.
“Comedy is strange. Even actors that I respect a lot are not great at comedy. It means noth- ing, though, because I am not great at doing truthful, emotional acting. There are a couple of scenes in the film in which I have to become very emotional and vulnerable. I found it very difficult to reach that truthful state. As a comic, I am too used to being in total control.”
Yet it is the most unusual of all the twists so far in a career which began after leaving Manchester Polytechnic school of theatre.
“All of it has been one long experiment,” he says. “If I open one door, I like to open the next one as well, just to see what hap- pens. I am not really bothered either way. I do things almost as if they are for a bet.
“I started off doing stand-up comedy in a bar in north Manchester. They had this thing called Stand and Deliver, which was in the lobby - a little venue. A lot of people, like poets, were invited to come along and just do something. We would all be paid £10 each. It was all about taking a chance and seeing how things went.”
He met his business partner, Henry Normal, who was also deliv- ering such performances. “He had worked in insurance for ten years, then dropped out to become a stand-up poet,” he says.
“So he totally changed his life around. We now have a company called Baby Cow pro- ductions – we did the TV series Marion And Geoff, with Rob Brydon – and are fortunate to have a lot of comic talent com- ing our way.
“They know that we are not just a couple of suits and we do know our way around comedy. They cannot say to us: ‘What do you know?’ We’ve both been doing it a long time.”
Coogan, who launched his tel- evision career ten years ago with Paul Calf’s Video Diary and within two years had his own series, Coogan’s Run, moved from his native Manchester to London.
He began his first series as the monstrously funny Alan Partridge in 1997, using his character to help keep a low-profile personal life. “I do not like to sacrifice that part of my life,” he says. “I want to be fulfilled, without just con- centrating on work all the time.
Coogan knows that there will be much resting on its release next year.
“A few people were looking at the early stuff on the film and think- ing: ‘Have we done the right thing in hiring him?’” he admits. “Now, everyone seems relaxed and happy. I just hope they are right.”
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